Sheikh Jarrah because we can

It’s 2021. The swamps have been drained, roads and airports secured. Strategically – imperatively – Israel controls the territory between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan (excluding the Gaza Strip held by Hamas).

The conflict that began over 100 years ago between the Zionist movement and the Palestinian Arabs remains a zero-sum game. This is something outside observers and global media do not fathom. No Arab leader – including the octogenarian denizen of Ramallah’s Mukataa – accepts the legitimacy of a Jewish state anywhere in the Land of Israel.

The root cause of the conflict is unresolvable. Two camps have a claim to the same Land. I believe that the Zionist claim is the stronger one. No one has to convince me that we are right and they are wrong. No one will convince me that we are all right and they are all wrong.

I do not discount persistent Arab claims. They have engaged in bloodlust and innumerable self-defeating maneuvers blinded by their misplaced righteousness and sense of victimization.

So, we need to operate on that basis.

Faced with a comparable dangerous conflict between Taiwan and China over the future of the island, Beijing’s late leader Deng Xiaoping decreed that all-out war was ill-advised and that it should be left to a future wiser generation to resolve the struggle somehow.

This is also good advice in the case of the Land of Israel/Palestine.

The Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the Green Line have their accommodationists prepared for practical reasons to make a truce with us and honor it. Some of these leaders are nationalists, and others are Islamists.

A truce is clearly in everyone’s interest and could be within reach. There would be violations because when an extremist cuts a deal, some uber-extremists will see an opportunity to fill the vacuum. There is always someone more dedicated to the will of Allah and, let’s face, on our side, someone more unaffectedly devoted to Eretz Israel.

But most of us on both sides do not want to be mobilized 24/7 in violent ideological skirmishing. There are groceries to buy, mortgages to pay, a kitchen floor to wash down, and laundry to fold. Children need to be taken to the dentist and elderly parents to medical appointments.

My Trump-supporting non-religious cousin in Brooklyn thinks “Israel should have thrown out the Arabs like Rabbi Kahane said years ago. It is simple. It’s not complicated!” His is an anger-fueled judgment that makes sense from 6,000 miles away because at that distance, humanity, ethics, and Jewish values are blurred. Commonsense vaporizes. Of course, if you are an Israeli religiopolitical fanatic, proximity to the Arabs is no less morally blinding, and the cognitive dissonance between what your clerics are teaching you and what you see out the window must be disorientating.

This brings me to Sheikh Jarrah a neighborhood located not far from the Mandelbaum Gate, the pre-1967 checkpoint between the Israeli and Jordanian sectors of Jerusalem. These days motorists headed to the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus use the district to circumvent traffic congestion on the main thoroughfare where the light rail also runs.

After Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Arabs fled west Jerusalem capital of the reborn Jewish state, and Jews were forced out of the Old City and the eastern sectors of the city as Jordanian occupation forces moved in. On the west side of Jerusalem, Jewish people moved into former Arab houses. On the east side of Jerusalem, Arabs moved into houses that formerly belonged to Jews.

Not just private homes. Several stately office buildings in central Jerusalem had been Arab-owned.

After Israel liberated eastern Jerusalem (including Sheikh Jarrah) in 1967, some former Jewish homeowners began litigation to reclaim their properties. Arabs abroad who owned property in west Jerusalem had no parallel legal recourse.

Israeli courts have upheld the claims made by the estates of several original Jewish owners. Arabs living for decades in these Sheikh Jarrah properties are to be evicted.

Let’s be frank. The Jewish claims are inspired by Hardel alt-right extremists funded by gormless middle-class American and British Orthodox Jews. The dogmatists dream of a country cleansed of Arabs, Jewish leftists (and who is not a leftist in their eyes?), homosexuals, and cosmopolitans. The zealots scan the hills of Jerusalem and envision erecting a Third Temple that would kickstart the messianic era.

Any day now the Israeli Supreme Court will decide the fate of the contested homes in Sheikh Jarrah. I hope the justices rule against the Jewish claims whatever their technical legal merit. For it is unfair to allow Jews to reclaim homes and Land while forbidding Arabs to make similar claims on the Israeli side of the Green Line.

But mainly because displacing the Arabs in Sheikh Jarrah (where there is already a longstanding barbed wire Jewish encampment) does not enhance Israeli security or sovereignty. Forcing more Jews into Sheikh Jarrah is unwise. It exacerbates tensions. It pushes away the possibility of a lasting truce. It tarnishes what is left of our brand overseas.

I think the rule of thumb should be that just because we Zionists can do something – legally or because we have the power – doesn’t mean we necessarily should. Not dancing around the Old City during Ramadan. Not forcing Muslims from hanging out on the steps outside the Damascus Gate. Just because we can rub the enemy’s nose in the ground doesn’t mean we should.

With sovereignty comes heavy ethical and moral responsibilities and a need for political self-abnegation.

The Palestinian Arab enemy is implacable. And more and more, some of us are taking on the trappings and mindset of their religiopolitical fanaticism.

The Zionist enterprise remains brittle notwithstanding our strategic control over the Land. If our Third Commonwealth were to fall, it will not be because we did not build enough settlements in the Land of Israel but because any semblance of internal consensus crumbled. Over the long haul, the tribes of Israel divided against each other cannot stand. Sheikh Jarrah further divides us.

I do not intuit a Jewish consensus to incite a religious war against the Sunni Palestinian Arabs as Ramadan comes to a close (May 12), as we mark the reunification of Jerusalem (May 9-10), as they register our very existence as their nakba catastrophe (on May 15) and as we head into Shavuot on May 16.

Relatively small but vocal fanatical Jewish forces are propelling us toward a pointless cataclysm. Their Arab enablers — with Mohammad Deif in the vanguard — are only too happy to oblige.