#975 9/29/19 – Make the Case: The Land of Israel Is Ours

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish religious New Year starting this evening, has been a time for making resolutions for that Jewish new year. Let me suggest one that means something for the Jews of our time.    

Make the Case:  The Land of Israel Is Ours

If the Martians pick today, this Erev Jewish New Year, to land here on Earth, they ought not pick the U.S. or Israel, because when they say to an American or Israeli “Take us to your leader,” today neither of us could do it.

This situation is relevant to these weekly emails because the latest survey of the world’s Jewish population, such as it is, puts Jews 95% in the U.S. and Israel, split about equally between them.  The Good News is that these two places are Home.  The State of Israel is situated in the land of Israel, the three-millennia homeland of Jews.  If there is a place on Earth in which the Jewish people, through tenacious presence and blood, has historically established itself as the indigenous people of that place, the land of Israel is it.  And America, where no one not residing on a “Reservation,” except Elizabeth Warren, is indigenous, is not just exceptional but unique.  Most non-Jewish Americans, which is almost all Americans even with almost half of us living here, see us as part of the American people mix.

The Gravity of the Dispute Between American and Israeli Jews

The Bad News is that these two almost halves of world Jewry are deeply at odds over the most consequential issue facing the Jews of our time.  This is not hyperbole.  All but one of the differences between American and Israeli Jews which surfaced during the past year – should Israel have welcomed Congresswomen Omar and Tlaib; should Arabic have been blessed as “official” instead of just “special” in Israel’s new Nation State law; what should be the standing of non-Orthodox American Jewish movements in Israel – either fade away or can be revisited at a later time.  That one issue, that one with the deepest of historical consequences for Jews, that can’t be revisited later is what the international borders of the State of Israel will be.

Fighting in the unfinished War of 1948-49 ceased in a ceasefire agreement which drew a line with a green pen, hence the “green line,” which was expressly declared in that defining document to be a military ceasefire line only, expressly not a political border.  That ceasefire line left invading Jordan in military control of the historic part of Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria.  Almost the entire world regarded this as only de facto Jordanian control.  A homeland army of homeland Jews evicted the invader Jordan from the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, in the 1967 War.

No lay Jew who witnessed the terrifying events of May and heroic events of June 1967, especially those of us who were alive during WW II and the Holocaust and the heroic struggle that followed for Israel’s sovereign rebirth, gave thought that we’d ever see the day when the central pillars of American Jewry, the Conservative and Reform religious movements, rabbis and all, against the position of the vast majority of Israeli Jews, would openly petition the President of the United States for a Greenline New Deal – retreat of the Jewish State to the nine miles wide in the lowland middle 1949 military ceasefire lines, deceptively called in that petition “the 1967 borders,” save for “any territorial adjustments” [i.e., border changes] that did not “hew precisely” thereto in a signed agreement between the two sides.  Yet that day came in 2019.

Appreciate how irrevocable such a security-wise suicidal, Jewish homeland redemption surrendering Israeli withdrawal from historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, a half-century after their restoration to the Jewish State in the Jewish homeland, would be.  Worse than only undoing the Six Day War, it would change the ante-bellum de facto Jordanian control of the heart of the Jewish homeland into de jure possession by a new inside-the-land-of-Israel Arab state.

All Palestine is Divided Into Two Parts – Jordan for Arabs, Israel for Jews

Those of us who believe in the Jewish State being coextensive with the Jewish homeland have to make to the western world a two-part case – that we are justly entitled to the land of Israel as the Jewish National Home and that this doesn’t leave Palestinian Arabs, who, btw, are not The Palestinians, out in the Palestine cold.

The Land of Israel is the Jewish National Home

Jewish biblical history happened.  It lasted in the homeland longer than one thousand years – from Joshua through Second Temple Judaea.  Following the Romans’ final destruction of Judaea in CE 135, every ruler of the land of Israel was a foreign empire invader – Romans-Byzantines, Omayyad-Abbasid-Fatimid Muslim dynasties, European Christian Crusaders, non-Arab Mamluks, non-Arab Turks.  Today’s State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Jewish Judaea, for the third time a Jerusalem-capital native state, all three of them Jewish.

A while ago, Israpundit’s Ted Belman wrote an article explaining why there weren’t more Jews in Israel in 1948 – because the British, before, during and after the Holocaust strenuously kept the Jews out.  Belman’s right, of course, but there’s more.  Throughout all the post-biblical centuries, homeland Jews, not as stray individuals but as the organized, openly Jewish, homeland-claiming Yishuv, tenaciously remained in the land.  They were repeatedly murdered en masse by these foreign conquerors – most especially by the Byzantines and Crusaders – for being homeland Jews.  Today’s latest survey of the world’s Jews puts our total just shy of fifteen million, more than a million fewer than in 1939, eighty years ago.  It takes a long time to recover from holocausts, even in places rightly called Home.

Eminent British historian Parkes wrote that the continuous tenacious homeland presence of Jews all through the post-biblical centuries wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”  True enough, but the ink of Israelis’ deeds is crimson, the blood, which has saturated the land of Israel’s soil, of homeland Jews murdered by foreign invaders for being homeland Jews.

Palestinian Arabs’ Homeland is the 78% of Palestine That’s All-Arab Jordan

The Palestine Mandate, created (along with other Mandates) by the League of Nations out of the old Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had ruled the region for four hundred years, embraced what are today Jordan and Israel.  It recognized the Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine and called for restoration therein of the Jewish National Home, with close settlement of Jews on the land.  In short order, the Mandatory, Britain, exercised its Mandate option to excise what became all Arab Transjordan, the 78% of the Mandate east of the Jordan River, leaving that high-sounding Jewish National Home language to apply to the remaining 22% of Palestine west of the River.  Colonial British-enthroned Hashemite Arab kings, not Palestinian Arabs, still rule Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan today, but the fix for that is in the 78% of Palestine which that first division awarded Arabs, not in a second division between Arabs and Jews of that first division’s 22% left for the Jews.

A Rosh Hashanah Resolution For Us  

The “two-state solution” of a western Palestine, inside the land of Israel, Arab state – favored by the U.N., the EU, Abbas and American liberals, including most American Jews – would be an irrevocable disaster for us, depriving the Jewish state of both defensible boundaries and the heart of the homeland – historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria hill country.  Notwithstanding such respected American Jewish institutions as AIPAC and the Conservative and Reform movements’ support for relinquishing these crucial core parts of our homeland, it’s a betrayal of the Dream of Generations for the homeland’s sovereign redemption, which after eighteen hundred years came to pass, just after the most massive slaughter ever of Jews, in our time.

We who oppose this inside-the-land-of-Israel new Arab state must clearly and concisely make two points to the western world:

*  the entirety of the land of Israel, the western 22% of the Palestine Mandate, with its call for restoration therein of the Jewish National Home, is the state of the Jews;

*  the state of Jordan, 78% of the Palestine Mandate, is the homeland of Palestinian Arabs.