Israel just inaugurated a new president. He is largely a ceremonial figure as the official “head of state.” He has a limited but very structured constitutional role. Nonetheless, amazingly, he is a Palestinian.
Isaac “Bougie” Herzog is Israel’s 11th president. His father was also (Israel’s sixth) president, Chaim Herzog. He was also a Palestinian.
How do I know this? Because I am a Palestinian too. “What?” you ask. “But Jonathan, you’re Jewish. How....”
Yes. Stick with me.
The new President Herzog’s grandfather was Israel’s renowned first Chief Rabbi. He was a Palestinian. Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog became Chief Rabbi of Palestine in 1936.
“But wait Jonathan, this doesn’t make sense.”
Rabbi Herzog was appointed as Chief Rabbi when Britain occupied “Palestine.” He immigrated from Ireland where he had been Chief Rabbi since 1921.
“Palestine” was an administrative territory of Britain following World War I, succeeding the Ottoman control of the same territory (from 1516 until 1917), also occupied by many others including the Crusaders, Moslems, going back to Rome in the first century. Rome renamed it “Palestine” as a slap in the face of the indigenous, and then captive, Jewish community, and as an attempt to erase Jewish history.
But “Palestine” never existed as an independent entity much less a state. It never had a capital, a currency, a king or sultan. It simply existed as an administrative territory fought over and conquered by successive empires. The list of occupiers is long. But it was always the Land of Israel.
“Jonathan, I still don’t get it. How are you and President Herzog Palestinians?”
When the British occupied “Palestine” following the 1917 League of Nations Mandate, it was populated by Arabs and Jews. The population grew as Jews started returning to the Land during the previous century, and as Arabs from nearby lands began migrating to benefit from the opportunities and prosperity that increased with the Jews’ return.
When people today speak of the “indigenous Arabs,” or suggest that the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty is in any way foreign, while it’s of course indisputable that there were indigenous Arabs, many of todays Arab clans are known to be relative modern transplants. Their names, Masri, Hejazi, Halabi and others give away the fact that their relatives came from Egypt, Arabia, and Syria, as recent as a century ago.
Underscoring that “Palestine” was desolate and largely uninhabited, in 1867 Mark Twain visited and exposed the Land’s nakedness in his book, “The Innocents Abroad.” This was a decade and a half before the Jewish people started returning en masse, making the Land flourish as prophesied. (Ezekiel 36:8 says “But you, mountains of Israel, will produce branches and fruit for my people Israel, for they will soon come home.”)
When Twain visited, “Palestine” had a population of about 300,000-350,000. Had he come back 20-30 years later, he’d have seen something very different. The Land did begin to produce fruit. The population exploded. By the time the British arrived, the population had doubled. While Jewish immigration accounted for some of this, it’s impossible to explain the Arab growth as anything but the migration of Arabs from throughout the Middle East. Natural growth of the Arab population from fewer than 300,000 to nearly 600,000 is implausible.
At the time, Twain called it like he saw it. Arriving via Europe, Twain got to see the length and breadth of “Palestine” intimately. “There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not for 30 miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.” In case he was to be confused as being rhetorical, Twain underscored, “Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince... Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.”
When the British took control, “Palestine” had already benefitted from decades of Jewish prosperity. Historically, when the British referred to “Palestinians” they only referred to the Jews.
When Rabbi Herzog arrived in 1936, some years after my grandparents did, they were the Palestinians.
Documents registering my father’s birth (and that of the first President Herzog) were part of the British administration of Palestine. They controlled the territory with a hard hand. After dividing the territory of Mandatory Palestine they inherited, with the actual mandate to establish a Jewish homeland, they carved off 80 percent to create a new Arab state (today’s Jordan), worked against Jewish sovereignty, armed and emboldened the Arabs, and actively prevented Jews from immigrating, even after the Nazis’ rise to power and the beginning of the slaughter of the Jews of Europe.
While my father grew up with Rabbi Herzog as Chief Rabbi in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the Holocaust raged, and my father’s family was slaughtered, he and my grandparents were called Palestinians. So was Rabbi Herzog, and so was his son who would become Israel’s sixth president. Not only is the current President Herzog a Palestinian, all but one of Israel’s previous presidents were as well.
While Israeli Jews ceased to be called “Palestinians” upon declaring independence, the fact is that not until almost two decades later did the Arabs adopt this term and identity. When they did so, Jordan controlled what’s today known as the “West Bank,” and Egypt controlled Gaza. The new “Palestinians” were controlled by two different Arab regimes who not only did not give them citizenship, but let the refugee status fester of those who fled the 1947-49 war.
Israel gave full citizenship and equal rights to the Arabs who remained. Today, they make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, and are integrated throughout society. The “Palestinians,” however, have done nothing to build a state, or the infrastructure needed for that, continue to deny Israel’s right to exist, and actively incite, promote, and engage in terror against Israel’s population. Conversely, today’s “Palestinians” have created a system that’s unique in the history of the world: bestowing refugee status on, now, five generations of Arabs displaced from 1947-49, and not allowing them to settle as citizens of anywhere, especially since the State of Palestine that some recognize is a historical mirage.
I was in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market a few years ago and found a “Palestinian” coin from 1937; the year in which my father was born. I tried to hide my elation so as not to have the price marked up. Albeit with writing in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, the Hebrew whispers a secret that must be shared. First, that of course Jews belonged there. One does not merely add an ancient language of a people to the currency of a place in which they have no roots. Today, when people challenge that, try to deny and erase our history, and bemoan what they call efforts to “Judaize” Jerusalem, this underscores our historical presence.
However, only in the Hebrew does one see the real secret revealed. Following the name “Palestine,” (???????) there are two Hebrew letters, aleph and yud, (???). This is an abbreviation for the Hebrew “Eretz Yisrael,” or Land of Israel. Those two letters underscore the entire Biblical history of the Land, not a place to which Jews have come as foreign occupiers, but to which we have returned home. In fact, had the Land of Israel not been synonymous with the Jews, and therefore the Bible, Twain and his church group would have had no particular reason to visit.
Three decades ago, I had the honor to deliver a speech at the president’s residence before President Chaim Herzog. I spoke about Zionism, as a fulfillment of a centuries-old dream of our return. Anyone who suggests that it is anything otherwise is, generously, at best confusing their facts.
Forget that the Palestine Liberation Organization was not born until the year I was born, and that until then, there was no consistent hijacking of the term “Palestinian” as there has been in reference to the Arabs of the Land of Israel. Again, a historical fact. I ask people who doubt this one simple question: ‘What if, in 1948, upon declaring independence, the founders of Israel decided to call it Palestine?’
What would the PLO terrorist group established in 1964 (before the so called “occupation” of the Six Day War) have called itself? The Canaanite Liberation Organization? The Popular Front for the Liberation of the Sanjak of Jerusalem? Galilean Jihad?
Congratulations to President Herzog. Bringing in his family history, and diplomatic and political expertise, I pray that he will succeed in being the leader that his father and grandfather were before him. May he use a foundation of facts and actual history to be a unifying source of healing in the Land that is thriving but still not yet blessed by peace.