WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Do we ourselves have to call Arabs in Palestine “THE Palestinians”? Should we propagate “Exile & Return” as opposed to continuous presence? Should Diaspora Jews tell Israel that Arabic should be an official language too? Does what we’re doing make sense? Is it sane?
This Week: Does What We’re Doing Make Sense? Is It Sane?
If UFOs (“flying saucers”) are real (and I’m not convinced that they’re not), here’s how those super-advanced civilizations regard Planet Earth – as the Lunatic Asylum of the Milky Way Galaxy. This week, let’s venture into the severest cases’ wards – those holding the Earthlings called “Jews.”
Specifically, let’s look at three manifestations of Jewish insanity: our joining in calling Arabs in Palestine “The Palestinians”; our propagating a Jewish narrative of “exile and return” as opposed to that of the continuous homeland presence of Jews; and Diaspora Jewish leadership’s recent joinder, through telling Israel that Arabic should be official in Israel too, in disrespecting Israel’s prerogatives as a sovereign state.
*** Jews are “Palestinian” too: As exemplified by New Jersey U.S. Senator Corey Booker this week holding a sign with the current catchy phrase, “From Palestine to Mexico, All The Walls Have Got To Go,” to Israel’s enemies’ ubiquitous catchy slogan “From The River to The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” those who do not mean the Jewish homeland well constantly drive home into Westerners’ sensibilities that “Palestine” is not the Jewish homeland at all but the homeland of that subset of Arabs known as “The Palestinians.”
Our lunacy is not just that American and even Israeli Jews join in calling Arabs in Palestine “The Palestinians,” but that since neither we nor others including the U.N. called them that historically, we don’t need to now. The United Nations itself, in its 1947 resolution partitioning the Palestine Mandate into an Arab [not “Palestinian”] State and a Jewish State referred to Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.” Indeed, during the Mandate the term “Palestinian,” as David Bar-Ilan of the Jerusalem Post used to point out, was more used by those Jews of themselves than by those Arabs.
As with “West Bank,” when confronted with the concession inherent in we Jews ourselves calling our opponents in the struggle for Palestine “the Palestinians,” most Jews sheepishly smile, shrug and concede that “That battle was lost a long time ago.” Our lunacy resides in our not comprehending the enormity, along with non-necessity, of that concession, that in most people’s minds, defining who are Palestine’s “Palestinians” isn’t a battle in the struggle for Palestine. It’s the war.
Certainly, the world will scoff if we start to reassert Jewish equity in “Palestinian,” but it’s a saner and more self-respecting course, and one more likely to get through to Westerners our land-of-Israel homeland equity in Palestine, than our continuing to join in calling Arabs in western Palestine “the Palestinians.”
*** “Exile and Return,” “Zionist” Entity, Holocaust-Created State: The reason Israel’s enemies call Israel “the Zionist entity” is that the Zionist movement began in the late nineteenth century. Calling Israel “created because of the Holocaust [so why should the Palestinians suffer?]” (as did this year’s Israel-selected winner of Israel’s Israel Prize, in her statement declining to go to Israel to accept it because Israel’s prime minister would be there), shrivels Israel’s historical roots to the mid-twentieth century. The media reinforces this through insistently calling Israel “created” and “founded” in 1948 and linking Israel’s connection not just to Judea-Samaria but to historic Jerusalem to “their capture by Israel in 1967.”
We have to drive home to people in the West that the Jewish connection to the land of Israel, Palestine, doesn’t date from the mid-twentieth or late nineteenth century, but goes back without interruption, including through physical presence of Jews, as Jews, for three thousand years.
Our insanity in not doing this includes:
[a] Our joinder, along with, e.g., Jimmy Carter, in speaking of “exile” by Rome in CE 135 and almost two-millennia-later “return.” Historian Parkes was right that the continuous tenacious post-biblical homeland presence of the Jewish Yishuv wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”
[b] Israel not building on the ample grounds of Yad Vashem, the moving Holocaust museum and memorial to which visiting VIPs are taken religiously, a museum vividly documenting that three-millennia physical Jewish presence in Israel. And
[c] Our acquiescence in media and public usage of expressions and terms – “Israel’s 1948 creation and founding … Israel’s 1967 borders … East Jerusalem … West Bank … captured by Israel in 1967 … occupied territories … Palestinian territories … occupied Palestinian territories … etc, etc”, culminating in the “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem” of last year’s UNSC 2334 – designed to delegitimize the Jewish homeland of Israel.
*** Intrusion into Israel’s Prerogatives as a Sovereign State: Israel’s designation of its official language(s), like its designation of its capital city, is its prerogative as a sovereign state. Diaspora Jews, of all peoples, should be scrupulous in respecting those prerogatives. Israel’s Nation-State Basic Law adopted this summer designated Hebrew as that nation’s official language, giving Arabic, which had been co-official under the old never-repealed British Mandate law, honorable mention as “special.” This wasn’t “democratic” enough, in the opinion of the representatives of organized American Jews, which lobbied the Knesset against parts of it, including re Arabic, and immediately issued a statement of “disappointment” on the Law’s adoption. Et tu, Brute?
Is all of this sensible? Given how well we’re doing at convincing Europe and the rest of the West that the land of Israel in which the state of Israel has been established, as the Nation-State Basic Law expressed Land and State, is the historic homeland of Jews, and not the Palestine of “The Palestinians,” is it sane?