#914 7/29/18 – This Week: Why Israel Is The Jewish State, and Why It Needs To Be

This Week:  Why Israel Is The Jewish State, and Why It Needs To Be

Why Israel Needs To Be a Jewish State

I don’t know about you, but when I think about why Israel needs to be a Jewish state, I see in my mind’s eye two ships that sailed the high seas in the mid-twentieth century.

The first to sail was the St. Louis, from Hamberg to Cuba on May 13, 1939.  If ever there was a ship carrying real refugees, these c. 900 Jewish refugees fleeing the heart of Nazism for refuge in the Western hemisphere was it.  Turned away, first from Cuba and then from the U.S., the ship returned its passengers to Europe, where c. 250 died in the Holocaust.  (Wikipedia, “MS St. Louis”).

The second ship, exemplifying Jewish defiance of Europe’s recurrent banning over the centuries of “transport of Jews to the East,” was the Haganah ship Exodus 1947, which the British intercepted and returned its Holocaust survivor passengers to Germany [n.b.]

When I wrote my book Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, we put on the cover what my friend Herb Denenberg wrote:  “In an ideal world, this book would not have to be written.”  We live in what, not least for us, is far from an ideal world, and so long as Israel is a Jewish state opening its arms, as Hitler put it, to those with one Jewish grandparent, the sad saga of the St. Louis and voyages of the rickety Aliyah Bet boats that sailed into the teeth of the WWII-and-beyond British blockade will not be repeated.

Why Israel Is The Jewish State

But that does not address “Ok, so a Holocaust [may have] happened in Europe, so why should the Palestinians suffer?”

The State of Israel was not reestablished in the land of Israel because of the Holocaust.  Nor is it what its enemies mock as “the Zionist entity,” an ex nihilo creation of a late nineteenth-century Western Jewish movement.  For three millennia, the land of Israel has been the homeland of the Jewish people, and the State of Israel is a Jewish state in that homeland.

Israeli Knesset, last week:

“A.  The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.”

Those are the opening words of last week’s “Basic Law:  Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People,” followed by

“B.  The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.”

The only problem with this is that the World, not having read my book, does not believe it.  What the world does believe, per UNSC Resolution 2334, is that every inch of the land of Israel beyond the old 1949 ceasefire lines is “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem.”  Worse than that, much of the world believes that Israel was created and founded artificially and out-of-the-blue in 1948 as an alien European implant in the Palestine of The Palestinians.

How to contend against this?  We need to put before the world as easily grasped a homeland case as that purveyed by our adversaries – “the place is called Palestine and we’re the Palestinians.”  The direct answer is “for 3000 years the place has been the land of Israel, the Jewish homeland, reestablished as a modern Jewish state by Jewish Israelis.”

My book traces what historian Parkes called “the heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement” that wrote the modern Zionists’ “real title deeds.”  (Whose Land, p. 266).  (I commend it to you, together with all the books you can find on the Aliyah Bet, of which, by me, Arie Eliav’s The Voyage of the Ulua, followed by Ruth Gruber’s Destination Palestine, are the most moving.)

What I would leave you with today is a sampling of testimony that Israel’s Knesset’s action last week, enshrining Jewish-stateness in the State of Israel’s Basic Laws is not a new thing, but what fulfillment of the Dream of Generations has, from the inception, been all about:

***  1896, Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat

***  1942, American Emergency Committee of Zionist Affairs, Biltmore Program:

“The Conference calls for the fulfillment of the original purpose of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate which recognizing the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine’ was to afford them the opportunity, as stated by President Wilson, to found there a Jewish Commonwealth.” (emphasis added)

***  1947, British Foreign Secretary Bevin [no friend of ours] to Parliament:

“There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs [too high, according to, e.g.,  Katz in “Battleground”] and 600,000 Jews.  For the Jews, the essential `point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”  (Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 433, col. 988, quoted in Bell, Terror Out of Zion, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, p. 188, emphasis added)

*** 1947, United Natons Partition Resolution:  “… the Arab State” and “the Jewish State,” over and over (emphasis added)

***  1948, Israel’s Declaration of Independence:

“WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight … the People’s Council … shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called Israel.” (emphasis added, but just a little)