This Week: The Uphill Battle Facing Jewish Homeland-Defending American Jews
Key terms demanding definition in that title above, “Uphill Battle Facing Jewish Homeland-Defending American Jews,” are both “Jewish Homeland” and “Homeland-Defending.” By “Jewish homeland” I mean the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. By “homeland-defending” I mean making the case that the Jewish people has the strongest claim to the entirety of that Jewish homeland, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, and that that is where the borders of the State of Israel, the sovereign embodiment of that Jewish homeland, rightfully lie.
I recognize that my making this case puts me, and likely you who are reading this, in the minority not just in the world at large, but even among – incredibly, though it seems to me – American Jews. So what I’ll do here this week is [1] summarize the world-and-American-Jewish-position we’re up against, and [2] suggest some key facts to cite in confronting it. Here goes.
[1] Myth: The 1949 Ceasefire Line as Among the Holy Land’s Holy Places
International borders have gravitas. They survive their military breach by one side. Military ceasefire lines don’t. Renewed fighting between the same sides ending in new ceasefire lines renders the old ceasefire lines void. The green pen-drawn 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document to be military ceasefire lines only, not international borders, were rendered void by renewed 1967 fighting between Israel and Jordan, again initiated by Jordan, ending in infinitely more geographically natural and securer for Israel Jordan River ceasefire lines.
The world at large does not accept this. It wants to void the 1967 Six Day War and drive Israel back to the 1949 ceasefire lines. Two indelible examples:
*** Our last week’s #982 highlighted the European Union’s just-rendered Judea-Samaria product labeling decision requiring products made there by Jews to be labeled, e.g., “from the West Bank (Israeli settlement),” but if made there by Arabs just, e.g., “product from Palestine.” The avowed “aim,” avowed the EU, included making clear “the non-recognition by the Union of Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.” It called “the West Bank,” which it repeatedly defined as “the West Bank (including East Jerusalem),”as “a territory whose people, namely the Palestinian people, enjoy the right to self-determination….” It defined “settlement” as having “a demographic dimension beyond its geographical meaning, since it refers to a population of foreign origin.” That’s us, folks, “settlers” – “a population of foreign origin” in “the West Bank (including East Jerusalem).”
*** Before that, we had UNSC 2334, in which the U.N. “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 of international law …. reiterates its demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem … [and] underlines that it will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations.”
Alas, the majority of American Jews agree with this. Our last week’s #982 referred to the Reform’s latest statement that “the sovereign border” of the State of Israel is “the Green Line,” and to its and the Conservatives’ statement earlier this year that “the two-state solution’s” borders should “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders,” save for any agreed “adjustments.”
[2] Making the Jewish People’s Jewish Homeland Case
The Jewish state envisioned by supporters of “the two-state solution” along “the 1967 borders,” which includes the UN, EU and majority of thereto-hewing American Jews, would be a militarily indefensible sliver nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle and exclude historic Jerusalem, the most meaningful heart of the homeland. As Israelis appreciate, we can’t settle for that homeland sliver, but our needing more doesn’t make our case for more to the world.
What does make our case is making clear to the world that we Jews are the land of Israel’s indigenous people – that our biblical era homeland history happened, that the Romans did not exile us for close to 2,000 years, but that we never left and that today’s State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.
Using Self-Respecting, not Self-Delegitimizing, Terms
We – both Israeli and Diaspora Jews – can begin making this case by we ourselves ceasing to call Arabs who live in western Palestine, the historic land of Israel, “THE Palestinians” and Jews who live in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem “Jewish settlers.” Judea-Samaria was called “Samaria and Judea” for 3,000 years, including by the UN itself in 1947, and we need to stop saying “West Bank,” coined in 1950 to delegitimize us. “East” Jerusalem isn’t some suburb or satellite 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 1800’s times, but IS that historic city itself, renamed by the world “East” to disassociate it from us, so we of all peoples shouldn’t say “East Jerusalem.” And we have to stop agreeing with the media that “Israel was created/founded in 1948” and that our connection to historic Jerusalem and Judea/Samaria dates from “their capture by Israel in 1967.” We have to stop acquiescing in terms like “occupation and occupied territories … Palestinian territories … occupied Palestinian territories … annexation (as opposed to application of Israeli sovereignty).” Use of such delegitimizing language by us is not just counter-productive but self-disrespecting.
Biblical and Post-Biblical Homeland Jewish History Happened
But we have to use as well as wash-out our mouths. We have to familiarize ourselves with our own people’s homeland history – uninterrupted from the thirteenth century BCE to the present – and make that clear to a world that entertains challenges to the historicity of every moment of Jewish history from “King David was as real as King Arthur” to “the Holocaust didn’t happen.”
Archeology has uncovered a lot in recent decades, starting perhaps with “the House of David” inscription of an eighth century BCE enemy king found at Dan in the 1990’s. Seals with names found in the Bible have been unearthed in Jerusalem, as have what may be King David’s palace and a Solomon-built wall. The Bible’s description of Solomon’s Temple was once considered fanciful, but a temple in Syria has been unearthed with that description.
The Maccabees’ war against Alexander’s Seleucid successors was no more a civil war among Jews than the American revolution was a civil war among colonists. Both had partisans on both sides, but both resulted in a new nation that hadn’t existed before. The Roman-Jewish wars of 66-70 and 132-35 CE were major Roman empire wars, following which the Romans did not exile the homeland’s Jews. Multiple lines of evidence – synagogue and Jewish community remains, Roman recognition of the Patriarch as head of the homeland’s Jews until the fifth century, the homeland-written Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud, self-mustered Jewish participation in the seventh century Persian-Byzantine Palestine war – substantiate this.
Historian Parkes asserted that the continuous tenacious homeland-claiming presence of the Yishuv throughout the post-biblical centuries, in spite of every discouragement, wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” Katz quoted this approvingly in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, and I was so taken with it that I wrote a book tracing that presence, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine. It’s real. It happened. The Jews, diminished by wholesale foreign conqueror slaughter (e.g., by Byzantines, Crusaders) to a pummeled minority in the land, never left, and never stopped claiming our people’s right to it.
Every ruler from the Romans through the Turks was a foreign empire invader, and the State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Judaea.
Palestine Has Been Divided Between Arabs and Jews
Beyond we ourselves using self-delegitimizing dirty words, and not making the case of the homeland-claiming significance of the ever-present Yishuv (the point of my book), we further err in not incessantly citing the significance of the Palestine Mandate and its division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.
The League of Nations post-WWI Palestine Mandate, with its express recognition of the Jewish people’s historical connection with Palestine and provision for reconstituting in Palestine the Jewish national home, embraced what are today’s states of Israel and Jordan. In short order, in accordance with an optional clause in that Mandate, the Mandatory, Britain, excised from it the 78% east of the Jordan River as all-Arab Transjordan, today’s Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan, leaving the 22% of Palestine west of the River for that Jewish national home. That British-enthroned Hashemite Arab kings, not majority Palestinian Arabs, today rule Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan is to be resolved in that Arab 78% of Palestine, not by again dividing between Arabs and Jews the 22% of Palestine left for the Jews.
The western world believes in an equitable division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. We err in talking about “the Jordan option” as an Arab-Jewish Palestine division that might happen if the king would just go away. We should argue that Palestine has been, equitably to the Arabs (3.5:1), divided between Arabs and Jews, and that that remaining 22% west of the River, a natural defensible boundary, corresponding to that of the historic land of Israel, is the homeland of Jews.
Judea-Samaria and eastern Jerusalem-resident Arabs
Judea-Samaria and eastern Jerusalem-resident Arabs will be Jewish state-resident aliens, free to move if they wish to Jordan, Palestinian Arabs’ Palestine homeland. To the extent that resident alien Arab presence may be seen in the West as Israel not being both “democratic and Jewish,” Israel has to choose “Jewish.” How’s this for this week? ADL, 11/21/19: “About 1 in 4 Europeans polled harbor pernicious and pervasive attitudes towards Jews ….” And press release, 11/22/19, by Cong, Andy Levin (D-Michigan): “Congressman Andy Levin (MI-09) last night led a letter signed by 107 [!] House Democrats rebuking the State Department’s decision to reverse decades of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy on Israeli settlements in the West Bank” – i.e., non-acceptance of Jewish presence in Jewish-Arab disputed area as even “legal” (and, btw, Reagan rejected Carter characterization as “illegal”).