A modern Orthodox rabbi from Los Angeles has published an essay in the Jewish Journal saying his reasons why Jerusalem should be negotiated. In order not to take any of his comments out of context I will print the entire article here:
The question of whether we could bear a redivision of Jerusalem is a searing and painful one. The Orthodox Union, National Council of Young Israel and a variety of other organizations, including Christian Evangelical ones, are calling upon their constituencies to join them in urging the Israeli government to refrain from any negotiation concerning the status of Jerusalem at all, when and if the Annapolis conference occurs. And last week, as I read one e-mail dispatch after another from these organizations, I became more and more convinced that I could not join their call.
It’s not that I would want to see Jerusalem divided. It’s rather that the time has come for honesty. Their call to handcuff the government of Israel in this way, their call to deprive it of this negotiating option, reveals that these organizations are not being honest about the situation that we are in, and how it came about. And I cannot support them in this.
These are extremely difficult thoughts for me to share, both because they concern an issue that is emotionally charged, and because people whose friendship I treasure will disagree strongly with me. And also because I am breaking a taboo within my community, the Orthodox Zionist community. “Jerusalem: Israel’s Eternally Undivided Capital” is a 40-year old slogan that my community treats with biblical reverence. It is an article of faith, a corollary of the belief in the coming of the Messiah. It is not questioned. But this final reason why it is difficult for me to share these thoughts is also the very reason that I have decided to do so. This is a conversation that desperately needs to begin.
No peace conference between Israel and the Palestinians will ever produce anything positive until both sides have decided to read the story of the last 40 years honestly. On our side, this means being honest about the story of how Israel came to settle civilians in the territories it conquered in 1967, and about the outcomes that this story has generated.
An honest reading of this story reveals that there were voices in the inner circle of the Israeli government in 1967-1968 who warned that settling civilians in conquered territories was probably illegal under international law. But for very understandable reasons — among them security needs, Zionist ideologies of both the both secular and religious varieties, memories that were 20 years old, and memories that were 3,000 years old — these voices were overruled. We can identify with many of the ideas that carried the settlement project forward. But the fact remains that it is simply not honest on our part to pretend that the government of Israel didn’t know that there was likely a legal problem, or that the government was confident that international conventions did not apply to this situation. That just wouldn’t be an honest telling.
An honest reading of the story reveals that the heroes of Israel’s wars who became the ministers in its government, who were most responsible for the initial decision to settle, were quite aware that by doing so they were risking conflict with the Arab population that was living there. They were aware that these Arabs would never be invited to become citizens of Israel, and would never have the rights of citizens. Nonetheless, they decided to go forward. Some believed that the economic benefit that would accrue to these Arabs as a result of their interactions with Israelis and Israel would be so great that they wouldn’t mind our military and civilian presence among them. Others projected that some sort of diplomatic arrangement would soon be reached with Jordan that would soften the face of what would otherwise be full-blown military occupation. These may have been reasonable projections at the time. But as it turned out, both of them were wrong. And it’s not honest to tell the story without acknowledging that we made these mistakes.
The Religious Zionist leadership (similar to today’s Evangelical supporters of Israel) made a different judgment, namely that settling the Biblical heartland would further hasten the unfolding of the messianic age. Thus, the Arab population already there was not our problem. God would deal with it. This belief too — reasonable though it may have seemed at the time — has also turned out to be wrong. To tell the story honestly, this mistake too must be acknowledged.
And the difference that honest storytelling makes is enormous. When we tell our story honestly, our position at the negotiating table is one that is informed not only by our own needs and desires, but also by our obligations and responsibilities. The latter include the responsibility to — in some way, in some measure — fix that which we have done. Also included is the need to recognize that we have some kind of obligation toward the people who have been harmed by our decisions. Honesty in our telling of the story reveals the stark and candid reality that we also need to speak the language of compromise and conciliation. Not only the language of entitlement and demands.
To be sure, I would be horrified and sick if the worst-case division-of-Jerusalem scenario were to materialize. The possibility that the Kotel, the Jewish Quarter or the Temple Mount would return to their former states of Arab sovereignty is unfathomable to me, and I suspect to nearly everyone inside the Israeli government. At the same time though, to insist that the government not talk about Jerusalem at all (including the possibility, for example, of Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods) is to insist that Israel come to the negotiating table telling a dishonest story — a story in which our side has made no mistakes and no miscalculations, a story in which there is no moral ambiguity in the way we have chosen to rule the people we conquered, a story in which we don’t owe anything to anyone. Cries of protest, in particular from organizations that oppose Israel’s relinquishing anything at all between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, and which have never offered any alternative solutions to the ones they are protesting against, are rooted in the refusal to read history honestly. And I — for one — cannot lend my support to that.
Without a doubt, the Palestinians aren’t telling an honest story either. They are not being honest about their record of violence against Jews in the pre-State era, or about the obscene immorality with which they attacked Israeli civilians during the second intifada. They are not being honest about the ways in which their fellow Arabs are responsible for so much of the misery that they — the Palestinians — have endured, and they certainly are not being honest about the deep and real historical connection that the Jewish people has to this land and to this holy city. And there will not be peace (and perhaps there should be no peace conference) until they tell an honest story as well. But for us to take the approach that in order to defend and protect ourselves from their dishonest story, we must continue telling our own dishonest story, is to travel a road of unending and unendable conflict. Peace will come only when and if everyone at the table has the courage, the strength, and enough fear of God to tell the story as it really is.
For many decades we have sighed and asked, “When will peace come?” The answer is starkly simple. There will be peace the day after there is truth.
Rabbi Kanefsky says many right things, and he makes a few mistakes, to reach a very wrong conclusion.
He is entirely correct that there cannot be peace until there is truth. Unfortunately, he is not being entirely honest himself as he conflates the history of Jerusalem after 1967 with that of Judea and Samaria – the Israeli government annexed Jerusalem and did offer citizenship to all its Arab residents, so his arguments would be more powerful if he would only be referring to the rest of the West Bank and not Jerusalem.
His major mistakes, though, are not historical but tactical. His yearning for truth in negotiations may be admirable, but when one is in a situation where only one side is willing to tell the truth, it puts that side at an enormous disadvantage in a neutral forum.
I touched upon this point recently when I discussed the British commission of inquiry after the 1929 riots, where they listened to the Arab claims of ownership of the Western Wall and the Jewish claims that only God owns the wall – and they sided with the Arabs. The Jews could have made a compelling legal case for historic ownership of the entire Temple Mount but instead they told the truth. And in that forum, they lost.
Whenever third parties look at competing claims, they make the assumption that both claimants are fundamentally honest and that the truth is somewhere in between. When one side has no compunctions about lying, that side has a tremendous advantage over the side that is willing to admit mistakes. Honesty will be used against the truth-tellers.
Simply put, the Arab/Israeli conflict is a land dispute. If one side claims all the land and the other side equivocates about that question, naturally the side that claims it all is in a position of power.
This is not to say that Israel should lie. Its true claims are powerful enough, if they are not often stated as well as they should be. But this means that Israel should not negotiate by showing its hand as to what it is willing to give up – because these are essentially one-way negotiations, the question is how much land Israel will end up losing, and not what she will get in return because that is intangible (and almost certainly fantasy.) An “honest” negotiator will always lose because you will never find both sides putting on the table their final position.
Israel’s legal, moral and historic claims to Jerusalem – and the entire West Bank as well – are very strong, but they have been given up by successive Israeli governments, in some part because of this desire for “honesty.” Is Israel in better shape now than before Oslo? Is real peace any closer? Has Israel reaped rewards for its honest negotiations, which translates directly into capitulations?
It is unfortunate but becoming increasingly clear that “peace” is literally impossible with the current generation of Arabs. “Honesty,” goodwill gestures, pleading, and the intense interest of most of the world has led to nothing. Israel’s relative safety vis a vis its neighbors (as opposed to terror groups) is a result not of peaceful negotiations but because of Israel’s success at war.
Sure Israel has made mistakes. No one should cover up errors or change history. But honesty has little to do with negotiations.
Kanefsky’s major error is the assumption that both sides want peace and have the capability to deliver, and his advice (glowingly quoted in The Forward) is very, very wrong.
See also “The Case for a Larger Israel” for a completely different way of looking at things.
Each to his own. I think the case for a larger Israel rests best on, of all things, UN Resolution 242, which establishes the right of Israel, among other states to live “within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force”.
To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, “I don’ theenk these wor’, ‘secure’ meen wha’ some say eet mean.” The Green Line — the effective border pre-1967 is a fractal, with more twists and turns than a Ludlum novel; obviously not secure. The Fence is an attempt to turn a less twisty line into something less insecure.
The Jordan River, though — like the Golan, and the Suez Canal . . . well, that’s a different story.
Everybody pushing negotiation seems to believe, in the face of decades of experience and all the evidence, that the Palestinian Arabs want peace and are willing to compormise to get a state. This is not true. What they want is to kill Jews and destroy Israel. Syria, Egypt and the other Arab states want the same thing, restrained, as Elder says, only because of Israel’s might in arms. The Arabs rely on terrorism because it is the characteristic Arab and Muslim way of war in the last century and because they regard Israel as civilized enough not to retaliate the way an Arab country would, with mass slaughter.
If anything comes of the current futile round it will be nothing more than what the Oslo Treaty was, a Treaty of Hudabiyah. Such will allow the Arabs a few years to grow steronger and Israel relatively weaker. It will not even stop terrorism, as the Oslo Treaty did not. Any Pali government will just claim that private groups are doing the terrorism and they have no control over them, and if Israel retaliates outsiders will scream bloody murder as usual, with no thought for the Israeli victims.
There is something about armed Jews defending themselves against genocide that makes a lot of people nervous, even hysterical. I can only wonder why.
The whole negotiation is a futile farce at this time. Let the Palis stew in their own juice and strike them hard when they attack. Kill the Hamas scum and the other terrorists and let the Palis reap the just rewards for their evil ways. Cut all money transfers off, cut off the gas and electricity, leaving only water going to them, making them pay reasonable amounts for it. After a few years maybe they will be ready to negotiate honestly, but I doubt it.
You wrote: “Israel’s legal, moral and historic claims to Jerusalem – and the entire West Bank as well – are very strong, but they have been given up by successive Israeli governments”
True, but what about the spiritual claim? No, I’m not referring to ancient texts with no modern application. I’m referring to the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy that has taken place in recent decades in Israel.
The Tanach clearly foretold the restoration of Jerusalem to Israel in 1967, in the eighth chapter of the Book of Daniel, verses 13 and 14 (see http://www.sixdaywar.co.uk/Daniel8.pdf for the full explanation).
Yet, Jewish people in Israel and worldwide refuse to acknowledge that G-d did it, and did it exactly as prophesied by giving courage to the IDF and by confounding the minds of Israel’s enemies so as to bring about the miraculous result. It’s almost as if the Jewish people are ashamed of their heritage and the relationship that defines Jews as a people.
Israel is in a spiritual battle for Jerusalem and Eretz Yisrael, yet it refuses to use the most powerful weapon at its disposal. That weapon is belief in the G-d of Israel, and in the promises made to Israel in the Tanach, and, in the case of 1967, the miracle performed literally before the eyes of the people of Israel so that they can believe.
If Jewish people do not believe in their Divine right to the Land of Israel, and say so out loud, why should anyone else believe? My question is not an accusation, but a plea. So much is at stake, my friends.