Dirty Words 101 – Answering Anti-Jewish Homeland Canards and Pejoratives in Arab-Israeli Conflict Discourse
What’s unique about our Jewish people’s three millennia history is that every moment of it, from biblical times through the Holocaust and our homeland’s sovereign rebirth and beyond in our own time is doubted, distorted or even outright denied not just by enemies but as well by seemingly knowledgeable people with seemingly no axe to grind.
We mustn’t simply ignore this by simply averting our eyes. It affects, prejudicially influences, poisons, western publics’ perceptions of Israel and us. Armed with a basic working knowledge of our people’s past and present and of what the terms that are used against us have been coined to convey, we have to counter with brief plainly stated historical and current facts.
A non-profit in which I’m involved is working on a pamphlet on Israel for grassroots American Jews, summarizing our historical and legal rights to our homeland, and pros and cons of peace process “solutions.” It will include an appendix enumerating by historical period and subject scores of canards and pejoratives denigrating our people’s homeland connection, with brief responses. Here’s a quick look at that while you stand on one leg.
Biblical Times (c 1200 BCE – 135 CE): What they say is that “the Palestinians” are the Canaanites’ if not the Neanderthals’ ever-present descendants; that Joshua’s conquest never happened; that King David was as real as King Arthur; that Solomon’s Temple, as fabulously described in the Bible, is a fictional fantasy; and that the Maccabees’ revolution restoring the homeland’s independence was just a civil war between Jews.
Don’t believe it. Archeologists are divided into “Conquest” and “indigenous origins” camps, but they agree on Israelite presence, which developed into the monarchies, by the late second millennium BCE. A ninth century BCE enemy king’s inscription mentioning “the House of David” was unearthed in the 1990’s at Tel Dan. A contemporary temple has been unearthed in Syria matching more than thirty biblically-described details of Solomon’s Temple. There were Jews in the land of Israel who opposed the Maccabees’ war against the Alexander-successor Seleucids, just as there were colonists in America who opposed George Washington, but in both cases there existed after the war independent states, Jewish Judaea and what became the United States of America, that hadn’t existed before. After having fought Assyrians, Babylonians and Alexander’s Seleucid successors, the Israelites fought four wars (63 and 37 BCE, 66-70 and 132-35 CE) against Rome. Where were Arafat’s ancestors during all this?
Talmudic Period (135 – 638): They say the Romans exiled the Jews in 135 CE, after defeating Bar Kochba, and that the Jews were gone from Hadrian to Herzl, some eighteen hundred years.
No they didn’t, and no they weren’t. Roman-Byzantine period synagogues and other Jewish remains have been unearthed all over the land. The Romans themselves recognized the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community (as did Diaspora Jews) until the fifth century. Schools of sages in the land wrote the Mishnah and then Palestinian Talmud. Twenty thousand or more homeland Jews fought in self-mustered battalions alongside the year 614 Temple-rebuilding-promising (they reneged) invading Persians against the Romans’ Byzantine successors, who went on a Jew-massacring rampage on regaining control, and the Jews then aided the invading Muslims, who acknowledged their support with rewards.
Muslim Dynasty Period (638 – 1099): They say that during the four and a half centuries of foreign Muslim dynasty rule [begun as Arab, but fell progressively under control of the Turks, btw the land’s only period of Arab rule], there were hardly any Jews there.
Not so. Archeologist Bahat includes in his book The Forgotten Generations (pp 30-31) a map showing c. a hundred ninth century Jewish communities of which we’re aware a millennium later. And Jews weren’t just “there” as stray individuals, but as the organized, openly Jewish, homeland Yishuv.
Crusader Period (1099 – 1187): They say that there were hardly any Jews in the land during Crusader rule. But there were, and they resisted the coming of the Crusaders. The Crusaders recorded that “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them at Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.” They wrote of Haifa, “which the Jews defended with great courage [alone, for a month], to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.” The Crusaders ruthlessly slaughtered homeland Jews. Yet travelers wrote of Jews as Jerusalem’s dyers and living elsewhere in the land. The wonder is not that Tudela and others reported only small numbers. The wonder is that there were still any Jews still there at all.
Ayyubids, Mongols and Mamluks (1187 – 1517): They say there were hardly any Jews during Mamluks’ two-century rule. But there were, and more came, including 300 rabbis from England and France in 1211, and many refugees following the Spanish Inquisition. Geographers noted many Jewish communities. A Christian pilgrim recorded “not many Christians, but many Jews” in Jerusalem, who claimed the Holy Land as their land and “refuse to leave.”
Ottoman Turks (1517 – 1917): They say that there were hardly any Jews in Palestine until near the end of Turk times. Not so. The Jews lived in their four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land. Jews again became Jerusalem’s largest population group during 1800’s Turkish rule, and led the breakout from the Old City’s walls, founding new communities, before the Zionists came. An 1859 British consulate document cited Muslims as constituting “scarcely one-quarter” of Jerusalem’s population. Yet the Turks’ four-century rule was again one of relentless persecution of the homeland’s Jews.
Mandate Period (1917 – 1948): They say that Balfour, San Remo and the Mandate gave Arab land to outsider Jews. Not so. The post-WWI League of Nations Palestine Mandate, embracing what are today Israel and Jordan, expressly recognized the Jewish people’s historical connection with Palestine and provided for reconstituting in Palestine the Jewish national home. The Mandate allowed the Mandatory, Britain, to remove the 78% of Palestine east of the Jordan River from its provisions, which Britain did, creating Arab Transjordan (today’s Jordan), leaving just 22% for the Jewish national home.
Israel’s Independence (1948): They say the UN sought to divide Palestine into “Palestinian” and Jewish states; that Israel was “created and founded” in 1948, because of the Holocaust; that it’s “the Zionist entity”; that its creation displaced “Palestinians,” still living in “refugee camps.”
Nope. The UN said “Arab” and Jewish states and called Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” Israel, which Jews never left, has been the Jewish homeland for three millennia, not just since the nineteenth century Zionist movement, itself generations before the Holocaust. More Jews, mostly Israel absorbed, were displaced from vast Arab lands than Arabs left tiny Israel. Those Arabs left in an Arab invasion, thrown back by a homeland army of homeland Jews. It’s Arab “hosts,” including in Palestine, who isolate those Arabs’ descendants.
Six Day War (1967): They say Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem were “captured by Israel in 1967”; that these are “occupied Palestinian territories”; that “Judea-Samaria” is the old “biblical name” for “the West Bank”; that historic Jerusalem is “East” Jerusalem; and that “West Bank and East Jerusalem” Jews are just “settlers.”
Not so. The Jewish connection to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem dates from three thousand years earlier than 1967. Jews have been twice previously sovereign there, Jerusalem has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Turkish rule, and Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Jerusalem or Judea-Samaria ever. “East” Jerusalem isn’t some suburb of historic Jerusalem, but the historic city itself, renamed “East” to disassociate it from Jews. “Judea and Samaria,” yes, biblical names, remained in use all through the centuries, including by the UN in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….” History and the Mandate, with its provision for reconstituting in Palestine the Jewish national home,” establish western Palestine as the Jewish homeland, and you’re not a “settler” or “occupier” in your own home.
“The Peace Process”: They say the 1949 ceasefire lines are “Israel’s 1967 borders,” and that applying Israeli law in the Jordan Valley is “annexation”; that core issues include “the Palestinian refugee issue,” and that Palestinian Arabs accept and Israelis reject “the two-state solution.”
None of this is true. The 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement defined “the green line” it drew as a military ceasefire line exclusively, not a political border, and as such it was obliterated and replaced by the infinitely securer for Israel post-Six Day War ceasefire line of the Jordan River. “Annexation” is taking over territory of another country, which applying Israeli law in Judea-Samaria, to which Israel has the strongest historical and legal claim, is not. Israel’s absorption of the greater number of Middle Eastern Jews displaced from Arab lands than Arabs left Israel doesn’t transform the Arab-Israeli conflict’s two-sided refugee issue into a one-sided refugee issue. The US and Israel define “the two-state solution” as “two states for two peoples.” While Israel in the past expressed conditional support for this, Palestinian Arabs have always rejected Jewish-state Israel.
The Name Game: They call Israelis who claim Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem as part of Israel “ultra-nationalist” believers in a “Greater Israel,” while calling Abbas and Fatah “moderates,” the Temple Mount “the al Aqsa compound,” terrorists “suicide bomber militants,” and Palestinian Arabs “the Palestinians.”
On the contrary, it’s those who would sanctify the 1949 military ceasefire line as among the Holy Land’s holy places, depriving the Jewish homeland of its Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and historic Jerusalem (Old City, Temple Mount, Western Wall, Jewish Quarter, City of David and all), who are championing a Lesser Israel. The Temple Mount has been called the Temple Mount in the West for millennia, and American newspapers and others who use the Muslim name “al Aqsa compound” are disrespecting Christians along with Jews. Terrorists who blow themselves up in buses and markets are bent on murder, not “suicide,” and they aren’t mere “militants.” “Palestine” comprises the territory of the Palestine Mandate, today’s Israel and Jordan,” twenty-two percent and seventy-eight percent respectively, and Jews, having lived there as Jews a millennium-and-a-half longer than Arabs have lived there as Muslims, are as “Palestinian” as Palestinian Arabs.
Keep your ears pricked for these dirty words. Don’t use them and criticize those on our side who do. Don’t acquiesce in the canards and pejoratives that claim that our biblical history and post-biblical homeland history never happened, that Israel is a post-Holocaust or Zionist-era newly created state. Make the affirmative case that by continuous homeland presence history and the post-Ottoman Palestine Mandate the land of Israel, Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria included, Palestine west of the Jordan, is ours.