Why is this important? After all, more than twelve hundred years have passed since this change occurred. Nations come and go, and history moves on. Even if it was the Arabs who finished off the Jewish presence in Palestine, what of it? They conquered the land, and it has become theirs.
In many ways the argument between Jews and Arabs over their respective historic rights to a national home resembles an argument over the rights of an individual owner to his house. If the original owner is tossed out of his home but never relinquishes his right to return and reoccupy the premises, he may press his claim. But suppose a new occupant has fixed up the place and made a home of it while the original claimant is still around but prevented from pressing his claim? In such a case, even if the new occupant has resided there for a considerable period of time and improved the premises, his claim to the place is considered inferior to that of the original owner. Yet if in the meantime no one has set up house and the place has become a shambles, there can be no rival claim, and the original owner is clearly entitled to have his property returned to him.
The two crucial questions to ask about the conflicting Jewish and Arab historical claims to the land are therefore these: First, did the Jews sustain their claim to the land over the centuries? Second, did the Arabs create a unique national claim to the land after the Jews departed?
Clearly, conquest alone does not endow a conqueror with national rights to a particular land. It is the emergence of a separate, distinct people with continuous ties to a defined territory that is at the heart of all national territorial claims. This is the basis of the Jewish claim. And this is why the Arabs, in their efforts to overturn it, are now careful to assert that centuries ago a separate and distinct Arab nation was created in Palestine—the “Palestinians.”
Unlike civil disputes over property rights between individuals, the passage of time alone does not necessarily resolve claims to the ownership of a national home, as we are seeing in the current resurfacing in Eastern Europe of national conflicts going back hundreds of years. Consider the case of the Arabs’ subjugation of Spain in their great expansion. The Arabs conquered Spain in the year 711 and held most of it for centuries. The Spaniards retained only a tiny patch of the mountains in the north, and the entire composition of the country was transformed. The Christians became a minority, the Moslems a majority. By the time the Spaniards began their slow and painful reconquest, Spain had become a different country socially and politically. Seville and Cordova were recovered by the Spaniards after five centuries of Arab rule; the Kingdom of Granada after eight. Yet despite the enormous span of time between the Arab conquest and the restoration of Spanish sovereignty, Spain never ceased to be the Spaniards’ homeland—notwithstanding Moorish Arab attachment to the land and the creation of an impressive Arab civilization there. This is an important reason why no one seriously suggests that the Spaniards who rolled back the Arab tide that had swept over their land committed a “historic wrong.”
What the Spaniards achieved after eight centuries, the Jews achieved after twelve—but the principle is identical. More important are the differences in the manner and circumstances in which the two national restorations were accomplished. The Spaniards reconquered their land with fire and blood; the Jews embarked on a peaceful resettlement, resorting to arms only in self-defense. The Spaniards battled against a Moorish nation that had built one of the great intellectual and cultural centers of mankind there, and they regained a land that had largely been cultivated. What the Jews found when they returned to Palestine was a ruined land, largely unpopulated.
What is common in the cases of Spain and Israel is the continued existence of the people whose country had been conquered, and the persistent aspirations of that people to be reestablished in its national home. The Spaniards, to be sure, retained a corner of their country from which they could begin their restoration, but this merely facilitated the task; it did not create their basic right of recovery.
Against the accepted reasons for Jewish restoration such as these, some sympathizers of the Arabs tried to invent arguments to weaken the Jewish case. The British historian Arnold Toynbee, for example, who resented the Jewish people for not behaving according to his iron laws of history (“fossils,” he believed, do not come back to life), argued that a statute of limitations should be imposed on national claims, just as in civil disputes. If the Arabs were to recover Palestine from the Jews within, say, fifty years of Israel’s establishment, that would be a legitimate reconquest. But if the Jews had taken the land from the Arabs after a longer period, that could not be considered legitimate. While applicable in certain civil cases, statutes of limitations are woefully unsuited for these kinds of national claims. Toynbee’s toying with numbers aside, the mere passage of time cannot render a national claim obsolete. If the claim is historically laid, it disappears only with the disappearance of the claimant. * 32
Here, indeed, is where the case of the Jews differs from that of all other nations. Dispersed for more than a thousand years, they refused to disappear. History is replete with examples of nations that have succumbed to forced dispersion. But in all other cases of exile, the displaced peoples were assimilated over time into other nations, or occupied a new land for themselves that then became their national home. The Jews refused to do either. As individuals, some Jews have assimilated (a process much in evidence in the West today). But as a collective body, the Jews rejected this course. They also rejected the notion of establishing an independent Jewish polity anywhere other than in their historical home. When this idea was offered to them in modern times, they refused Birobidzhan, Argentina, Uganda, even Manchuria as possible alternatives to a permanent Jewish homeland, and insisted on returning to the Land of Israel. In 1903, in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom in Russia, the Zionist movement faced a schism over the question of whether to consider even a temporary home in British East Africa in order to save the lives of Eastern Europe’s Jews. The controversial “Uganda Plan” was later abandoned when the Eastern European Jewish leadership refused even to consider the option, insisting on the Land of Israel as the only possible Jewish home. Perhaps in retrospect one can appreciate Herzl’s rationalist view that a haven, any haven, was needed to save millions of European Jews. But the Jewish people’s attachment to the Jewish land was more powerful, and only its force could ultimately harness the Jewish masses to concerted political action. Herzl tried in vain to explain that he viewed Uganda as a mere way station, not as the final destination for the Jewish people, which could only be the Land of Israel. When Vladimir Jabotinsky voted against Uganda, he admitted that he did not know why. It was “one of those ‘simple’ things which counterbalance thousands of arguments.” 33
My own grandfather, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, was more explicit in explaining why as a young man he resolutely opposed and finally helped defeat the Uganda Plan at the Zionist Congress of 1905. Twenty-five years later, after the relationship between Britain and Zionism had soured, my father asked him if the opposition to Uganda had derived from the belief that the project was impractical and that the British would not see it through. He clearly remembers my grandfather’s reply:
On the contrary. We believed that the British would be faithful to their word. In those days England enjoyed a great reputation among the Jews. But it was precisely because we believed that the project could be carried out that we were all the more opposed to it. For so many centuries the Jewish people had made so many sacrifices for this land, had shed their blood for it, had prayed for a thousand years to return to it, had tied their most intimate hopes to its revival—we considered it inconceivable that we would now betray the generations of Jews who had fought and died for this end. It would have been a terrible moral and emotional collapse. It would have rendered the whole of Jewish history meaningless. We had to oppose it.
Indeed, throughout the centuries, the Jews kept alive the hope of Return to their old homeland. This desire was no mere sentimental impulse, soon to be discarded. Indeed, rather
than diminishing with the passage of time, it got stronger. It contained the essence of Jewish peoplehood, the memory of the Jews’ unique history and struggle, and their desire to rebuild their national and spiritual life in their ancient land now occupied by foreign conquerors—not merely because it was the land of their forefathers but because it was the irreplaceable crucible in which their identity and faith had been forged and could be reforged anew after centuries of formless, helpless wandering.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the idea of the Return in Jewish history and its centrality to the rise of Israel. Yet the fashionable ahistoricism prevalent today assumes that the Holocaust was the main force that propelled Jewish statehood. Undeniably, the Holocaust was a pivotal event not only in Jewish history but in all history. Undeniably, too, it moved many to sympathize with the suffering of the Jews. But it was the ultimate act of destruction, wiping out the millions of Jews whose hearts had been set on Zion, almost obliterating the human basis for a durable Jewish state. It was the culmination of the tragic—and to the founding Zionists, predictable—trajectory of ever-growing calamities of pogrom and expulsion that had afflicted the Jews of England in the 1290s, the Jews of France in the 1390s, the Jews of Spain in the 1490s, the Jews of the Ukraine in the 1640s, the Jews of Russia in the 1880s.
Without the idea of the Return, the Holocaust could have elicited a horrified sympathy but not much more. The addition of millions of Jewish corpses could have spelled only the final death blow to the Jewish people. Had this destruction not been preceded by a millennial yearning for Return and restoration, by a century of Zionist activists, and by the Jews’ tremendous efforts to rebuild and revive a desolate land, the State of Israel would never have come into being. The Jewish remnants would have been scattered even farther afield, and denied a vital center, the Jewish people would have declined into irrelevance and oblivion.
The idea of the Return is therefore an integral part of the secret of Jewish longevity. It was the driving force in the rebirth of Israel, and it is the key to Israel’s future. This dream was preserved intact from antiquity into modern times through the unique nature of Judaism itself. Westerners often assume that Judaism, like Christianity, is only a faith and is therefore lacking in national consciousness. But from its genesis, Judaism comprised both nation and religion, and while it readily accepted converts, such converts not only joined the faith but became “naturalized citizens” of the Jewish nation as well. (As Ruth, one of the most famous converts, tells Naomi: “Your people will be my people.”)
In the Jews’ dispersion, the dual nature of Judaism assumed vital importance. Stripped of their homeland, their government, and their language and dispersed into myriad communities, the Jewish religion became the primary vehicle by which the Jews maintained their national identity and aspirations. Into this vessel they poured their dreams of Return and ingathering in the Land of Israel. The Jewish religion—with its cycle of bitter fast days mourning the destruction of Jerusalem, its thrice-daily supplications to “gather up the exiles from the four corners of the earth,” and its smashing of the glass at every joyous occasion “lest I forget thee, O Jerusalem”—became the repository for their memory of an inspiring past and a hope for a better future in their ancestral home. 34
This concrete attachment of a particular people to a particular place distinguishes Judaism from all other religions. Catholics, for example, do not pray, “Next year in the Vatican.” In other religions, pilgrimages are periodic journeys to holy sites where the faithful can achieve a heightened sense of communion with God. But when in a hundred different lands, century after century, Jews prayed, “Next year in Jerusalem,” they meant something entirely different: not merely an individual’s desire to return to a holy site for prayer, but the wish of an entire people to return and rebuild its life in its own national home, of which Jerusalem was the heart. 35 This powerful longing was so unique that it was sometimes dismissed as the pitiful gasp of a dying race. It was nothing of the kind. The persistent yearning to return was an expression of the very life force of the Jewish people, the idea that held it together, a distilled defiance of its historical fate.
The final undermining of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel was followed by an unbroken centuries-long tradition of intellectual and popular longing for restoration of Jewish sovereignty, most frequently evoked in religious themes. Pick a century at random, and you will find not only wide expression of this Jewish yearning among the common people but moving poetic and philosophic longings penned by virtually every leading man of genius. Thus in the tenth century, the Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon:
May it be your will, O Lord our God, that this era may mark the end of the dispersion for your people the House of Israel, and the time for the termination of our exile and our mourning. 36
In the twelfth century, the great Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, writing of Jerusalem, in Hebrew, from Spain:
O great King’s city, mountain blessed!
My soul is yearning unto thee
From the furthest West.
And who shall grant me, on the wings of eagles,
To rise and seek you through the years,
Until I mingle with your dust beloved
The waters of my tears? 37
Later in the same century, the philosopher Moses Maimonides declared that the return to Israel was the only hope of an end to Jewish suffering at the hands of the Arabs, of whom he writes that “Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.” But he promises,
The future redeemer of our people will… gather our nation, assemble our exiles, [and] redeem us from our degradation. 38
In the thirteenth century, the scholar Nahmanides went further, ruling that the return to live in the Land of Israel was an obligation morally binding on every Jew 39 —a stricture he would dutifully fulfill by coming to the land and helping to rebuild the Jewish community there that had been nearly annihilated during the Crusades.
By the sixteenth century, the idea of a Christian-Jewish alliance taking the land back from the Moslems elicited enthusiasm from many Jews in Italy and some of the Marranos (Christians of Jewish descent) of Portugal. 40 Jewish exiles from Spain rebuilt the Jewish quarter in Hebron, and the Portuguese Jew Don Joseph Nasi rebuilt the city of Tiberias with the permission of the sultan. This wave of return also sparked an unprecedented intellectual and cultural revival in the Galilee city of Safed, which drew between ten thousand and twenty thousand Jewish immigrants by the end of the century. The renowned Rabbi Yehuda Leowe of Prague, known as the Maharal, was no less clear that full-scale Return would have to come:
Exile is a change and departure from the natural order, whereby the Lord situated every nation in the place best suited it…. The place [the Jews] deserved according to the order of existence was to be independent in the Land of Israel. 41
In the seventeenth century among the Jews of Poland, large-scale preparations for the Return began (and a few years later abruptly ended) with the rise and fall of the would-be Jewish “messiah” Shabtai Zevi. Despite this disappointment, the Gaon of Vilna and the Ba’al Shem Tov, the foremost leaders of eighteenth-century European Jewry, both inspired their students to organize groups to come and settle in the land. One of the Gaon of Vilna’s students described the great sage’s insistence that his pupils personally take up the responsibility of realizing the Return:
Who is greater among us in all the recent generations than our teacher, the Gaon of Vilna, who with his impassioned words urged his students to go up to the Land of Israel and to work to ingather the exiles, and who frequently exhorted his students to speed the end of the exile, [and] to bring the redemption closer by means of settling the Land of Israel. Almost every day he would tell us with trembling emotion, that “in Zion and Jerusalem the remnants will see salvation,” and that we should not miss it. Who can describe in words the concern of our teacher when he told us these things in his exalted spirit and with tears in his eyes�
��. 42
Indeed, when the Zionist pioneers began arriving in the Land toward the end of the nineteenth century, they found the small communities, built by the disciples of these great religious figures and by other Jews already on the Land, in Jerusalem comprising the majority of the city’s inhabitants.
Thus, in spurts and trickles, sometimes even in streams, Jews went back to their land throughout the centuries. Some walked the plains of Russia and, after pausing in Damascus or Beirut, entered Palestine from the north. Others sailed a pirate-infested Mediterranean and landed in Jaffa. Once there, they joined the Jews of Hebron, Safed, or Jerusalem who down the ages had kept an uninterrupted vigil over a ruined land. As a consequence, there was no period during which the land was devoid of Jews. (In the villages of Peki’in and Shefar’am in the Galilee, Jews have lived continuously from ancient times until the present.) 43
But a truly large-scale return was not possible until the emergence of modern Zionism in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the traditional longing for Zion on the part of the Jewish multitudes and the scholars of the exile first found practical political expression. Such works as Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem (1862) and Leo Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation (1882) were able to build on ancient feelings to contribute to a belief in the possibility of contemporary action. In the wake of the great anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in 1881, these longings were quickly translated into an emotional proto-Zionist movement for the settlement of Palestine called Hovevei Zion, the “Lovers of Zion,” which in turn fostered the first large-scale immigration to Palestine.
A Durable Peace Page 5