Guest essay: Israel’s right to exist, where it is

By Jerome Verlin

“The Squad” just did grassroots American Jews a favor by introducing House Resolution 1123, “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugee Rights.”  [”Nakba” means “catastrophe” in reference to the Jewish state.]

In branding Israel’s 1948 independence an unjust “catastrophe for Palestinians” and demanding a “Right of Return” for Arabs, Rep. Rashida Tlaib et ilk joined Israel’s enemies in their quest to “recover” Palestine in its entirety, meaning all of today’s Israel, including Judea-Samaria (mislabeled “the West Bank”) and all of historic Jerusalem. The “return” of millions of Arabs who had never set foot in Israel would destroy the Jewish state. 

Israel’s enemies deny that today’s Israel is the third entity of Jewish sovereignty stretching back 3,000 years.

In a nutshell: the ancient Israel of the Bible did exist (King David, Temple Mount and all); the Romans didn’t “exile” us; our presence has been continuous. There would have been vastly more Jews present in 1948, except for foreign rulers’ massacring homeland Jews and barring entry to Jews, from the Romans to the British. 

The Jews’ Biblical history is based on reality. Archeologists are divided on whether Israelites, as Jews were initially known, entered Canaan from outside more or less as described in the Bible (“Conquest” school), or arose from within the Canaanite population (“Indigenous Origin” school). On this they agree: Israelite presence. A state arose in the late second millennium BCE, in the Judea-Samaria highlands (what many now call the “West Bank,” in an attempt to sever Jews from the land of their origin and strategic heart of their state).

For decades, this was said with a smirk: “King David was as real as King Arthur.” But in the 1990s, archeologists unearthed at Tel Dan an 8th century BCE enemy king’s inscription boasting of victories over the northern kingdom of Israel and “the House of David.”  Other enemy inscriptions and Assyrian and Babylonian records reference Israel and Judah.  First and Second Temple period structures (Temple Mount, Western Wall, Hezekiah’s Tunnel, Masada, Khirbet Qeiyafa, much more) and artifacts, including seals with biblical names, attest to ancient Israel’s reality. It is history, not myth.

The Maccabees’ long 2nd (CE) century revolt against Alexander’s Seleucid successors regained independence for the Jews’ homeland.  The Great (66-70 CE) and Bar Kochba (132-135 CE) revolts were major Roman wars, not mere provincial rebellions. 

The widely-held belief that on defeating Bar Kochba the Romans exiled Judaea’s Jews is factually incorrect.  Post-revolt Roman-Byzantine era (135-638 CE) synagogues and other Jewish remains dot the land.  Schools of homeland sages in Galilee wrote great works, including the Mishnah and then Jerusalem Talmud.  

The Romans themselves recognized the Patriarch as head of the homeland’s Jews until the 5th century. Self-mustered battalions of 20,000 or more homeland Jews fought alongside the 614 CE Persians against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs. The Jews were rewarded after fighting alongside the soon-following Muslim invaders. Archeologist Dan Bahat published a map of a hundred 9th century Jewish communities.

The 1099 CE Crusader invaders acknowledged that “the Jew is the last to fall” in fighting them at Jerusalem and that Haifa’s Jews “courageously” held them off for a month.  Jews lived in their four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and in Galilee and elsewhere in the 400 years of Turkish rule.  

Historian James Parkes wrote that the continuous, tenacious presence of post-Biblical Jews, “in spite of every discouragement,” and wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”

Today’s Israel is the next sovereign native state to emerge after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. Every ruler in between – Romans-Byzantines, foreign Muslim dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks and Turks – had been a foreign invader, and mostly non-Arab at that.  Arabs whom we all call “the Palestinians” have never ruled Palestine ever, and foreign Arab dynasties only between 638 and 1099 (progressively under control of the Turks).

In 1947, British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, no friend of ours, told Parliament that there were about 1.2 million Arabs and 600,000 Jews in Palestine.  Others put the number of Arabs at only a million. Jews weren’t a tiny minority.  Indeed, a century earlier, Turkish misrule had driven Palestine’s population down to a couple hundred thousand or less. Starting in the 1850s, Jews were a majority in Jerusalem.

 The Jewish population would have been higher, save for the previously mentioned massacres and the barring of Jews from their homeland. Turks expelled many during World War I.  

20th century Arab immigration was unimpeded, while the before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust anti-Jewish British blockade, backed by interference elsewhere, blocked Jews from escaping from Europe to Israel.

 Israel wasn’t “created” or “founded.” In 1948. Its government declared independence, just as American colonists had done two centuries earlier.  Its homeland army threw back the instant, Palestinian Arab-involved, multi-nation Arab invasion aimed at Israel’s destruction, launched the day it declared independence.

 The post-WWI San Remo treaty and Palestine Mandate recognized historic Jewish connection to Palestine and called for re-establishment there of the Jewish national home.  A clause in the Mandate allowed Britain to “withhold” from the Jewish national home the portion of Palestine east of the Jordan River, which Britain did, creating today’s Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan.

There was no such Mandate clause applying to Palestine west of the River, the historic land of Israel itself.  After the excision of Jordan, the U.N. in 1947 attempted to partition that remaining 22% of Palestine land between Arabs and Jews, all of whom were Palestinians.  That led to the declaration of independence of a Jewish state and the Arabs’ failed attempt to drive the Jews into the sea.

God knows Jews need Israel. For centuries, indigenously Middle-eastern Mizrahi Jews had lived lives of persecuted dhimmis in Arab lands. In the West, the Holocaust was no anomaly.  Over the centuries, every device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom – was devised in Christian Europe for Jews. There was no peace, there was no shelter.

 In Africa, Israel three times provided a magic carpet for Ethiopian Jews, who are Black, to escape persecution by migrating to Israel, which has Muslims and Christians in its government. And yet liars smear Israel as “apartheid.”

More Jews were expelled from Arab lands than Arabs who left Israel. One distinct difference: Israel absorbed Jews from Arab lands, while Arab “hosts” put Palestinian Arabs into refugee camps, where they languish today.

 Grassroot American Jews and their allies should not be reticent.   They should forcefully and forthrightly stand up for the historic, international treaty-recognized Jewish people’s national home — Israel, where it is, with its current borders and historic boundaries.