WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: “The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people in which the State of Israel was established.” (Nation State Law, par. A) It’s for Israelis, who defend Israel’s borders, to determine where within the land of Israel the State of Israel’s borders should be. They have rejected a “two-state solution” of an inside-the-land-of-Israel Arab state. We should help make their case in the West by making clear that Palestine, which was defined in the Palestine Mandate with its call for reconstitution of the Jewish national home, has been divided 78%, Jordan, for Arabs and 22%, the historic land of Israel, for Jews.
This Week: Why Our Enemies Call Israel “The Zionist Entity” and Why We Should Not
A fortnight ago, Nasrallah, the leader of our Hezbollah enemy, wrongfully used the expression “the Zionist entity” in referencing Israel (JPost, 9/30/19). But we call ourselves “Zionists,” so what’s wrong with even an enemy calling Israel “the Zionist Entity”?
What’s wrong with calling Israel “the Zionist entity” is that it isn’t. “Zionism” isn’t an end, only a means to an end. In Zionism’s pre-State heyday, a quip with some truth in it defined “Zionism” as a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine.” But as Katz noted in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, “modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organization were new. The living movement to the land had never ceased.”
Calling Israel “the Zionist entity” attributes its “1948 creation” to Zionism, a movement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the Jewish connection to the land of Israel runs three millennia deeper than 1948. Jewish biblical history happened. Post-biblical Jewish homeland history likewise happened. The State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader (and mostly non-Arab at that). The land of Israel is steeped in continuous homeland-claiming Jewish presence, and its soil saturated in foreign conqueror-splattered homeland Jewish blood. I wrote a book about it, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, documenting historian Parkes’ Whose Land assertion that the Yishuv’s continuous presence, “in spite of every discouragement,” wrote today’s Zionists’ “real title deeds.”
In whacking up (mostly to Arabs) the old Ottoman Empire-ruled Middle East after World War I, the League of Nations expressly recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and “the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”
To what territory did that Palestine Mandate with its high sounding Jewish national home language apply? Originally to land both west and east of the Jordan River, today’s states of Israel and Jordan. The Mandate contained a clause (article 25) allowing the Mandatory, Britain, “to postpone or withhold” most of the Mandate’s provisions to “the territories lying between the Jordan and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined.” This Britain quickly did to that 78% of the Mandate’s territory east of the Jordan, creating all-Arab Transjordan, today’s Jordan, leaving that high sounding Jewish national home language to apply to the 22% of Palestine that was left.
“But wait!” howl clamorers of “what’s Arabs’ in Palestine is Arabs’, what’s Jews’ is divisible.” The particular Arabs that Britain enthroned in that first division’s 78% of Palestine awarded to Arabs were and still are Hashemite Arab kings from Arabia, not “Palestinian” Arabs, Jordan’s majority population today. Never mind fixing that in that 78% that’s all-Arab Jordan. There needs to be a second division between Arabs and Jews of that first division’s 22% left for the Jews, which would leave only a fraction of a fifth of the original Palestine Mandate upon which to apply its high sounding language of the Jewish national home.
One definitively sufficient reason Israel and supporters of the Jewish homeland simply cannot agree to this is, as Dr, Martin Sherman put it this week in “Into the Fray: Alternative Jordans,” JPost, 10/7/19,
“… the crucial strategic importance for Israel of the highlands of Judea-Samaria and the Jordan Valley. As I have been at pains to point out on numerous occasions, not only are these highlands the only topographical barrier between Jordan and the heavily populated coastal plain, but any forces – regular or renegade – deployed on them will have complete topographical command and control of virtually all Israel’s airfields (military and civilian, including Ben Gurion, the only international airport), its major ports and naval bases, its principal traffic axes (rail and road), vital infrastructure installations/systems (electrical power, desalination plants and water conveyance), centers of civilian government and military command and 80% of the civilian population and commercial activity.”
Read about the desperate three battles of Latrun, all of them lost, in the 1948 war, and about the battles of Ammunition Hill and for the steep slopes dominating access to Jerusalem in the 1967 war, Israeli control of the skies and all, and ask yourself how can the Reform and Conservative movements of American Jews call for an inside-the-land-of-Israel western Palestine Arab state with borders that “hew precisely” to the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines that would bestow those very “highlands of Judea-Samaria and the Jordan Valley” into that new Arab state’s hands.
But beyond these key American Jewish groups bestowing their heksher on a security-wise suicidal “two-state solution” so beloved by the UN and EU, they’re bestowing their blessing as well on undoing the once-in-two-thousand-years (am I exaggerating?) Jewish peoplehood achievement, through the 1948 and 1967 wars, that occurred in our time, literally on the heels of a Holocaust – rebirth of sovereign independence of our historic Jewish homeland of Israel. What would be left of that homeland sovereign state, if that much of it survived, after such a “two-state solution” would be a nine-miles-wide in the most populated lowland middle coastal strip rump of a homeland state, sans historic Jerusalem – which Bibi, love him or not, correctly called the core of the core of that homeland.
So where do we come out in a situation in which a “two-state solution” of a western Palestine Arab state, in Israelis’ considered opinion, is incompatible with a viable Jewish homeland state of the Jews? We Jews in the West have to make the case in the West that the Palestine Mandate’s 78%-22% division into what have become the states of Jordan and Israel constitutes an at least equitable to Arabs two-state division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.
Israpundit’s Ted Belman today, in commenting upon the looming “Deal of The Century,” put it this way:
“T. Belman: Greenblatt said ‘The dispute over the territory is a question that can only be resolved in the context of direct negotiations between the parties.’ If that is the starting principle there is no peace in sight because there will be no negotiated sharing of the land.
“That doesn’t sound realistic to me.
“What needs to be done is the US must cede the lands west of the Jordan R to Israel just as it ceded the Golan Heights to Israel. Nothing else will work.”
What “will work” is not, alas, synonymous with what the world will accept. The world has not reconciled itself that even “west” Jerusalem, where Israel’s capital has stood since 1948, is part of Israel – Jerusalem’s renewed Jewish majority since the 1800’s, its having been the capital of three natives states in the past 3000 years, all of them Jewish, notwithstanding.
The Jewish homeland’s Jews, and the decision is theirs, have decided that a “two-state solution” including an Arab state west of the Jordan is not a viable solution for them. In standing by them, as Ben-Gurion on the day of Israel’s restored independence called on us to do, we must make the case to the West that Palestine’s original 3.5:1 division favoring Arabs was Palestine’s equitable to Arabs division between Arabs and Jews.