#955 5/12/19 – This Week: Yom Haatzmaut – 71 Years or Longer Than 3,000?

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Let’s not let our rightful celebration of Israel’s seventy-first independence anniversary obscure our own or others’ understanding that our Jewish homeland claim to the land of Israel dates from three millennia before 1948 and that we weren’t “exiled” but have never relinquished our homeland-claiming physical presence. 

This Week:  Yom Haatzmaut – 71 Years or Longer Than 3,000?

Israel this week celebrated the seventy-first anniversary of its independence.  Mazel tov!  It has come a long way just in what the Bible defines as the span of a lifetime.  And yet, I think that in focusing on these most recent three-score years and eleven, we slight our most momentous achievement of all, our people’s continuous physical presence over the course of three millennia in our Jewish homeland of Israel.

But is that really true, what really historically happened?  Years ago, I read, I think in Katz’s popular book Battleground, that an historian named Parkes had written that for all the Jews’ talk about “exile and return,” our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds” had been written by the tenacious continuous presence all through the long, dark post-biblical Hadrian-to-Herzl centuries, in spite of every discouragement, of the ever-present Yishuv.

But is historian Parkes right?  I wondered, to the extent that I researched and wrote my own non-historian to non-historians book on it, Israel 3000 Years. At the top of chapter 1, I invite the reader to join me in this deepest of quests for peoplehood roots.  In this week’s #955 media watch newsletter, I invite you on the quickest of tours, one while you stand on one leg.

But, first, what is all this doing in a weekly newsletter that bills itself as a “media watch”?  It’s here because there are two very damaging ways in which the mainstream Western media misportrays the Jewish homeland of Israel – by distorting the particular facts of some news stories, and by the loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives in which virtually all Israel-related news is purveyed to the public.

“The core of the core” of the Jewish homeland, as Bibi puts it, is historic Jerusalem, capital of three states in the past 3,000 years, all of them Jewish, and with a renewed Jewish population majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule.  The media loves to refer to the historic portion of the city that was seized by invading Jordan in 1948 until ousted by Israel in 1967 as “East Jerusalem,” “traditionally Arab East Jerusalem,” and even just “Arab East Jerusalem.”  But as archeologist Gabriel Barkay just this week pointed out in the Jerusalem Post, the Temple Mount and Western Wall, City of David, Mount of Olives and other most sacred Jewish (and Christian) holy sites are in “east Jerusalem.”  No such city as “East Jerusalem” ever existed in history before the “green line,” the Israel-Jordan military ceasefire line – not one of the Holy Land’s holy places – was drawn in 1949, and if you look at a map of Jerusalem today you’ll see one city not two.

The media loves to call Judea and Samaria, the land of Israel’s hill country heartland, “the West Bank,” invented by the invader Jordan in 1950, and to dismiss the Hebrew-origin names “Judea and Samaria,” as “the biblical names of the West Bank,” but “Judea and Samaria” remained in use all through the post-biblical centuries, including by the United Nations itself in 1947.

The media loves to call Israel “created” and “founded” in 1948, as though artificially and out-of-the-blue, which doesn’t explain how the 1948 invasion of neighboring Arab states was thrown back by a homeland army of homeland Jews.  And the media attributes that “creation” and “founding” of Israel to the U.N.’s 1947 attempt “to partition Palestine into Palestinian and Jewish states” (like partitioning the ex-planet Pluto into Plutonian and Jewish states).  But what the U.N. really said, over and over, was “Arab” and Jewish states, and called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.”  And the media loves to attribute Jewish connection to historic Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to “their capture by Israel in 1967,” as though there was no Jewish connection before that.

The answer to all this persistent consistent delegitimization of the Jewish people’s homeland connection to the land of Israel is to make the correct case that following Roman destruction of Jewish Judaea in CE 135, we weren’t exiled but, as historian Parkes put it, tenaciously remained in the land all through the centuries, writing our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

We must not be reticent in asserting this to the world.  Jews remained there, not as stray individuals, but as a consciously homeland-claiming community, the Yishuv, and every ruler between 135 and 1948 was a foreign empire invader – Romans-Byzantines, Omayyads-Abbasids-Fatimids, Crusaders, Mamluks, Turks, British – and mostly non-Arab at that.  The state of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.  So, here goes, while you stand on one leg.

Roman-Byzantine era synagogue remains have been unearthed all over the land.  The Romans recognized the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community until the fifth century.  The Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud were constructed by scholars in the land.  There is documentation aplenty (see, e.g., Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age, pp. 6-11) of correspondence between Jewish religious authorities in the Yishuv and diaspora communities, showing Yishuv hegemony over that diaspora.  Twenty thousand or more homeland Jews, in their own self-mustered battalions, fought alongside the invading Persians in 614 against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs.  When Byzantines (briefly) regained control, they went on a rampage, massacring homeland Jews.

We know quite a lot about the Yishuv during the ensuing era of foreign Muslim dynasty rule, which began as Arab and fell progressively under control of Turks.  Archeologist Bahat has constructed a map, over a millennium later, of c, a hundred ninth century homeland Jewish communities in this place the size of New Jersey.  There was much Jewish religious activity.

The Crusaders wrote that “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them at Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.”  Albert of Achen wrote of Haifa, “which the Jews [alone, for a month] defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.”  Historians tell us that we don’t know of other homeland places defended by Jews, “but there is no reason to suppose that Jerusalem and Haifa were exceptional places.”   Runciman wrote that Crusader massacres greatly reduced the land’s population of Jews.  Benjamin of Tudula and other travelers’ writings tell of Jewish communities in the land in Crusader times, where Maimonides stayed for a time.

Not Arabs but Turks ultimately ousted the Crusaders, and following Mongol and other destructive invasions, Turk-Circassian Mamluks ruled, from Turkey and then Egypt, from 1260 to 1517.  Diaspora Jews continued to come, especially after the Spanish expulsion.  From various sources, I constructed a timeline of Jewish life in Jerusalem during Mamluk rule.  And there are records of Jewish communities elsewhere in the land.

The Turks misruled the land for four hundred years, 1517 – 1917, driving its population, including its Jews in their four holy cities and elsewhere in the land, down to its lowest of all recorded times, famously captured by Mark Twain and others.  But the Yishuv began to revive, breaking out of Jerusalem’s stifling walls, founding new communities, agricultural communes and schools, in the 1870’s.  It was to an already reviving Yishuv that the Zionists came.

There’s more than a grain of truth in the old pre-state quip that “Zionism is a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine.”  As Katz put it in Battleground, modern Zionism indeed brought modern tools to immigration, but “the living movement to the land had never ceased.”  At my own book’s end I added:  “Travel of Jews to Palestine has always been fraught with difficulties and dangers confronting all audacious travelers in every age, but superimposed upon them, from decrees of medieval popes to the British blockade, have been obstacles placed uniquely for Jews.”

I end Israel 3000 Years (save for a final comment re omission of the Yishuv’s significance from Israel’s declaration of independence) by quoting Katz on a particularly brutal seventeenth century expulsion of Jews from eastern Europe, from which most fled to western Europe, though “again the bolder spirits among them made their way to Palestine.”  I end:

     “And so too has it been in every age the presence, beacon, magnet of the Yishuv, at times diminished to a pummeled minor minority, that has made the millennia-long return of countless generations of Jews possible, even thinkable, and formed the continuous generational link between ancient Israelites and Israelis today.”

And so, in ever so rightly joining with Israelis this week in commemorating this seventy-first anniversary of Israel’s independence, not of “creation” and “founding,” let’s make clear, first to ourselves, second to the American Jewish kids quoted in the Haaretz op-ed our #954 cited last week saying they see no need for a Jewish state, and then to the West, that, whatever Israel ultimately agrees to, we never physically or otherwise relinquished our land of Israel homeland claim and that the Jewish people is its rightful owner, not “occupier,” from the sea to the river, including in historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria.