Ongoing Necessity To Protect The Jewish People

The need for a homeland where Jews could protect themselves was another factor in establishing the Jewish state. After personally experiencing antisemitism, Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, wrote in his diary in June 1895 that he “recognized the emptiness and futility of efforts to ‘combat antisemitism’” in Europe. “Declamations made in writing or in closed circles do no good whatever; they even have a comical effect.” At one point he thought the press could be mobilized to fight antisemitism, but soon realized this idea to be a “feeble, foolish gesture. Antisemitism has grown and continues to grow—and so do I.” The only solution was for the Jews in the Diaspora to found a Jewish state.

Moses Hess, a Zionist theorist, independently concluded that nothing the Jews would do could change the views of antisemitic Europeans. “For despite the fact that the Jewish people has been living together with these nations for two thousand years, it can never be organically united with them.” Europeans “have considered the existence of the Jews in their midst as nothing other than an anomaly.” Jews “will always remain strangers among the nations which might well emancipate us out of humanitarianism and a feeling of justice but will never, never respect us…”

Antisemitism had taken its toll on the Jews of Europe and Russia, as Victor Jacobson, a member of the Russian-Jewish Scientific Society in Berlin and later a Zionist leader explained in 1883: “The consistent humiliation and slander of the Jews has led us to begin believing these lies.”

Nothing less than “a return to the land of their forefathers,” would be conceivable, insisted Asher Ginzberg (Ahad Ha’am), a leading ideologue of secular cultural Zionism. This “historic bond between the people and the land” meant that “allocating them the most magnificent expanses of farm land in Canada or Argentina will not enhance the strength of the wandering Jew as much as settling on the lowly plain through which the Jordan flows and upon which the Lebanon looks out.”

When a portion of modern Kenya was proposed and debated between 1903 and 1905 as a place to settle the Jews as an alternative to the Land of Israel, a firestorm developed against the idea, ending its feasibility. Without any religious, spiritual or historic ties to eastern Africa, the Jews would not have been motivated to emigrate there notes historian Shmuel Almog.

The systematic destruction of six million Jews by Germany during World War II demonstrated the extent to which Jews were not accepted in their respective countries asserts historian Arthur Hertzberg. They were killed simply because they were Jews. Whether Western civilization would continue to accept the right of Jews and other minorities residing in its midst as distinctive entities with their own group consciousness is a question the Holocaust raised, and one that remains unanswered. Antisemitism and racism are still part of Western culture, and will be so for the foreseeable future.

During the Holocaust, not one state in Western Europe offered to help the Jewish people “defend its interests or even its existence” against the Nazis and their collaborators, declared Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Ambassador at the UN. The same can be said for the behavior of the nations in the East. The inability to protect the Jews’ fundamental rights or compensate them for their suffering emphasized the necessity to establish a separate state.

The hundreds of thousands of homeless Jewish displaced persons (DPs) wandering in Europe seeking sanctuary and a means to earn a living added urgency to finding a solution. Speaking for the Jewish Agency for Palestine at the UN, David Ben-Gurion summed up their predicament when he said there exist “large numbers of homeless Jews for whom there is no other salvation in the future except in their own national home.”

When the issue of allowing the DPs into Palestine was broached, the Arab states argued that they should not be held accountable for the persecution of the Jews in Europe or compelled to alleviate their plight. No one assumed the Arabs would be responsible for solving the problem of the DPs or that Arab countries would be expected to absorb them, Ben-Gurion argued. Homeless and persecuted Jews were being brought to “our own country,” where they would be settled in the Jewish towns and villages of Petach Tikva, Tel-Aviv, Haifa, Rishon le Zion, Jerusalem, Degania, and the Negev. Moshe Shertok (Sharett), another spokesman for the Jewish Agency, added that the Jews were not coming “as guests of anyone.” Every acre of land they would farm had been paid for and “had to be wrested from wilderness and desolation.”

What about those who claim that Jews today are less in danger than in most areas of the world than they are in Israel, and that Israeli policies are a significant element that threatens Jews in the world? To these charges professor of law at the Hebrew University Ruth Gavison had four responses.

 “First, even if it is true that Jews in Israel are not safe, Jews in Israel do not depend for their safety and security on the goodwill of rulers and the societies hosting them. This is a critical element of what the Zionist revolution was all about. Second, the safety of Jews around the world may be related to the existence of Israel in complex ways. While debates and opposition to the policies of Israel may contribute to antisemitism, clearly antisemitism existed before Israel, and having a place of refuge and a state that may use diplomatic and other measures to defend Jews may be significant.

Third, Zionism was also concerned with the quality of Jewish life permitted by life in the Diaspora. Israel is the only country in the world that gives Jews an opportunity to apply Judaism to the totality of their existence, including the political level. Finally, Israel is the only place in the world where a Jew can live in a public culture that is Jewish. Israel is the only place in the world where pressures to assimilate work toward Judaism rather than against it. For those who care about the continuation of Jewish identity and transmitting it, Israel provides the only place in which Jewish identity can flourish in the ways made possible by a Jewish public sphere.”