Pop Quiz
POP QUIZ, You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly:
QUESTION #1 (100 points): Which of the following constitutes the State of Israel’s most existential threat:
[A] Arabs
[B] the EU and UN
[C] the Mainstream Media
[D] the Israeli electorate
[E] Us American Jews
The most correct answer is, alas, [E], us American Jews. But [A] through [D] give us a run for our money. Come see.
[A] ARABS: In 1947, British Foreign Secretary Bevin (no friend of ours) summarized to Parliament in three sentences what the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine was then, is today, has always been, and will always be about. He said:
“There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews. For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.” (Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 433, col. 988, quoted in Bell, Terror Out of Zion, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, p. 188, emphasis added)
Thanks in large part to the anti-Jewish British blockade while America banned arms to both sides, the homeland’s Jews entered their 1948 War of Independence against invading Arab states armed more with guts than with guns. They threw back that invasion, at the cost of 6,000 dead, in a partial homeland redemption that left Israel nine miles wide in the lowland middle, and with the overlooking Judea-Samaria hills, the Jordan Valley and historic Jerusalem in invading Jordan’s hands. Israel began the full homeland-redeeming 1967 war from those perilous lines. In 1973, it threw back the two-front surprise attack from front-lines in Sinai and on the Golan. Israel will always be tiny in population and size compared to the c. two-dozen Arab states, but the state of its armed forces and its security control of the entirety of the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, disincentivize aims to destroy it.
[B] The EU and UN: Resolution 2334, adopted by the UN Security Council 14-zip with the U.S. abstaining in the Obama administration’s final days, didn’t just “condemn Israeli settlements,” as is commonly said. It revoked post-1967 war UNSC 242, which hadn’t said “the territories” in calling for Israeli withdrawal. Nor is the [talk about abandoning allies] U.S. abstention the sole shameful thing about it. The elected representatives of the entire rest of the world, led by those of the EU, affirmatively voted for it.
In 2334, the UN Security Council declared that it
“reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace….” [emphasis added a little]
This “East” Jerusalem isn’t some eastern suburb of the historic city that’s been the capital of three native states, all Jewish, in the past 3,000 years and has had a renewed Jewish majority since the 1800’s. It is that historic city itself, save only for nineteenth and twentieth century-built neighborhoods Israel managed to keep from invading Jordan in the 1948 war. Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria aren’t the territory of “Palestinians” who never ruled it, and Israel’s redemption of this part of the 22% of the Palestine Mandate left for reconstituting the Jewish national home after the excision from the Mandate of all-Arab Transjordan is as of right, not “occupation.”
“Multiculturalism” isn’t working out too well in the EU, and the rise of parties there with a more empathetic view of ethnicity in national entities, coupled with greater emphasis by Israeli and Diaspora Jews that the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, Jerusalem and all, has been and is the Jewish people’s historic homeland, may temper the present animosity toward Israel in the UN and EU. E.g., Gatestone had an article yesterday, “Europe’s Populist Wave Reaches Portugal,” reporting that the leader of its new Chega! [Enough!] party, beyond calling for lower taxes and strengthened borders, “has also called for an ‘unequivocal commitment’ to support the State of Israel and for transferring the Portuguese embassy to Jerusalem” [alevai].
[C] the Mainstream Media: Issue #001, January 7, 2001, of this Brith Sholom Media Watch captured this despicable Knight-Ridder wire service misportrayal of the Jewish homeland of Israel:
“[Under than President Clinton’s plan,] Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel. In exchange, Palestinians would gain . . . .” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/4/01, pp. 1, 16)
CAMERA and others, including this media watch, eventually beat back the misleading “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants,” but the loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland delegitimizing poisoned pejoratives [see, e.g., last week’s #978; www.factsonisrael.com] continues to permeate mainstream media misreporting on Israel.
In 2002, I had the privilege, sandwiched between then ZOA-GPD President Len Getz and the inimitable Herb Denenberg, to speak at a [part of the] Jewish community protest on the sidewalk of the Philly Inquirer’s old dark tower on Callowhill Street. Herb warned readers to be wary of all reporting in newspapers that misportray Israel – “false in one thing, false in everything.” Over the ensuing years, the mainstream media’s lack of objectivity on American politics and other things has weakened its credibility, including on Israel and everything, in the eyes of the public.
[D] the Israeli Electorate: Arlene Kushner valiantly tries to explain to us American Jews what’s going on over in Israel re figuring out who’s in charge of the place. She’s not succeeding. So I accept the succinct wisdom on that score of Bernie Sanders’ Endorser-in-Chief: “It’s all about the Benjamins, Baby – Benjamin Gantz and Benjamin Netanyahu.” A country as beleaguered as Israel really really needs to figure out who is Prime Minister.
[E] Us American Jews: There are today some fourteen million Jews in the world, almost as many as on the eve of the Holocaust. Almost half today are in Israel, and almost the other half in America.
Many years ago, when my wife and I and her cousin and her husband made our pilgrimage to Israel, we were exceedingly graciously greeted and treated by distant cousins there. After one particularly delightful dinner, they asked us: “So how soon are you moving here?” I countered: “Why do you think the U.S. supports Israel?” “Because it’s the right thing to do.” “Of course, it’s the right thing to do. But that’s not the reason.” Well, at least not the sole reason. Beyond it being the right thing – morally and in the U.S.’s own strategic interest – to do, two further reasons the U.S. supports Israel are Christian Evangelicals and until now American Jews.
There’s a moving book about the Battle of Britain, the gallant struggle of a few squadrons of Spitfires defending the country against the daily WWII bombing onslaughts of the German air force, that’s rightly titled “The Narrow Margin.” Perhaps, that large percentage of American Jews who join with the Palestinian Authority, the EU, UN and western liberals in championing “the two-state solution” with borders, as the American Reform and Conservative movements put it, that would “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” [i.e., 1949 military ceasefire lines expressly defined not to be borders] except for agreed “territorial adjustments” lack knowledge and appreciation of how narrow the Jewish homeland’s margins of victory were in each of its wars.
American Jews should read about the three desperate 1948 battles for Latrun, all lost, which left that Jerusalem road-blocking site and the steep slopes overlooking the corridor to Jerusalem in Jordanian hands. They should read about Israel launching almost all of its air force in its opening strike in the 1967 war, leaving the narrow homeland undefended from the air, and about the fierce battle for Ammunition Hill, opening the way to Mount Scopus and the Old City. They should read about Syria and Egypt’s two-front surprise attack in 1973, and how the thin lines of regular soldiers in Sinai and the Golan incredibly courageously hung on, preventing massive Arab breakthroughs, until the frantically mobilized reserves began arriving in strength. One good place to begin to appreciate just how courageous and close this hanging on was is the movingly told non-fiction beginning of the Prolog to Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears.
As Jonathan Tobin points out, Israelis do not support creation inside the land of Israel of an Arab state overlooking its nine-mile-wide lowland middle and giving up, of all places, historic Jerusalem. It is the height of chutzpah and folly for American Jews, half of world Jewry [et tu, Brute?], to join with the UN, EU and Israel’s enemies in seeking to impose such a shameful surrender on the courageous homeland defenders of the historic Jewish homeland of Israel.