#926 10/21/18 – This Week: Silver Lining in U.S. Jews’ Israel ‘Not Very Important’ Poll?

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  A much-discussed new poll says most U.S. Jews regard Israel as “not very important.”  What to make of that, and how to get them to see that a seminal Jewish history event occurred in our time, imposing an obligation on all of us actively to make the Jewish homeland case to the Land of Israel, irrespective of personal belief, if present, that the State of Israel’s borders need not be coextensive?  Here’s one poll response.  Come see.

This Week:  Silver Lining in U.S. Jews’ Israel “Not Very Important” Poll?

The much-discussed poll this month of American Jews’ attitudes about domestic and international issues found that a bare majority, 52%, ranked Israel as “very important,” as opposed, e.g., to over 80% who cited health care and Social Security issues as “very important.”   This is not good news to those of us who do view active American Jewish support for our Jewish homeland of Israel as “very important,” but there may be a “silver lining,” an opportunity here for us to try to awaken more of our brethren to the seminal significance of the momentous Jewish people event of our time, and our obligation actively to support it.

When I was a kid, a relentlessly-increasingly long time ago, there was a sign in a shop on Atlantic City’s boardwalk, quoting, I think, Oliver Wendell Holmes:  “A person should share in the action and passions of the events of his time, for fear of being judged not to have lived.”

For ourselves in our time, Charles Krauthammer put it best:  “The Jewish people are living through a miraculous age: the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty.”  It is, as Ben-Gurion put it on May 14, 1948: “… the great struggle for fulfillment of the dream of generations for the rebirth of Israel.”  I think about those generations to whom Ben-Gurion referred, especially the Jews in Europe expressly for whom every device of ethnic cleaning – Pale of Settlement, Ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, Pogrom – was devised over centuries in that heartland of Western civilization, and I ask myself what those Jews would regard as “very important” if they could change times and places with us comfortable Jews in the U.S. today.

This past Wednesday night I enthusiastically attended the annual awards dinner of a group of local American Jews, the Greater Philadelphia District of the Zionist Organization of America, who regard actively supporting the Jewish homeland of Israel as “very important.”  But we are not the only Jews here who regard Israel as important.  E.g., the members of “J Street,” which appended to its opposing “BDS” in 2012: “We too oppose the occupation of the West Bank and the expansion and entrenchment of settlements there,” and like organizations, whose activists engage in all manner of “anti-settlement,” etc., activities, including, for some such groups, “BDS,” likewise regard issues concerning Israel as “very important.”

Which means that there is up for grabs between us activists on both sides the potential awakened awareness and activism of a great bulk of American Jews to whom today being active re Israel is not “very important.”

What both groups of American Jewish activists with their two very different views of Israel both seek to do is to enlist that big bulk of these “pro-Israel” but “Israel-low-priority” American Jews as activists on their side.

For our side, I’d start by stating to these people our conviction that, as Israel’s new Nation-State law puts it, the State of Israel exists in the Land of Israel, and that the Jewish homeland comprises the entirety of the latter – Palestine west of the Jordan, including Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem.  I’d tell them that even if they personally believe, for perceived democracy, demographic or other reason, that the State of Israel should reach a compromise settlement with the Arabs that would leave the State with less than the entirety of the Land, claiming the Land in the negotiations comprises the compromise, while conceding equity in the Land beyond the “green line” before entering into realistic settlement negotiations just moves the beginning of compromise to an even more vulnerable starting point.

I’d contrast this view with that of, e.g., J Street:  “We too oppose the occupation of the West Bank and the expansion and entrenchment of settlements there.”  I’d add to that what Saab Erekat, “head of the PA peace negotiations team,” complained this week:  “The Trump administration is making clear that it is working together with the Israeli government to impose Greater Israel rather than the two-state solution on the 1967 border” (Jewish Press, 10/19/18).

Greater Israel”???  This is not a new term of endearment that Saab Erekat coined this week.  Back on 6/11/14, the Washington Post ran an article, headlined in the Philadelphia Inquirer as “Hard-Liner Reuven Rivlin Will Be Israel’s President,” which used the expressions “hard-liner” and “hard-line” for Rivlin in the WPost article text, basing this characterization on stating that Rivlin  “is opposed to the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state and who envisions a ‘Greater Israel,’ a Jewish homeland stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, with Jerusalem as its undivided capital”  (emphasis added).  A 1/13/04 Philly Inquirer article called hopes of some Jews for retaining Judea-Samaria “settlements” dreams of a “greater Israel.”

“Greater Israel” is a media-Palestinian Arab mocking reversal of reality.  The original Palestine Mandate with its “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and “close settlement of Jews on the land” embraced the entirety of Palestine, including east of the Jordan.  But the 78% east of the Jordan was cut off as all-Arab Transjordan.  And now the media and Arabs call the Jewish claim to that part of the remaining 22% west of the Jordan beyond the 1949 Israel-Jordan exclusively military ceasefire lines “Greater Israel”?   They should call their own driving of the Jews back into those perilous (“Auschwitz lines,” Eban called them) 1949 ceasefire lines [the Arabs’ and media’s “Israel’s 1967 borders”] the making of “Lesser Israel.”

Those “pro-Israel” American Jews who see Israel as “low priority,” as “not very important,” need to appreciate the seminal significance of the Jewish homeland’s re-attainment of sovereign independence in our own time as placing a self-respecting obligation on us, the Jews in whose time this occurred, to regard it as “very important”; to join in actively asserting the Jewish homeland claim to the Land of Israel – Palestine west of the Jordan, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem – where Jews have lived without interruption for three millennia, which Palestinian Arabs have never ruled, and in which the State of Israel is the Land’s next native state after Jewish Judaea.