WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Well, here we are at #999 of these weekly emails, which began in January 2001. What I would tell you this week is how, starting not then, but as far back as I can go back, what got me, and maybe you, from there to here, and where from here.
Reflections at #999: Sharing in the Events of Our Time
When I was a little kid there was a sign in a shop on the Atlantic City boardwalk, attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes: “One should share in the action and passion of the events of his time, for fear of being judged not to have lived.” Perhaps you saw that sign, or encountered Holmes’ saying elsewhere. I’ve tried to be guided by it.
It’s not rocket science for a Jew born in Philadelphia in 1940 to figure out the chief event for him of his time – our time’s momentous chapter in the three millennia journey of our people, the Jewish people, through history.
My awareness of our time’s Jewish journey began with an American Jewish child’s view of the Holocaust. My mother was a chapter officer in Holocaust-aftermath ORT. I overheard some and understood a bit of the work that it did. I also overheard neighborhood sneers that “the Jews went like sheep to the slaughter.” When I became older and learned more of the Shoah, two symbols of it have ever since stuck in my head. One is that the Allies’ bombers did not bomb the tracks leading to the extermination camps even though their missions flew near. The other is my vision of the steamship St.Louis, sailing forlornly along the American coast before returning to Europe. So near but yet so far. Could not at least temporary asylum in a camp have been offered?
And Jewish mistreatment in Europe neither began nor ended with the Holocaust. Over the centuries, every device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Inquisition, pogrom, preceding the Holocaust – was devised in good old Christian Europe, heartland of western civilization, for Jews. And after the Holocaust, with the British striving to keep its survivors in Europe, Jews returning to Poland were subjected to renewed pogroms.
The struggle against the British, highlighted by the Exodus-exemplifying Aliyah Bet, likewise sticks in my head. You can’t read about Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain without in some ways admiring the British, but the Jewish immigration-choking White Paper – vigorously enforced before, during and after the War – imposed on the Holocaust’s eve? And the British armed the 1948 Arabs while blockading arms to the Jews. And after Independence, it was all right with Britain for the Egyptian army to reach within twenty miles of Tel Aviv, but Britain instantly threatened to intervene on the Arabs’ side the moment Israelis set foot in Sinai.
There was at least one Jew, Eddie Jacobson, whom President Truman genuinely liked, and at least one, “the old doctor” whom he feared at one point would regard him a liar, whom I believe Truman respected. It took guts for Truman to support partition against the strong will of the State Department, but America barred arms to Palestine’s Jews (and meant it, see, e.g., The Pledge or I Am My Brother’s Keeper) in 1948, when all Israel could throw against Britain-supplied Egyptian Spitfires were a few Czech-version ME-109’s with overweight, underpowered bomber engines. Nor did the U.S, supply arms to Israel, while Russia was supplying the Arabs, for the 1956 war or for that in 1967.
Ok, I’m eccentric in having collected about a thousand (used) Jewish history books (btw, libraries’ stock-in-trade is used books), but there are a few Jewish history books every Diaspora Jew of our time should read. One, of course, is Herzl’s Jewish State, because it is Jewish history. Another, not least but not entirely out of respect for its author, is Dr. Weitzmann’s Trial and Error. And I would add, from my way of looking at things, Begin’s Revolt. Beyond that, a Diaspora Jew of our time should read as much as he can about Israel’s 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars. Having done so, I cannot imagine how such a Diaspora Jew – not least one who hasn’t forgotten the pre-state fortunes of twentieth-century Jews – could conceivably support driving Israel back to the nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle 1949 ceasefire lines (not “1967 borders”), depriving the Jewish homeland of its historic Judea-Samaria (not “West Bank”) hill country heartland and historic (not “East”) Jerusalem (Western Wall, Temple Mount, Jewish Quarter, City of David and all).
But it’s not enough for us to argue that we have to have a viable meaningful Jewish State coextensive with the Jewish homeland, the land of Israel, manifestly as we have to have it. We have to make the case that historically and legally the land of Israel IS ours, and that it being so doesn’t screw Arabs (who have 99% of the Middle East sans Palestine) out of Palestine altogether, or even out of almost four-fifths of it.
To counter, e.g., “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” chanted not just by “Palestinians” but by their supporters in the West, and such Jewish homeland-halving documents as UNSC 2334, calling historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria “occupied Palestinian territory”; the European Union’s product labeling decree of 2019, calling Jews “foreigners” in “the West Bank (including East Jerusalem)”; and the American Reform and Conservative Jewish sects’ open letter to President Trump, calling the 1949 ceasefire lines Israel’s “1967 borders,” we must clearly and simply make our Jewish homeland case.
[1] Biblical Jewish history happened: Jews are more native to that biblical land than are Arabs. Modern Israel’s capital, Jerusalem, was the capital of two previous states – Judah and Judaea, both Jewish – in the past 3000 years.
[2] Post-biblical homeland Jewish history happened: Today’s State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. Not only was every intervening ruler a foreign empire invader, but we Jews never gave up either our spiritual or physical presence homeland claim, including by re-becoming Jerusalem’s majority population during 1800’s Ottoman Empire rule. Historian Parkes rightly put it that the Yishuv’s continuous tenacious homeland-claiming physical presence, all through the post-biblical centuries, in spite of every discouragement, wrote our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds.”
[3] Palestine HAS BEEN divided, 78%-22% in favor of Arabs, between Arabs and Jews: The League of Nations Palestine Mandate, which provided for restoration in Palestine of the Jewish national home, embraced both today’s Israel and Jordan. It authorized Britain, which Britain exercised, to exclude from most of the Mandate’s provisions, including for the Jewish national home, the 78% of Palestine east of the Jordan River, which became Arab Jordan, which today has a Palestinian Arab population majority.
Ok, say the advocates of today’s proposed “two-state solution,” Jordan was part of the Palestine Mandate and has a Palestinian Arab population majority, but Palestinian Arabs aren’t in charge of Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan.
The solution to that is to make Jordan, that 78% of Palestine, “democratic and Arab,” not to again divide between Arabs and Jews the 22% of the Palestine Mandate which Palestine’s first division between Arabs and Jews left for the Mandate’s Palestine Jewish national home.