WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Is there a way for us ordinary American Jews to do something meaningful in our time’s epic struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for our Jewish homeland’s sovereign redemption? I think so. Come see.
This Week: But What Can I Do? Help Make the Case
Answering a call “to help” in a cause these days is typically instantly followed by a screen full of buttons for quantifying your helpfulness in a credit card contribution. But in the case at least of us American Jews’ ability to help in our time’s struggle, as Ben-Gurion put it, for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for our Jewish homeland’s sovereign redemption, there’s a non-monetary way for us individually to make a real contribution.
The terminology and frames of reference in which the struggle for Israel’s sovereign redemption is cast comprise a one-way-slanted loaded lexicon of pejoratives poisoned against us. American Jews obliviously, shamefully, call it what you want, counter-productively join in using this lexicon. As individual American Jewish supporters of our Jewish homeland of Israel, our contribution is not just to avoid using these terms ourselves, but to protest ardently others’, friends as well as adversaries, use of them.
Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms and perspectives attack at two levels: those that disparage Jews’ claim to the land of Israel beyond “the 1967 borders,” and those that deny the legitimacy of the Jewish homeland altogether. Even if you believe, which I don’t, in “the two-state solution,” your task is to make the Jewish claim to the entirety of the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, and then offer the part of it beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines – Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem – as a peace process concession, not as the starting point for negotiation.
Terms Belittling Jewish Homeland Claim Beyond the 1949 Ceasefire Lines
“Greater Israel” is the term the mainstream media mockingly applies to Jewish homeland claim to an inch of Palestine beyond the “green line,” the military ceasefire line drawn with a green pen in the 1949 Israel-Jordan armistice agreement between where their armies then stood. “Lesser Israel” is the term an objective media would use.
The League of Nations post-Ottoman Empire Palestine Mandate, with its express recognition of “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and “the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country,” originally encompassed as Palestine what are today the states of Jordan and Israel. Exercising an optional clause in the Mandate, Britain quickly excised the 78% of Palestine east of the Jordan River as all-Arab Transjordan, leaving the Mandate’s high-sounding Jewish national home language to apply just to the remaining 22%. But, demanding zero percent, the neighboring Arab states invaded Israel the day in 1948 it declared independence. That war terminated in ceasefire agreements leaving the invader Jordan in possession of Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, a big part of that remaining 22% left from the creation of Jordan. And Israel’s claim to that piece of that 22% is ultra-nationalists’ “Greater Israel”?
In 1950, Jordan rechristened Judea-Samaria as “the West Bank,” for the same reason the Romans had renamed Judaea as Palestine 1800 years earlier – to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews. The media lovingly says that the Hebrew-origin names “Judea” and “Samaria” are antiquated “biblical names” for “the West Bank,” but don’t believe it. “West Bank” dates from 1950. “Judea” and “Samaria,” yes, biblical names, remained in use all through the post-biblical centuries (see maps and documents), including by the United Nations in its own Palestine Partition resolution in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”
“East Jerusalem” is the media’s and world’s name, not for some eastern suburb of the historic city of Jerusalem which has been the capital of three native states, all Jewish, in the past 3,000 years and has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman Turkish rule, but for that historic city itself – Old City with its Jewish Quarter, Temple Mount and Western Wall, and the original City of David and all. This “East” Jerusalem existed for just 19 of those past 3,000 years, between invading Jordan’s seizure of the historic city in 1948 and its ouster by a homeland army of homeland Jews in the 1967 war.
The media religiously dates Jewish connection to “the West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem to their “capture by Israel in 1967.” Off by about 3,000 years. Jews living there are “Israeli settlers” living in “Israeli settlements,” in pointed contradistinction to “Palestinian residents” of nearby “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns and villages.” In one contempt-dripping classic example, the Philadelphia Inquirer on 4/1/04 headlined as “Arrival of Jewish Settlers Spurs Clash in Jerusalem,” a wire service article that ten times referred to as “settlers” Jews who intended “to reestablish a Jewish presence in what had been a Yemenite Jewish village in the Silwan neighborhood until Arab riots in the 1920’s and ‘30’s drove the Jewish residents out” (emphasis added). Jewish presence, even in historic Jerusalem, is of course “occupation.” E.g., UNSC 2334, in which the UNSC “reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity ….”
That 1949 Israel-Jordan armistice agreement expressly defined the “green line” which it drew as a military ceasefire line only, without prejudice to either side’s claims re political borders. As a military ceasefire line, it was obliterated and consigned to history’s dustbin by renewed 1967 fighting (again initiated by Jordan) between the same sides. In the spring of 2019, the Conservative and Reform movements of American Jews, expressly rabbis and all, echoed the misleading language of Israel’s enemies in these movements’ call in an open letter to President Trump for a “two-state solution” with borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” [i.e., the 1949 ceasefire lines defined in their defining document as not being borders] except for “any territorial adjustments” thereto in signed agreements between the two sides. These “borders” are nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle and exclude the strategic Jordan Valley and overlooking Judea-Samaria hill country and historic Jerusalem. Inexplicable.
Terms Belittling Jewish Homeland Claim Altogether
The media sometimes says the UN sought to partition Palestine into “Palestinian and Jewish states,” rather like partitioning Philadelphia into Philadelphian and Jewish states. What the UN actually said, over and over, in its Palestine partition resolution was “the Arab and Jewish states” (emphasis added). It also called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” We should not regard “Palestine” as a dirty word. It has Jewish equity, deeper than Arab equity. We should not concede that Palestinian Arabs are “THE Palestinians.”
Israel was not “created and founded in 1948,” but 3,000 years earlier. Not just Jewish biblical history, but post-biblical Jewish homeland history happened. Israel is not a “colonial European entity” that was “created because of the Holocaust.” More than half of Israel’s population is descended from Jews who never left the Mideast. Nor is it “the Zionist entity,” Zionism being essentially a modern implementation of homeland connection that never ceased. Historian Parkes rightly put it that Jews’ continuous post-biblical homeland presence, in spite of every discouragement by the foreign conquerors who ruled continuously from Judaea’s destruction by Rome to Israel’s 1948 reattainment of sovereignty, wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”
The media blames Palestinian Arab refugees on “the war that followed Israel’s creation.” That war was begun by an Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, and more indigenously Middle Eastern Jews, mostly Israel-absorbed, were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in that war’s wake than Arabs left tiny Israel. Israel’s absorption of those refugees, while Arab “hosts” (including in Palestine) to this day maintain descendants of those Arabs in “refugee camps,” does not convert the Arab-Jewish conflict’s two-sided refugee issue into “the Palestinian refugee issue,” as though those Jewish refugees had never existed.
Making the Affirmative Jewish Homeland Case
We should not use these dirty words, and we should strongly criticize those on our side who do, e.g., by our posting language-criticizing comments to their internet articles. But we must go beyond ourselves not using Jewish homeland-delegitimizing dirty words. We must affirmatively assert the Jewish homeland claim to the land of Israel in its entirety. This claim is based upon both continuous Jewish homeland presence in spite of every discouragement including repeated wholesale slaughter of homeland Jews by foreign conquerors, and on twentieth century documents, including the San Remo treaty and Palestine Mandate.
If we believe in a secure, meaningfully-fulfilled sovereign Jewish homeland, we have no choice in the matter. A “two-state solution” including a new Arab state in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem (“the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” as UNSC 2334 with US abstention put it) would render Israel militarily perilous to the extreme of inviting invasion and as historic-Jerusalem-less as Uganda. It would be a definitive Jewish history failure by our Holocaust and 1948, 1967 and 1973 war-witnessing generation.