WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The Philly Inquirer’s foreign affairs columnist had a pejorative-laced Jewish homeland-disparaging column last week, but shorn of its pejoratives, is it advocating anything more destructive of our Jewish homeland’s sovereign redemption than we ourselves, American Jews and our key institutions, are openly advocating? Alas, I think not.
Inq Columnist: Jordan River Border “Undermines Israeli Security”
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s long-time house foreign affairs columnist, Trudy Rubin, had an Inq article just before the Israeli election, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Election Pledge To Annex Much of West Bank Undermines Israeli Security. Two of us submitted an unaccepted op-ed to the Inq, including unmentioned facts weighing against four of Ms. Rubin’s contentions. Here, in expanded form, is our rebuttal.
“Rabin led push for two-state solution”
Citing warnings that “creeping annexation of the West Bank” would “rule out” creation of the west-of-the-Jordan-River Palestinian Arab state which she favors, Ms. Rubin wrote that “the post-Oslo push for a two-state solution was led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,” who “believed Israeli security required Jews and Palestinian Arabs to have separate states.”
But did he? In October 1995, a month before he was assassinated, Rabin told the Knesset that what he envisioned was “a Palestinian entity” that is “less than a state,” a “united Jerusalem” as “the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty,” and that “the security border of the state of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.”
“West Bank Arabs are disenfranchised”
Ms. Rubin warned that Israeli retention of all of Palestine west of the Jordan would confront it in time with an Arab majority, giving it “two impossible choices” of either giving all Arabs the vote, ending Israel as the Jewish homeland, or ruling “over a disenfranchised Arab majority in an apartheid mode.”
But Palestinian Arabs living in Judea-Samaria aren’t homeland-less waifs with no place, indeed no place in Palestine, which to call home. Palestine, defined by the League of Nations Palestine Mandate, carved like other Mandates out of the old Ottoman Empire, didn’t stop at the Jordan River, but continued eastward to embrace an area three-times the size of Palestine west of the Jordan. That eastern 78% of the original Palestine Mandate is today the Palestinian Arab-majority state of Jordan. The place for Palestinian Arabs’ full enfranchisement is that 78% of Palestine which its first division gave to the Arabs, not that first division’s 22% left for the Jews.
Perhaps such Palestinian Arabs can be given non-resident citizenship in Palestinian Arab Jordan. But even if they have to move from one part of Palestine to another part, their movement would be hardly as far or as traumatic as that of the Arab-Jewish conflict’s almost one million displaced indigenously Middle Eastern Jews, most of whom fled deprived of their property to Israel where they were absorbed.
“An Israel comprised of 22% of the Mandate is ‘Greater Israel’”
This Inq house world affairs columnist’s article is replete with Jewish homeland delegitimizing pejoratives.
*** Three times she called historic Jerusalem – capital of three states in the past three millennia, all of them Jewish, with its renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule – “East Jerusalem … Arab East Jerusalem … Arab Jerusalem.” Arab Jerusalem? Palestinian Arabs have not ruled any part of Jerusalem ever. Invading [Trans-]Jordan seized and ruled part of it from 1948 to 1967, when it was evicted by a homeland army of homeland Jews, a 19-year partial control that ended more than a half-century ago. The only time in history before that when Arabs, foreign Arab dynasties, ruled Jerusalem was for a sometimes-interrupted few hundred years ending almost a thousand years ago between the rule of the European Romans’ Byzantine heirs and and that of the European Christian Crusaders.
*** Two names not mentioned by Ms. Rubin, though they’ve been in continuous use for millennia, including their use by the U.N. in 1947, are the Hebrew-origin names Judea and Samaria. Judea and Samaria are to Ms. Rubin in this short article “the occupied West Bank … the occupied West Bank [again] … occupied territory … occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.” The Jewish connection to Judea and Samaria precedes the Six Day War by three millennia.
*** “Annex,” forms of which (“annex … annexation … annexationist [singular and plural]) appear a dozen times in Ms. Rubin’s article, is partisan. The language used by Bibi in his “election pledge” was not, as Ms. Rubin put it in her opening sentence, “to annex a third of the occupied West Bank,” but to “apply Israeli sovereignty” to the Jordan Valley, part of Area C, under Israeli control under the failed Oslo Accords. To “annex,” per the Encarta Dictionary, is “to take over territory and incorporate it into another political entity, e.g., a country or state.” The Jewish state has legitimate legal and historical claim to Judea-Samaria, which is not part of another political entity. Bibi’s actual words, “apply Israeli sovereignty,” used by Ms. Rubin zero times, including in citing Bibi’s “vow,” is more objective than “annex,” which Ms. Rubin used a dozen times.
*** Ms. Rubin referred to “the long-delayed peace plan hatched by First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner” and to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel as “David Friedman, Trump’s former bankruptcy lawyer.”
*** But Ms. Rubin’s biggest belittlement of the Jewish homeland is her use twice in this article of “Greater Israel” [upper-case ‘G’] to refer to a Jewish State comprising the 22% of the Palestine Mandate west of the Jordan. The Palestine Mandate, with its express recognition of the Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine and call for reconstitution therein of the Jewish National Home with close settlement of Jews on the land, originally included the 78% that was soon excised as all-Arab Transjordan, leaving that high sounding Jewish National Home language to apply just to a Lesser Israel of 22%. But that 22% is “Greater Israel” to Ms. Rubin, who would apply that Jewish National Home language to just a nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle piece of that 22% – i.e,, to a fraction of that fifth.
“’Calamity’ confronting Israel is Israeli [not Arab] rule of ‘West Bank’”
Ms. Rubin warns in her article of “the long-range calamity” facing Israel if it “annexes” the “West Bank.” She gives no hint to Inq readers that what the vast majority of Israelis see as an immediate calamity – security suicide – from creation of an inside-the-land-of-Israel Arab state literally overlooking a nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle truncated Israel, and homeland redemption surrender through Israel walking away from historic Jerusalem with all of its central-to-Judaism-and-Jewish-homeland religious, historical and archeological meaning. Inq readers were entitled to know what Israelis themselves see as calamitous.
The Real “Lesser Israel” – American Jews’ Advocacy of Greenline New Deal
Ms. Rubin’s column, I think, did us a favor in garnering our attention and arousing our anger through her mocking “Greater Israel” and other pejoratives. But, removing them from her column last week, what remains is a calmer core that calls for a reduction of the Jewish state to an indefensible nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle rump of a homeland omitting Rabin’s united Jerusalem under Israel’s sovereignty and Jordan Valley security border “in the broadest meaning of that term.” What ought to bother us most is that the advocates of this Greenline New Deal include not just a left-wing American newspaper’s house world affairs columnist but the large bulk of American Jews and our central pillar institutions.
Understand clearly that what the American Reform and Conservative movements et al advocated in their letter to President Trump calling for a new western Palestine Arab state with borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 border,” except for “any territorial adjustments” thereto [i.e., changes to the existing borders] in signed writings, is not just a call to undo the Six Day War, inconceivable as that seems for central pillars of American Jewry, but something even more destructive to fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for our Jewish homeland’s sovereign redemption – replacement of what had been mostly viewed as de facto Jordanian control of Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem with their de jure inclusion in a new Arab state. That is precisely what “hew precisely to the 1967 border” entails. That the American Reform and Conservative movements, rabbis and all, would put their heksher on such is a shanda.