In today’s HaAretz, an Israeli newspaper I read daily, I was informed that “The United States views East Jerusalem as no different than an illegal West Bank outpost with regard to its demand for a freeze on settlement construction.”
In response to the American policy, HaAretz reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that, "United Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people in the State of Israel, and our sovereignty over the city is not subject to appeal,… Our policy is that Jerusalem residents can purchase apartments anywhere in the city. This has been the policy of all Israeli governments. There is no ban on Arabs buying apartments in the west of the city, and there is no ban on Jews building or buying in the city's east. This is the policy of an open city."
I feel obligated to parse apart and unpack whatever I read in the news in order to come to a clear understanding of what messages I am receiving and what meaning I make from them. This is what I do before acting in the world.
Some would say that meaning is not made, rather facts are delivered. Often people use the word facts and truths interchangeably. I am of the opinion that facts are perspectives on things that happen; truths are the subjects of our meaning making.
As a Jew and scholar, I use a form of Jewish critical literacy to unpack the meaning of messages I read. It is called Pardes, the Hebrew word for a grove and the acronym that prescribes that we read the literal meaning of text first (pshat), followed by an inquiry into the hinted meaning which is clearly the product of an author with motivations (remez). The next letter, dalet, represents the interpretive meaning (drash) which is the domain of the interpreter with all the personal baggage brought to interpretation. And last in the very linear progression is samach, representing the word sod, which translates in modern Hebrew as secret, but I have learned that the sages who developed this system of inquiry understood sod to mean kehillah, community, thus I understand the sod to be the conjoint meaning the community creates for the message. In my application of Pardes, as I understand the rabbis intention, we are obligated to go through this serious regimen in order to create meaning and act in the world. Reading the news is our job, and there are specific guidelines to doing it properly.
In the article I am trying to make meaning of, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that "Israel will not agree to edicts of this kind in East Jerusalem." An edict, according to the Merriam – Webster on-line dictionary is “a proclamation having the force of law.” The choice of these words sets the stage for a relationship between the presumed edict maker and the subjects of the edict – America is laying down the law and Israel will not agree. The audience of this message is the Jewish people, at large, and the Jewish Israelis in particular, with some room for ancillary recipients and less engaged media consumers. As a Jew, edicts remind me of the period of Seleucid rule in the biblical Land of Israel described in the books of the Maccabees. These edicts were created to end Jewish practice and were vigorously opposed by some members of the Jewish community living in the land at the time. To really understand the use of the word edict to a Jewish – Israeli audience, which itself is diverse, one must study how the Maccabees are represented in the Books of Maccabees and how the sages later recall and canonize the celebration of Hanukah. Without digging to deep, Mr. Netanyahu is trying to evoke parallels between the hated Seleucid monarch, Antiochus, and the US president.
All of this is just an example of what I mean by a critically literate, Jewish reading of any text. To this goal, Jews study in groups called chevruta. The root of this word, chet, bet, reish, is reminiscent of the modern Hebrew word with the same letter combination, chaver, meaning friend, but I see a much greater correlation to the primary meaning of these three letters combined in this order – chibor, which means joint or seam. In a healthy study partnership, respect for the seam that creates the relationship is essential. In other words, we cannot have the relationship without the seam, so we must find a way to make meaning together. What Prime Minister Netanyahu does very well is present complicated ideas in simple terms that pull our seam to his understanding and will for the chevruta. As a member of the large Jewish chevruta, woven together by a rich and binding seam, our internal dialog which vies for dominating the making of meaning for the nation, I would like to present an alternative understanding of the Prime Minister’s other comments about Jerusalem. To do this, I will start with a joke.
At the time of the creation of the United States - Canadian border, the people laying out the border found a home in the middle of their path. They asked the family living in the home whether they want the border to be laid around their home to the north or south, which would determine the family’s national identity. The family asked to think it over for a week during which they received bribes from both sides. The Americans sent baseball tickets, an apple pie, and a Chevy. The Canadians sent maple syrup, Canadian bacon and a mounty on a horse. At the end of the week they returned and asked for a decision. The family decided to become Americans, which upset the Canadians and elated the Americans. The Canadians, wanting to learn from their mistakes, asked for an explanation and the family responded with a simple sentence. “We hate those Canadian winters.”
Okay, it may not be funny, but it does illustrate the human hand in many things that we accept as inevitable. For instance, “Undivided Jerusalem.” What does this term mean? As far as I understand, King David and his son Solomon did not rule over West Jerusalem, let alone most of East Jerusalem. The Jerusalem that resonates in our hearts is a mere 2 square kilometers and is located along the armistice line of 1949. It is a fraction of the modern Jerusalem that Mr. Netanyahu can’t fathom dividing. But why has this modern, human designation of land become so sacrosanct? Why is Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem “not subject to appeal?” Who can appeal it anyway? And who determines the rights of any people to live anywhere, let alone a territory that was conquered in a war?
For millennia, Jerusalem has been changing hands through military conquest. Nebuchadnezzar conquered it from the Ancient Israelites centuries before the Seleucids and Romans did. Crusaders and Muslims, the Ottomans and the British, all took control by military might. But when Israel became a state, it was vested with its rights through the United Nations, the body that is supposed to represent the will of nations. And at the same time, some would like to suggest that the reclamation of the Land of Israel is the will of God, something that is neither provable nor universally accepted.
As I see it, the bottom line is that this boils down to a matter of authority. Once authority came at the price of military conquest, and today if comes via international consensus. “But,” many would argue, “the Jewish people can’t wait for a consensus. Look what happened in the Holocaust.” And I would not disagree. Still, what is so sacrosanct about an undivided Jerusalem?
Is it in our best interest to rule over 200,000 Palestinians with metropolitan but not national identity and rights? East Jerusalem Palestinians are Jerusalem citizens but not afforded Israeli passports. Is it better for the Jewish people and their state to have a security wall run through the borders of its undivided capital? Currently, the wall that was erected to secure Israelis and “make good neighbors,” runs through the “indivisible capitol. What would be so wrong about gerrymandering the human drawn borders and “dividing” the capitol into two cities, one for Jewish Israelis and the other for our Palestinian neighbors who want to rule themselves in a majority status in their own sovereign state, just as we want for ourselves?
The bottom line is that those who make claims about an undivided Jerusalem are really just leaning on rhetoric that connotes the ancient past but does not reflect it. Jerusalem was never as big as the Israeli government has drawn it on its maps. It has no necessary need for including our Palestinian neighbors at the exclusion of their civil rights as Israeli citizens, and there is no need to make us become a nation that denies basic rights to its residents. In essence, when you peel away all the false illusions to the ancient metropolis, what you are left with is a big fat emperor without any clothes. The arguments don’t hold their own, and what they do support is the behaviors of a state of Jews guided by ideals that are hardly Jewish. As far as I’m concerned, that’s hardly worth the efforts of my brand of Zionism.
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