WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: In yet another display of deep difference between American and Israeli Jews on the most fundamentally consequential of Jewish homeland issues, the State of Israel’s permanent borders, American Jewish institutions supported Congressional passage this week of a bill “strongly supporting” a western Palestine two-state solution. Have we gone mad? I fear most of us have. Come see whether it’s me who is nuts.
This Week: We’re In The Same Tale Still
For us, there’s an apt scene in Tolkien’s marvelous adventure tale The Lord of the Rings. The heroes, Frodo and his servant Sam, deep in their quest to bear the evil Ruling Ring to the Cracks of Doom in Mordor, where alone it can be destroyed, spend a cold moonless night high on a desolate mountain on Mordor’s border. To keep up their spirits, Sam recounts sagas of ancient heroes bearing a source of light that gave power to forces for good in the world. And then he realizes that he and Frodo themselves bear a bit of that light in a star glass that had been given to them by an elf queen in their quest, to be a light to them “when all other lights go out,” that they themselves “are in the same tale still.” In wonder, he asks “Don’t the Great Tales never end?” They never end as tales, Frodo replies, and participants in their own time play their part.
The Great Tale that we’re in has three-millennia roots. The scene in our time is the struggle for fulfillment, after eighteen hundred years, of the dream of generations for sovereign redemption in the land of Israel of our Jewish people’s national home. The case, implausible as it may seem at first saying, that I would make to you this 966th week of these weekly emails, is that among American Jews, except among what are dubbed and snubbed as we “ultra-nationalist” believers in “Greater Israel,” all other lights have gone out.
Three calamities:
Federation
Last summer, when Israel formalized its raison d’etre in its Nation State Law, the CEO of JFNA, the Federation of Federations of American Jews, the pinnacle of our community’s formal organizational hierarchy, complained that Arabic, which that Law recognized as having “special status,” had not been blessed with “official” status equal to Hebrew, with which the British had endowed it, along with Hebrew and English, during the Mandate.
The President and CEO of the JFNA worried that this status change would be perceived as Arabic’s “demotion” with “potential ramifications for Jews across the world.” But if the Jewish State can’t make Hebrew, the language unique to the Jews for three thousand years, in which, literally, its Hebrew Bible was written there in that land, the one official language of that Jewish State, how Jewish a Jewish State is it?
Reform and Conservative Movements and Rabbis
This spring, nine important American Jewish organizations joined in an open letter to President Trump calling upon him to oppose “annexation by Israel of any territory in the West Bank,” and called for “a two-state solution” that would “hew precisely to the 1967 borders” except for “any territorial adjustments” in a signed agreement between the two sides. These organizations were the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Union for Reform Judaism, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, MERCAZ, the Rabbinical Assembly, the ADL, Ameinu, the National Council of Jewish Women and the Israel Policy Forum.
The nine august signatories to this open letter to the American President knew full well that what they called “the 1967 borders” were 1949 military ceasefire lines expressly declared in their defining document not to be construed as political borders, and that drawing borders hewing precisely thereto (except for any territorial adjustments agreed in writing between the two sides), in undoing the Six Day War would abandon historic Jerusalem and restore Arab control to places like Jerusalem access-blocking Latrun, site of such desperate battles to relieve Arab-besieged Jerusalem in the 1948 war that Israel threw into the lost fights there just-rescued Holocaust survivors who didn’t even know to unlock the weapons, such as they were, that Israel thrust in their hands.
And the signatories to this letter knew that the term, “West Bank,” which they used to refer to that part of the land of Israel across those 1949 ceasefire lines was coined by the 1948 invader Jordan, not as a synonym but as an antonym for Judea-Samaria, that region’s Hebrew-origin names that had been used all through the post-biblical centuries, including by the U.N. in 1947. And instead of writing in that letter that the Jewish people have a legal and historical claim to that “West Bank” that the letter writers believed should be forgone in compromise for peace, they wrote that application of Israeli law to “any territory in the West Bank” 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.”
I’m just an ordinary grassroots American Jew, but if the signatories to that letter, American rabbis and all, can fairly label Israeli exercise of Israeli law in “any territory of the West Bank” beyond Israel’s “1967 borders” to be “annexation” by Israel, then I’m the King of Kuwait.
AIPAC Last Week
Alas, there was yet one more Major American Jewish Organization light that this week went out.
The U.S. House of Representatives this week passed H. Res. 246, rightly condemning anti-Israel “BDS,” but, as stated in a July 22 ZOA press release, also including “an unnecessary and harmful statement ‘strongly supporting’ a ‘Palestinian state’ next to Israel, as the pre-determined outcome of Israeli-Palestinian negotiation.” As ZOA rightly put it, the net effect of this resolution intended to help Israel is instead to hurt it. ZOA: “In fact, a Palestinian-Arab state would be more dangerous for Israel than BDS is. So, as a result of this insertion, the net effect of these resolutions is to harm Israel.”
ZOA: “We are dismayed that AIPAC [THE American Jewish organization entrusted by us all to inform our elected leaders of matters of great concern to American Jews] sent out emails last week, again [as at its spring conference] urging passage of H. Res. 246, as is, with the dangerous support-for-a-Palestinian-Arab-state language still included.”
Shining the Lights that Remain Lit
As noted in this week’s ZOA press release: “Promoting a Palestinian-Arab state moreover contradicts the overwhelming will of the Israeli government and the Israeli people, confirmed by numerous polls. Israelis oppose creating a Palestinian-Arab state by as much as a 10 to 1 margin.”
From the earliest dispersions of Jews from our homeland, both of us, the Diaspora and the Yishuv, have been participants in our people’s three-millennia saga, and American Jews today are part of that great tale still. Alas, in terms of appreciation of the strategic and homeland heritage significance of the State of Israel’s boundaries in the land of Israel, the lights of lay and religious institutions and leaders of all but some Orthodox (I’m not) and grassroots American Jews have for the present gone out.
A two-state solution “hewing to” or even approximating “the 1967 borders” would be security-wise suicidal and heritage-wise a Jerusalem-less, failed Zion-less Zion. And Israelis have fully abandoned supporting an inside-the-land-of-Israel Palestinian Arab state. In practical terms, no solution to the Arab-Jewish struggle over Palestine seems likely for the foreseeable future. But the concept of a “two-state solution” seems to most folks an equitable ultimate resolution of the sides’ competing Palestine claims. In that context, casting those two states as the existing states of Jordan and Israel, the two alumni of the Palestine Mandate with their respective Arab and Jewish majorities, comes across as being at least as equitable (and infinitely safer and homeland-fulfilling for us) an eventual solution as a second partition between Arabs and Jews of the first partition’s part for the Jews. It’s up to the lights still lit in the American Jewish community to make this case to Americans.