JRV1334

Going On Offense

#1334 August 9, 2026

Yes, we must debunk “genocide” and “apartheid” and “occupied” and all the other anti-Israel canards.  But we mustn’t stop there.  We grassroots U.S. Jews must affirmatively make the case to our fellow Americans that from every standpoint the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is our Jewish people’s sovereign national home.

Jonathan Tobin’s JNS article Tuesday, 8/4/26, To Antisemites, Israel and the Jews are the Reason for Everything, realistically sums up how deep into US public perception malicious myths about Israel have penetrated:

“The discussion about ‘genocide’ or the fabrications about Israel manipulating America are examples of the kind of antisemitism that ought to be confined to the fever swamps of the far right and left in the same way people should treat the conspiracy theories about Ceuta. Instead, they are now mainstreamed by the media and embraced by powerful and loud voices that are having an impact on both our discourse and elections.”  [emphasis added a little]

We must of course debunk these canards.  It seems these days we could well spend all of our time and energy doing it.  But we must not stop there.  We grassroots American Jews must affirmatively make the case to our fellow Americans that the land of Israel, our Jewish people’s national homeland, with historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria biblical hill country heartland as its very heart & soul, is ours. 

It’s not simple to condense a tenacious three thousand-year connection of a people to its homeland into short straightforward points the wider public will grasp, but here’s my shot at a half-dozen Jewish people – Jewish homeland connections.

Biblical: When I took a course in “Life of Christ” as an elective to my accounting major a half-century ago at Washington & Lee, the first question the prof put to the class was “What religion was Jesus?”  It was surprising so few appreciated that Jesus was a Jew. 

If you didn’t see it the two nights it showed in American theaters as the most attended motion picture of all, get the DVD of Mike Pompeo & David Friedman’s Route 60: The Biblical Highway.  It will help you remind our Christian fellow Americans that the Holy Land is strewn with religious and historical sites, some of them the same sites, revered by Christians and Jews.  “The Palestinians” don’t have an impeccable track record protecting and preserving other folks’ holy places.

The site of sites is of course the Temple Mount.  Today, many Muslims (abetted e.g., by my hometown Philly Inquirer, 5/24/21, headlining “Mosque Visits Resume” for Jews ascending the plaza not the al-Aqsa building itself) claim the entire Mount as “a mosque,” and Islam’s third holiest at that. Too many Jews, some of them Israeli, call the Western Wall the sole remnant of the Temple Mount, but as archeological architect authority Leen Ritmeyer, Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount; The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, has convincingly shown, much of the Temple Mount still stands, including within the Muslims’ Dome of the Rock the slot that had been carved by King Solomon three millennia ago on Mount Moriah’s summit, the floor of the Temples’ Holy of Holies, for the Ark of the Covenant.  Christians and Jews have Promised Land, Holy Land equity that Muslim sovereignty would not respect.

So, connection #1: The Temple Mount, with its still-extant Herodian, Hasmonean and even First Temple time testimony written in stone, along with much other biblical era remains, indisputably shows Jewish biblical era history happened, many centuries preceding Islam.

Historical: It isn’t true, period, that the Romans on defeating Bar Kochba in 135 CE “exiled” the Jews and that they were gone from the land of Israel for almost two thousand years.  Homeland Jews remained, becoming over the centuries a persecuted but tenacious homeland-claiming minority, throughout the exclusively foreign empire Roman-Byzantine, Muslim dynasty, Crusader, Mamluk, Turk and British rule.  That post-biblical Jewish presence, historian Parkes wrote in Whose Land? (p. 266) “in spite of every discouragement” wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”  So taken was I with Parkes’ assertion, I wrote a book, Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, tracing and documenting that presence.  Today’s Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.

So connection #2: Homeland-claiming Jews physically remained in the land throughout the post-biblical eighteen hundred years of exclusively foreign empire rule, becoming the land of Israel’s next native state after Jewish Judaea. “The Palestinians” have never ruled Palestine ever.

Legal: Following World War I, the League of Nations divided the defunct Ottoman Empire’s Mideast areas into English and French-administered Mandates which would grow into native states.  In recognition of the Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine, the Palestine Mandate (later endorsed by the UN), with Britain as its trustee, comprised today’s Israel and Jordan as the “Jewish national home.” The Mandate authorized Britain to withhold from the Jewish national home the three-quarters of Palestine east of the Jordan River, which Britain did, creating Transjordan, today’s Jordan.  There was no provision for divesting from the Jewish national home any part of Palestine west of the River. 

Connection #3: The Palestine Mandate, originally including the entirety of Palestine as the Jewish national home, ended with dividing Palestine between Arabs and Jews east and west, respectively, of the Jordan River.

Equitable: Palestinian Arabs are the majority population of judenrein Jordan, sitting on three-quarters of Mandated Palestine. It’s true that some of their ancestors had lived in Palestine west of the River and were displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, begun btw by a multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction.  But in that war and its wake, a greater number of indigenously Middle-eastern Jews were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel.  Most of these Jewish refugees fled to Israel, which absorbed them (Look, Ma, no UNRWA), and their descendants today (not European Ashkenazis) constitute the biggest ethnic stream of Israelis.

Connection #4: Palestinian Arabs have a Palestine home, three-quarters of Palestine, Jew-free Jordan.  Israel absorbed more indigenous Jews displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands, today the largest ethnic stream of Israelis, in the 1948 war’s wake than Arabs left tiny Israel.

Indispensable: The Holocaust was no anomaly. It was always thus, Jews being persecuted as outsiders in Europe. E.g., read the first six chapters of Martin Gilbert’s Exile & Return: The Struggle for a Jewish Homeland.  One story that exemplifies Europeans treating us as outsiders (I forget where I read it) is of a Jewish soldier in the Russian army closing in on Berlin in the final days of World War II.  They break into celebration when word comes Germany has surrendered, the War is over. Russian airplanes fly overhead and the Jewish Russian soldier shouts “There go our eagles.”  “What do you mean ‘our,’ one of his comrades sneers, “You’re not one of us.”  Nor have our people fared freer as dhimmis in Muslim lands.  Nor has been or is America immune from the ubiquitous antisemitism curse. 

We have to have it, a sovereign homeland that’s ours, into which our people can Ingather our Exiles.  Of my thousand-plus Israel history books, none touches my heart deeper than those on the Aliyah Bet, Palestinian Jews and U.S. vet volunteers sailing Holocaust survivors into the teeth of the anti-Jewish British blockade.  Add to that the gripping rescues of Yemenite and Ethiopian Jews.  “We have to have it,” national embodiment of Never Again, is the indelible lesson of the last eighteen hundred years. 

Connection#5: No people on earth has a stronger need for, along with claim to, its sovereign historic homeland to Ingather its persecuted Exiles than us Jews. We won’t give it up, period. 

Indivisible: If none of these peoplehood-based claims to our Jewish people’s homeland moves listeners, there remains this geographical case. The land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, contains no geographical separators between populations.  See, e.g. Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs study reported in its July15 article The PA’s Massive Army Threatens Millions of Israelis Within Just 22 Kilometers; section “18.6 The Dangers to Our Jewish Homeland of ‘Two-States’”, in my book Here & Now: U.S. Jews and the Issues Confronting Us, quoting multiple authoritative analysts.

Connection #6: The narrow land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, has no physical dividers for separating two mutually hostile peoples’ sovereign states. The highland ridge-backed Jordan Valley geographically separates Arab eastern and Jewish western Palestine.

Bottom Line

Like the Holy Roman Empire, the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” are neither “occupied” nor “Palestinian” nor “territories,” just geographically undifferentiated areas of our Jewish national home, and the most meaningful and defensible of them at that.  Palestinian Arabs have an in-Palestine home, Jew-free Jordan on three-quarters of Mandated Palestine.  We grassroots American Jews must make this case – biblically, historically, legally, equitably, indispensably, indivisibly – to our fellow Americans.