WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The EU has just joined the UN in calling Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem “Palestinian” territory, not just “disputed.” We can and should support Israel in its defending of our Jewish homeland claim in the councils of nations, but fighting American Jews’ misguided calls for restoration of “the 1967 borders” is our fight, not Israel’s.
This Week: “… And If Not Now? ….”
Contrary to what the European Union just sneeringly told us in its Judea-Samaria product labeling decision, that we Jews are “settlers” of “foreign origin” in “the West Bank (including East Jerusalem),” which is “a territory whose people, namely the Palestinian people, enjoy the right to self-determination,” we Jews, as Dr. Weitzmann once rightly reminded the British, were living in Jerusalem when London was a marsh.” (emphasis added)
But this international scorn for the Jewish people’s claim to our historic homeland isn’t new. In 2016, the United Nations Security Council, voting 14-zip with the U.S. abstaining, proclaimed in UNSC 2334, 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.” (emphasis added)
If you’re a Jew and not infuriated by the world crowing that Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem (heart of the Jewish homeland, capital of three native states, all Jewish, in the past 3,000 years, with its renewed Jewish majority since the 1800’s), none of which Palestinian Arabs have ever ruled ever, are not Jewish, not even “disputed,” but is “occupied Palestinian territory,” territory “whose people, namely the Palestinian people, enjoy the right to self-determination,” stop reading. What follows will mean nothing to you.
Being infuriated may be indispensable, but it isn’t sufficient. We have to coldly assess the scope of the campaign against Jewish heritage and history and decide what we grassroots American Jews of today can individually personally do about it, and start doing it.
I see no clearer than you, but here’s what I see:
Years ago, when the UN, bless it, was about to adopt its “Zionism Is Racism” resolution, the American Pat Moynihan turned to his Israeli counterpart Herzog and asked, “So where are your f—ing Jews?” Years later, at the Annapolis installment of America’s never-ending “Middle East peace process” (as though splitting up Palestine west of the Jordan will bring “Middle East Peace”), I joined a ZOA contingent standing as near as they let us (and the other side) to the building housing the conference. A reporter came up and asked me what I was doing there. “I’m part of a group that just wants the Israeli delegation in there to know it’s not here alone.”
Well and good for grassroots American Jewish support, but it’s the State of Israel’s role, not ours, to conduct its affairs in the councils of nations. But there is a Jewish homeland-defending battlefield that is ours and not Israel’s – the struggle for the soul of American Jews.
I titled this week’s #984 of these weekly electronic epistles “And If Not Now?” because over the now almost nineteen years I’ve been doing these weekly “Alerts,” American Jews have never seemed to me so adamantly alienated from the Jewish homeland of Israel as they seem to me now. I do not understand it.
I was eight years old when Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, called on the Jews of the world, three years after the Holocaust, to stand by Israel in the great struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for our homeland’s sovereign redemption. This struggle, eighteen hundred years in the dreaming, is occurring right now, in our time. We can’t be oblivious.
The Israelis have come far in this struggle, but it’s far from over. Israel threw back the 1948 Arab invasion. A half-century ago, Israelis liberated (not “occupied”) Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem – Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all. Events of the succeeding half-century have cemented Israelis’ view that they can’t go back to the ceasefire lines of 1949. It would be security-wise and Jewish state meaningfulness fatal.
Yet, in the spring of this year, 2019, the American Reform and Conservative Jewish movements, not some far-from-mainstream Jews lost beyond recall, called on the American President to seek restoration of those super-perilous to Israel 1949 ceasefire lines, which they disingenuously (no other word) called “the 1967 borders” – “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” save for any agreed “adjustments.” The Reform has just reiterated that, by it, Israel’s “sovereign border” is the 1949 “Green Line.” The Reform and Conservative movements, which embrace most American Jews, aren’t alone. AIPAC calls for a “two-state solution.”
It’s up to us individually to persuade individual Jews that negotiating Israel’s borders is Israelis’ decision, not that of American Jews, and collectively to make clear that American Jewish organizations advocating a western Palestine “two-state solution” speak for only some American Jews.
In last week’s #983, I suggested three ways to help make our case:
[1] Cease using the Jewish homeland delegitimizing terms so favored by the media and others in Arab-Israeli conflict discourse, and openly criticize those who use them;
[2] Make the case that both biblical and post-biblical Jewish homeland history happened, that we weren’t “exiled” but never left, and that Jews not Arabs are the land of Israel’s indigenous people; and
[3] Make the case that the Palestine Mandate provided for reconstituting in Palestine the Jewish national home and that the excision from the Mandate of the 78% east of the Jordan River as Arab Jordan, leaving just 22% for that Jewish national home, constituted an equitable-to-Arabs division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews, and that resolving Palestinian Arabs not being in charge of Palestinian-Arab-majority Jordan is to be done in that Arab 78%, not by again dividing between Arabs and Jews that first division’s 22% left for the Jews.
Take a look at our website, www.factsonisrael.com, for more information.