The Birthright Was Sold for a Pot of BeansPalestinians Launch a “Birthright Palestine” Project

I recently met a Jordanian named Esau in Petra. Interesting name, I thought. No Jew would name his son Esau, the twin and arch-rival of the Jewish forefather Jacob, aka Israel.

The Bible says that Esau demanded red bean stew from Jacob and in return surrendered his birthright as the first-born son.

That birthright has been fought over for millennia, and the battle has intensified in the last century. As of today, even the word “birthright” is contested.

“Birthright Palestine” (BP) was launched this week by the Palestine Center for National Strategic Studies (PCNSS), located, according to its website, in the Deheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem. A program “created by Native Palestinians for Diaspora Palestinians,” Birthright Palestine is designed to “make foreign-born Palestinians feel at home in their homeland” and to rekindle a sense of kinship between Palestinians.

That’s cool, but take a look at the BP goals which embody the spirit of the Biblical Esau:

• The organization claims that it intends to “counter the effects of Birthright Israel, which over the years has brought thousands of Jewish people from around the world to ‘Israel’ in order to encourage their adoption of Zionist ideals and learn about their ‘promised land.’"
  
  “Coming back to visit the land that your parents or grandparents were forced to flee from, is a form of active non‐violent resistance against the illegal Israeli occupation. This is because this simple act opposes everything that the ‘State of Israel’ was founded on (the idea to ethnically cleanse the Holy Land/Palestine of all Arabs, so as to create a purely Jewish State).”
  
  Why the quotes around the word Israel and the phrase State of Israel? Because BP does not and cannot recognize the Jewish state. Will the BPs also visit their cousins, the million Arab citizens of Israel? If they were “ethnically cleansed,” what are they doing serving in the Knesset, caring for patients in Israeli hospitals and studying in Israeli universities?
  
  Will Christian Palestinian Arabs who fled Muslim discrimination and oppression also have a share in Birthright Palestine?



• BP promises its participants that they “will become ambassadors for the Palestinian Cause – your cause, and convince other Diaspora Palestinians to return to their homeland so that our nation can continue to survive in exile until the day that we are able all return (sic) home permanently.”
  
  “All” Palestinians will return home? So much for the advocates of the Palestinian “right of return” who argue that only a small fraction of Palestinians would return.



• BP participants are offered tours of their “ancestral homeland,” including Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Jericho, etc. But a couple of locations stand out in the list: Yaffa, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Akka, Nazareth and Bir Al‐Saba’ [Be’er Sheva].
  



• The BP website shows a picture of the Mosque of Omar in the old city of Jerusalem. OK, that’s very legitimate; no one denies the Muslim tie to their mosques. But the panoramic view of Jerusalem has the title “Birthright Palestine” right above the distinctive Plaza Hotel and the Clal building in the western side of Jerusalem. A mistake? Doubtful.
  
  


• The following is BP’s most interesting appeal to young Palestinians: “Palestinian Citizenship: When you arrive, you may apply for ‘Lem Shaml’ (Government Term for National Reunion in Arabic) – or – Palestinian Citizenship (in addition to your foreign citizenship – not in place of) at the Interior Ministry of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA); thus, formally requesting your right to return (Haq Al‐Awda).”
  
  BP comes right out and says it’s a vehicle for the right of return.
  
  Imitation may be the highest form of flattery. But from its own name and description, Birthright Palestine reveals itself as another form of competition with Israel and a challenge to the concept of a Jewish state. Granted, the BP application requires interns to pledge they “will remain non-violent, both in speech and in actions, throughout my journey and visit.” But every aspect of the organization, including PCNSS’ logo, suggests that they don’t want to share that pot of beans.
  
  PS. I’m reluctant to add to the hits on BP’s webpage, but I guess I have to share their website: http://www.birthrightpalestine.com/

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Ms. Rice Visited Israel, Not Birmingham, Alabama

Two months ago in Annapolis Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice compared the plight of Palestinians to the experience of African-Americans some 40 years ago in the segregated South. "I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian," she said. "I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness." The reporter continued, “As a black child [pictured with her mother] in the South, [she remembers] being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants.”

Well, Ms. Rice, I recently returned from the South – southern Israel – and I saw a far different scene from the Jim Crow measures you experienced in the land of the Confederacy. My wife and I drove some 200 miles south from Jerusalem to Eilat, Israel’s “little Riviera,” for a week’s vacation. It coincided with the Muslim holiday of Id al Adha, and we shared Eilat with thousands of Israeli citizens of Muslim faith and Palestinian national identity.

I recall the de facto segregation in the Takoma swimming pool in northwest Washington DC where I grew up. In our Eilat hotel, on the other hand, it was impossible to differentiate between the Israeli Jewish and Muslim kids splashing in the pool. In the 1960s, ten years after Rosa Parks, seating on D.C. Transit buses and at the Peoples Drug Store soda counter reflected a habitual racial separation. There was nothing similar in the Eilat hotel dining room on Friday night which was filled with Jewish families saying Kiddush at their traditional Shabbat meal alongside Arab families partaking of the Ashkenazi gefilte fish and the Sephardi couscous. The Israeli Arabs’ 4x4 monster SUVs cast shadows over our modest sedan at the famous 101 roadside rest stop in the Negev desert where all Israelis – Muslim and Jewish – shared the restaurant, kids’ rides and washrooms.

Anyone suggesting that Jim Crow is present in Israel should be eating crow (except for the fact that it’s not kosher). That includes the Washington Post correspondent Scott Wilson who recently filed a story, “For Israel's Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion.”

Israeli Arabs or Palestinian Israelis

Standing in line at an Eilat supermarket check-out we stood behind an Israeli Arab woman who spoke no Hebrew or English, only Arabic. She was a Palestinian from the West Bank who was married to an Israeli Muslim citizen, one of many West Bankers who have found a surreptitious way to accomplish the Palestinian goal of a “right of return” to the area of pre-1967 Israel.

Instead of traveling a route past the Dead Sea and parallel to the Jordanian border, our drive went straight south along Route 60 from Jerusalem. The first 30 miles were through the southern half of the West Bank, known for centuries as “Judea.” That took us past Hebron (Al Khalil on map), Arab villages and Jewish villages and towns -- misnamed for years as “settlements.” The term connotes temporary, military-style encampments. They’re nothing of the sort, with many stylish residences housing second and third generations of Israeli Jews.

Hundreds of Palestinian cars, trucks, and the distinctive yellow Palestinian taxis shared the road with us. My wife and I, in one of the few cars with the yellow and black Israeli license plates, kept looking for the supposedly omnipresent Israeli Army roadblocks and checkpoints. Frankly, we were a little anxious, and we were a lot curious about Ms. Rice’s complaint that Palestinians “can’t go on a road.” Along the whole route of this major thoroughfare – some 30 – 40 miles we did not see one roadblock or checkpoint! Only at the “crossing points” between the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel did we see checkpoints, established to prevent suicide bombers and terrorist groups from attacking Israeli targets. One such checkpoint recently discovered 6.5 tons of the bomb-making chemical, potassium nitrate, hidden in bags of sugar sent by the European Union as humanitarian aid.

Yes, there are checkpoints – and choke points – around some Palestinian towns, and travel to areas adjacent to Jerusalem and other major Israeli cities is often made difficult as the Israeli army attempts to thwart terrorists going into Israel and Palestinian car thieves fleeing Israel with their loot. But we travelled the length of a large, contiguous Palestinian region where Palestinian school children, merchants, truckers and commuters experienced no interference whatsoever as they traveled.

Ms. Rice, thank God Almighty that the U.S. civil rights movement was led by the likes of Reverends Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy. Imagine how the U.S. government would have reacted if the movement were led by the militant Black Panther’s Booby Seale or Huey Newton, or a terrorist group such as the Symbionese Liberation Army led by Donald “Field Marshal Cinque” DeFreeze. Government agencies probably would have set up roadblocks and checkpoints around every American urban center. Ms. Rice, if a non-violent Palestinian national movement were ever to emerge and really purge the terrorists, then your comparisons would be worthy of consideration.

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What the WashPost Won't Print:Letter to the Editor Sent Last Week

Eilat, Israel -- I'm sitting in a hotel lobby in the Eilat resort, reading Scott Wilson's "For Israel's Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion" on my laptop. At the next table is an Israeli Arab family of 12 who are here with hundreds of other Muslim families to celebrate the Id al Adha holiday. That's not "isolation." Walk along the Eilat boardwalk, eat in a kosher restaurant, swim in the pool, and you see Jewish and Muslim Israeli families enjoying the respite from the wintery winds in the north. That's not "exclusion."

Yes, Israel's Arabs feel different and are treated differently in some sectors but often because their religious and political leaders identify with the Palestinian radicals over the border who seek to destroy Israel or refuse to recognize the right of a "Jewish state" to exist.

By the way, Israeli Arabs serve in Israel's Knesset, They are not "excluded" from the Israeli army. They decided to exclude themselves. Indeed, Israel's Bedouins serve with distinction in all of the army's units. Some young non-Bedouin Arabs have risked being ostracized in their community and have also volunteered to serve in the "Zionist Army."

[January 2 -- A Druze soldier died in a training mission yesterday. It was revealed that he was serving in Israel's most elite Special Forces unit, Sayeret Matkal. Where's the "exclusion?"]

No, it's not easy being a minority anywhere, but Israel's civil rights standards certainly surpasses anything known in the Middle East, and I dare say, Israel -- even in a state of war -- can compete with many of the West's democracies.

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