This Week: The Evil Inherent in “Captured by Israel in 1967”
Most weeks I’m favored with a few emails, sometimes agreeing with me, sometimes not. I appreciate them all (well, maybe except those that begin “Unsubscribe …”), but I got one this week that hits the nail on the head concerning the difference on Israel among American Jews, if perhaps in delightful phraseology that’s not necessarily exactly how I’d have phrased it. This longtime much-appreciated subscriber wrote:
“The main reason for the divide among American Jews today is the apparent refusal of Israel’s right wing (and folks like you) to give up that Judea-Samaria dream by continued building over the Green Line. Query: what if the Palestinian Arabs were willing to give up all their demands – which they won’t in our lifetime and probably not the lifetimes of our grandchildren – so long as they get 95% of Judea and Samaria? (That’s actually the deal they rejected before initiating the second intifada.) Wouldn’t Israel be better off with that deal than holding out for the whole thing? Isn’t the Perfect the enemy of the Good?”
Start by giving that reader some terminology credit for calling Palestinian Arabs “Palestinian Arabs” and not “THE Palestinians” engaged in a tug-of-war over Palestine with the Jews. But there are grave differences between him, and it seems to me the bulk of American Jews, and “right-wing folks like me” re what Israel should do and the role in that of American Jews.
#1 – The Decision Is Israel’s, Not Ours
Israel’s Nation-State law adopted last summer began by declaring: “A. The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.” There’s substance in that differentiation between “land” and “State.” I wrote in #913 last July that our diaspora Jews’ homeland stake is in the land and does not extend to our criticizing governmental decisions within the purview of the State, such as whether Israel’s official national language should include Arabic, which was given only honorable mention, along with Hebrew.
That applies even more to the State of Israel’s existential peace-process determinations. It’s not for us to tell Israel, though we may offer suggestions carefully characterized as such, for example, on whether to cede almost all of Judea-Samaria to a new Arab state. It’s for the State of Israel to do what it determines it needs to do re Judea-Samaria, except to call it “West Bank.”
This is not, by me alas, the position of the influential pro-Israel organization AIPAC:
“A negotiated two-state solution – a Jewish state of Israel living in peace and security side-by-side with a demilitarized Palestinian state – is the clearest path to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict….”
This is not a friendly outsider’s suggestion to Israel of what seems to the outsider an effective peace-seeking course. This is a flat outsider dictate of what course to take.
#2 – A “Demilitarized Palestinian State” is not “the clearest path” to resolving the conflict
I quarrel, first, with AIPAC’s use of “Palestinian state.” We Jews have equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian.” I quarrel too with “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” as opposed to “Arab-Israeli conflict,” if not “Arab war upon Israel.” Beyond terminology, “demilitarized” states’ demilitarization doesn’t last very long, especially in these days of war being effectively waged, not just by nations’ armored divisions, air forces and navies, but by non-state militias armed to the teeth (e.g., Hezbollah) with increasingly powerful and accurate missiles. And fundamentally, I don’t see room for two secure states in Palestine west of the Jordan.
“A Jewish state of Israel living in peace and security side-by-side with a demilitarized Palestinian state”? Not so clear a realistic path to resolving the conflict that American Jews should endeavor to push it on Israel.
#3 – Even “Two-States” believers should support Jewish home building over the Green Line
Back now to our reader’s email’s suggestion that a, if not the, main obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs is “the apparent refusal of Israel’s right wing (and folks like you) to give up that Judea-Samaria dream by continued building over the Green Line.”
You don’t have to read “The Art of The Deal” to appreciate that making your strongest case for what you’re willing to give up in the end as a negotiations compromise is more effective than conceding all equity in your bargaining chips before negotiations begin.
The “Green Line” is not “Israel’s 1967 border,” as the media loves to mischaracterize it, and is not among the Holy Land’s holy places. It was a 1949 armistice line between Israel and invading [Trans-]Jordan, expressly declared in its defining document as not a political border but an exclusively military ceasefire line only, and as such it was obliterated and consigned to history’s dustbin by renewed 1967 fighting, again initiated by Jordan, between the same sides.
Even if you believe in a western Palestine “two-state solution,” you should support Israel building homes for Jews in Judea-Samaria (and historic Jerusalem), and not call them “settlements” in contradistinction to “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns and villages.”
#4 – Jewish equity in Judea-Samaria is not a mere right-wing “Judea-Samaria dream”
But, on the merits, Jewish connection to Judea-Samaria (and historic Jerusalem) is not a mere fanciful right-wing “Judea-Samaria dream.”
The mainstream western media religiously dates Jewish connection to Judea-Samaria [“the West Bank”] and historic [“East”] Jerusalem to “their capture by Israel in 1967.” Wrong by three thousand years, and the media very well knows it.
But accepting arguendo for one sentence that our connection did date from 1967, wars, not least defensive wars, as in Nasser’s 1967 blood-curdling cry “Our basic aim is the destruction of Israel!” have consequences, and the Six Day War, of which we’re so proud, and the results of which the world unceasingly seeks to reverse, is among them.
The Dream of Generations, which Charles Krauthammer among others pleaded with American Jews to appreciate is occurring in our own time, was not for restoration of an historic Jerusalem-less Jewish homeland nine miles wide in the lowland middle, but for re-independence of a Jewish State in the historic Jewish homeland of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem.
Our emailing reader may be right that ultimate attainment of that Dream of Generations may not be attainable, but should we therefore surrender the seeking of it in exchange for an insecure rump of a homeland and dubious peace? I’m reminded of the 1903 Zionist Congress, at which Uganda was proposed, at least as a way station primarily for immediate amelioration of the perilous plight of pogrom-plagued Russian Jews, who themselves walked out of the Congress, protesting “Zionism without Zion.” (Verlin, Israel 3000 Years, pp. xii – xiii, citing Dubnow, History of the Jews of Russia and Poland, vol. 3, pp. 84-85).
#5 – We must get through to the West that the land of Israel, western Palestine, is not Arabia
It may be that Arabia has always been Arab, I don’t know its full history, but for the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, that is emphatically not so. In the first millennium BCE, the thousand years preceding the Common Era, the main people of the land of Israel were Jews, the people of the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, who fought against, among other enemies, Assyrians and Babylonians, of Yehud, who fought against the Seleucid heirs of Alexander, and of Judaea, who fought (63 and 37 BCE, 66-70 followed by Masada, and 132-35 CE) against Rome. Where were the supposed “Palestinian” descendants of the Canaanites then?
Following final Roman defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135, Romans-Byzantines, Europeans not Arabs, ruled Palestine until 638. The Jews, not exiled by Rome, were still there. Remains of synagogues, the writing of the Mishnah and Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud, Roman recognition of the Patriarch as their leader until the fifth [!] century, and self-mustered homeland Jewish battalions fighting alongside the 614 Persian invaders prove it.
Yes, invading Arabs conquered Palestine from the Byzantines in the 630’s, and foreign Omayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid dynasties ruled from afar until defeated by invading European Christian Crusaders in 1099. These less than five centuries were the only time in Palestine history that it was ruled by Arabs, foreign Arab dynasties at that, and much of that time under the thumb of the Turks. The Crusaders acknowledged that “the Jew is the last to fall” in the Jerusalem battle, and that Haifa’s Jews, fighting alone, “courageously” held them off there for a month. Crusader laws recognized Jews as among the varied peoples inhabiting the land.
The Crusaders were defeated by Turks, and following Mongol and other invasions, non-Arab Mamluks followed by non-Arab Turks ruled Palestine for six-plus centuries until World War I. The Jews were still there in their four holy cities and elsewhere in the land.
In 1948 Israel became the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, and threw back a multi-nation Arab invasion with a homeland army of homeland Jews.
Prof. Wilken, in The Land Called Holy (p, 23), pointed out the historic difference, and its Christian significance, between Palestine and Arab lands like Arabia. With the coming of Alexander, he wrote, “Palestine was joined to the West, first through the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Ptolemies and Seleucids, later through the Romans…. The people of Palestine became part of our history, the history of Greece and Rome and of Christianity, not simply a distant chapter in the fortunes of the ancient Near East.”
This is the straight-forward case we must make to the West: Israel is not a twentieth century European colonial implant in “the Arab Mideast.” Its Jews are as indigenous to the land of Israel, and the Mideast, as Arabs are to Arabia. Jordan, 78% of the post-Ottoman Palestine Mandate, with its Palestinian Arab majority population, is the Arab state of the Palestine Mandate’s two-states for two peoples solution. A precarious Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria-excluding rump Jewish homeland would uproot Christian heritage from the very place it began along with that of us Jews.