#917 8/19/18 – This Week: Israel’s Nation-State Law Does Not Stand Alone: The Human Dignity and Liberty Basic Law Stands Alongside It, But So Must Also Our Own Everyday Speech

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Left-wing American Jewish groups’ petition stating that Israel’s new Nation-State Basic Law “alienates the majority of American Jews, damages their connection to Israel and weakens overall support for Israel in the United States” because it “disenfranchises Israel’s minorities” overlooks that Israel’s Nation-State Basic Law stands alongside, not in place of, Israel’s Human Dignity and Liberty Basic Law guaranteeing minority rights.

But reaffirming Israel as the Jewish State isn’t something to be stated religiously every seventy years.  We also need to state it in our own everyday speech by discarding gratuitous expressions delegitimizing the land of Israel, aka Palestine, as the historic homeland of the Jews. 

This Week:  Israel’s Nation-State Law Does Not Stand Alone: The Human Dignity and Liberty Basic Law Stands Alongside It, But So Must Also Our Own Everyday Speech

A Jerusalem Post article Friday, “Left-Wing U.S. Jewish Groups Petition To Question MKs on Nation-State Law,” called “on people to pledge to ask MKs who backed the Nation-State Law speaking in the U.S. to explain their backing for the legislation.”

According to this JPost article, the questions posed by the petition’s promulgators [which included groups which, by me, ought to call themselves Nay Street and The No Israel Fund] for American Jews to put to visiting Israeli MKs included such are-you-still-beating-your-wife inquiries as:

*  “Why did you vote for the nation-state bill, which pointedly disenfranchises Israel’s minorities – and never once uses the words ‘equality’ or ‘democracy’?”; and

*  [Do you understand that the bill] alienates the majority of American Jews, damages their connection to Israel and weakens overall support for Israel in the United States?”

This JPost article quoted Deputy Minister MK Michael Oren and MK Amir Ohana, who chaired the committee which dealt with the Nation-State Basic Law, flatly rejecting that it discriminated against Israel’s minorities, and citing the Human Dignity and Freedom Basic Law specifically protecting minority rights.

A seemingly more serious question the American left-wing petition asked folks to pledge to ask visiting Israeli MKs is

*  “Can you explain what you perceive to be the threat to Israel’s Jewish character that necessitated this new law?”

A New York Times op-ed Wednesday by Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Naftali Bennett provided one direct answer:

     “What many of the Nation-State Law’s critics fail to recognize is that its passage comes only after decades of successive rulings by Israel’s judiciary that have ignored the aspirations of those who seek to preserve the Jewish nature of our state.  Our Supreme Court has based its rulings in numerous cases – on issues such as immigration and the extension of Israeli citizenship to Palestinians – on the existing Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, much to the dismay and despair of many in Israel and abroad who saw these rulings as a direct attack on Israel’s Jewish character.  The Nation State Law seeks to balance the scales and ensure that these concerns are considered.”

Shortly before his recent death, Charles Krauthammer lamented that today’s American Jews don’t seem to appreciate adequately the seminal Jewish history event – the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland as that land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea and the ensuing almost two millennia of exclusively foreign empire rule – that has occurred in our time.  If it is true, as the left-wing American Jewish petitioners put it this week in one of their questions quoted above, that Israel’s Nation-State Basic Law, which reaffirms Israel as a Jewish Homeland Jewish State and changes nothing regarding minority rights guaranteed in the Human Dignity and Liberty Basic Law, “alienates the majority of American Jews” and “damages their connection to Israel,” it may be merciful that Krauthammer didn’t live to see it.

But none of us – not just left-wing American Jews, but non-left-wing American Jews and Israeli Jews – are fully free from blame here.  Declaring Israel to be a Jewish state in the land of Israel isn’t something we state, starting in 1948, every seventy years.  We have to recognize, all of us, that in our everyday speech we ourselves voice expressions inconsistent with claiming that Palestine [at least Palestine west of the Jordan] is the land of Israel, the historic homeland of the Jews.  These expressions include

*** gratuitously calling western Palestine Arabs “THE Palestinians,” as though Jews have no historical equity in that name that the Romans invented to disassociate what had been Judaea from Jews, and that twentieth-century Jews residing in Palestine (at least a third of its 1948 population) were not Palestinian, even though they, more than the resident Arabs, called themselves such, and the United Nations itself called both the land’s Jews and Arabs such;

*** gratuitously calling the old 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire line, expressly declared in its defining document not to be a political border, and obliterated even as a military ceasefire line by renewed 1967 fighting between the same sides, with Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem outside it, “Israel’s 1967 border,” enabling our enemies mockingly to call the Jewish claim to every inch beyond it (i.e., Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem) “ultra-nationalist Israelis’ claim to a ‘Greater Israel’”;

*** gratuitously calling Judea-Samaria “the West Bank,” a term invented by the invader [Trans-]Jordan in 1950 for the identical reason the Romans had renamed Judaea as Palestine – to disassociate what been Jewish [history, San Remo, the Mandate] from Jews;

*** gratuitously calling Jews living in Judea-Samaria Jewish communities “Jewish settlers in West Bank Jewish settlements” [in pointed media contradistinction to “Palestinian residents of West Bank Palestinian towns and villages”], and gratuitously acquiescing in the media and our enemies calling Jews, of all people, in parts of Jerusalem, of all places, “East Jerusalem Jewish settlers”; and

*** gratuitously acquiescing, if not actually joining, in the media and world calling “the West Bank” and “East” [i.e., historic – including the Old City and City of David] Jerusalem “occupied Palestinian territories” – as in last year’s UNSC 2334.

These everyday Jewish homeland delegitimizing expressions even we ourselves gratuitously use greatly contribute to ordinary people in the West, including some American Jews, viewing western Palestine not as the land of Israel historic homeland of Jews but as an historic Palestine homeland of “the Palestinians.”  Should we do better?  We must.