WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: American Jews should defer to Jews in Israel whether to accept in Judea-Samaria and part of Jerusalem a west-of-the-Jordan River Arab state. But there is plenty we can fairly suggest to them about our jointly making the Jewish homeland case. Here’s an earful.
Jews are At Home Only in the U.S. and Israel, and American Jews Should Not Try to Set Israel’s Borders, But There’s a Lot We Can Suggest to Israelis
In the final seventh volume of the Harry Potter saga, the evil wizard Voldemort has seized control of the magical world and remolded the Ministry of Magic atrium’s statue set to show Muggles (England’s non-magical population) cowering in subservience to the land’s Wizards. (Potter overthrows Voldemort in the end and restores peaceful Wizard-Muggle co-existence.)
Is there a real world statue-set model for author J.K. Rowling’s Ministry of Magic Wizards-Truimph-Over-Muggles statue set? Turns out, there is. On the façade of a prominent building in Europe have long been two prominent statues capturing feelings of Christians toward Jews:
“On the right, one woman stands ragged, defeated, her eyes are covered by a snake and her head is bowed. She holds a broken scepter and tablets of Jewish law are slipping from her grasp. Under her feet lies a crown trodden into the dust. She is ‘Synagoga,’ representing the synagogue or Judaism in general….
“On her left is a finely dressed woman standing upright, carrying a chalice and a staff with a cross at its peak, seemingly triumphant. She is known as ‘Ecclesia,’ representing the victorious Catholic Church.”
This building, in Paris, is the Notre Dame Cathedral, and yes, this pair of Jew-degrading statues on its façade seems to have survived the electrical short, computer glitch, cigarette butt, whatever-caused devastating fire that just occurred. (JNS, 4/18.19, “The Jewish Treasures [so-to-speak] of Notre Dame.”) A lot of incidents of Jew-mistreatment in France over the centuries are enumerated in this JNS article, where you can go read them, but why? It is enough to know for certain that Europe has never accepted Jews as at-home there, ever, and that anti-Semitism on that Dark Continent today is not confined to its Muslims. Witness UNSC 242 and Six Day War-reversing UNSC 2334, for which all the representatives of Europe cast their votes.
I’m haunted by Dr. Weitzmann’s despair during the Holocaust about the world being divided between places Jews could not live and could not enter. Today, there are two places on earth in which Jews are at home – in the U.S., God Bless It, and Israel. It is a crime against ourselves that the Jewish community of the United States, through the leaders of its main religious institutions, the Reform and Conservative movements, has just set itself against the just-unequivocally-democratically-expressed will of the homeland’s Jews by exhorting the President of the United States to force upon Israel the creation, inside the historic Jewish homeland, Palestine west of the Jordan, a “demilitarized Palestinian Arab state.”
This very month the respected Begin-Sadat Center For Strategic Studies, at Bar-Ilan Uninversity, has issued a 60-page Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 160, “The West Bank’s Area C: Israel’s Eastern Line of Defense.” This thorough study concludes that from a military-strategic standpoint, a “two-state solution” along the pre-June 1967 lines “will not only deprive Israel of defensible borders but will almost certainly lead to the advent of a terrorist entity like the one created in the Gaza Strip” (p. 5). British Col. Kemp, in his remarks outside AIPAC just weeks ago, likewise called such borders indefensible by Israel.
In a JNS article Thursday (JNS, 4/25/19, “Most Israelis Disagree With Dershowitz’s Support for a Palestinian State”), the ZOA’s Mort Klein and Elizabeth Berney issued a six-point statement challenging Prof. Dershowitz’s statements, including his recent tweet, issued simultaneously with the Reform and Conservative movements’ and others’ open letter to President Trump, that it’s “time for a fair two-state solution that assures Israel’s security.” Klein’s and Berney’s points: [1] Opposing “two-states” is not “extreme” and favoring it not “centrist,” as Dershowitz claims. Polls show Israelis are heavily against “two-states.” [2] Israel’s Declaration of Independence was not “based on the partition plan,” as Dershowitz claims, but cited that document along with the Palestine Mandate, the Jewish people’s natural rights and other grounds for reconstituting their state. [3] It’s wrong to invoke the partition resolution as justifying a Palestinian Arab state, as the Arabs rejected that recommendation resolution with an invasion for Israel’s destruction. [4] In the face of the British blockade against Holocaust survivors coming to Israel, Ben-Gurion expressed willingness to “consider” accepting less than what the Jewish people had a right to, but he testified to UNSCOP that justice, history and international law entitle Israel to all of Palestine west of the Jordan. [5] It was misleading for Dershowitz to invoke Netanyahu’s 2009 Bar-Illan University speech re a Palestinian Arab state because the P.A. has never agreed to any of the five statehood conditions laid out in that speech. [6] Forming a Palestinian Arab state is not current U.S. policy, and Rabin, in his last Knesset speech, opposed a Palestinian Arab state.
By me, it’s not for American Jews to tell Israeli Jews, the homeland’s defenders, what the nation of Israel’s borders – not hyperbole, an existential decision for them – should be, that it’s for Israeli Jews to do whatever they decide they need to do re Judea-Samaria, except to call it “West Bank.”
But we have earned the right to kibitz a bit. We should suggest to Israelis:
[a] Stop calling Jews living in Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria “Jewish settlers in Jewish settlements,” which the media revels in pointedly contrasting with nearby “Palestinian residents of Palestinian villages and towns.” In today’s world, “settlements” is a Dirty Word.
[b] Stop calling Palestinian Arabs “THE Palestinians.” Back during the Mandate, you Palestinian Jews were “Palestinians” too. In fact, if anybody was “THE Palestinians” back then, it was you – the Palestine Post, Palestine Symphony, Palestine Electric Company, etc.
[c] Stop taking VIP visitors, particularly foreign governmental officials, exclusively to Yad Vashem. Recognize that if you put the “Israel-was-created-because-of-the-Holocaust” Iranians in charge of welcoming your VIP visitors, this is exactly where they would exclusively take them. Build adjacent to Yad Vashem a museum vividly documenting the uninterrupted three millennia homeland presence of the Jewish people in the homeland of Israel.
[d] Stop talking about “Exile and Return.” You never left. This is what historian Parkes was trying to tell you in asserting that the Yishuv wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” (Trust me. I wrote a book about it.) Make it clear that modern Israel is the land of Israel’s next-native-state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, that every ruler in between – Romans-Byzantines, Ommayad-Abbasid-Fatimid dynasties, European Christian Crusaders, non-Arab Mamluks, Ottoman Turks – was a foreign empire invader, and except between 638 and 1099, non-Arab at that.
[e] Explain why there were fewer Jews than Arabs – six hundred thousand vs. c. a million – in western Palestine in 1948. Start with the before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust anti-Jewish immigrant from Europe British blockade. Mention the papal and other European decrees over the centuries against “transport of Jews to the East.” Mention the massive Roman, Byzantine, Crusader and others’ wholesale slaughters of homeland Jews.
[f] Adamantly reject the canard that Jews are Jerusalem “settlers.” Except during periods of forced foreign conqueror expulsion, from which they relentlessly returned, Jews have lived as Jews in Jerusalem for 3,000 years, for two thousand nine-hundred and some of which nobody called Jews in Jerusalem – capital of three states, Judah, Judaea and Israel, all Jewish, with a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Turkish Ottoman rule – alien “settlers.” Add that Palestinian Arabs have never ruled in Jerusalem, and foreign Arabs only between 638 and 1099, and 1948-67.
[g] Explain the significance of the Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle Eastern Jewish refugees from Arab and other vast Muslim lands, who outnumbered the Arabs who left tiny Israel, that these Israel-absorbed Middle Eastern Jews, who with their descendants make up the majority of Israel’s present population, not only offset the Arab-claimed “right of return,” but establish Israelis not as “European colonialists” but as an indigenous people of the Mideast.
[h] Get across to people in the West that the “green line,” the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire line expressly declared in its defining document to be a military ceasefire line only and not a political border, was replaced by its successor post-1967 war ceasefire line, the Jordan River, and is not among the Holy Land’s holy places. And
[i] Vigorously contest the mainstream Western media’s loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing Israel-reporting poisoned pejoratives – U.N.’s attempted partition of Palestine into “Palestinian and Jewish states,” when it really said “Arab” and Jewish states; “Israel’s 1948 creation and founding,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue; “[Arab] East Jerusalem,” which never existed in history before 1948; “West Bank,” when the U.N. itself used “Samaria and Judea” in its partition resolution of 1947; “Israel’s 1967 borders,” that were actually only 1949 military ceasefire lines; “captured by Israel in 1967,” as though the Jewish people had no pre-1967 equity in historic Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria; “settlers and settlements”, “occupied territories … Palestinian territories … occupied Palestinian territories”; Palestinian Arabs as “THE Palestinians,” etc., etc.