#951 4/14/19 – JTA This Week = Establishment Jewish Groups; Unprecedented Pleas Implores U.S. President To Restrain Israeli Prime Minister [really]

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  A bevy of heavyweight American Jews and institutions weighed in on Friday for “the two-state solution” and against Bibi “annexing the West Bank.”  Comfortable U.S. Jews shouldn’t tell Hamas-Hezbollah-pay-to-slay-PA-surrounded Israelis to live alongside “a demilitarized Palestinian state” in “the West Bank,” but should voice support for our Jewish homeland claim to the entirety of the land of Israel, including Judea-Samaria.

JTA This Week:  Establishment Jewish Groups’ Unprecedented Plea Implores U.S. President to Restrain Israeli Prime Minister [really]

The astonishing assessment in that headline above isn’t mine.  It’s that of the far-from-right-wing Jewish Telegraphic Agency Saturday (JTA, 4/12/19, Ron Kampeas, “Some of Israel’s best American Jewish friends are worried about Netanyahu’s promise to annex the West Bank”):

“In what appears to be an unprecedented plea, establishment Jewish groups were imploring a U.S. president to restrain an Israeli prime minister.”

Nine heavyweight American Jewish groups – the Reform Movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis and Union for Reform Judaism; the Conservative Movement’s  United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Rabbinical Assembly and Zionist affiliate Mercaz; and “the Anti-Defamation League, the lead Jewish civil rights advocacy group; Ameinu, a liberal Zionist group; the National Council of Jewish Women; and the Israel Policy Forum, a group focused on reaching a two-state solution” (JTA. 4/13/19, “Reform, Conservative Jews to Trump: don’t let Netanyahu annex West Bank”) – penned a joint letter to the President, which they released to the JTA.   The JTA article quoted ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt:  “We continue to believe in the two-state solution.”

A JTA-quoted “separate statement, released at virtually the same early-morning hour, by the four members of the U.S. House of Representatives who are closest to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC]” – “pro-Israel Jewish Democrats” Cong. Engel, Lowey, Deutch and Schneider – stated:

“As strong, life-long supporters of Israel, a U.S.-Israel relationship rooted in our shared values, and the two-state solution, we are greatly concerned by the possibility of Israel taking unilateral steps to annex the West Bank.”

JTA:  A “third warning to Netanyahu, at a similar time Friday morning” came on Twitter from Prof. Alan Dershowitz:

“Mazel tov to @IsraeliPM@netanyahu, who I’ve known since he was a student at MIT.  Waiting for the new peace plan to be implemented.  Time for a fair two-state solution that assures Israel’s security.”

One problem, Professor, and dozen establishment U.S. Jewish institutions and Jewish Congressional leaders quoted above, is that Israelis themselves had just convincingly voiced (QED) their own rejection of the supposition that there can be “a fair two-state solution that assures Israel’s security.”  Is your armchair assessment of what suffices for Israelis’ security more valid than theirs?  And is it not chutzpah (something you wrote a good book about, Professor) for secure-in-their-homes American Jews to tell Israelis, surrounded as they are by Hamas, Hezbollah and a pay-to-slay PA, to accept a “two-state solution,” slinking back to the perilous 1949 ceasefire lines in Judea-Samaria, and turning over security control of the land of Israel’s hill country heartland to “a ‘demilitarized’ Palestinian state”?

But there is a deeper, more fundamental, problem with you here, Professor, and establishment American Jewish institutions and Congressional leaders quoted above.  And with you, too, JTA.  And even with us, grassroots American and Israeli Jews, who countenance Jewish use of Jewish homeland delegitimizing terms and expressions like “West Bank,” and “Palestine” as an Arab state to be created in “the West Bank,” west of the Jordan.  It is incumbent upon all of us, including Jewish advocates in the end of that two-states-in-western-Palestine “two-state solution,” to state clearly and unequivocally the historical Jewish equity in the territory which that twenty-fourth or so Arab state would comprise.  It’s time for us to make the case, as the chair of Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights put it in a JPost posting this weekend, that “Jews are owners, not occupiers.”

There has never been an independent Arab state in Judea-Samaria, which was what “the West Bank,” a name coined in 1950 by Jordan, was called, not just in antiquity, but all through the centuries through 1947, when the U.N. itself used “Samaria and Judea.”   Except during the Jordanian invasion between 1948 and 1967, the last time, indeed only time, even foreign Arabs (Ommayad, Abbasid, Fatimid empires) controlled Judea-Samaria was between 638 and 1099.  Where were the Arab “Palestinians” when homeland Jews were fighting Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucid successors of Alexander, Romans four times (63 and 37 BCE, 66-70, 132-135 CE), and Byzantines (alongside Persians in 614)?

The Mandate goalposts which were established internationally after World War I, allocated the entirety of Palestine, east and west of the Jordan, to the Jewish National Home, in recognition of historical Jewish connection to Palestine, and called for close settlement of Jews on the land.  There was no “green line” running through western Palestine in the Mandate, but there was a provision permitting withholding of the Mandate east of the Jordan.  That was done, and that was the Palestine Mandate’s partition into two states for two peoples.  The Arab-rejected proposed second partition of 1947 would have moved the goalposts to west of the Jordan.  We should not concede, any of us, that that first partition of the Mandate – 78% for the Arabs, 22% for the Jews – didn’t happen, that what that 1920’s partition gave Arabs is Arabs’, but that what it left for the Jews is again partitionable between Arabs and Jews.

The deep respect due the opinions of Prof. Dershowitz and these U.S. establishment Jewish organizations, even AIPAC [!], and these Jewish Congressmen/woman notwithstanding, it’s their  “demilitarized Palestinian state” west of the Jordan that’s what’s unsustainable.  As Col. Kemp knowledgeably stated at a sideshow at AIPAC, Israel has to maintain permanent security control of western Palestine’s hill country heartland.  We should not call such control there, even if it includes exercising full Israeli sovereignty, “annexation,” any more than we should call Judea-Samaria “the West Bank,” Jewish presence there not communities but “settlements,” not homeland presence but “occupation.”   Just as Jordan is the Palestine Mandate’s successor to Palestine east of the Jordan, Israel is to Palestine to the west of it.

More than one reader of this weekly email has emailed me, “But what of the Arabs living in western Palestine?  Does Israel ultimately either get diluted into a non-Jewish state, or become vulnerable to accusations of ‘apartheid’?”    I don’t have a perfect-world answer.  There are two dozen or so Arab states where they could live as freely as these states’ other citizens.  But if there is one lesson for us to learn from our people’s long diaspora history, it’s that we have to have our one small homeland Jewish state which Israel was reborn as a sovereign nation expressly to be – we have to have it.  And right about now, isn’t the U.S. academic world, however grossly unjustly, commemorating its annual “Israel Apartheid Week”?  Arabs who are not Israeli citizens will have full civil and religious rights.  Security against external invasion and internal terror will be handled by Israel.  (There is btw somewhat of an historical precedent.  The northern kingdom of ancient Israel, I learned from inter alia Prof. Finkelstein’s The Bible Unearthed in researching my own book on the Jews’ 3000 year homeland presence, was a dual-ethnicities kingdom with Canaanites having their own internal governmental functions administrative facilities.)