Norway Recognizes “Palestinian State: – My Unanswered Letter to Its U.S. Ambassador
June 2024, by Jerry Verlin
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Among the jurisprudential gems I gleaned in my three years at an Ivy League Law School was the celebrated Pornography Perception Principle. “I may not be able to define pornography,” a U.S. Supreme Court Justice put it,“but I know it when I see it.” Can this hallowed legal principle be applied as a precedent to other plagues scourging humanity? How about Antisemitism? Here’s my receipt-acknowledged-but-so-far-unanswered letter Tuesday morning to the Norwegian Ambassador to the United States.
To: Hon. Anniken Krutnes, Ambassador of Norway to the United States, emb.washington@mfa.no
Dear Mr. Ambassador:
I’m a secular U.S. Jew, not a Diplomat. I have complaints and predictions.
Per the Jerusalem Post [5/23/24], in announcing your country’s recognition of “Palestine,” your Foreign Minister said, inter alia:
“‘What we have seen from this [Israeli] government … is a rapid expansion of government-sponsored settlements that we see as illegal – on top of tolerating the settlements [West Bank outposts – JPost insertion] that are illegal even under Israeli law,’ he said. [emphasis added, a little]
This was a grossly misleading attempt by your Foreign Minister to portray Israel as itself joining your country in considering these “outposts” as acts of moral turpitude. In fact, the “illegality,” under Israeli law, is that they weren’t authorized by the government – i.e., a zoning issue, not self-acknowledged international law flouting.
Your Foreign Minister wasn’t done:
“‘Then there is the use of Jewish extremist and settler violence to help expand Israel’s hold on West Bank territory,’ Eide said. [emphasis added]
Note that he said “Jewish,” not “Israeli,” extremists, giving me standing as a non-Israeli Jew to be personally affronted by these misstatements.
By us, Israelis and Diaspora Jews alike, that area is “Judea and Samaria,” what the media lovingly calls “the biblical names for the West Bank.” Yes, they are Hebrew-origin biblical names, but they remained in use for three thousand years, including by the UN itself in its Palestine partition resolution of 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….” The 1948 invader, Jordan, coined “West Bank” in 1950, for the same reason the Romans, eighteen hundred years earlier, had renamed Judaea as “Palestine,” to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews.
My Jewish people has been sovereign in the land of Israel, western Palestine, including Judea-Samaria and historic (“East”) Jerusalem, three times in history – as the kingdom of Judah, Maccabean/Hasmonean Judaea, and today’s Israel (as the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab at that). Palestinian Arabs have been sovereign there never (and foreign Arab dynasties only from 638 to 1099, between European Roman-Byzantines and European Crusaders).
Israel’s claim to Judea-Samaria (and to historic Jerusalem) is by uninterrupted continuous homeland-claiming Jewish presence, which British historian Parkes called sufficient, “in spite of every discouragement,” to have written today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” The League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, endorsed by its successor UN, recognized “the Jewish people’s historical connection to Palestine” and our “Jewish national home” with “close settlement of Jews on the land.” That irreversible Mandate allowed Britain to withhold from that Jewish national home the 78% percent of Palestine east of the Jordan River, which Britain with alacrity did, creating Transjordan, today’s Jordan, but there was no such provision in the Mandate for excluding land west of the River.
Israel does not in fact, “use” any “Jewish extremists” and “settlers” in order “to help expand Israel’s hold on West Bank territory,” as your Foreign Minister misleadingly put it. Judea-Samaria is ours, and Israel has no need or wish to do so. To the minor extent unauthorized “settler violence” occurs, it doesn’t occur in a vacuum, to borrow a phrase, but in the context of “pay-for-slay” Palestinian Arab attacks on Jewish men, women and children.
Here’s a prediction: When the keys to the last church in Norway are handed over to Muslims to be turned into a mosque, your Foreign Minister will lament to the Muslim, “You know, this is all the fault of the Jews” [note he’ll not say “Israelis”]. And the Muslim (pocketing the keys), will smile and reply, “Yep, you’re right.”
Is it too late to avert this catastrophe to Christendom? I think, if your Foreign Minister’s statement stands, and you pray in your churches for European transition to Islam not to happen, the Almighty will answer: “So you Europeans didn’t like Jews living amongst you for two thousand years? Watch this.”
Regards,
Jerry Verlin
What I Didn’t Say in My Letter: “A Palestinian State” Already Exists
Excepting howlers of “From the River to the Sea,” who draw an exception for Jews, people in the West believe that peoples should have a place where they’re the majority, what they can call their people’s home. Thus, they believe there should be a state in which Palestinian Arabs, whom they see as separate from other Arab peoples, are the majority people.
The Jewish homeland case that we ourselves must make to the world is that the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan River, all of it, is historically and legally ours. I tried to convey that in my letter to Norway’s Ambassador. What I didn’t include in my letter is that accepting Israel as such doesn’t deprive Palestinian Arabs of their own Palestine home. We have to get that across to the West.
A Jerusalem Post article Thursday – 5/30/24, After Oct. 7, Only 19% of Israeli Jews Believe in Peaceful Coexist with a Palestinian State, sub-headlined The Figure of 19%, Reported in a Study Published Thursday by the Pew Research Center, was the Lowest Since Pew Started Surveying Israelis in 2013 – uses an expression, “a Palestinian State,” that’s a candidate for my list of “Toxic Terms” (www.factsonisrael.com, page titled “Toxic Terms,” see also “Dirty Words”).
What’s unfairly misleading about saying “a Palestinian State,” especially if expressed in future tense, is that it suggests that no Palestinian Arab-majority state presently exists. But one does. Jordan, comprising 78% of Mandated Palestine, is majority Palestinian Arab. Yes, Jordan’s a British colonial days-installed Hashemite Arab kingdom, but let its king be a constitutional monarch like Chuck and Jordan be “Democratic & Arab.”
Whether you believe in a western Palestine (i.e., inside the land of Israel) “Two-State Solution” or not, Jordan is what it is – 78% of Palestine with a majority population that’s Palestinian Arab.
And Palestinian Arabs are the exclusive population of another piece of Palestine, Gaza. And both Bibi and Gantz signed off on the Trump plan, offering Palestinian Arabs internal autonomy in a bigger chunk of Judea-Samaria that where they mainly live now.
We must include the present existence of a Palestinian Arab-majority Palestine State in the Jewish homeland case we make to the West.
