#930 11/18/18 – With the ‘Deal of the Century’ on the Horizon, What Is It We Want, or Rather, Cannot Accept?

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  President Trump will soon unveil his “Deal of the Century” peace plan, of which we know only his warning that it will contain provisions that each side won’t like.  It would behoove us now to make clear to the President and ordinary people in the West that there are existential concessions the Jewish homeland simply cannot make.

With the ‘Deal of the Century’ on the Horizon, What Is It We Want, or Rather, Cannot Accept?

All we know so far about President Trump’s looming “Deal of the Century” Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict peace plan is that “both sides will find things in it that they don’t like.”  In anticipation of that, and perhaps even of persuading the President not to put certain things into that plan that the Jewish homeland doesn’t merely “not like” but existentially cannot accept, we need to articulate now where that indelible non-green line lies.

By me, accepting a nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle Jewish state, sans Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and above all historic Jerusalem, would not just leave such a rump of a Jewish homeland state hopelessly militarily vulnerable, but would be a betrayal of not just the modern Zionist movement but of the Dream of Generations for the redemption of Israel.  And yet, a call for just such a rump state is not just the solution on which the U.S. sadly abstained in the Obama administration’s closing days, but the solution for which the nations elected to represent every other nation on earth, including America’s European allies, unanimously voted in U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334.

So, how do we get this non-acceptability across not only to the American President, but to ordinary people in the West?  By making plain

***  that historic Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, Western Wall, Jewish Quarter, City of David, etc., etc., is not “Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem” where Jews, of all peoples on earth, are “settlers” living in “settlements,” but what Netanyahu at the U.N. podium rightly called the Jewish homeland’s core of the core;

***  that what even the United Nations itself in 1947 called “the hill country of Samaria and Judea” is not “the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank”;

***  that the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines, expressly declared Not to be political borders, vitiated in any case by renewed 1967 fighting between the same sides, are not “Israel’s 1967 borders”;

***  that Israel was not “created and founded” in 1948, but reattained its independence that year as the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea;

***  that the Jewish homeland connection to historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria does not date from “their capture by Israel in 1967,” but from three-thousand years earlier;

***  that the Hebrew-origin names “Judea and Samaria” are not “the biblical names for the West Bank,” but remained in use all through the post-biblical centuries, including by the U.N. itself in 1947; and

***  that Jews who believe in homeland Jewish sovereignty in the remaining 22% of the Palestine Mandate after the excision of 78% therefrom as all-Arab Transjordan, today’s Palestinian-Arab-majority Jordan, are not seeking a “Greater Israel” but only what has historically been the thrice Jewish-sovereign land of Israel which Palestinian Arabs have never ruled and foreign Arab empires only between 638 and 1099.

Not only must we vigorously contest this loaded lexicon of poisoned pejoratives in which the Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict is reported in the news and discussed in the councils of nations and among the West’s ordinary citizens, but we must drive home one further point.  It is simply not true that the Romans exiled Judaea’s surviving Jews from the land of Israel and that they did not return for eighteen hundred years.  We Never Left, as exemplified inter alia as recently as this week by publicizing of mosaics uncovered in a fifth century synagogue.  And that there weren’t more Jews (c 600,000 vs c. a million Arabs) there in 1948 was not caused just by twentieth-century Turks, Germans and British, but by recurrent slaughters of homeland Jews over the post-biblical centuries by Byzantine, Crusader and other foreign invaders.

Kurds, Tibetans and other peoples are testimony that not all peoples have homeland states.  But “the Palestinians” are not among those stateless peoples.  “Palestinians” have a sovereign state, Jordan, carved from the Palestine Mandate, today’s Arab state of the true Two-State Solution, with its Palestinian-Arab majority, plus a de facto second state in the old Palestine Mandate, Gaza, comprised of and ruled by Palestinian Arabs.  They are not entitled to a third Palestinian-Arab state in the Mandate, inside the land of Israel west of the Jordan.