RUTHFULLY YOURS

Though demography was not an exact science, Jews may have numbered several million in the early Roman Empire. For more than a century before the 70 CE destruction of the Second Temple, most Jews preferred living around the Mediterranean basin, instead of their aboriginal homeland. Still, Jews were the majority in the Holy Land, perhaps until the late 6th century CE. Historical and religious sources like the Torah, the Gospels and the Koran affirm the existence of the Jewish People and their historical, demographic and cultural connection to their ancestral homeland. There are, for example 16th-century Ottoman tax registers listing the names of the Jewish tax-payers. There were always Jews living in the Holy Land, where the total population (also including the Muslims and Christians) had by the 19th century fallen to a level much lower than in Roman times or today. 1.

When the Muslims invaded Palestine in 634, ending four centuries of conflict between Persia and Rome, they found direct descendants of Jews who had lived in the country since the time of Joshua bin Nun, the man who led the Israelites into the Land of Canaan. This means that for 2,000 years Jews and Christians constituted the majority of the indigenous population of Palestine, while the Bedouin’s were the ruling class under the Damascene caliphate. As far back as the Byzantine Empire, (313 to 636), rabbinical leaders in Palestine argued about “whether most of Palestine is in the hands of the gentiles,” or “whether the greater part of Palestine is in the hands of Israel.” This was essential to determine, since according to halacha (Jewish law), if the Jews ruled the country Jews they were obligated to observe religious agricultural practices in one way, and another if they were not in control.”2

Gerson D. Cohen, a professor of Talmud and a former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, added that “the Rabbis could no more conceive of Judaism without the land of Israel then they could have without the people of Israel.” To place this in its proper historical perspective, Maimonides’s renowned legal code, the Mishneh Torah, compiled between 1170 and 1180 (4930–4940), devotes fully one third of the book to the land of Israel. It had to be this way since “all of Jewish law is inextricably connected with the land of Israel.” There is “an unbreakable covenant between G-d and the Torah on the one hand with the people of Israel and the land of Israel on the other.” 3

“The Centrality of Israel to the Jews”

The land was reserved for the Jews at creation not only because of it being the most striking and bountiful of lands, but because of its spiritual character asserts Jewish philosopher Eliezer Schweid. A unique sanctity permeates the land making living there intrinsically of the uppermost importance, overshadowing all the other Biblical commandments. 4 Even Muslims accept the patriarchy of Abraham. 5

It follows then that the centrality of the land of Israel to the Jewish religion stems from the Torah’s formulating Jewish law and ritual conditional to the Jewish people possessing the land. The agricultural laws found in the Torah are expressly connected with cultivating the earth of the Holy land. Animal sacrifices were confined to the Temple in Jerusalem. Cities of refuge for those guilty of manslaughter could not be built anywhere but in the land of Israel. Leaving the country became a religious transgression laden with remorse. Those living outside of the Holy Land were considered unwilling accomplices in idolatry. 6

The rabbis were so concerned about the national welfare and the continuation of Jewish rule of the land, they refused to accept any foreign occupation as valid. Although they had to acquiesce to their rule, they viewed the Romans, for example, as intruders and their representatives as robbers. G-d had promised the Land to Abraham and his descendants and no one could change this right. The Jews did not accept their authority reflecting the humiliations and degradation they faced at the hands of these oppressors. 7

When the Roman Army destroyed the Temple in 70 C.E., the rabbis decided to establish ceremonies to commemorate the destruction, and maintain the belief that the Temple will be rebuilt “speedily in our days.” The success of these ceremonies, known as Zekher le-Hurban (Remembrance of the destruction), are practiced to this day by observant Jews. The period of mourning commemorating the destruction of the first and second Temples begins on the 17th day of the Jewish month of Tammuz and ends on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, the day of the destruction, called the fast of Tisha B’Av. On this day Jews sit on the floor lamenting their past and entreat G-d to fulfill the messianic promise of return to their land to rebuild the Temple. 8

When Jordan’s Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city– the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible. Officers like Colonel Bill Newman, Major Geoffrey Lockett and Major Bob Slade, under Glubb Pasha, better known as General John Bagot Glubb, whose son later converted to Islam, invaded Jerusalem and used the Muslim forces under their command to make the partition and ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem possible.

The Jews living in the free half of Jerusalem continued to be killed by Jordanian Muslim snipers. The victims of those years of Muslim occupation included Yaffa Binyamin, a 14-year-old girl sitting on the balcony of her own house and a Christian carpenter working on the Notre Dame Convent.

Under Muslim occupation, while Muslim snipers were cold-bloodedly murdering their children, the Jewish residents living under fire couldn’t so much as put in an outhouse without being reported to the UN for illegal construction. In one case a UN observer organization held four meetings to discuss an outhouse for local residents before condemning Israel for illegal construction.

It did not however condemn Jordan when one of its soldiers opened fire on a train wounding a Jewish teenage girl.

Not very much has changed.

The hysterical condemnations of “illegal construction” did not end when the Muslim occupation did. The great outhouse of the United Nations and the smaller outhouses of the foreign ministries of countries whose leaders tremble whenever Muslims grow agitated over a cartoon or a YouTube video fill the air with the vilest of substances whenever a Jewish family moves into a home in Jerusalem.

It would be inconceivable for the international community to denounce an ethnically cleansed group which survived attempted genocide for moving back into its own city. It is, however, standard policy at the State Department and the Foreign Office to denounce Jews living in those parts of Jerusalem that had been ethnically cleansed by Muslims, as “settlers” living in “settlements,” and accuse them of being an “obstruction to peace.”

Peace being the state of affairs that sets in when an ethnic cleansing goes unchallenged.

What we are talking about here is not peace, but ethnic cleansing. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Their synagogues were blown up by the Muslim occupiers. Their tombstones were used to line the roads traveled by the racist Muslim settlers. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Whether they were Zionists or anti-Zionists did not matter. They were not Muslims. That was all that counted.

“For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter,” Abdullah el-Talal, a commander of the Muslim invaders, had boasted. “Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.” In his memoirs he wrote, “I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty…. Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it.”

Every politician who denounces Jews building houses in Jerusalem, but not Muslims doing the same thing is endorsing Abdullah’s genocidal vision and all the terrorism that goes with it.

In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted “Mohammed’s religion was born with the sword”, “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.

In his quest to discover the sources of the growing rift between American Jewry and Israel, Daniel Gordis convincingly arguesthat, rather than being traceable to the character of Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, or to changing patterns in American Jewish life, the rift is over issues of “moral and political essence and ideology”—issues of, in a word, identity. He proceeds to diagnose four divergent “political and cultural assumptions” that, taken together, expose the ways in which Israel and America represent “two fundamentally different if not antithetical political projects.” Although the resultant tensions between Israeli and American Jews are “as old as Israel itself,” rarely if ever have they generated the fissures currently dividing the two communities. The question, then, is: why now?

In what follows, I mean to expand on the reasons advanced by Gordis with some background reminders from American political history. This history shows that inter-communal tensions are not the only or even the most important factors in the rift. Although, as Gordis notes, suspicion and misunderstanding plagued relations between American Jews and the Jewish state from Israel’s inception, they were also tied in great part to a tension that pervaded U.S.-Israel ties more broadly, and that has its locus in the shifting priorities of American foreign policy.

In May 1948,President Harry Truman swiftly extended diplomatic recognition to the newly born state of Israel. Nevertheless, during its War of Independence, he also imposed an arms embargo that imperiled Israel’s ability to repel invading Arab armies. For his part, Truman’s successor Dwight Eisenhower at firstdistanced America from Israel as he sought to win over Gamal Abdel Nasser and convert the Egyptian dictator’s influence into coin on the Arab street more generally. His administration even established a CIA front group to counteract popular American sympathy for Zionism.

Although the relationship improved somewhat under the Kennedy administration, it remained tepid until the Six-Day War. Just as Jerusalem’s stunning success in that conflict “did much,” as Gordis writes, “to soften feelings” toward Israel among American Jews, more significantly it did the same in Washington. Israel’s victory demonstrated the logic of a U.S.-Israel alliance. Morally, the Jewish state represented at once a fellow democracy in a region otherwise devoid of free societies and a plucky underdog pursuing its national self-determination in the mold of America’s founding fathers. Strategically, Israel could serve as America’s battleship in the Middle East; armed with U.S. weapons, it could help balance and beat back Soviet power.

The new partnership quickly took hold. President Lyndon Johnson began to speak of the Jewish state with the moral conviction that would become common among later presidents. Soon after the war, when the Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin asked why the U.S. would back a country with only three million citizens against 80 million Arabs, Johnson responded: “because it is right.” Many Americans appeared to agree. In June 1967, a Gallup poll had found 38 percent sympathizing more with Israel than with the Arab nations; by January 1969, that number had jumped to 50 percent.

Throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s—despite Arab oil embargoes, despite the humiliation of the American defeat in Vietnam and the ensuing years of foreign-policy confusion and disillusionment—Israel successfully reinforced its moral alignment with the United States. It did so through its performance as the forward arsenal of American might in the Middle East. As I’verecounted elsewhere, Israel saved the U.S.-backed Hashemite kingdom in Jordan from a Syrian invasion, humiliated the Soviet Union by downing its planes over the Suez Canal, and opened the port of Haifa to the U.S. Sixth Fleet to counter the Soviet presence in Syria. Most spectacularly, in the summer of 1982, Israeli pilots flying U.S. planes downed 86 Syrian-manned Soviet MiGs without suffering a single loss.

Israel’s achievements generated American goodwill. When asked in the 1970s whether a so-called Jewish lobby was taking over Congress, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Democratic Senator from Washington, responded that Americans of all kinds, far from being in the thrall of lobbyists, “respect competence. They like that we are on the side which seems to know what it’s doing.” In 1988, 63 percent of Americans averred to pollsters that an “extremely important” or “very important” reason for U.S. support of Israel was that the country was “the most outspoken foe of Communism in the Middle East and its strength prevents the Soviets from gaining even further influence in the region.”

American Jews, for their part, largely adhered to the same views. Not only did they remain strongly pro-Israel, but, as Gordis points out, they “saw no friction between those feelings and their feelings as proud Americans.” And this seamless support would persist, at least on the surface, throughout the Reagan presidency and until the collapse of the Soviet empire—after which the tectonic plates undergirding the U.S.-Israel alliance and, correspondingly, the American Jewish relationship with Israel began to shift.

Palestinian Authority “president” Mahmoud Abbas exploited his visit with Donald Trump in the White House on May 3 to tell a lie so deceitful, it amounted to an insult: “we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace.” As many observers quickly noted, schools routinely are named after Palestinian suicide bombers, and Abbas’ party consistently glorifies murderers including on the very day Abbas met with Trump — his Fatah party honored 12 terrorists who murdered 95 people.

But that’s just the beginning of Abbas’ outrages against Trump; Abbas and his many organizations – Fatah, the PLO, the Palestinian Authority – insult the American president in outlandish and unpleasant ways.

On January 20, Fatah posted photos of anti-Trump protests that included a banner of Trump’s face stepped on by Palestinian protestors; a screaming Trump being warned to “Keep your populism away from Jerusalem”; and a sneering image of Trump with claims he is a racist. Protestors set fire to some images of Trump over a Twitter text announcing: “Activists of the popular resistance burn pictures of Trump before the entrance of the occupation wall of Bethlehem.”

(When Trump visits Bethlehem on May 23, you can be sure that all anti-Trump imagery will have been cleaned up.)

Fatah Twitter post January 20, 2017.

Abbas and his Fatah party organized anti-Trump protests on January 19 in the West Bank. The Fatah Facebook post states, “#Pictures of protests organized by the Fatah movement in the city of #Nablus against the promise of Trump to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to #Jerusalem.” The highlighted photo features a poster of Donald Trump as a screaming pile of manure.

Fatah Facebook post January 19, 2017.

A Fatah video shows a city circle decorated with professionally produced banners demanding that a belligerent-looking Trump not move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In the Trump banner, it states, “The world advances and the Trump administration regresses.” Next to it is a second banner of a wide-eyed Yasser Arafat ordering Trump to submit to Palestinian demands and not move the embassy. (Which, so far, he has done.)

Morton A. Klein is National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Dr. Daniel Mandel is Director of the ZOA’ s Center for Middle East Policy and author of H.V. Evatt & the Establisment of Israel (Routledge, London, 2004).

It’s time to end the propaganda myth that Jerusalem is a holy city to Muslims.

The Muslim fixation and clamor on Jerusalem is actually a very recent historical development, a product of political conflict, not historical truth.

Jerusalem rates not a single mention in the Quran and Muslims face Mecca in prayer.

In the seventh century, the Damascus-based Umayyad rulers built up Jerusalem as a counter-weight to Mecca. This is when the important Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock (691 CE) and, later, the Al-Aqsa Mosque (705 CE), were intentionally built on the site of the destroyed biblical Jewish temples –– a time-honored practice to physically signal the predominance of Islam.

However, references in the Quran and hadith to Muhammad’s night journey to heaven on his steed Buraq from the ‘farthest mosque’ couldn’t mean Jerusalem because the Quran refers to Palestine as the “nearest” place. And it couldn’t have been a reference to the Al-Aqsa (‘Furtherest’) Mosque, for the simple reason that the Al-Aqsa Mosque didn’t exist in Muhammad’s day.

With the demise of the Umayyad dynasty and the shift of the caliphate to Baghdad, Jerusalem fell into a long decline, scarcely interrupted by occasional bursts of Muslim interest in the city during the Crusader period and the Ottoman conquest. Mark Twain, visiting in 1867, described it as a “pauper village.”

It did, however, become a majority Jewish city during the nineteenth century. The 1907 Baedekers Travel Guide lists Jerusalem with a population of 40,000 Jews, 13,000 Muslims and 7,000 Christians.