WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Matti Friedman made a strong case in an interview this week that Israelis, not just Israel’s Mizrahis, are Middle Easterners, not Europeans. But we need to go further: Israel’s indigenous Middle Eastern status doesn’t date from 1948, or even from the late nineteenth century Zionist movement. Jewish homeland presence, embodied in today’s State of Israel and its Israelis, dates continuously from the Late Bronze-Iron I Age transition.
This Week: Matti Friedman Is Right – As Far As He Goes
“Israel is in the Middle East.” Those are the opening words of David Horovitz’s Times of Israel interview this week of Matti Friedman, ex-APnik, writer of media bias-analyzing articles praised by, inter alia, this part-time media watch, and author of a new book – Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel – on Mizrahi [Middle Eastern origin] spies for Israel in the days of its struggle for independence.
It’s that interview’s opening sentence – “Israel is in the Middle East” – that kicks off a discussion of great import to American Jews, especially those like me troubled by our most central institutions – the Reform and Conservative movements, AIPAC – injecting American Jewish involvement in Israel-Arab peacemaking and at that weakening the Jewish homeland case by calling for creation of an inside-the-land-of-Israel Palestinian Arab state.
Friedman’s point is not just that Israel is in a dangerous place, which of course it is, but more deeply than that, with half its population from the Islamic world, Israel isn’t a European implant but “native to the region,” a “continuum of the Jewish presence inside the Muslim world.” Interview text: “Jews were always part of the Middle East. Every Arab city had a Jewish quarter. Jews didn’t come here in 1948. They were here.” [Italics Horovitz or Friedman’s]
Friedman believes that instead of Israel’s Jews from Muslim lands becoming Westernized, “Jews of European origin are becoming more Mizrahi here.” He says that in general Israelis with roots in the Islamic world were always politically to the right and skeptical of the left’s “belief that rational self-interest and modern ideas of progress would prevail,” and that this accounts for Israelis’ growing belief that “optimistic Western templates” of territorial compromise “don’t apply here.” He himself agrees: “In 2019, it’s clear that the Middle Eastern perspective is closer to reality.”
Beyond just not touting to the world a western Palestine two-state solution, we American Jews should draw something further from Friedman’s Times of Israel interview. We should make the case in the West that Israel isn’t just in the Middle East, but that it is Middle East, indeed even more deeply so than Friedman himself sees it.
Friedman says that Israel’s Jewish majority is about 50-50 from Christian Europe and the Islamic world, that it used to be more the latter but “the Russians came and offset that.” But he says the Russian arrivals themselves are more non-liberal Middle Eastern than European in perspective, and, as noted above, the European-origin Israelis are becoming increasingly more Middle Eastern in outlook as well. We American Jews should impress on the American public that Israelis are Middle Eastern, not European, that at least half of them have always lived there.
But where I differ from Friedman is over why we each wrote our books. He says in the interview:
“The book was born of insights that I’ve had about Israel in my 24 years here. I thought we needed stories that better reflect the real Israel – not just stories of secular Ashkenazi pioneers and survivors of Warsaw. It’s much more a Middle Eastern place than the one in the stories. It was designed as a refuge for the Jews from Europe but it came too late for that. It became a refuge for Jews from the Middle East. It’s part of the continuum of the Jewish presence inside the Muslim world, in different circumstances.” [emphasis added]
I wrote a book about Israel too – Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine (Pavilion Press, 2005, 2011, Amazon). In the front, I quote British historian James Parkes:
“It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.” – James Parkes, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p. 266.
I went on for the next 143 pages (with 571 authority-citing footnotes) to trace that heroic continuous tenacious homeland-claiming Jewish presence from its Late Bronze-Iron I Age transition origins through the late nineteenth and twentieth century Yishuv revival and Zionist movement. It was we Jews, not Arafat’s ancestors, who, in defending two successive Jewish Temple-centered, Jerusalem-capital kingdoms, took on Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucids and Romans. It was we Jews who got successively slaughtered by Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders and others, which, along with pre-, during- and post-Holocaust British-barring of the Jewish homeland to Jews, accounted for there not being more of we Jews there (600,000 vs c. a million Arabs) in 1948. And it was we, whose homeland army of homeland Jews threw back the instant invasion of neighboring Arab states in reestablishing in 1948 the State of Israel as the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.
It’s a myth, just as Parkes said, that the Romans “exiled” the homeland’s Jews on defeating Bar Kochba in CE 135. We Never Left, and this is the point we must make, along with half of Israelis having indigenous Muslim-land Middle East roots, in explaining Israel’s indigenous roots to people in the West.
And (my shtick) we have to stop using terms deliberately designed to delegitimize the land of Israel homeland of Jews. E.g., “West Bank … East Jerusalem … 1948 founding and creation of Israel … 1967 borders … captured by Israel in 1967 [as opposed to by Joshua] … settlers and settlements … occupation and occupied territories, Palestinian territories, occupied Palestinian territories … [Palestinian Arabs as] The Palestinians.”