My New Year’s Plea To My Liberal Readers: You’re Most Valuable To Us All Where You Are
My year-end postscript to last week’s #988 expressed my appreciation to all you subscribers – You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly – to this sometimes-media watch. Not unmindful of the admonition “Fools rush in,” I’ll start this new year with a special plea to that especially appreciated subgroup of you who – talk about putting up with me – are of a liberal political and Zionist bent.
By your leave, I’ll try to persuade you liberals on two points:
[1] The Palestine “two-state solution,” as propounded by the UN, EU and many influential liberals in the US, including important American Jewish groups’ leaders, disrespects our Jewish homeland claim and would leave Israel existentially vulnerable and deprive it of the historic heart of our homeland. My plea to you liberal readers is not to abandon your political, religious and other affiliations, but to advocate actively in these institutions for policies consistent with the security and meaningfulness of our Jewish homeland of Israel.
[2] If Palestinian Arabs were more concerned with having a Palestine homeland for themselves than with uprooting the Palestine homeland of Jews, they would accept as an equitable division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews the existing division of Palestine, 78% to 22% favoring Arabs, as providing viable homelands for both.
[1] The UN, EU and American Liberal Leaders Disrespect Jewish Homeland
UN Security Council resolution 2334 in 2016 didn’t just “criticize Jewish settlements” in disputed land. It declared Judea-Samaria and the heart of Jerusalem “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967,” and Israeli presence there null and void, and a major obstacle to “the two-state solution”:
“… 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.”
Not to be outdone, the EU’s 2019 Judea-Samaria and ‘East’ Jerusalem product labeling decree went way beyond product labeling. It decreed:
“[T]he aim is also to ensure the respect of Union positions and commitments in conformity with international law on the non-recognition by the Union of Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.”
And added:
“The West Bank is a territory whose people, namely the Palestinian people, enjoy the right to self-determination….”
And multiple times in this edict the EU referenced this “West Bank” as “the West Bank including East Jerusalem,” and defined “settlement” as having “a demographic dimension beyond its geographical meaning, since it refers to a population of foreign origin.” [emphasis added, but not by much]
In a Frontpage Mag article late last year, “2020 Dems Stand With J Street, Hamas and Isis Against Israel,” 11/1/19, Daniel Greenfield wrote that although “not a single Democrat candidate from the massive field spoke at AIPAC’s pro-Israel summit in the spring,” five spoke at the J Street conference and some of those who did not sent video messages. He wrote that Elizabeth Warren threatened “to cut off aid to Israel” and to “divide Jerusalem”; that “Bernie Sanders, to thunderous applause from anti-Israel activists at J Street, vowed to redirect foreign aid from Israel to Hamas-run Gaza”; that “Amy Klobuchar condemned Israel for keeping out Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib” and “did not rule out an aid cutoff”; that Biden and Yang joined in “sending messages of support and friendship to the anti-Israel group”; and that “both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke at the hate fest featuring BDS and terror supporters.” He wrote: “J Street had been set up by George Soros and other anti-Israel figures to destroy support for Israel among Democrats. The J Street Conference makes it abundantly clear that they have succeeded.”
Last week I condemned as “THE most disturbing action by American Jews in 2019” the open letter that nine important American Jewish organizations, including the Reform and Conservative religious movements, wrote to President Trump in April last year. I wrote that they should not have denied the Jewish homeland claim to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem [Temple Mount, Western Wall, Jewish Quarter, City of David and all] by wrongly imbuing the old defunct 1949 ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document not to be political borders, and which were obliterated by renewed 1967 fighting, again initiated by Jordan, with the gravitas of “the 1967 borders,” and that they should not have declared Israeli imposition of Israeli sovereignty in Judea-Samaria to be “annexation” [the taking over of another country’s territory] by Israel of territory in “the West Bank.”
Israel aside, there are very deep differences today between the core memberships of the Republican and Democratic parties. To rattle off a few, we’re against the impeachment of President Trump and the replacement of the electoral college with the popular vote (not far from accomplishment due to state legislatures voting to throw their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner); we’re for stopping illegal immigration and “birthright” citizenship; we’re for religious liberty and the Second Amendment; we consider abortion to be the abominable crime against nature. Better for all of us for liberal Jews to stay in the Democrats, where we are a most loyal constituency, and fight there for fairness to Israel. You have your work cut out for you.
[2] Palestinian Arabs Have a Homeland in Palestine, 78% of It, If That’s What They Want
British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin (no friend of ours) perhaps said it best. He told Parliament in 1947 that for the Jews “the essential point of principle” was establishment in Palestine of a Jewish state, and that for the Arabs “the essential point of principle” was to prevent that from happening.
A Gatestone article this week, “Palestinian ‘Moderates’ Celebrate Terror,” 1/3/20, made points that show that nothing has changed:
“Those who refer to Fatah as a ‘moderate’ Palestinian faction need to take into account that it speaks in different voices in Arabic and English and sends conflicting messages as to its true intentions….
“One thing is clear… Abbas and the Fatah leaders who are talking about a two-state solution are at the same time endorsing the strategy of their military wing to destroy Israel.”
Prof. Eugene Kontorovich had by-me a superlative op-ed this week in the Jerusalem Post, “Why President Trump Is Keeping the Promise Made At San Remo in 1920,” 1/2/20, in which he wrote, among many other valid points, that “at San Remo [and then in the Mandate], the Jews were promised a ‘national home’ in Palestine, and an explicit right to ‘settle’ throughout the territory, which included Judea and Samaria.” It was left to the Jews to fulfill this promise, which we partially did in 1948-49, and completed in 1967. But, Kontorovich continued:
“After Israel retook these territories [Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem] in 1967, much of the international community pretended its earlier guarantees did not exist.”
Through thrice-sovereign uninterrupted physical presence and by San Remo and the Palestine Mandate, the Jewish people has a legitimate homeland claim to the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, where Israel is the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, and which Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Ever (and foreign Arabs only 638 to 1099, and Jordan, in part, between 1948 and 1967).
But this does not exclude Palestinian Arabs from their own homeland, if they truly want one, in Palestine. Jordan was originally part, indeed a 78% part, of the Palestine Mandate and has a majority population of Palestinian Arabs. Its early excision from the Mandate, with its express recognition of the Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine and provision for reconstituting in Palestine the Jewish national home, left only the 22% of the Mandate west of the River Jordan in which to implement that Jewish national home.
Jordan – 78% of Palestine with a Palestinian Arab majority population – IS a Palestinian Arab state, a Palestinian Arab homeland, if you will, IN Palestine. BUT WAIT, say Palestinian Arabs, and the world that has forgotten, chooses to forget, that the Palestine Mandate provided for reconstituting in Palestine the Jewish national home, eastern Palestine, Jordan, is ruled by colonial Britain-enthroned Hashemite Arab kings, not its Palestinian Arab-majority Palestinian Arabs, so the “two-state solution” is again to divide Palestine’s first division’s 22% left for the Jews once again between the Arabs and Jews. Nuts. The real-life “two-state solution” is to acknowledge that those two Palestine states for Arabs and Jews already exist, 78% for Arabs and 22% for Jews, and to make Jordan “democratic and Arab” by putting Palestinian Arab-majority Palestinian Arabs in charge.
The irony is that Jordan is much bigger, and with the seaport of Aqaba, much more viable a Palestinian Arab homeland than would be the landlocked rump of a “West Bank” Palestinian Arab state defined more or less by the ceasefire lines of a war suspended in 1949. Of course, Jordan-as-Arab-Palestine would leave Israel militarily defensible with the natural boundary of the Jordan Valley with Judea-Samaria hill country behind it, instead of with a nine-miles-wide-in-the-lowland-middle coastal plain, and in possession of thrice Jewish state capital Jerusalem, with its renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman Turkish times. But that’s not where the Jewish state’s enemies’ “essential point of principle” lies, making truncating Israel through an inside-the-land-of-Israel “two-state solution” insane.
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Jewish history book reader-collector I am, I applaud Herut NA’s inauguration of its “Zionist History Book of the Month” project. This month’s selection is “Letters To Talia,” those of a soldier who was killed on the Golan in the Yom Kippur War. Algemeiner and other sites have carried this month’s review. Be on the lookout for future months’ selections. (Btw, I have about a thousand Jewish history books. If you can’t find something in which you’re interested, I may have a copy.)