Erasing Jewish History Will Not Help Palestinians

erasing jewish history will not help palestinians

Erasing Jewish History Will Not Help Palestinians

For Jews, the events of October 7—the worst massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust—were horrifying and traumatizing. But what has happened in the three months since is also deeply unsettling, though in a different way. Much of the world, rather than offering empathy and compassion for Israel, has turned on it.

Hamas’s malevolent actions helped produce a sharp rise in anti-Semitism and in anti-Israel rallies in cities across the world. Earlier this month, the International Court of Justice in The Hague began hearing South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide in its war against Hamas, launched in reaction to the massacre.

Israel was the victim of depraved attacks by an Iran-backed terror group determined to annihilate the world’s only Jewish-majority country—and yet it is Israel that is in the dock.

We’ve seen this perverse phenomenon play out in other ways as well. During the Christmas holidays, Jesus was pulled into the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In an Instagram post, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew parallels between the persecutors of Jesus and modern-day Israel. Jesus was “part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust leader’s power,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “Thousands of years later, right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians.” She continued, “The high Christian holiday is about honoring the precious sanctity of a family that, if the story were to unfold today, would be Jewish Palestinians,” she continued.

[Simon Sebag Montefiore: The decolonization narrative is dangerous and false]

She was not alone in drawing that parallel. On Christmas morning, Father Edward Beck, a Catholic priest and religion commentator, was asked on CNN about the “pain and suffering” taking place all over the world during the holiday season. “What I’m so struck by is that the story of Christmas is about a Palestinian Jew—how often do you find those words put together? A Palestinian Jew—born into a time when his country was occupied, right?” Beck said. “I mean, you can’t make up the parallels to our current world situation right now.” On Boston Common, a vandal went a step further, spray-painting Jesus Was Palestinian below a nativity scene.

This claim is hardly new. In 2013, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, called Jesus “a Palestinian messenger” in his annual Christmas message. In 2019, Ocasio-Cortez’s colleague Ilhan Omar shared a tweet by an academic who said this: “I was once asked by a relative who is a Palestinian Christian why the Christian right in America largely supports their oppression. ‘Don’t they know we’re Christian too? Do they even consider us human? Don’t they know Jesus was a Palestinian?’”

In fact, although many Palestinians today are Christians, Jesus himself was not one. He was born to Jewish parents in Judea, he lived as a Jew, and he died as a Jew. In the time of Jesus, Palestine didn’t exist—as a place, an entity, a word, or a concept. In the second century, Judea, which was the epicenter of large-scale Jewish rebellions against Roman rule, was renamed Syria Palaestina—later simply Palaestina—by the Romans. The term Palaestina was derived from Philistia, the name given by the Greeks to the land of the Philistines, the ancient enemies of the Israelites. (The Philistines were not Arab but Aegean.)

Rome’s goal was to sever the connection between Judea and the Jews, to de-Judaize the land. It was an unsuccessful effort. Jews, who first arrived in present-day Israel more than 3,000 years ago, continued to maintain a presence in that land, especially in Jerusalem, the holiest city in Judaism—the location of the First and Second Temples, atop which the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock were later built—and in Hebron, the second-holiest. So why does this matter? Because the assertion that Jesus was Palestinian is often made in an effort to negate Jewish history, to insist that only Palestinians, and not Jews, have claim to the land. This absolutist claim provides a seedbed for the radical belief that Jews do not deserve a country of their own in even a part of their ancestral homeland.

Even the more qualified claim that Jesus was a “Palestinian Jew” is often intended to make the same negationist point. Jews who lived in the Ottoman empire and then British-occupied Palestine, to be sure, often used the term Palestinian to describe themselves. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, in a 1970 interview, said, “I’m a Palestinian. From ’21 until ’48, I carried a Palestinian passport.” But when Ocasio-Cortez calls Jesus a Jewish Palestinian, she is not trying to connect him to the likes of Golda Meir.

None of this is to say that Palestinian Arabs are not indigenous to the land. Certainly they are. To deny that would be to play the same pernicious game that is played against the Jews. The Palestinians today are descendants of the Arabs who left Arabia and conquered Palestine (and much of the known world) 1,400 years ago. Surely, 1,400 years is enough to establish a claim of indigeneity.

Of course, to acknowledge that both Jews and Palestinians are indigenous to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is to shatter the widespread narrative that Israel is a “settler-colonial state” (as well as the narrative advanced by some far-right Jews and Christians that Palestinians have no legitimate national claims of their own). If Israel is, as the historian Barbara Tuchman put it, “the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago,” then the creation of the modern state of Israel can’t be understood through the frame of colonization or imperialism. It was rather a case of an indigenous people returning home from exile—a people, it should be said, willing to live under a United Nations–sponsored partition plan in 1948 that many Jews at the time felt ceded too much land to an Arab polity, with frontiers that were virtually indefensible. Israel accepted the compromise; the Arab world did not. The Arab states attacked, expressing confidence that they would annihilate the Jews. They failed in their war of extermination. But the wars kept coming. And keep coming.

[Read: A war to end all wars between Israel and Palestine]

To better grasp how essential the denial of history has been to opponents of Israel, consider a story from Dennis Ross. The former Middle East envoy worked with President Bill Clinton to achieve a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians at Camp David in the winter of 2000. The only new idea Yasser Arafat raised at Camp David over the course of 15 days of negotiations, Ross has said, “was that the temple didn’t exist in Jerusalem, it existed in Nablus.” Clinton informed others that Arafat told him there was no trace of a temple on the Temple Mount. Arafat later told a delegation of Arab leaders that the temple was not in Jerusalem but in Yemen. The grand mufti of Jerusalem; Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas; and other Palestinian religious and political leaders have similarly denied the existence of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This is part of the historical erasure that is being done by the enemies of Israel, and the enemies of truth.

ISRAEL’S POLITICAL CULTURE is famously rambunctious, vibrant, contentious, and at times heated; the disagreements are often intense. Many Israelis are self-critical, and sometimes rightfully so. The current government includes Itamar Ben-Gvir—“a disciple of the infamous extremist Meir Kahane,” in the words of my Atlantic colleague Yair Rosenberg—and Bezalel Smotrich, who wants to turn Israel into a theocracy. “The rise of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir is emblematic of a fundamental shift in Israeli politics: The extreme has entered the mainstream,” according to Rosenberg. Their dehumanizing attitude toward Palestinians is abhorrent. (Until 2020, Ben-Gvir hung a portrait in his home of Baruch Goldstein, the man who massacred 29 Palestinians worshipers and wounded 150 at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994. Israel’s political and religious leaders condemned Goldstein. “We say to this horrible man and those like him: You are a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism,” then–Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Knesset.)

[Read: The Israeli government goes extreme right]

I know ardent supporters of the Jewish state who have been quite troubled by the Israeli government’s settlement policy. Many of them have long favored a two-state solution, the kind offered by Ehud Barack in 2000 and by Ehud Olmert in 2008 (and rejected by Arafat and Abbas). Israelis themselves are critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—only 15 percent want Netanyahu to stay in office after the war on Hamas in Gaza ends, according to one recent poll—and many of them filled the streets to oppose his efforts at judicial reform. Some Israelis also oppose the Israel Defense Forces’ military tactics in Gaza, though it’s necessary to point out that Hamas’s barbaric attack triggered this war, Hamas is inviting civilian casualties by using Palestinians as human shields, and if Israel were to cripple or eliminate Hamas, it would destroy a truly malevolent terrorist group. (A New York Times investigation recently uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation, and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.)

These days, I’ve found myself thinking of Yossi Klein Halevi, the author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, a beautiful and evocative book that seeks mutual understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. In a recent interview with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, Halevi said, “On the one hand, I believe that a Palestinian state is an existential need for Israel. And I also believe it’s an existential threat, especially given what we’ve just experienced on Oct. 7.” I have enormous sympathy for Halevi, as I have enormous sympathy for Palestinians raised in refugee camps who have suffered, including one who told Halevi, “We both have legitimate claims.” If only the Palestinian leadership since 1948 had embraced that view. The whole modern history of the Middle East would have unfolded differently, far more peacefully, far more justly.

In any event, those who believe that Israel is prosecuting the war against Hamas in a way that’s deeply regrettable yet necessary—who know that the leader of Hamas in Gaza said that October 7 was “just a rehearsal,” and yet concede that the moral calculus of this war, the balancing of means and ends, is agonizing—can still weep for the deaths of the children and the innocent in Gaza. The loss of life all around is horrifying.

But what Israel asks, and what Israel deserves, is to be judged by a reasonable standard, not a double standard—not by a standard of behavior that, in the words of my late friend Charles Krauthammer, is “not just equal to that of the West, but in fact far higher than that of any Western country in similar circumstances.” My reading of the record is that Israel, although certainly imperfect, has navigated extraordinarily difficult circumstances in astonishingly admirable ways.

Whether you agree with my assessment or not, Israel certainly deserves a fair account of its history rather than a tendentious distortion of it. When the distortion is done as part of a larger effort to unfairly undermine support for or even to demonize the Jewish state, then those of us who are non-Jews should speak up.

Peace and reconciliation are the goals, but they will come only when Palestinians and their supporters—including Christians who should acquaint themselves with the history of their own faith—recognize that Jews are also indigenous to the land once called Judea.

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