WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The consequences of the media incessantly saying, and the world believing, that Israel was “created and founded,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue, in 1948, are considerable, damaging public perception of Israel as an indigenous homeland state of the Mideast. It came up this week in a quick trip to Florida.
This Week: Conversations Near Orlando With Quakers
Gentle Reader, in compensation for no weekly email like this last week, I bring you Orlando-warm regards from a bunch of manatees in a tributary of the St. John River and Harry Potter. Eileen and I drove down to see Dan, my old law school roommate from fifty-five years ago, married to Susan for fifty-four years. They’re flaming liberals and Quakers, parents of three and grand-parents of many, who live in DeLand, Florida, and are well-worth our driving through Baltimore and Washington, twice.
We talked, of course, over beer and such of much that relates to Israel and Jews, but, first, don’t sell Harry Potter and his pals too cheaply. Educators complain today’s kids with all their electronic gizmos don’t read enough books on their own, and Rowling has pediatricians complaining some of the Harry Potter books are so heavy they’re hurting kids’ wrists. And each of the five hero kids in the books – Harry, Ron, Hermione, Neville and Luna – has an eventually-conquered growing-up issue with one or another of which any kid can relate. Going to Harry’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry at Universal Parks in Orlando, once at least, is worth the tuition, and I recommend the fish & chips at The Three Broomsticks in Hogsmead.
Another marvel of our age is the traffic-savvy GPS that comes in the latest model car we rented from Enterprise. You could not wend your way through the maze of Baltimore-Washington alleged bypass segments without it. NASA’s GPS that routes its spacecraft through the asteroid belt does not hold a candle. Ours included a premeditated divided-highway U-turn (our old GPS only ordered a U-turn when I’d somehow veered from its toward-Mars-directed course towards Venus).
Now, then, conversation between liberal Quakers and rightwing Jews about Israel. Dan suggested that the American Friends Service Committee’s viewpoint on Israel is grounded in its starting its perspective in the year AD 1948. While I presume that the AFSC’s view of what occurred in Palestine in 1948 is closer to Bernie Sanders’ (I read his what-happened-in-1948 speech to J Street) than my own, I put a big part of the fault on ourselves for not more vigorously contesting the mainstream media’s mantra that Israel was “created” and “founded,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue, “in 1948.” I’d start the land of Israel clock three thousand years earlier, coupled with the assertion that following final Roman defeat of ancient Judaea we weren’t “exiled” but Never Left.
So I regaled our courteously-patient hosts over dinner with tales of post-Revolt homeland Jews writing the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud, building synagogues, having the Roman-recognized Patriarch, fighting alongside the 614-invading Persians, aiding the Muslim invasion, fighting the Crusaders at Jerusalem and Haifa, surviving six centuries’ Mamluk and Turk foreign rule in their four holy cities and elsewhere in the land, sailing refugee-laden ships into the teeth of the before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust anti-Jewish British blockade, and finally throwing-back and then-some the 1948 multi-nation Arab invasion with a homeland army of homeland Jews. I don’t know how far I got through on this to our hosts, but they still served us dessert.
They also told us about a friend who doubts there ever was a King David. I pointed to page twenty-something of my book Israel 3000 Years, which I’d thrust upon Dan and Susan on our arrival, on which I quote an historian on what David accomplished, followed by my own question “But was there King David?”. I answer, of course, with the enemy king’s House of David inscription, and with lots of recent archeological findings – Khirbet Qeiyafa, Tel Zayit, even what may be King David’s Jerusalem palace – evidencing the substantiality and literacy of tenth century BCE Jerusalem and Judah.
But it seemed to me that once again we’re called upon to defend the historicity of every moment of Jewish history – King David and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, post-biblical homeland Jewish presence from Hadrian to Herzl, the Holocaust in our own time [!], Israel’s 1948 War of Independence not being a War of Creation & Founding.
We talked – Dan and Susan and Eileen and I – about what’s called “Middle East peace,” a term a lot broader than the Palestine struggle between Arabs and Jews that’s typically mis-called “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” To us, Palestinian Arabs aren’t “THE Palestinians,” and aren’t the only people contesting the Jewish people’s land of Israel homeland claim, and even settling the Palestine conflict, were that possible, would hardly bring peace to the entire conflict-raging Middle East. And we told them that at present Palestine peace is not possible because what the Jews have to have as a secure and meaningful homeland – the land of Israel, western Palestine including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem – is more than Arabs accept.
That impasse is where we left things in DeLand. But what eventual prospect for peace can there be? A background paper published in January by Kohelet Policy Forum in Jerusalem, titled “Is UNRWA’s Hereditary Refugee Status for Palestinians Unique?”, offers, I think, a pointer towards a potential solution. This paper convincingly shows that unlike the UNHCR, the UN’s agency for all the world’s refugees except Palestinian Arabs, UNRWA uniquely grants “refugee” status to Arabs who never left Mandatory Palestine, even Palestine west of the Jordan, and to descendants of refugees.
Ask yourself candidly what it is that makes UNRWA unique. Is there something unique about “Palestinian Arabs,” or something unique about Israel, the subject of more UN condemnations than all the world’s other nations combined, and us? Arabs will slowly come to the realization, perhaps, that the Europeans, Russians, and rulers of the Iranians and Turks will contest the Jewish people’s right to its historic homeland to the last drop of Arab blood, and will reconcile to the idea that the Jews, indigenous to the Mideast, who’ve lived in their thrice-sovereign Middle East homeland and more broadly among fellow indigenous Arabs for three millennia, legitimately belong there, in a land of Israel homeland comprising the twenty-two percent of the post-Ottoman Palestine Mandate left over from the seventy-eight percent excised as all-Arab Transjordan. Fanciful, perhaps, but are prospects for permanent peace based on a historic Jerusalem-excluding nine-miles-wide-in-the-lowland-middle 1949 military ceasefire line not fanciful too?
The message I would leave with you this week is that we diaspora American Jews are not passive spectators to all this. We ourselves must make the case that the land of Israel, the Jewish homeland, is as legitimate a part of the Middle East as Egypt and Arabia; that Israel wasn’t “created & founded” out-of-the-blue in 1948, but is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, where Jews have lived without interruption since ancient times; that Palestinian Arabs aren’t exclusively “THE Palestinians”; that the Palestine Mandate’s “two-state solution’s” two-states-for-two-peoples are Jordan – 78% of the Mandate with a Palestinian Arab majority population and no Jews – and Israel, the homeland of the Jews.