Jewish Nationalism

The Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine from 1517 until WWI, relinquishing the sovereignty of the territory to the Allies in the Treaty of Sèvres of August 10, 1920. This enabled the Jews to pursue their historic claim to Palestine contends Dore Gold, historian and former Israeli ambassador. The British did not give Palestine to the Jews; “it was a de jure recognition of a situation that existed de facto,” asserts historian Isiah Friedman. They assumed that the Arabs and Jews would be able to live together in harmony and that the Arabs would profit from this arrangement. But the British acknowledged an overriding issue: The Jews had the more compelling and credible case, and that this was sui generis.

The Jews are the only people in the world who insisted they could not live without their land, even though they had not lived there for 2,000 years, notes former Israeli Ambassador Yaacov Herzog. In a debate with British historian Arnold Toynbee, Herzog asserted that the normal laws of history do not apply in this case, “so long as the world agrees that there is something unique about the Jews in the history of mankind, it cannot deny the right of the Jews to this land.”

In describing the Children of Israel 3,000 years ago, Balaam the Prophet referred to them as “a people that dwells alone.” This is how the Jews are perceived today. Whether this concept suggests privilege with a unique responsibility or an anomaly, which must be refuted and rejected, is “the question of Jewish history.”

Attacks on Israel’s distinctive Jewish character also fail to take into account the many new states established in the last half of the 20th century that do not have deeply rooted identities, such as Syria, Iraq, and many Eastern European states. Jewish nationhood, on the other hand, has existed thousands of years before the creation of most modern nation states Gold adds.

On the most fundamental level, the conflict remains unresolved because the Arabs have never accepted the historic right of the Jewish people to re-establish their sovereignty in their ancestral homeland—a homeland that was never regarded as a national homeland by any other people; a homeland that the Jewish people continually inhabited for the last four millennia asserts Israeli President Chaim Herzog.

The Arab claim to the land is founded on having lived there for a thousand years; the Jews’ is based on their historical connection to the land, present bond and religious faith explains Norman Bentwich, the first Attorney-General of Mandatory Palestine.

Abba Eban points out that when the Jews began immigrating in increasing numbers beginning in 1882, they were returning to their ancient homeland, fleeing persecution and rebuilding their lives in a land that generations of Jews had “immortalized…in its previous era of independence.” Here they were to be safe and able to defend themselves against physical annihilation and spiritual assimilation.

When other civilizations and cultures were destroyed, their identities discarded or lost, they vanished into oblivion notes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Jews refused to abandon their religious and spiritual connection to Jerusalem and attachment to their land. They never stopped affirming their right to the land of Israel. “This continuous, uninterrupted insistence, an intimate ingredient of Jewish consciousness is at the core of Jewish history, a vital element of Jewish faith.”

The concept of exile and return to Zion dominates halakhah (Jewish law). A man was forbidden to coerce his wife to leave Palestine, but could divorce her if she refused to go with him to the land of Israel. An individual purchasing property in Palestine could complete the transaction even on the Sabbath. This is why British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli could say, “The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist, but the eternal law enjoins the children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that persists in celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards.”

Jewish law asserts that if a person loses an item through an act of aggression and never gives up hope of recovering it, neither he nor the one who stole the article can consecrate it for religious use: the one who pilfered the item because it is not his; the owner because he does not have it in his possession. Since the Jewish people were stripped of their land by violence, they never gave up hope of reclaiming it. Foreign occupation was deemed a transitory phenomenon, while the Jewish people had an eternal link to the land.

Zionism was thus “born out of memory, out of ritual and prayer, out of faith in the promise, out of loyalty to the biblical command, never to forget our origin, our link, never to relinquish hope for Zion and Jerusalem.”

“The return to Zion,” observed Heschel, “is an unprecedented drama, an event sui generis for which there is no model, no analogy.” Never before in history “has a nation been restored to its ancient hearth after a lapse of 1,897 years.” For Jews this resurrection was “an accord of a divine promise and a human achievement.”  Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the spiritual leader of Modern Orthodoxy, saw the rebirth of the State of Israel “in a political sense,” as an “almost a supernatural occurrence.”

A team of experts from the Royal Institute of International Affairs, headed by British historian Edward Hallett Carr concluded in 1939 that, “Jewish national feeling [in the Diaspora] could never have remained so strong if Jerusalem had been blotted out and the place of it forgotten….”

Five years before Israel’s War of Independence, theologian Eliezer Berkovits said, “The creation of an autonomous Jewish body corporate is the sine qua non for the regeneration of Jewish religion and culture. Without it, further development of Judaism is impossible; without it Judaism can hardly be saved in the present.”