Nowhere Else To Go

There’s a story that Joe Biden has referenced many times over the years about his first trip to Israel 50 years ago about the time of the Yom Kippur War.

In fact, Biden repeated the story a month ago when he visited Israel to express United States support for Israel in its war with Hamas to avenge the attacks of October 7.

The following passage about that Biden story is taken from a Jerusalem Post article in 2021 that was written just after Hamas had fired 4,000 rockets at Israel in 11 days. Ironically, its was that Hamas attack and the Israeli response that led to a ceasefire agreement that Hamas violated when it attacked Israel this year with many more rockets and much more killing and kidnappings.

As a freshman senator in 1973, Biden was granted a meeting with prime minister Golda Meir, who together with Yitzhak Rabin briefed Biden on the many threats Israel faced, showing him a series of maps.

“I guess she could see the sense of apprehension on my face,” Biden said in a 2010 retelling of the story. “She said, ‘Senator, don’t look so worried… We Israelis have a secret weapon.’ And I thought she only had said this to me, no one else in the whole world… And I thought she was going to tell me about a new secret weapon.”

So what is Israel’s secret weapon, Biden asked eagerly.

“We have nowhere else to go,” replied Golda.

"We have nowhere else to go."

I pointed out in a previous blog post that that the majority of the early settlers to Israel in the period 1948-1952 were from other Middle Eastern countries where they were seeking freedom from Muslim persecution and violence or were explicitly expelled from Middle Eastern Muslim countries.

The rest were Holocaust survivors from Europe.

When Palestinians and their ignorant acolytes in the West are asked where the Jews are supposed to go if "from the river to the sea" becomes a reality and Palestine expels the Jews, they typically state Eastern Europe or Russia. However, that is not where most of the people in Israel came from.

They came from the Middle East.

Of course, outside of Israel, there are almost no Jews living in the Middle East today as they have all been driven out.

The creation of the Israel state provided a convenient path by which the Jewish population could be removed from most other Middle Eastern countries.

They now want to also remove the Jews from Israel?

"We have nowhere else to go."

Credit: https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1727381751029530765

Just as interesting as the decline of the Jewish populations in Middle Eastern countries since 1948 is the growth in the Arab population in Israel and Gaza shown in the graphic above.

The Palestinians like to use a narrative that the state of Israel is occupying what was always an Arab land.

However, the historical record does not support the narrative.

For example, a census from the British in 1864 found that there were twice as many Jews as Arabs in Jerusalem in that period.

Source: https://twitter.com/truth_seeker_vp/status/1726980051940639129

There was also almost no one living in the area around Jerusalem (Jew, Arab or Christian) according to this account by Mark Twain written in "The Innocents Abroad"in 1867. 

It was a veritable wasteland that no one wanted to live in.

 "Stirring senses... occur in this valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not for thirty miles in either direction." He goes on to describe Galilee, Judea, and around Jerusalem as deserts devoid of population. And for the country as a whole: "Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies... Palestine is desolate and unlovely... It is hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land."

A series of letters written by some travelers from Utah to the area around Jerusalem in 1873 confirms again that the majority of the population was Jewish. 

In fact, Jews and Christians combined, outnumbered Arabs by almost three to one.

 

Why do these historical records refer to Palestine if the Palestinians do not have the claim on the land they say they do?

First of all, it needs to be understood that Palestine has never been a country or nation state at any time.

Jewish people populated what is now Israel dating back to when the area was referred to as Judea.

Judeans or Jews were indigenous to Judea and Arabs were indigenous to Arabia.

Kings of Israel such as Saul, David and Solomon ruled over the land at least a thousand years before Christ was born.

The Romans started using the name "Palestine" (more accurately Syria Palestine) in the second century A.D. after an insurrection in the Judea territory as punishment to remove the link between the Jews and the province of Judea.

The British began referring to the area around Jerusalem as "Palestine" in the 1800's. The term "Palestine" had been used by the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the area for the 400 years before World War I,  to vaguely refer to area that spanned both sides of the Jordan River.

However, Palestine was never recognized as an administrative unit.

You can see that in these maps of the Ottoman Empire from both the 1860's and in 1915 right before the Ottoman Empire fell.

There is no reference to Palestine at all in these maps.

Source: https://zionism-israel.com/maps/Ottoman_Palestine_1860.htm?__cf_chl_tk=75.ucNuPlaWS3XfMTMHwpRJimOFJzDLfnmxyqP6PC7s-1701018287-0-gaNycGzNCfs

Map of Ottoman Administrative Districts-1915
Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-ottoman-administrative-districts-1915

Further, the Jewish faith dates back to 640 B.C. while Islam did not appear on the scene until some 1,200 years later in the area around Jerusalem.

You can see how inconvenient these facts are by looking at the following  video clips where some anti-Israel Jewish rabbis held a Torah reading in Washington, D.C. before a rally with Representative Rashid Talib in calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

A Daily Wire article provides some context on the event.

A planned Torah reading got awkward in a hurry when a group of leftist Jews gathered to publicly call for a ceasefire in the ongoing war between Israel and the terror group Hamas.

The group, who refer to themselves as “Rabbis for Ceasefire,” joined with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) — who has often faced criticism and was even recently censured for repeated anti-Semitic statements. Their plan was to bring “the Synagogue into the public with Shacharit [morning prayer] in front of Congress.”

But some who listened to the Torah reading – which was supposed to be done in Hebrew and then in English — quickly realized that something was a little bit off.

During the Hebrew portion, several pointed out that the woman doing the reading — among truly religious Jews, men typically do the Torah reading — dropped her voice to nearly a whisper when she got to the part that talked about God giving the land to his chosen people — the Jews — and their descendants.

Of course, that land is Israel.

You can view the original videos here on X. 

 

Talk about those quiet words speaking volumes!

It is clearly not a coincidence either that these rabbis feel comfortable in speaking the way they do under the umbrella of security and freedom provided by living in the United States.

The completed Torah is dated to around 600 B.C. This is 1,200 years before anything to do with the Muslim faith was ever considered by anyone on earth.

For those who want to see the actual reading of the Torah in Hebrew and English.

I have said it before in these pages.

There are over 1.8 billion Muslims on the planet.

There are only 15 million Jews.

How is it that those 1.8 billion Muslims (and it appears millions of other young, college-educated, so-called progressive Americans and European) cannot see to it that a small number of Jews are allowed to live on and enjoy a small strip of land on this earth in peace that they have inhabited for thousands and thousands of years?

If not in Israel, where?

Golda Meir understood everything too well 50 years ago.

There is nowhere else for them to go.