Israel: Historically, Legally, Indispensably, Equitably Our Jewish State – By Jerry Verlin
Like Stu, I take up our “Two-States” debate holding my partner in this in high regard. He earns the Sirius Black award for surviving 47 years at the Inquirer-Daily News HQ with his mind still intact, esp. on supporting Israel. He has reported from there, and his stubykofsky.com blog posts resonate with the grassroots.
But on two grounds I disagree with Stu’s position that Israel can agree to a “two-state solution,” not now, as Stu agrees, but in the future when mutual hatreds have cooled:
[1] Inserting a Palestinian Arab state inside western Palestine, the land of Israel, would render Israel militarily indefensible;
[2] The land of Israel is historically, legally, indispensably and equitably our Jewish people’s homeland, not that of Arabs.
[1] The “Two-State Solution” would render Israel militarily indefensible
As Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. during the Obama term, pointed out in his book Ally (p. 115), the Obama administration, in seeking to “place the United States in a viable mediating position,” attempted “to square contradictory” [emphasis added] Palestinian Arab and Israeli goals:
“We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.” [emphasis added]
Not just Obama-fostered UNSC 2334 [see Bibi: My Story, pp. 577-578], but President Biden agreed with the Palestinian Arab two-states goal: See Jewish Press, 6/6/23, quoting U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken quoting President Biden that week at AIPAC [!]:
“As Blinken put it: ‘As the President said on his recent trip to Israel and the West Bank last summer, a two-state solution – based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps – remains the best way to achieve our goal of Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace, with equal measures of security, freedom, justice, opportunity, and dignity.’” [emphasis added]
So what’s the real Palestinian Arab goal? In his autobiography Bibi, p. 241, Netanyahu quotes Arafat’s deputy, Abu Iyad, explaining their “Phased Plan”:
“We cannot achieve the strategic goal of a Palestinian state in all of Palestine without first establishing a Palestinian state [on part of it].”
And then Bibi quotes Arafat:
“The Palestinian people’s struggle will continue until the complete liberation of the Palestinian land…. The Palestinian people’s struggle ought to be assisted until the complete liberation of Palestine from the River to the Sea.” [emphasis added?]
Now, look at a map, preferably a 3-D map, of Israel during the 1948-67 period showing the armistice “green line” separating the armies of Israel and 1948 invader Jordan. The armistice agreement that drew that ceasefire line expressly declared it to be a military ceasefire line only, not an international border. And it was of course consigned to history’s dustbin by renewed fighting between the same sides, Israel and Jordan, again initiated by Jordan, when Israel evicted Jordan from Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria (“the West Bank”) in the Six Day War. As shown above, “the two-state solution” would reinstate those old defunct, never among the Holy Land’s holy places, so-called “1967,” 1949 ceasefire lines, excluding from Israel Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem.
From a military security standpoint consider this: The 1949 ceasefire lines snake through the countryside and downtown Jerusalem marked by no natural boundaries, leaving Israel with a perilously narrow corridor to Jerusalem and nine-miles-wide in the heavily populated lowland middle dominated by an Arab-held central ridge. Compare Israel’s post-Six Day War eastern border, the Jordan Valley, described by Amb. Dore Gold and Gen. Kuperwasser in Defensible Borders for Israel:
“…. The Jordan Valley is not just the water bed where the Jordan River is located. It includes the steep slopes of the West Bank mountain ridge facing the Jordan River. Taking into account the fact that the Jordan River is adjacent to the lowest point on earth – roughly 1.300 feet below sea level – and the mountain ridge reaches a maximal height of 3,300 feet above sea level, the Jordan Valley really constitutes a strategic barrier reaching more than 4,500 feet in some places.”
[2] The land of Israel, historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria heartland as its very core, is historically, legally, indispensably and equitably our Jewish people’s homeland, not that of Arabs
Historically: Biblical era Jewish homeland history happened. We have today to show for it, e.g., the Temple Mount (read Ritmeyer, Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount) and the even earlier City of David with its King David palace, Siloam Pool and Pilgrimage Road connecting it to the Mount (read Spielman, When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David and What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You To Know. And watch the DVD of Mike Pompeo and David Friedman’s Route 60: The Biblical Highway, traversing the stream of Jewish and Christian holy sites in Samaria, Jerusalem and Judea, the most-watched movie in U.S. theaters the first two nights it was shown.)
And the Romans did not exile the Jews from the land. Historian Parkes (Whose Land? p. 266) wrote that Jews’ continuous tenacious post-biblical homeland presence wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”
Every land of Israel ruler in between final Roman destruction of ancient Israel in 135 CE and today’s Israel’s independence in 1948 as the land of Israel’s next native state was a foreign empire invader, mostly non-Arab at that. In the past 3,000 years, Jerusalem has been the capital of three native states – Judah, Judaea and Israel, all Jewish. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Palestine ever.
Legally: World War I ended the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had ruled the Mideast and elsewhere for 400 years. In its wake, the League of Nations created Mideast Mandates leading to independent states, just one of them non-Arab, the Palestine Mandate, in recognition of Jews’ historical connection with Palestine, comprising today’s Israel and Jordan, for the reconstituted Jewish national home. That Mandate, later endorsed by the UN, allowed its trustee, Britain, to excise from the Jewish national home Palestine east of the Jordan River, which Britain with alacrity did, creating all-Arab Transjordan, today’s Jordan. The Mandate contained no such provision for excluding from the Jewish national home any part of Palestine west of the River. Those who today howl that an Israel including Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria seeks a “Greater Israel” are themselves seeking a “Lesser Israel” than that minimum – Palestine west of the River – that that UN-endorsed League of Nations Palestine Mandate decreed.
Indispensably: The Holocaust was no anomaly. Through the centuries, every device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom, not to mention repeated expulsions – was devised in Christian Europe, heartland of Western civilization, specifically for Jews. Nor over those centuries did we Jews fare freer and safer as dhimmis in Muslim lands.
France, Britain and Spain champion the world’s current clamor for an inside-the-land-of-Israel Palestinian Arab state, in addition to judenrein Jordan, three-quarters of Palestine with its heavy Palestinian Arab population majority.
It was hearing Parisians’ cries not of “kill the traitor!”, wrongly-convicted Dreyfus, but “kill the Jew!” that shocked Herzl into writing The Jewish State. Britain, Trustee of the League’s Palestine Mandate to reconstitute the Jewish national home with close settlement of Jews on the land, instead held millions of desperately Jewish homeland-seeking European Jews’ arms beyond their back before, during and even after the Holocaust in which Germans murdered them. Today, the prime minister of Spain, Inquisition tormentor of Jews, laments he doesn’t have an atomic bomb to drop on Israel to stop its war in Gaza. The Aliyah Bet and “on eagles’ wings” rescue of Yemenite and Ethiopian Jews accomplished an Ingathering of Exiles that may have no ending.
Equitably: What’s wrongly cast as “the Jordan option” is not a peace process alternative but an historical fact. Eastern Palestine, today’s Palestinian Arab-majority judenrein Jordan, does in fact sit on three-quarters of the Palestine Mandate and its population is in fact largely Palestinian Arab. Britain’s excision of Eastern Palestine, Jordan, from the Palestine Mandate’s Jewish-national-home constituted in fact the Partition of Palestine, three-quarters to Arabs, between Arabs and Jews.
Yes, there are Palestinian Arab refugees, today mostly descendants of Arabs who left in 1948, who nowhere else in the world would be considered refugees. In the wake of the 1948 war, more Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jews were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel. This Mizrahi Jewish stream is the largest segment of Israel’s population today, giving the lie to the canard of a “European colonialist Israel.”
Re Stu’s “Should Israel Trade Land for Security?”:
Stu’s right that Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt, in which it gave back the Sinai, and Jordan, in which it recognized Jordan sovereignty over small border areas, have more or less worked. Israel’s still there. But the Sinai and Jordan border areas, unlike historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, aren’t the heart & soul of our Jewish people’s national home.
And while it’s true drones and missiles play a larger role in today’s warfare than ever before, and Israel has a world class air force, territory in depth and defensible borders are the sine qua non of national defense. As Naftali Bennett once put it, there’s no room in the heartland of the land of Israel for a second sovereign state.
Stu says I overlook that war sides’ aim evolve more peaceably over time, that “I’m still fighting the last wars.” He’s more right about me than he knows. I don’t just believe that Israelis are still fighting just one war, their War of Independence in which 1948, ’56, ’67, ’73 … are just battles. I believe that our Jewish people has been fighting one long war, against us as Jews, for two thousand years.
The land of Israel, as Bibi just put it, “belongs to us.” There can’t be an inside-the-land-of-Israel Palestinian Arab state, not just because Palestinian Arabs represented by hostage-holding Hamas and Pay-For-Slay Palestinian Authority aren’t ready to share the land with us, but because the land of Israel is historically, legally, indispensably and equitably our people’s homeland, not that of Jordan-and-Gaza-pieces-of-Palestine-possessing Arabs.
What’s Possible
Trump’s first term Ambassador to Israel David Friedman in his first book, Sledgehammer, details the peace plan Trump’s Mideast specialists worked out, titled “The Deal of the Century” [ok, this is after all Trump]. It provided for Palestinian Arabs internally autonomous Judea-Samaria areas, larger than where they mainly live now, under Israeli security control. It was sidelined by the broader Arab-Israeli peace potential of the Abraham Accords. In his recent second book, One Jewish State, Amb. Friedman expands on this to encompass Israeli application of sovereignty [miscalled by too many “annexation,” which means taking over another country’s land] over the entirety of Judea-Samaria still with those internally autonomous Palestinian Arab areas. This is in addition to Jordan and Gaza.
For some Judea-Samaria Arabs, whom Amb. Friedman analogizes to Puerto Ricans, who don’t vote for U.S. president, internal autonomy however economically good may not nationalistically suffice. But unlike Puerto Ricans surrounded by ocean, these Palestinian Arabs [shall I call it “the Jordan option”?] have someplace to go. Just by crossing a River not much more formidable to crossing than Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Creek, they can go home to a three-quarters of Palestine Palestinian Arab-majority Palestine home.
