By Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel
CHULA VISTA, California —One of my favorite lines from Simon and Garfunkel’s greatest hits reads:
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you (Woo, woo, woo)
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson
Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away
(Hey, hey, hey…hey, hey, hey)
I mention this song for a reason. This past week President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday. “Jerusalem’s identity is Arab, and the city’s and Christian holy sites must be protected from Israeli threats.” He added that Israeli excavation work in Jerusalem and in the Western Wall tunnels beneath the mosque “will not undermine the fact that the city will forever be Arabic, Islamic and Christian.” Abbas concluded, “there will be no peace or stability before our beloved city and eternal capital is liberated from occupation and settlement.”
For all the talk about Israeli and Palestinian peace, there can be no peace without the recognition of each people’s symbolic attachments. By “symbolic attachments,” I am referring to the ancestral religious and cultural history and religious connectedness that Jews, Christians and Muslims have with the ancient city of Jerusalem.
I had hoped that President Obama or Hillary Clinton would have condemned the outrageous remark of Abbas.
Let us turn the clock back to March 10, 2010. CBS News reports:
- Barack Obama and Joe Biden condemned an Israeli plan to build hundreds of homes in disputed east Jerusalem today, casting a cloud over a high-profile visit that had been aimed at repairing ties with the Jewish state and kick starting Mideast peace talks. His remarks came after Israel’s Interior Ministry said it had approved construction of 1,600 new apartments, an embarrassing setback for Biden after a day of warm meetings with top Israeli officials.
In characterizing East Jerusalem—or any part of Jerusalem, for that matter—as territory that Israel “occupies” but over which it enjoys no sovereignty, the Obama administration has broken with a long tradition of American presidents who regard East Jerusalem as a non-negotiable item—Jerusalem shall forever be Israel’s.
The drafters of Resolution 242 were very precise in creating the statute’s language, and never considered Jerusalem to have been “occupied” by Israel after the Six Day War. Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg, one of the resolution’s original authors, made this very clear when he wrote some years later “Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate . . . At no time in [my] many speeches before the UN did I ever refer to East Jerusalem as occupied territory.”
If President Obama wins a second term, I suspect the President will use his power and influence to force Israel to accept his notion that East Jerusalem is an “occupied Arab territory.” Such an attitude will never serve the cause of peace; if anything, it will eventually unleash the dogs of war. If peace is to have any real chance in the Middle East, it must be tempered with respect and most importantly—a respect for history itself. If we suppose that East Jerusalem “is not Jewish,” then neither is the rest of Israel; we cannot allow politically expedient individuals remove the heart of Jerusalem from our people.
Like Simon and Garfunkel said:
Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away
(Hey, hey, hey…hey, hey, hey)
Gone are the genuine leaders who governed with common sense and ethics.
On a positive note, let us take the words of Hillel who wisely suggests, “In the place where there are no decent leaders (literally, “worthy men”) strive to be one” (Avoth 2:6).
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Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista. He may be contacted at michael.samuel@sdjewishworld.com