WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I don’t know about your custom, but I intend to drink three New Year’s Eve toasts Monday night, two looking back, in memory and appreciation, respectively, and one, the focus of this 18th year-end media watch edition, looking forward with hope. As a new year begins, let’s articulate what it is that we seek, identify the forces arrayed against our attaining it, and adopt a course through which we ordinary Jews can individually, as Ben-Gurion put it, stand with Israel in fulfillment of the dream of generations for its redemption.
Erev 2019: Looking Back, and Looking Forward
In Memory
We lost a rightly respected voice this year with the death of Charles Krauthammer. I didn’t always agree with him. He thought, for instance, that the Maccabees’ war was a civil war among Judaea’s Jews. It was, in the sense that many of the homeland’s Jews at the time favored a non-Jewish life under the Seleucid foreign rulers and that there was bloodshed among Jews. But many American colonists were opposed to George Washington, and some helped the British. The historical significance of both the Maccabean and American Revolutions was independence of the revolutionaries from foreign rule. Krauthammer, by me, rightly told American Jews to appreciate the enormity of the Jewish history event – rebirth of Jewish homeland independence after 1800 years – that’s occurring in our time and to stand with it. We’ll miss you, Charles.
In Appreciation
The Jewish people has an institutional memory that extends back over some three millennia of life in our homeland and in the realms, as Max Dimont called them, of the world’s civilizations. In that memory, America stands out not just as exceptional, but as unique in its degree of acceptance of us as part of itself and, at times, especially without limitation 1948 and now, in support of our right to our people’s homeland of Israel. I would have liked to write here that in 2018 the United States “led the world” in finally moving the US embassy to Jerusalem based on the President’s 12/6/17 statement recognizing, as far as that went, that Israel’s capital is “in” Jerusalem [“We are not taking a position on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem”], but it’s more true that the U.S. “defied” the world in doing even that. It was, more so thereby, a courageous step by America, and in my Monday night toast I’ll single out for that three representatives of our government, [unsubscribe, if you must] our President, Vice President and U.N. Representative, and one American people group, the Evangelical Christian Zionists, for standing by our people’s right to our homeland by, respectively, taking and supporting that step.
In 2019
Now, then, what is it we seek, what forces are out there contending against us, and what can we ordinary Jews do in 2019 to further our cause?
President Trump’s “Deal of The Century” remains under wraps, but Israeli pundit Ted Belman took a shot recently at describing what the President’s claimed new and different proposed peace plan might be. Belman’s take is that the President will go back to the original partition of the Palestine Mandate – 78% east of the Jordan as the Arab and 22% west of the River as the Jewish Palestinian States [Belman, IsraelPundit, 10/17/18, “Trump’s Real Deal of the Century”]. Alevai.
A State of Israel coextensive with the Land of Israel, including the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and Jerusalem period (and the Israeli piece of the Golan), would be as defensibly secure as Israel’s borders can be, and would embrace the historic homeland’s core historic parts.
The world will react to this as an unfunny joke.
*** 137 nations already recognize “Palestine” as a state, of which 120 have full diplomatic ties [RJC, 12/27/18, quoting Jerusalem Post].
*** The EU, citing inter alia, 2334 [e.g., Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, 12/27/18, “EU, France: Israel’s Settlements Endanger the Two-State Solution”] on which the Obama administration in its last days pointedly abstained, is “truly convinced” that the only solution is “the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders [i.e., 1949 ceasefire lines] with Jerusalem as the capital of both states” [World Israel News, 12/19/18, “EU To Trump: Peace Deal Must Include Palestinian State”]. Something new? Ask yourself what these five classic tools of ethnic cleansing – Pale of settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom – have in common. They were all invented over the centuries on the Dark Continent, Europe, the heartland of western civilization, for us.
*** The self-proclaimed human rights watch “Human Rights Watch,” far from recognizing that the Jewish people has a scintilla of a claim to Judea-Samaria based on history, San Remo, the Mandate, etc., just put out a two-year study “Bed and Breakfast on Stolen Land: Israeli Settlements in the West Bank” (emphasis added, but only a little).
*** The “mainstream” western media, with its exclusively employed loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland delegitimizing pejoratives [partially enumerated in “Dirty Words” on our website, www.factsonisrael.com], will label this “Greater Israel’s” rightwing “ultra-nationalists’” fantasies gone berserk.
*** American Jewish journalists, most noticeably the solidly pro-Israel Jonathan Tobin, will continue to call Judea-Samaria “West Bank.”
*** Our own American Jewish establishment – the Federations and Reform Movement – which joined this year in instant international criticism of Israel’s Nation-State Law, will defend “the two-state solution” [see, e.g., Traiman on JNS.org, 12/23/18, “Getting ‘Fed-up’ with Critical Tone of Federation Leadership”].
*** The Jewish far-left will … who knows?
*** The Arabs and other Muslims, not least “The Palestinians,” will hardly fold their tents, like the United Nations in 1967, and silently steal away into the night.
What’s a just-plain-Jew in America to do? I’ve gotten a fair number of emails from you Gentle Readers over the past 18 years, mostly encouraging me to go on, but I want to tell you about the very first one I got, to our Alert #1 back in January 2001, in which I’d railed against the media telling readers about “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation,” etc., etc., and how I responded. This reader encouragingly wrote: “Unsubscribe. Yes, the media is anti-Israel, but it will never change, so stop wasting your time and give it up.” I replied: “It’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” So here, for us ordinary American Jews, are my Erev 2019 candle-lighting suggestions.
#1: Appreciate that, whether they’re geographically co-extensive or not, there’s a difference, as Israel’s Nation-State Law adopted this year stated, between the State of Israel and Land of Israel – “The State of Israel exists in the land of Israel.” We diaspora Jews have a peoplehood membership stake in the Land of Israel, but it’s not for us to tell the State of Israel what to do. E.g., Israel can do whatever it decides it needs to do re Judea-Samaria, except to call it “West Bank.” It’s not for us, lay people or leaders, to tell Israel, e.g., “adopt the ‘two-state’ solution.”
#2: Purge from your own lips, utterly and completely, the entire “mainstream” western media’s loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives. E.g. “West Bank … East Jerusalem … Israel’s creation and founding in 1948 … captured by Israel in 1967 … Israeli settlers and settlements [while saying Palestinian neighborhoods, towns and villages] … occupied territories … Palestinian territories … occupied Palestinian territories.” Yes, even “The Palestinians.” The homeland’s Jews are Palestinians too [even the UN said so in 1947], are were Palestinians first.
#3: Plead with pro-Israel journalists, starting with the solidly pro-Israel prolific Jonathan Tobin, that in succumbing to using “West Bank” and other designed-to-delegitimize the Jewish homeland pejoratives, they are making their otherwise persuasive pro-Israel cases from the back of the bus.
#4: If you haven’t done so lately, go read a book. Read the classics, authored by Israel’s Washingtons and Jeffersons themselves, of the momentous Jewish history event of our time. Every Jew in his lifetime should read Herzl’s Jewish State. Yes, it’s a naïve little book [for a different view of him read Lowenthal’s thick (ok, a test of commitment to Zionism) translation of Herzl’s diaries], but that thin little book (which was not the first on the subject) inspired the movement and in the end launched a thousand ships (most of them British destroyers). I do not know how a Jew of our time can not have read Jewish State. Read Dr. Weitzmann’s Trial And Error. You owe it to him. And read Begin’s Revolt, about the insides of the struggle against the British, then Arabs. All the world’s revolutionaries do. And, homework done, read one more book just for the inspiration it gives. A wide range of choices here (though the “Israel” shelf is a minefield), but I’d recommend to you for plain inspiration Arie Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua. (More about that quite inspiring book some week when we have time.)
#5: Keep up with current pro-Israel opinion and news, and try to make the Jewish homeland claim to the land of Israel, all of it, to people who potentially can be reached.
#6: Make a New Year’s Resolution (the grassroots counterpart of a politician’s Campaign Promise) to cajole your brother-in-law or someone into subscribing to this media watch. Go out and buy a hat “New Year’s Resolutions Made, New Year’s Resolutions Kept.”
#7: And, finally in 2019, be part of the organized pro-Israel grassroots Jewish street. There are many honorable grassroots organizations I don’t know about, but two that I do and recommend to you are ZOA and Stand With Us. You don’t have to feel and act all alone.
May you enjoy a healthy and happy 2019.