President Barack Obama received a lot of flack from the Israeli right (and from nobody else in the world), when he said that the Jews' claim to a state rested on their suffering, which culminated in the Holocaust. Did Zionism start with the Holocaust, asked the critics? Wasn't it as old as Abraham? Shouldn't the right of the Jews to the the Land of Israel derive from historical rights?
Not so, according to Barack Obama.
And guess what ideological founder of the Israeli right agrees with him?
In a highly interesting op-ed in today's Haaretz, Israeli philosopher Chaim Gans points out that Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, before the Peel Commission, argued the Jewish claim to settlement on both banks of the Jordan River not by appealing to historical rights, but by arguing that Jews needed to be rescued from extermination.
Gans writes:
The U.S. president and his administration are convinced that settlements are illegitimate, and they are right.
Moshe Arens and the right wing in general believe that the settlements are legitimate because the Jews' historic right to the Land of Israel serves as the basis for the right to exercise sovereignty over all the land. Yet even Arens' ideological forefather, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, did not think so. As Prof. Gideon Shimoni has noted, Jabotinsky wrote that if the Jews felt they had enough land, they wouldn't need to rely on historic rights.
During his testimony to the Peel Commission, Jabotinsky rationalized the necessity for a Jewish homeland on both banks of the Jordan River not by citing historic rights, but by the need to rescue Europe's Jews from extermination (while taking into account the population density that would have resulted in the late 1930s in relation to the number of Jews in Europe).
Gans continues:
The Jews' historic right justified their choice of the Land of Israel as the place to realize their self-determination. But that right has never justified Jewish sovereignty over all the Land of Israel. The Zionist movement accepted this truth at every important stage of its history. After the persecution of the Jews reached its peak in the 1940s, Zionism had the justification to actualize its right to self-determination immediately. It is no wonder then that Israel's attempt to turn this historic right into the basis for demands more than 60 years after the persecution of the Jews - all while continuing its cruelty and abuse of the Palestinians - endangers both world peace and Israel's moral standing.
Arens' claim that "the right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria is a basic principle not subject to negotiations" has only managed to persuade the Israeli right, which has also misinterpreted the views of its spiritual leader. But it fails to convince other Israelis, Obama and the world. From Israel's standpoint, this view not only endangers the future, but also the past.
1 comment:
I am no historian and have no access to all of Jabotinsky's statements, but I think it is obvious that Jabotinsky's testimony to the Peel Commission on the basis of the mortal need of the Jewish people for the territory does not mean that he thought the Jewish people did not have a historical right to the Land as well. Given the events that unfolded, which Jabotinsky was one of the few to predict (in one article he wrote "D-E-S-T-R-U-C-T-I-O-N" and told Jews to learn this word well), need the reasons for a focus on Jewish physical necessity really be pointed out?
In other public statements Jabotinsky interprets the Palestine Mandate's command to Britain to establish the Jewish National Home (what all understood to ultimately mean a state) in Palestine as meaning in all of Palestine, just as one says the government in Russia as meaning the government of all of Russia. Can it seriously be argued that in his argument Jabotinsky did not also believe in the basis for the Mandate's call to establish the Jewish National Home in all of Palestine - the legal recognition given to the historical connection of the Jewish people to Palestine?
According to Gans, Jabotinsky who time and again argued for the Jewish claim to Palestine on both sides of the Jordan believed the Palestine Mandate secured by international law the Jewish right to Palestine, but did so on faulty grounds. Gans' evidence for this is merely a selection of Jabotinsky's testimony which focuses on the plight of Jewry.
Must one really spend the time on such trivial claims? I have already wasted too much time on it.
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