#923 9/30/18 – Making Our Case: The Yishuv Wrote the Zionists’ Real Title Deeds

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  A month ago, I argued that we fail to make the case that the tenacious continuous post-biblical presence of homeland Jews [the Yishuv], despite repeated slaughter by the foreign conquerors who ruled from Judaea’s fall to Israel’s rise, helped stake our homeland claim.  This week: a sequel, and a suggestion.

Making Our Case:  The Yishuv Wrote the Zionists’ Real Title Deeds

A month ago, I headed our weekly edition #918 of August 26 with this “executive summary” of its argument that all through the long, dark foreign empire rule centuries between Jerusalem-capitaled Judaea’s final fall in CE 135 and Jerusalem-capitaled Israel’s independence in 1948 as the land of Israel’s next native state, Jews tenaciously remained in the land despite being massacred time and again by those foreign conquerors:

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  All the ‘dirty words’ [“West Bank …1967 borders … occupation …”] that I plead with us to stop gratuitously using aside, where we fail in making our Jewish homeland case to people in the West is in not emphasizing both the reality and tenacity of the Jews’ continuous post-biblical homeland presence.  Perhaps we discount it because we were long the minority, but Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Judaea, and the succession of foreign empire conquerors specialized in massacring us.

That same week, a prolific pundit in Israel, an advocate, as am I, that Jordan, comprising 78% of the original Palestine Mandate with a population largely considering itself “Palestinian” Arab, is the other state of the “two-state solution,” wrote an article explaining why there weren’t more Jews in western Palestine in 1948.  He said that the British, administrators of the Mandate, did their level best to keep Jews out and vastly restricted land purchase by Jews.

True, indeed, but that’s scratching the surface. Even more significant to the explanation why there weren’t more Jews there in 1948 than that the British kept Jews out is that their Roman, Byzantine, Crusader and other foreign ruler predecessors repeatedly massacred homeland Jews who were already there.

So I emailed this prolific Israeli pundit, suggesting he write a second article making this case.  He begged off:  “I don’t have that knowledge,” that he thought “the British” explanation enough. (He said I could leave my comment on his site.)

I beg to differ.  President Carter voiced a widely-held view when he wrote in his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid that on defeating Bar Kochba the Romans forced “almost all Jews of Judaea into exile.”  That isn’t true, as I learned for myself in researching and writing chapter four of my own book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine.  It isn’t even close to true, according to the many respectable authorities that I cite.

What is true is what eminent British historian James Parkes wrote in his book, Whose Land: A History of the People’s of Palestine.  Parkes asserted that our time’s Zionists’ cite the Maccabees and Bar Kochba, “but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement” (p. 266).

Samuel Katz, acknowledging Parkes in his important book Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, wrote that “the gap between what is generally known and the facts of the continuity of Jewish life in Palestine since the destruction of the Second Temple” is “an astonishing area of Jewish neglect.”

These days, “neglect” is a luxury we cannot afford.  President Trump this week made reference to “the two-state solution,” if the parties want maybe a “one state solution,” and to “centrality” of “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” to overall peace in the region.  For all his self-respecting Jewish advisors, does the President really understand what our homeland case is about?  Are we back to square one on “Israel=Palestinian” peace as the prerequisite to overall peace in the Mideast?  Here’s what, Maliki, the “Palestinian Foreign Minister,” said this week about that “two-state solution”:  “He [Trump] has to come forward and say yes to the two-state solution on the ’67 borders, that the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem are occupied territories.”  [And, btw, “the right of return”?]  But at least give Maliki credit for this, that he knows how to put words – “’67 borders … West Bank … East Jerusalem … occupied territories” – into a sentence better than us.

An idea I would have you gentle readers flirt with this week is tracing back homeland Jewish presence from the Mandate back through Turkish, Mamluk, Mongol, Crusader, Muslim dynasty, Byzantine and Roman murderous misrule, back to the Maccabee-founded homeland Jewish kingdom Judaea, and before that Yehud, and before that the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and before them the Israelites who arrived or arose in the land of Canaan.  By me, this is the deepest of quests for peoplehood roots.  One primer, by me, you can find on Amazon is Israel 3000 Years.