JERUSALEM VIEWPOINTS
No. 507 21 Heshvan 5764 /
16 November 2003
AN
ANSWER TO THE NEW ANTI-ZIONISTS:
THE RIGHTS OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO A
SOVEREIGN STATE IN THEIR HISTORIC HOMELAND
-
A new critique of Israel proposes its
elimination and replacement with a bi-national Palestinian-Jewish
state. Israel's new detractors doubt the legitimacy of Jewish
statehood, though they say nothing about the validity of dozens of
new states that have emerged in the last half century, many of which
lack any firmly rooted national identity. The new attack on Israel's
right to exist as a Jewish state is particularly ironic since Jewish
nationhood preceded the emergence of most modern nation-states by
thousands of years.
-
The new critics of Jewish statehood
neglect the fact that Israel's communal expression - like that of
many communal states around the world - in no way infringes the
rights of minority citizens, who enjoy full equality under the law
and the political system. They also ignore that this form of
national expression is not unique; indeed, most states identify in
some formal way with the religious or cultural heritage of their
predominant communities. Yet only Israel is singled out for
criticism.
-
Israel is the only state created in
the last century whose legitimacy was recognized by both the
League of Nations and the United Nations. The League of Nations
Mandate did not create the rights of the Jewish people to a national
home in Palestine, but rather recognized a pre-existing right
- for the links of the Jewish people to their historic land were
well-known and accepted by world leaders in the previous century.
-
By 1864, a clear-cut Jewish majority
emerged in Jerusalem - more than half a century before the
arrival of the British Empire and the League of Nations Mandate.
During the years that the Jewish presence in
Eretz Israel was restored, a huge Arab population influx
transpired as Arab immigrants sought to take advantage of higher
wages and economic opportunities that resulted from Jewish
settlement in the land. President Roosevelt concluded in 1939 that
"Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the
total Jewish immigration during the whole period."
-
Israel's new detractors seek to
delegitimize Jewish national rights by
arguing that their assertion was an extension of European
imperialism. In fact, Jewish underground movements waged an
anti-colonial war in the 1940s against continuing British rule.
Israel was an anti-imperialist force when it first emerged,
while the Arab states were aligned with the imperial powers, their
armies trained and supplied by the French and British Empires.
-
There was no active movement to form
a unique Palestinian state prior to 1967. In 1956, Ahmad
Shuqairy, who would found the PLO eight
years later, told the UN Security Council: "it is common knowledge
that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." In the early 1960s,
many Palestinians looked to Egypt's Abdul Nasser as their leader as
much as to any Palestinian. Given the historical background, it is
impossible to argue that the Palestinians have a claim to the Land
of Israel superior to that of the Jews, as Israel's
detractors contend.
-
The new assault on Israel is partly
based on ignorance of Jewish history in today's highly secularized
world. But it also emanates from a new anti-Semitic wave reflected
in a public opinion poll by the European Commission showing Israel
as the country most regarded by Europeans as a threat to world
peace. The president of the European Commission, Roman
Prodi - alluding to the anti-Semitic
underpinnings that led to the poll's results - said, "to the extent
that this may indicate a deeper, more general prejudice against the
Jewish world, our repugnance is even more radical."
The New Anti-Zionists
Although Israel won its
existence more than fifty years ago, a new and insidious critique has
begun to spread, attacking anew the legitimacy of Israel's very
establishment as a Jewish state. The new line does not come from
Tehran or Riyadh but, surprisingly from largely European intellectuals
and certain voices on the fringe American Left, surfacing recently in
The Guardian and The New
York Review of Books. It proposes the elimination of Israel and is
generally accompanied by calls to establish a bi-national
Palestinian-Jewish state in its place.1 The new
anti-Zionists invariably start with the claim that there are no Jewish
rights to sovereignty in Israel, or that, in any case, Jewish
nationalism is inherently unjust.
Curiously, this campaign is accompanied by no
corresponding questions about the validity of any other of the more
than 190 states that belong to the UN, whether they resemble
Israel or not. There is no such scrutiny of the
mini-states of Europe - from Liechtenstein to the Vatican - or the
multi-tribal states of Africa, many of which are breaking down. Nor is
there any questioning of the rights of expressly Catholic, Protestant,
or Muslim states to exist. The exclusive focus on Israel raises
troubling questions about the real motives of these commentators. As
Michael Gove, assistant editor of the Times of
London, recently noted: "I do not know how newspapers can
get away with it. You can have criticism of the State of Israel but it
is entirely different to say it shouldn't exist. It is applying to the
Jew a different standard than you apply to anyone else."2
Equally remarkable, for all the singular focus on
Israel, the attack on Jewish statehood
avoids even the slightest consideration of the specifics of Israel's
case. The attackers fail to examine the legal or political
consequences of Israel's national expression as a Jewish state
(perhaps because they find none) with regard to its non-Jews,
religious and racial equality, or the civil and political equality of
all citizens. They also ignore the specific historical circumstances
and perils that gave rise to the need for Israel to identify
Jewishly. In short, it is an attack on
Israel without regard to the cost, benefit, or uniqueness of Jewish
statehood - indeed, without any grounding at all. That becomes clear
after a brief examination of the history, the law, and the facts
surrounding Israel's existence as a Jewish state.
The
Rights of States and the Rights of Israel
International law has traditionally held that in order
to be defined as a state, political communities
must meet four qualifications: First, there must be a people; second,
there must be a territory; third, there must be a government; and
fourth, there must be a capacity to enter into relations with other
states. In advocating Israel's admission
to the UN in 1948, the U.S. representative to the UN Security Council
argued that Israel fulfilled these conditions. In fact, the new
attacks on Israel's rights are particularly ironic since Jewish
nationhood preceded the emergence of most modern nation-states by
thousands of years. Still, today's discourse has created doubts about
the basis of Jewish peoplehood and the
connection of the Jewish people to Israel's territory. Whether the new
assault on Israel is a byproduct of the radical secularization of
certain intellectual circles who have no
understanding of Jewish history, or whether it emanates from a more
insidious anti-Semitism that has been re-born, its handmaiden is the
general ignorance that is rampant about Israel's unique roots.
The Jewish claim to a right of sovereignty in the
Land of Israel (Eretz
Israel; Palestine) emerged in the last century for three essential
reasons:
First,
it was not a new claim, but rather a reassertion of a historic right
that had never been conceded or forgotten. Even after the
destruction of the last Jewish commonwealth in the first century,
the Jewish people maintained their own autonomous political and
legal institutions: the Davidic dynasty was preserved in Baghdad
until the thirteenth century through the rule of the
Exilarch (Resh
Galuta), while the return to Zion
was incorporated into the most widely practiced Jewish traditions,
including the end of the Yom Kippur service and the Passover Seder,
as well as in everyday prayers. Thus, Jewish historic rights were
kept alive in Jewish historical consciousness.
Second, the security of the Jewish
people in the diaspora became completely
untenable as the threat from anti-Semitic persecution and assault
was replaced in the twentieth century with the threat of actual
annihilation - or genocide - as demonstrated by the Holocaust. While
this threat initially was focused in Europe, it soon extended to the
Middle East, as newly independent Arab states came to view their
ancient Jewish communities as European foreigners and
systematically violated their basic human rights, either by denying
them protection or by confiscating their properties. From the 1840
Damascus blood libel to the 1941 farhud
(pogrom) against the Jews of Baghdad, an uneasy Arab-Jewish
coexistence that existed earlier collapsed even before the rise of
the State of Israel. Far from receding, the danger of rabid
anti-Semitism persists, thereby necessitating a strong Jewish state
that can serve as an ultimate refuge for Jews under threat,
anywhere. The Jewish people have learned that they must not return
to a state of powerlessness.
Third, the steady growth of
assimilation threatened to eliminate Jewish communities worldwide.
The existence of a Jewish state, whose public culture is based on
the unique practices of the Jewish people, is the best guarantor for
Jewish continuity - both religious and non-religious - and the birth
of a new Jewish civilization that can continue to contribute to the
world community.3
Israel's
Historic Basis: The Unbroken Jewish Connection with the Land of Israel
Israel is the only state that was created in the last
century whose legitimacy was recognized by both the League of Nations
and the United Nations.4 The League of Nations Mandate that
was issued by the victorious powers of World War I did not create the
rights of the Jewish people to a national home in Palestine, but
rather recognized a pre-existing right, for the links of the
Jewish people to their historic land were well-known and accepted in
the previous century by world leaders from President John Adams to
Napoleon Bonaparte to British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston.5
These rights were preserved by the successor organization to the
League of Nations, the United Nations, under Article 80 of the UN
Charter. The ancient, even biblical, association of the Jewish people
with the Land of Israel was accepted in
the Judeo-Christian tradition as a historical axiom.
From a legal standpoint, an opportunity arose to assert
these historically recognized rights. Since 1517,
Eretz Israel had been under the
sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire; when the Ottomans lost to the
British in 1918, in the Treaty of Sevres they surrendered sovereignty
over their Asiatic territories outside of Turkey. A vacuum of
sovereignty was created in which the historic claim of the Jewish
people could be raised. Yet the Jewish people themselves had begun
raising it much earlier.
Since the loss of the Second Jewish Commonwealth to
Roman legions in 70 CE, and the destruction of the
Temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish people never lost their
connection to the Land of Israel (Palestine). The land, in fact, was
never claimed to be the unique home of another nation, but rather was
a province of other larger empires. As the renowned historian of the
Middle East, Bernard Lewis, has written:
From the end of the Jewish state in antiquity to the
beginning of British rule, the area now designated by the name
Palestine was not a country and had no
frontiers, only administrative boundaries; it was a group of
provincial subdivisions, by no means always the same, within a larger
entity.6
In the interim, the Jewish people never stopped
exercising their claim to the land. Lewis, in fact, notes "there had
been a steady movement of Jews to the Holy Land throughout the centuries."7 In 135 CE Jews took
part in the Bar Kochba revolt against
imperial Rome and even re-established their capital in Jerusalem.
Defeated by the most brutal of the Roman legions under the command of
the emperor Hadrian, Jews were forbidden to reside in Jerusalem for
nearly five hundred years. Once a year on the ninth of the Hebrew
month of Av, they were allowed to weep at the remains of their
destroyed Temple at a spot that came to be called "the Wailing Wall."
In the meantime, the Roman authorities renamed Judea as
Palestina in order to obliterate
the memory of Jewish nationhood.
During this period, the Jewish national center shifted
from Judea to the Galilee, where hundreds
of synagogues were erected from the Mediterranean to the Golan
Heights. Jewish law was then codified in the
Mishnah by Judah Ha-Nasi. Despite
the catastrophic losses in Jewish lives during the wars against the
Romans, Jews still constituted the majority of the population of the
Galilee in the fourth century. In the Upper Galilee village of
Pek'in there remained a continuous Jewish
presence from the Roman era to the rise of the State of Israel.
With the defeat of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) by Persian armies in 614, the Jewish
people recaptured Jerusalem and made it again their capital briefly.
Yet Byzantine rule was soon restored and Jews were forced again to
vacate Jerusalem until the defeat of the Byzantines in 638 by the
Islamic armies of Caliph Omar, who again opened the city for Jewish
resettlement. Eretz Israel became a part
of successive Muslim empires - the Rashidun
(the immediate followers of the Prophet Muhammad, who ruled from
Medina), the Umayyads (who ruled from
Damascus), the Abbasids (who ruled from Baghdad), and the
Fatimids (who ruled from Cairo).
Under Islam, Jews were to be protected as a "people of
the book," but were nonetheless forced to pay discriminatory taxes
like the jizya
(poll tax) and the kharaj (land
tax). The crushing burden of these land taxes led to a loss of Jewish
land control in the Galilee during the
first several centuries of Islamic rule. During the Crusader
occupation of Eretz Israel, many Jews were
physically slaughtered, especially in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the
great Jewish scholar and poet Rabbi Yehuda Halevi
(1075-1141) still called for the mass immigration of Jews to the Land
of Israel.8
The beginnings of Jewish recovery in Eretz
Israel started with the defeat and
expulsion of the Crusaders in 1187 by the Kurdish Muslim warrior
Salah ad-Din who, like Caliph Omar,
allowed the Jews to resettle in Jerusalem. For example, between 1209
and 1211, three hundred rabbis made their way from France and southern
England to settle in Jerusalem, once it was safe again to do so. They
were joined by rabbis from North Africa and Egypt. The great Jewish
scholar Nachmanides (Ramban)
erected a synagogue in Jerusalem in 1267 that still stands in the Old
City.
In the thirteenth century, Jewish families restored the
community of Safed, which would become the
international center for the study of Jewish mysticism by the
sixteenth century. Reinforced by their rising numbers, Jews became
assertive again about their claim in Jerusalem, so that the pope forbade sea captains from transporting
Jews to Palestine in 1428.9 Despite
the hardships, Jews continued to return. The great commentator of the
Mishnah, Ovadia
Bartinura, left Italy to settle in
Jerusalem in 1488; his tomb is at the foot of the Mt. of Olives.
The influx of Jewish refugees from the Spanish
Inquisition in 1492 into the Ottoman Empire, which took control of
Eretz Israel in 1517, led to a substantial
expansion of the Jewish presence in Safed,
Hebron, and Tiberias, where Sultan
Sulaiman the Magnificent allotted his
Portugese Jewish advisor, Don Joseph
Nasi, land grants for Jewish resettlement.
Even before the rise of modern political Zionism, Jews continued to
stream into the land from Yemen and
Lithuania, whose numbers included the students of the
halakhic scholar the Vilna
Gaon in 1809-1811. By 1864, a clear-cut
Jewish majority emerged in Jerusalem, more than half a century
before the arrival of the British Empire, the issuing of the
Balfour Declaration, and the establishment of the League of Nations
Mandate.
The
Palestinian Arabs Include Waves of Arab Immigrants
During the restoration of the Jewish presence in the
Land of Israel, the overwhelming
impression of Western visitors in the nineteenth century was that
there were few Arab inhabitants. The British Consul General, James
Finn, wrote in 1857 that "the country is in a considerable degree
empty of inhabitants." He added that the land's "greatest need is that
of a body of population."10 Mark Twain visited
Eretz Israel in 1867, traveled through the
Jezreel Valley, and related, "there
is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent."11
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, the great British
cartographer, reached similar conclusions in 1881: "In Judea it is
hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no
appearance of life or habitation."12
Geographers had long concluded that it was improbable
"that any but a small part of the present Arab population of
Palestine is descended from the ancient
inhabitants of the land"; indeed, according to their analysis,
Palestine was "peopled by the drifting populations of Arabia, and to
some extent by the backwash of its harbors."13
Additionally, the Ottomans settled Muslim populations as a buffer
against Bedouin attacks; Ibrahim Pasha,
the Egyptian ruler, brought Egyptian colonists with his army in the
1830s. It is noteworthy that the common Palestinian name al-Masri,
used by a clan in Nablus, literally means
"the Egyptian."14
Yet the Palestine Liberation Organization has
perpetuated a myth, put forward on the world stage by
Yasser Arafat at the United Nations in
1974, that "the Jewish invasion [of
Palestine] began in 1881."
Moreover, he asserted that there was already a large indigenous Arab
population when the Jews arrived. His implicit message was that there
was a well-entrenched Palestinian society in place before Israel's
rebirth, a society that had rights superior to those of the returning
Jews.
Yet it is now clear that during the years that the
Jewish presence in Eretz
Israel was restored, a huge Arab population influx
transpired from neighboring countries as Arab immigrants sought to
take advantage of higher wages and economic opportunities that
resulted from Jewish settlement in the land. Indeed, President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt concluded in 1939 that "Arab immigration
into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish
immigration during the whole period."15
The
Restoration of Israel Was Not a Product of European Imperialism
Another common argument put forward by the PLO is that
Israel is really the product of European
imperialism and hence it does not represent a legitimate
national movement of its own. As a result, Zionism came to be
portrayed in the Arab world as "a hyperaggressive
variant of colonialism."16 This perception has also
penetrated the discourse of Israel's European detractors. Initially,
it is true that the idea of a restored Jewish homeland received its
greatest push from the declaration in 1917 of the British Foreign
Secretary, Lord Balfour, who called for its establishment after the
British defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, ironically, during the
subsequent years of the British Mandate over Palestine, European (and
especially British) imperial policies actually obstructed the
emergence of the Jewish national home.
First, the territory of
Transjordan was cut off from the Palestine
Mandate and granted by the British to the Hashemite dynasty from
Arabia, who had lost their ancestral homeland, the
Hijaz, to the Saudi clan of eastern
Arabia. Second, the British sought to further partition the remaining
territory of western Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, reducing
the area for Jewish settlement even more. Finally, with the 1939 White
Paper, the British restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine just
as Nazi Germany began its conquest of Europe and its Holocaust against
European Jewry.
In this context, it is not surprising that Jewish
underground movements waged an anti-colonial war in the 1940s against
continuing British rule. In other words, Israel was anti-imperialist when it first emerged. By contrast, the
Arab states at the time were aligned with the imperial powers. The
Arab states that invaded the nascent State of Israel fielded armies
that were trained and supplied by the French and British Empires.
During Israel's War of Independence, British officers commanded the
Arab Legion of Transjordan, while the
Royal Air Force, defending Egyptian airspace, fought the Israeli Air
Force over the Sinai Peninsula in 1949. And the nations of the world
did not lift a finger when the Jews of Jerusalem were surrounded and
faced annihilation, even though the UN had called for
internationalization of the city. Only the Israel Defense Forces broke
Jerusalem's siege and saved its Jewish residents. In short, Jewish
independence in Israel was won by a native and indigenous community
acting in its own defense with little help from outside.
Is
Jewish Statehood Discriminatory?
Today, some argue that Israel's very establishment as a
Jewish state discriminates against non-Jewish Israelis, even, as a
recent article claimed, rendering them second-class citizens.17
Such a claim is not only utterly false, as any student of Israeli law
or politics knows; it also seriously distorts the harmless - and quite
beautiful - ways in which states can reflect the identity of their
majority communities, or pay tribute to their founding histories,
without infringing the rights of individual citizens.
Israel's critics go too far when they seek to cloak
Israel's mere communal expression in the inflammatory garb of
religious discrimination.
Nearly every country in the world boasts one majority
community, and nearly all reflect the cultural identity of that
community in one way or another. The United States officially
celebrates only Christian holidays; many European countries openly
identify as either Catholic or Protestant; and many Muslim countries
uncontroversially refer to themselves as
an "Islamic Republic," whether they are democratic or not. For some,
such identification is simply a sign of the spiritual persuasion of
the majority; for others, it is homage to the story of the country's
founding. There is nothing obviously wrong with such expression.
Indeed, in today's multi-culturalist
environment, with a renaissance in public appreciation of communal
identity, it is anachronistic to suggest that in the case of
Israel, alone, communal identification is
problematic. One can only wonder why Jewish national expression, with
no discriminatory effect, is so uniquely hard to bear.18
Perhaps the reason stems from the history of opposition to Jewish
statehood: it was first raised by Arab nationalists and religious
Islamic radicals, who opposed Jewish rule on what they had deemed
"Arab" soil. This opposition, though prominent in the rhetoric of
Palestinian groups like Hamas today,19
is largely unacceptable in Western political discourse. That forces
its proponents to reformulate their anti-Israel animus in the more
universal language of rights and equality. Still, as convenient a
target as it seems, Israel's self-expression as a Jewish state, like
the communal identification of any state, has little bearing on
questions of rights and equality.
The important point is not whether a state adopts some
communal theme but whether it in fact discriminates: Are minority
citizens equal under the law? Can they express their own heritage
publicly and communally? Do they have the same opportunities for power
and representation in the system, even the ability to become the
majority? In short, are they first-class citizens?
For non-Jewish citizens of
Israel, the answer to all these questions is "Yes.
Unequivocally." Israeli Arab citizens are
by law equal to Jewish citizens; they enjoy the same rights and are
legally protected from discrimination. Non-Jews enjoy every freedom
that democracies recognize, including freedom of worship, the free
expression and exercise of religion, equality of financial, material,
and employment opportunity, political power, and all legal rights.
Indeed, Israel's Declaration of Independence demands nothing less.
According to the Declaration, the Jewish state "will ensure complete
equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants
irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of
religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will
safeguard the Holy Places of all religions." Israel's Arab citizens
have, in fact, reached positions on Israel's Supreme Court and have
elected powerful parties in the Israeli Knesset that fully participate
in Israeli political life.
Some critics of Israel,
often with questionable motives, exploit the nature of Israel's
parliamentary political system to falsely depict Arab citizens as a
vulnerable minority. Indeed they are - but only inasmuch as all
minorities in a parliamentary government that are outside the ruling
coalition suffer some disadvantages. Israel contains a lively system
of distinct communities living side-by-side, often vying for the same
limited supply of the largely socialized national welfare and aid
programs. Israeli Arabs, for example, compete with other minorities
that do not typically reach the top - ultra-Orthodox Jews, Russian
immigrants, and religious Sephardim. That some of these groups
sometimes do better than others does not show discrimination; it
simply shows the system at work.
Most important, however, the disadvantages of political
minorities in Israel have nothing to do
with Israel's ceremonious identification as a Jewish state. Their
situation will change if and when Israel transforms itself from a
system of proportional representation, with each minority having a
party to call its own, into a district-based election system. Many
Israelis support such a change, though it has shortcomings, too. But
even under the current, imperfect, political reality, Jewish and Arab
citizens are equal under the law.
All this is not to deny that
Israel has one special mission as a Jewish state -
albeit one that does not affect the rights of its non-Jewish citizens.
Israel was built as a haven for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution.
The legendary Israeli statesman Abba Eban
referred to this aspect of Israel as a case of "international
affirmative action," because it was designed to correct an inherent
disadvantage suffered by a particular group throughout history, which
has deprived them of a level playing field. Unfortunately, Jews still
need a place of refuge from persecution. For that reason,
diaspora Jews deserve the special
treatment they receive in this one respect. When the Jewish community
of Ethiopia stood defenseless against the onslaught of armed partisans
in the 1991 civil war, or when Argentina's Jews became the target of
scape-goating and attacks during the
recent economic depression, or when Soviet Jews fled Communism, Israel
alone opened its doors unconditionally. For Jews seeking refuge in
Israel, the state grants immediate citizenship. Nevertheless, a
non-Jew enjoys the same right and opportunity to become a citizen of
Israel as any other country offers, including the United States.
And once a citizen, he or she enjoys all the
rights and privileges granted by Israel's laws and government to the majority of its
people, based on a principle of equality now enshrined in the basic
law of the country and the fabric of its political culture.
Israeli Rights
Versus Palestinian Rights
Still, regardless of the rights that
Israel has granted its non-Jewish citizens, critics
malign it on different grounds: that Palestinians boast a stronger
claim for national sovereignty over the same land. This claim needs to
be examined separately. In particular, was there, prior to Israel's
establishment, a distinct Palestinian nationalism vying for its own
separate place in the land?
The Palestinian Arabs originally saw themselves in the
early twentieth century as part of a greater Arab national
movement. For much of the first half of the last century Arab states
sought to unify as they supported various schemes for Arab unity. In
Arabic there are, in fact, two terms for nationalism:
qawmiyah - loyalty to the Arab
nation as a whole, and wataniyah -
loyalty to the local country in which one resides. For decades,
qawmiyah was far more predominant
for Palestinian Arabs.
For example, Bernard Lewis has written that while the
Palestinian Arabs had a growing sense of identity with their struggle
against Jewish immigration in the 1930s, still "their basic sense of
corporate historic identity was, at different levels, Muslim or Arab
or - for some - Syrian; it is significant that even by the end of the
Mandate in 1948, after thirty years of separate Palestinian political
existence, there were virtually no books in Arabic on the history of
Palestine."20
Moreover, the 1947 Partition Plan still described the
Palestinians as "Arabs" and called for an "Arab state" in
Palestine alongside of a Jewish state. In May
1956, Ahmad Shuqairy, who would found the
PLO eight years later, stated before the UN Security Council: "it is
common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."21
In the early 1960s, many Palestinians looked to Egypt's
Gamal Abdul Nasser as their leader as much
as to any Palestinian. And there was no active movement of the
Palestinians to separate the West Bank from Jordan or the Gaza Strip
from Egypt to form a unique Palestinian state prior to 1967. Today, a
third source of loyalty is emerging among Palestinian Arabs connected
to Hamas or Islamic Jihad - loyalty to the
Islamic nation or umma.
Hamas, after all, is the Palestinian
branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization with pan-Islamic
ambitions.
Still, Israel recognizes
that a unique Palestinian national identity exists today. But given
its historical background, it is impossible to show that Palestinian
nationalism has a claim to the Land of Israel superior to that
of the Jews.
In the future, whatever Palestinian political entity
emerges from part of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it very well
might decide to federate with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in ten
or twenty years, where a Palestinian majority already exists. In the
Balkans, for example, it is difficult for Europeans to predict the
future of Bosnia or Kosovo. Will their
populations seek to unify with states containing the same ethnic
makeup, so that Croats in Bosnia will merge with Croatia, while
Kosovars will seek to unite with Albania?
The same long-term question applies to the Palestinian territories
after Arafat.
The Continuing Need for Jewish
Statehood
Regardless, a uniquely Jewish democratic society will
continue to exist in Israel, where it
will serve as a vital refuge for Jews facing anti-Semitism from
France, Russia, South America, or Yemen. Israel remains the only
country that allows unconditional Jewish immigration. In a few years
Israel will comprise the largest Jewish community in the world. Only
the army of the Jewish people, the Israel Defense Forces, can protect
that community.
Some now argue that Jews no longer face the existential
threats that anti-Semitism once posed. It is even suggested that
today's anti-Semitism is caused, not counteracted, by Israeli policy.
But the recent experiences of Jews in Ethiopia, Argentina, and across Europe, along with the vile slurs
about world Jewry on the part of Islamic leaders like Malaysia's
Mohammed Mahathir, give lie to such
euphoria. Anti-Semitism has existed for centuries, well before the
rise of the State of Israel. Indeed, it could be argued that it is not
the reality of Israeli policy that is causing the new anti-Semitism,
but rather the prejudices of European editors who feature difficult
anti-Israeli photographs, out of context, as lead news items, while
downgrading serious cases of massacre, such as on the continent of
Africa.
Today, world leaders are willing to admit that the
harsh critique that Israel receives can
be traced to older, anti-Semitic roots. For example, the president of
the European Commission, Roman Prodi -
commenting on a new opinion poll showing that Israel is the country
regarded by most ordinary Europeans as a threat to world peace - said
the results "point to the continued existence of a bias that must be
condemned out of hand," and "to the extent that this may indicate a
deeper, more general prejudice against the Jewish world, our
repugnance is even more radical."22
There is even a new strain of anti-Semitism that has
emerged in the radical opposition to globalization, which now targets
Jews as a kind of transnational economic force and, in chillingly
familiar terms, blames them for economic upheaval. The anti-Semitic
threat, unfortunately, is alive and well.
Not only is Jewish security at stake but so is Jewish
continuity. Throughout Jewish history, national independence was
perceived as a condition for Jewish self-fulfillment.23
Redemption was tied to the idea of return. For that reason, the
re-birth of Israel strengthened Jewish
identity. A reversal of Jewish independence would clearly have the
opposite effect. As things stand, Jewish creativity in the future will
come increasingly out of Israel, as the Jewish state emerges as the
primary center of Jewish life. Just as the Jewish people of the
diaspora once contributed to the growth of
modern civilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it will
be Jewish civilization in Israel that will be the key source of the
Jewish contribution to world society in the twenty-first century. A
strong Jewish state is essential for protecting the continuity of
Jewish identity and its place in world affairs.
* *
*
1.
Tony Judt, "Israel: The Alternative," New York Review of Books, vol.
50, no. 16, October 23, 2003.
2.
Lawrence Marzouk, "UK Media Blasted Over Israel,"
Barnet & Potters Bar Times (UK), October 29, 2003;
3. Ruth Gavison, "On the Jewish Right to Sovereignty," Azure, Summer
2003.
4. Address by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the United Nations General
Assembly, September 24, 1998, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0h3f0
5. Benjamin Netanyahu, A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World
(New York: Bantam, 1993), pp. 14-15. For the sake of historical
perspective, one would do well to consider Ben-Gurion's first premise,
the title deeds of the Jews to this land, which he presented on
January 7, 1937, to the Peel Commission:
"I say on behalf of the Jews that the Bible is our Mandate, the Bible
which was written by us, in our own language, in Hebrew, in this very
country. That is our Mandate. It was only recognition of this right
which was expressed in the Balfour Declaration."
6. Bernard Lewis, "The Palestinians and the PLO, A Historical
Approach," Commentary, January 1975: 32.
7. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict
and Prejudice (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 164.
8. Arie Morgenstern, "Dispersion and the Longing for Zion, 1240-1840,"
Azure, Winter 2002.
9. Ibid.
10. Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons)
p. 26.
11. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), p. 349.
12. Netanyahu, A Place Among the Nations, pp. 38-40.
13. Palestine: A Study of Jewish, Arab, and British Policies (New
Haven: Yale University Press and Esco Foundation for Palestine, Inc.,
1947), v. 1, pp. 463-464.
14. Joseph Alpher, "Israel and the Palestinians: What Everyone Should
Know About the Conflict," Reform Judaism, Fall 2002, vol. 31, no. 1.
15. Netanyahu, A Place Among the Nations, p. 36.
16. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, "Graffiti on History's Walls," U.S. News &
World Report, November 3, 2003.
17. Judt, "Israel: The Alternative."
18. Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jews? (New York:
Touchstone, 2003), p. 170.
19. "Hamas Leaders Vow to Press Fight Against Israel," Washington
Post, Briefs (December 27, 1999), p. A16.
20. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semite, p. 186.
21. Harris O. Schoenberg, Mandate for Terror: The United Nations and
the PLO (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1989), p. 59.
22. Ed O'Loughlin, "Europe Apologizes to Israel for Poll, The Age
(Australia), November 5, 2003.
23. Marvin Fox, "Jewish Power and Jewish Responsibility," in Daniel J.
Elazar, ed., Jewish Education and Jewish Statesmanship (Jerusalem:
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 1996), p. 60.
* * *
Dore Gold is
President of the Jerusalem Center for
Public Affairs. Previously, he served as Israel's Ambassador to the
United Nations (1997-1999). He is the author of Hatred's Kingdom:
How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism (Regnery,
2003).
Jeffrey S.
Helmreich is the author of numerous articles on
Israel for American newspapers and journals. His most
recent Jerusalem Viewpoints include: "Beyond Political
Terrorism: The New Challenge of Transcendent Terror" (November 2001);
"The Israel Swing Factor: How the American Jewish Vote Influences U.S.
Elections" (January 2001); and "Journalistic License: Professional
Standards in the Print Media's Coverage of Israel" (August 2001).
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Viewpoints are published by the Jerusalem Center for Public
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