The 90`s

What about our inherent and inalienable rights

Note:Written by Howard Barbanel, Published Week of January 26th - February 1st, 1994

Samuel Bronston died on January 12th.  He was not exactly a household name. Bronston was a big-time Hollywood movie producer.  Some of his epics include Jack London, Fall of the Roman Empire and El Cid.

You may remember El Cid, it was one of those grandiose Hollywood blockbusters, set in the past and featuring both a cast of thousands and Charlton Heston in the title role.  Sophia Loren was in the movie, too.

Heston, as always, played a giant larger-than-life hero who leads his people from bondage to freedom and whose fame is so widespread, he becomes legendary even among his enemies.

El Cid takes place in the Middle Ages during the Spanish Reconquista (or, reconquest) of the Iberian Peninsula from the marauding Moors.  You may recall your European history - the Moors, Arabs, really, invaded Spain around the same time they were plundering, or trying to plunder to rest of the known world in the seventh and eighth centuries.  The Moors did a pretty good job of pushing the Romanized Spaniards back practically into France. In what a became a Catholic Holy War, the Spanish undertook the Reconquista to drive-out the Moors and reclaim Iberia for the Spanish and the Catholic Church.  This effort took over 600 years, culminating in the fall of Grenada and the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella.

The Spanish Reconquista is depicted in nearly every history book as having a high patina of piety  - being enshrined as one of Western Europe's most noble achievements - an accomplishment whose legitimacy it would be heresay to question.

Last month, The New York Times Magazine, that bastion of pro-Palestinian sensibilities ran an essay by a Professor Anton Shammas where the history of the land of Israel was allowed to be perverted to afford the Palestinian Arabs an opportunity to bolster their case for their national rights.  Shammas invoked an example from the Reconquista, quoting the tale of a Palestinian Arab woman who still held the keys to their home, vacated some 500 years ago in Grenada along with current stories of people holding the keys to houses in Jaffa. He bemoans the plight of his people while never accepting an iota of responsibility for the naked aggression and Jew-hatred that caused their woes.

It is time to cast the re-establishment of the State of Israel in terms of a Reconquista.  Our modern history basically tells a tale of return and the purchase of land with the kopeks dropped into JNF puskkas - but let's be frank about some hard truths:

It must be recognized, and we must educate everyone far and wide that there was never a time during the past 3,400 years when Jews have not lived in the Land of Israel.  There has never been any time in Jewish history when the Jewish people ever ceded or disavowed its claim to sovereignty to the Land of Israel. 

The Jewish People have been engaged in nothing less than a reconquest.  We've had to reconquer the land inch-by-inch from desert and swamp, from ruin to ruin.  We've had to reconquer the Jewish spirit from despair, weakness and hopelessness to pride, bravery and a future.  We've also had to fight against terrorism and war.

If you were to ask many of the so-called refugees from 1948 they will be hard-pressed to document residence in the land beyond a hundred years.  This is also why Palestinians come in many different shades of skin complexion.

Recognizing autonomy for the Palestinian Arabs is akin to the U.S. declaring amnesty for illegal aliens as it did a few years ago - it merely recognizes realities on-the-ground, but it doesn't make it legitimate or sovereign.  Visigoths sacking Rome didn't make Rome Visigoths.

The key difference between the Likud and Labor view toward autonomy for the Arabs is this: Likud at no time was or is willing to cede basic sovereignty over the land and its resources, while labor is busy serving as the midwife for a Palestinian State.  Likud would allow the Arabs to run their local community affairs, not a nation.

Yasser Arafat writes to Rabin on a letterhead printed "President of Palestine" on top.  The autonomy will be called the "Palestine National Authority." Their police force, 30,000-man-strong will be the "National Guard."  They will patrol borders, have an FBI and CIA, issue currency (whether Israel likes it or not) and stamps, they'll fly their flags everywhere and preach Israel's ultimate destruction nightly on their own TV news.

Labor's intense secularism negates the inherent holiness of the Jewish Reconquista of the Land of Israel and we have been remiss in imparting the sacred nature of the re-establishment of our independence.  Ours is no less sacred than the Spanish Reconquista - it just took us a longer time to accomplish than it did for the Spanish. And our current government is ceding Grenada to the Moors. Even the way Israel presents itself in the negotiations paints the Jews as a quasi-colonizing power.

Unless we start talking about our inherent and inalienable rights in Israel - and start believing it - we will be setting the stage for the next round when the PLO State will demand the repatriation of Jaffa, Ramle, Haifa and Nazareth.