WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Arguing that “Jordan Is Arab Palestine” may seem to be unrealistically pushing a solution to which the sides will not agree, but what of agreement on widely-pushed “two states for two peoples” sans “right of return”? In the battle for Western public perception of what’s an equitable Arab-Jewish Palestine Mandate partition solution, one of Israel as sovereign in the 22% west of the River, Palestinian Arabs in the 78% east of it can be seen to be fairer to both sides than an Israel perilously nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle, sans Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, with Palestinian Arab-majority states in both Judea-Samaria and also in Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan.
Article This Week: ‘Two-State Solution’ Isn’t Best For Either Side – What’s This, Idle Ivory Tower Talk? Nope.
Maybe in your virtual travels this week you glanced on the A-list Jewish website JNS at an article titled ‘Two-State Solution’ Isn’t Best for Either Side. If you did, perhaps you bypassed it as just some officious American academic’s meaningless exercise in telling the Mideast’s Jews and Arabs what’s best for each of them. I might have skipped that article for that reason myself, except that I co-wrote it, and ivory tower talk isn’t my shtick.
We need to ask ourselves what’s the task of individual members of the Jewish people today. We need to come up with how we might accomplish that task, and assess how realistic that is.
Our Task: Finishing Fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for Israel’s Redemption
Ariel Sharon, as credentialed as anyone in his post-military years to make such an assessment, told an Israeli journalist interviewing him that the State of Israel has fought only one war, its War of Independence and that it is still being fought.
The ceasefire lines of the 1948-49 battles of that war, preceding its 1956, 1967 and 1973 battles, are being proposed by most of the world as “the two-state solution” to that Arab-Jewish Palestine war. Col. Kemp and other military experts have made the case, which doesn’t seem to need military experts to make, that a nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle Israel, visually overlooked by the Judea-Samaria hill country in a sovereign Arab state, would be militarily indefensible. Formal peace treaties or not, such vulnerable Jewish state boundaries would entice future aggression by believers in “the Arab Mideast.”
I believe Col. Kemp’s military assessment is sound, but there’s more to the Jewish homeland’s sovereign redemption than that.
Back more than a century ago, when the Sixth Zionist Congress convened in Switzerland in 1903, Herzl presented “the Uganda plan,” not as a final goal, but as a temporary refuge in Africa for “the amelioration of the terrible condition of Russian Jewry,” victims of recurring horrendous pogroms. After “many stormy and soul-searching scenes,” the plan’s opponents, mostly those Russian Jews, bitterly protesting “Zionism without Zion,” walked out. (Dubnow, History of the Jews of Russia and Poland, vol. 3, pp. 84-85.)
Back more than a half-century ago, but during my lifetime, Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, put to the world’s Jews what Israel’s sovereign rebirth was about: fulfillment of the dream of generations for the Jewish homeland’s redemption. That dream of Jewish homeland redemption does not stop at the ceasefire lines of the fighting of 1948-49, but includes the land of Israel’s Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and above all historic Jerusalem.
Today, the State of Israel is in physical control of the land of Israel, but the world – see, e.g., UNSC 2334 – declares every inch, including in historic Jerusalem, beyond those 1949 ceasefire lines to be “occupied Palestinian territory.” The task of the Jewish people today is rejecting that declaration and finishing fulfillment of the dream of generations for the Jewish homeland’s sovereign redemption.
The Need for a Third Contender for Western Public Acceptance
Today, two Palestine solutions – Palestine for “the Palestinians” and a western Palestine “two-state solution” – vie for Western public acceptance.
Do not dismiss “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” lightly. This publicly chanted slogan powerfully pummels into western public perception two hostile-to-us messages: that Palestine is western Palestine only, excluding Palestinian Arab-majority, 78% of the Mandate Jordan from Palestine peace solution involvement; and that Palestine, so defined, is in its entirety Jewish-occupied Arab land.
Against this, American Jewry doesn’t convey to the American public the Jewish claim to the entirety of the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, based on history and legal grounds including San Remo and the Palestine Mandate. AIPAC calls for a “demilitarized” western Palestine state sharing the land of Israel with Israel. The Reform and Conservative movements, the religious institutions of most American Jews, call for a “two-state solution” that will “hew precisely” to 1949 ceasefire lines that they call “the 1967 borders,” not as a painful peace compromise of Jewish homeland rights to Judea-Samaria (and historic Jerusalem?), but as a disclaimer of Jewish equity in a “West Bank,” in which exercise of Jewish sovereignty in “any territory” of which would constitute “annexation” – defined in the Encarta Dictionary as “to take over territory and incorporate it into another political entity, e.g., a country or state.”
What American Jews who believe in Jewish homeland equity in historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, irrespective of possible peace process compromise, must impress upon Americans’ perceptions is the existence of a third Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict solution, one that’s fair and just to both Arabs and Jews. In as few catchy words as “From the River to the Sea” and “the two-state solution,” that third contender for Western public acceptance is not that “Jordan is Palestine,” but that “Jordan is Arab Palestine,” recognizing Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian.”
But Is the ‘Jordan-Is-Arab-Palestine’ Two-State Solution Realistic?
Beyond saying in the ‘Jordan-Is-Arab-Palestine’ article that Lee and I got posted on JNS this past week that an Israel that includes Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem is better for Jews than one that’s nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle without them, we said that a Palestinian Arab homeland in Palestinian-Arab-majority, 78% of the Palestine Mandate Jordan is better for them than a landlocked rump piece of the smaller piece of that Mandate with borders defined now by the long-gone ceasefire lines of a 1948-49 war that had been erased by those of a 1967 war.
Criticisms I’ve heard of this argument that we advanced in this article, and in other articles, and in this weekly media watch, include that neither the Palestinian Arabs, nor Jordan and its king, nor other Sunni Arab states, nor Israel, nor the U.S. will ever go for it. It’s even been suggested that we shouldn’t bring it up at all if the two sides’ agreement on it isn’t realistic.
But how realistic is parties’ agreement on “From the River to the Sea,” or on the western Palestine “two-state solution”? The U.S, and Israel define “Two-States” as “two states for two peoples.” Palestinian Arabs define “Two-States” as a judenrein western Palestine Arab state and a green line-Israel inundated with millions of descendants of 1948 Arabs under “The Right Of Return.” In 2010, Israel answered this: “If the Palestinians think that they can create one Palestinian state and one dual-nationality state, this will not happen” (quoted in Bender & Verlin, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, p. 52).
Hashemite Jordan is seen by Israel as relatively non-belligerent and by the U.S. as relatively pro-West, but Jordan’s minority Hashemite kings were enthroned after World War I by colonial Britain. The Arab Spring may yet come to Jordan. It might become a failed terrorist state. But so might a new western Palestine Arab state, not alongside but inside the historic land of Israel.
“Two states for two peoples” west of the Jordan River sounds equitable to Westerners who perceive Palestine as extending only “From the River to the Sea,” and not embracing the trans-Jordan 78% of a Palestine Mandate that recognized Jews’ historic connection to Palestine and called for restoration of the Jewish National Home in Palestine with close settlement of Jews on the land.
What we must get across to people in the West is that on historic and legal grounds the Jewish homeland claim extends to the 22% of the Palestine Mandate between the River and Sea, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, and doesn’t stop at the old long-extinguished ceasefire lines of the fighting of 1948-49, and that the Palestinian Arab claim is to the 78% of the Mandate east of the River. “Jordan Is Arab Palestine” conveys this – that Jordan is part, indeed three-quarters part, of the Palestine Mandate, and that it’s this three-quarters part that is Arabs’.