by Ami Isseroff
We Jews are no doubt a very clever people. Just ask any Jew and he or she will tell you about our Nobel prize winners, about Maimonides, about Baruch d'Espinoza, about Albert Einstein and many others. Any Anti-Semite will also tell you how clever and shrewd we Jews are. So it is not surprising that one of the tribe has come up with an earthshaking proposal that will make the Middle East safe for peace. He is not just any Jew. He is a journalist for Ha'aretz, which considers itself the cleverest and most sophisticated of all Israeli newspapers, and he is not just any journalist. He is the internationally renowned Yossi Melman. Everyone knows how clever and knowledgeable he is.
Melman's proposal is that Israel will give up claiming Jerusalem as its capital. Don't get excited, it's only temporary, maybe for a thousand years or so, until tempers cool down a bit. After all, we waited 2,000 years, so what's another little temporary delay for us Jewish people? This will, Melman assures us, remove a major obstacle to peace. Who among us is not ready to make sacrifices for peace? Melman also proposes that the Palestinians will give up claiming Jerusalem as their capital. Since the Palestinians do not have men of genius among them like Melman, that is not likely to happen until Hell freezes over, so perhaps Melman's proposal is a bit impractical. On the other hand, Melman's proposal is timed impeccably to coincide with the EU resolution proposed by the Swedes. That which would recognize a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, but would not recognize West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The Swedes will love the Melman plan.
Melman's reasoning is that Israel and the Palestinians are the only two peoples who claim a city as capital for "religious reasons." That is why Melman thinks we claim Jerusalem as our capital. Perhaps we want to rebuild the temple there and have animal sacrifices. There are a few people who would like to do that, but of course that is not the reason we want Jerusalem as the capital, and contrary to Muslim propaganda, there are no plans to rebuild any temple. Saudi Arabia, Melman notes, does not make its capital in Mecca. One reason that might be so is that non-Muslims are not allowed to enter Mecca, which would make foreign relations a bit difficult. Melman also thinks evidently, that it is only a coincidence that the Palestinians claim the same city as a capital as the Jews. It must be well established, in Melman's view, that Jerusalem was always the capital of the Palestinian state, right? I didn't here of any such state, but Melman is the expert on the Middle East, not I. Melman doesn't suspect that Palestinians might have an impure ulterior motive in claiming Jerusalem as their capital.
Very well then. For the sake of peace, relying on the word of an expert, we shall relinquish Jerusalem as our capital, as per the Melman plan. We can adopt, for example, Tel-Aviv or Herzliya Pituach as our capital. These are fine examples of forward - looking Zionist industry, a pleasant contrast to the backward and filthy Jerusalem. We shall change the lyrics of our national anthem, Hatikva, so that the words are "to be a free people in our own land, the land of Israel and Herzliya Pituach." And we shall change the name of our national movement to Herzliya Pituachism, because "Zion" after all, is a place in Jerusalem and a poetic allusion to Jerusalem.
There are people who will tell you that Yossi Melman has forgotten more about the Middle East than most of us ever knew. In any case, he certainly forgot a few important things. The Emperor Vespasian understood that Jerusalem is the key to this country, and that whoever holds Jerusalem and makes it his capital will rule here. The next person to teach this lesson was Salah al Din (whom you may know as Saladin) who ousted the Crusaders "temporarily" from Jerusalem. The Crusaders did not understand that they would never return, but Salah al-Din did.
Yossi Melman does does not understand that if we give up Jerusalem as our capital "temporarily" we shall not return there for a millennium most likely, but Mahmoud Abbas and Abbas Zaki can teach him. Zaki, the PLO ambassador to Lebanon explained in 2008:
LET ME TELL YOU, WHEN THE IDEOLOGY OF ISRAEL COLLAPSES, AND WE TAKE, AT LEAST, JERUSALEM, THE ISRAELI IDEOLOGY WILL COLLAPSE IN ITS ENTIRETY, AND WE WILL BEGIN TO PROGRESS WITH OUR OWN IDEOLOGY, ALLAH WILLING, AND DRIVE THEM OUT OF ALL OF PALESTINE."
To underline the point, he expanded his thesis in 2009:
"WITH THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION, IN MY OPINION, ISRAEL WILL COLLAPSE, BECAUSE IF THEY GET OUT OF JERUSALEM, WHAT WILL BECOME OF ALL THE TALK ABOUT THE PROMISED LAND AND THE CHOSEN PEOPLE? WHAT WILL BECOME OF ALL THE SACRIFICES THEY MADE – JUST TO BE TOLD TO LEAVE? THEY CONSIDER JERUSALEM TO HAVE A SPIRITUAL STATUS. THE JEWS CONSIDER JUDEA AND SAMARIA TO BE THEIR HISTORIC DREAM. IF THE JEWS LEAVE THOSE PLACES, THE ZIONIST IDEA WILL BEGIN TO COLLAPSE. IT WILL REGRESS OF ITS OWN ACCORD. THEN WE WILL MOVE FORWARD."
Yossi Melman and the editors of Ha'aretz will be very surprised to find out that after we give up Jerusalem and make, for example, Herzliya Pituach our capital, in order to avoid strife, the Palestinians will prove that a PalestinianstatewithHerzliyaPituach as its capital is what is needed to end the conflict, that it is a legitimate right of the Palestinian people, guaranteed in international legitimacy and stated in all the applicable UN resolutions, as well as the UN Charter and the vouchsafed by the European Union and the International Court of Justice. Justice Goldstone will no doubt back their claim, as will Richard Falk.
The lands of Tel-Aviv and Yaffo ("Jaffa") were likely part of Philistia and not Judea, and the Palestinian Arabs could claim them as their own. Yaffo, under "international legitimacy" (UN General Assembly Resolution 181) was to have been part of the Arab state, not the Jewish state. Tel Aviv, as claimed by the boycotters of the Toronto Film Festival, was built on Arab villages. If Muhammad did not park his flying horse there, then perhaps he visited it with a flying camel. No matter that the land was purchased a hundred years ago. Once someone makes a claim in "international legitimacy," we must obediently honor the claim. Jewish religious and historical claims may be treated as "myths," but the journey of Muhammad on his flying horse is to be reverenced as rock-solid proven fact. If Muhammad got to Jerusalem on a flying horse, and tethered his horse at the Wailing Wall (which just by coincidence happens to be holy to the Jews), he certainly must've reached Tel-Aviv-Yaffo, and tied up his horse, al-Buraq, at the Yaffo clock tower. It will be discovered that the Yaffo clock tower was long known as al Buraq.
As for Herzliya Pituach, it is the location of the famed Sidna Ali Mosque, and used to the the location of the village of Al Haram, which any Palestinian Arab patriot will no doubt inform you was a bustling and prosperous metropolis before the wicked Zionists depopulated it. Yossi Melman would certainly advise us not to make a capital there. In short, there is no place in Israel that could be made the capital city of a Jewish state without arousing the ire of the Palestinians and of the Swedish government, and bringing down on our heads all the imprecations due to those who violate "international legitimacy" as interpreted by the Mufti of Jerusalem.
The next logical and inevitable step for any persecuted people needing asylum is to seek a new home, It would be a temporary home of course, until all the bad feelings quiet down, a Nachtasyl as it is called in German - a night refuge. After all, the Jews, as Yossi Melman and Ha'aretz will remind us, are the only people who attach a religious significance to their homeland. We could just as well (or better) live in New Zealand, where there are friendly people and lots of water, or perhaps East Africa or the Jewish Autonomous Area in Birobidjan.
Territorial Zionism, the search for a territory outside the land of Israel for the Jewish people, was, of course, already tried. What in theory might have been a promising idea that could have saved the Jews of Europe, was in practice a miserable failure. It turns out that you can't take the Zion out of Zionism. The Jews would not accept it. This was true not only of religious Jews, but of radical Marxist atheist Jews.
It is a great plan, but nationalism is not logical. Aside from the Jews and almost everyone else, nobody would object. The Jews would not move to a new land, and defend their right to that land, were it not the ancient land of our forefathers. And were it not the ancient land of our forefathers, there would be no right for the Jews to defend -- no right that anyone would recognize. Alas for the Jews! We awakened too late from our national slumbers. Had we gone searching for a home a few hundred years earlier, we might have discovered America and claimed that. But by the end of the nineteenth century there were no more lands open to colonization. The Jewish people had no place on Earth to go but home, and would not move en masse to any other place. Just as they would not accept East Africa as their home, Jews will not accept Tel Aviv or Herzliya Pituach as their capital.
Yossi Melman is quite right that the earthly Jerusalem is a fairly miserable place. With its armies of black -coated and fur-hatted (they do not recognize the Zionist weather) anti-Zionist Haredi Jewish religious fanatics, and its growing armies of Arab Muslim religious fanatics, its lack of industry and poor infrastructure, it is redolent of the Jerusalem of my great grandparents, a place of the "old Yishuv" - the ultra-orthodox community of Jews that came to Jerusalem to die or to mourn the temple or to hasten the coming of the Messiah at the behest of their Hassidic rabbis and Kabbalist leaders. Over a century of Zionist development has failed to make much of Jerusalem into a part of the rebirth of the Jewish people.
However, for the rest of the world, including the Jews of the Diaspora, our non-Jewish friends, and our non-Jewish opponents, Jerusalem has a different significance. They do not think in terms of the earthly Jerusalem. They think in terms of a heavenly, theoretical Jerusalem, the idea of Jerusalem as a symbol of the eternal Jewish people. Rightly or wrongly, they see Jewish possession of Jerusalem as the goalpost by which to measure the reconstitution of the Jewish nation in its homeland. Not as a religious venue, but as the national polis or city-state of the Jewish people. That is why our friends want to see our capital in Jerusalem, and that is precisely why our enemies want to prevent Jerusalem from being our capital. And that is the compelling reason why the Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital - because it is the symbol of Jewish nationalism.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, ancient peoples reconstituted their polities and placed their capitals in the cities that symbolized their national aspirations. The Greeks no longer worship Zeus, and the Italians no longer give homage to Jupiter Stator. Their choices of capitals were not based on religious considerations. Can we imagine Greece with its capital in Piraeus instead of Athens, because the Turks claimed Athens or because Athens was backwards? Can we imagine Italy with its capital elsewhere than in Rome? Why not? Rome is full of religious people, it was claimed by the Popes in fact, and Italian industry is centered around the north of Italy and Milan. Yet the suggestion that Milan, rather than Rome, should be the Italian capital would be greeted with ridicule. Athens was never really the capital of a united Greece, and the later Roman emperors made their capitals in Mediolanum (Milan) and Ravena. The Italians are a gracious people and quick to admit the truth, even if it is not always flattering. Therefore they will forgive me for also mentioning that while Italians are not all descended from Khazars, as is falsely claimed of the modern Jews, modern Italians are in large part the descendants of Gothic and Visigothic invaders, and not the purebred descendants of the ancient and illustrious Roman and Italian peoples. But Rome and Athens symbolize the national aspirations of the Italian and Greek peoples, and the whole world accepts that it is natural that these cities are the capitals of those countries.
You do not have to be a learned expert to know that Jerusalem is to the Jewish people at least what Rome is to the Italians and what Athens is the Greeks. If earthly Jerusalem is a disgrace to Israel, we must ask why we have failed her, and we must repair our capital and make it worthy, rather than abandoning it. For without Zion there will not be Zionism for long, and without Zionism, there will not be a Jewish state of Israel.
Ami Isseroff
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
