The Dream of a Jewish State
Introductory Note: This is my first post on substack I am pretty sure I have not set it up correctly. I can’t predict how often I will have something to share. I am starting with an article that editors repeatedly tell me is “strong,” but that they decline to publish. If it comes through legibly, please circulate, and send me your reactions.
When the Lord brought back the captives of Zion, we were like dreamers.
Psalm 126:1
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
T. S. Elliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Today debate about Israel and its policies occurs in the context of what the U.S. calls the “Middle East.” When Zionism started, however, Palestine was an afterthought to a plan for solving the “Jewish question” in Europe by building a state. The dream of Palestine – Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel -- as the land of millennial Jewish salvation, drawn from daily prayers, sacred texts, and rituals repeated yearly with the seasons, filled the role of the territory that such a state required. The European Jews who founded Zionism knew nothing of the history of Palestine since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. Instead of a land with a population and its history, they, like the Europeans who colonized North America, saw a blank space on which to project their dreams.
Hence the epigraph to Theodore Herzl’s 1902 utopian novel, Old-New Land, was: “If you will it, it is no dream.” In that dream of a Jewish Palestine, the Arabs warmly welcomed the Zionists, secular and religious Jews lived in perfect harmony, there was nary an armed man in sight, and the voters of Palestine together handed a resounding defeat to a Jewish supremacist demagogue. In Herzl’s vision, a Jewish Palestine would join the greater project of colonialism in spreading the blessings of civilization throughout the world.
A more truthful epigraph would have been, “Though you will it, it is still a dream.” Now the dreamers are awakening, uncomprehending, to the fury and agony of those their dream erased.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of “Revisionist Zionism” and the direct political ancestor of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, understood that Herzl’s dream was a fantasy. “Zionist colonization [as he forthrightly called it] can proceed and develop only behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach,” he wrote in his 1923 manifesto, the “Iron Wall.” Since at that time Jabotinsky’s audience considered colonialism a pillar of Western civilization rather than a form of pillage and exploitation, he did not need to pretend, as do contemporary apologists, that the Zionist project was not colonialist or that European Jews rather than Palestinian Arabs were “indigenous” to Palestine. For Jabotinsky The iron wall would be built jointly by the British empire and the Zionist movement pursuant to the Mandate for Palestine, a component of the post-World War I colonial carve-up of the former Ottoman Empire.
When the Arabs realize that they will never breach that iron wall, Jabotinsky predicted, they will sue for negotiations over terms of coexistence. Jabotinsky recognized that “there will always be two nations in Palestine,” and he proposed to offer “a guarantee against Arab displacement, or equal rights for Arab citizens, or Arab national integrity.” He set only one condition: “provided the Jews become the majority.”
On December 30, 1947, one month after the U.N. General Assembly had passed resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, David Ben Gurion repeated the condition. He toldthe Histadrut trade union that there were too many Palestinian Arabs in the areas allocated to the Jewish State under the U.N. partition plan: “There can be no stable and strong Jewish State,” he said, “So long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.”[1]
As Ian Lustick pointed out in his requiem for the two-state solution, Paradigm Lost, however:
Neither Jabotinsky nor adherents to his strategy realized that fighting Arabs so often and defeating them so decisively would push Jewish psychology and politics toward more extreme demands for the satisfaction of Zionist objectives. This would reduce the desire for peace agreements and encourage psychological disregard of both the rights and abilities of the Arabs.[2]
Sure enough, nearly a century after Jabotinsky’s manifesto, Israel officially rejected the idea that “there are two nations in Palestine.” The Nation-State Law, passed in March 2018, provides that “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” It identifies the territory of the State as “the Land of Israel ,…, the historical homeland of the Jewish people,” meaning the whole of Palestine, from the river to the sea. Either a two-state solution or agreement on one state with full equality for all citizens would violate that basic law.
The first attempt to make the demographic obstacles to a Jewish state disappear had already started when Ben Gurion spoke to the Histadrut. Inter-communal battles that had begun on November 30, 1947, escalated into a war that led to the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians. However, they began, Israel made the displacements into permanent expulsions by forbidding the refugees’ return, reducing the number of Arabs ruled by Israel from 40 to less than 20 percent of the population.
The Absentee Property Law of 1950 expropriated the refugees’ abandoned property without compensation. These expulsions and expropriations provoked violence against the Jews of the Arab world, followed by the expropriation without compensation of much of their property as well. Together with Israeli efforts to encourage and organize the resulting exodus, that turmoil ultimately brought nearly 800,000 immigrants into the country.
That demographic balance seemed relatively stable until June 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights. In a May 23, 1967, report to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, the CIA had forecast Israel’s military victory based on what it knew of the relative capacities of the Israeli and Arab armies, but many in Israel and beyond experienced it as an unanticipated miracle, a triumph of David over Goliath. That inspiring triumph, however, put Israel back in the decidedly uninspiring situation that Ben Gurion had rejected; once again, the territory ruled by the State of Israel had “a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.”
*****
I witnessed the start of the next stage of denial. I graduated from Akiba Hebrew Academy, a Jewish day school in the Philadelphia suburbs, on June 6, 1967, just as we were learning of Israel’s astonishing victory. Elie Wiesel, the commencement speaker, tearfully evoked Israel’s total isolation, ignoring the American-supplied F-4 Phantom II and A-4 Skyhawk aircraft and the French Mirage III jet fighters with which Israel had already destroyed the air forces of Egypt and Syria by the time he took the podium.
Using my earnings from translating an Israeli history textbook from Hebrew to English, I departed for Israel on Monday, August 7. Two days after my arrival, an Israeli former classmate from Akiba took me to the community center in Omer, a suburb of Beersheba that I did not then know had been built over erased Palestinian villages whose inhabitants had fled to Gaza in 1948.
There we watched “Shisha Yamim la-Netzach” (Six Days to Victory), a film that ended with Israel’s soldiers arriving at the Western (Wailing) Wall, the remains of the temple dedicated by King Herod the Great in 19 B.C.E. We heard IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren blow the shofar (ram’s horn), an ancient clarion of victory, before the assembled throng of soldiers. The film ended with Naomi Shemer’s song, “Jerusalem of Gold,” released in May 1967, which had become a victory anthem. The original song included a verse reminiscent of the Book of Lamentations, erasing all the people who had lived in Jerusalem since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.:
How the cisterns have dried, the marketplace is empty,
And no one frequents the Temple Mount in the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountain winds are howling
And no one descends to the Dead Sea by way of Jericho.
The song was constantly playing on the radio with a new final verse that Shemer added after the war:
We have returned to the cisterns, to the market and to the marketplace --
A ram's horn (shofar) calls out on the Temple Mount in the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountain thousands of suns shine --
We will once again descend to the Dead Sea by way of Jericho!
This was as much of a fantasy as Herzl’s epigraph. The Roman empire that had destroyed the temple first became Christian and then split between West (Rome) and East (Byzantium). Jews settled around the Mediterranean, from where they began to migrate north. East of Palestine Jews remained in Mesopotamia and Persia and established communities along the Silk Route connecting the Mediterranean to China and India. A small remnant continued to live in in Palestine.
In 614 C.E., the Sassanid Persians looted Byzantine-ruled Jerusalem. The Byzantines recaptured the ruined city, but in 637 the Orthodox Patriarch surrendered it to ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph, who had captured the rest of Palestine and Syria from the Byzantines. ‘Umar invited the Jews, whom the Byzantines had prohibited from residing in the city, to return. ‘Umar built a prayer house on the Temple Mount (Harm al-Sharif, the noble sanctuary, in Arabic) that later became the al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third most important shrine. He also built another mosque on Harm al-Sharif, the Dome of the Rock, over the stone where, according to Jewish tradition, Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac when God intervened, and where, according to Muslim tradition, Ibrahim was about to sacrifice Isma’il when God intervened, and from which Muhammad ascended to heaven on his steed. When I visited Jerusalem, That The plating of that mosque’s dome was the only actual gold I saw in Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold”.
A few days later, August 14, was the eve of Tisha be-Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the first and second temples and other calamities that had befallen the Jewish people. On the eve of Tisha be’Av, the radio broadcast services live from the Western Wall. This was the first Tisha be-Av that the Wall and the Temple Mount had returned to Jewish control since 70 C.E. The Book of Lamentations, by tradition the lament of the Prophet Jeremiah over the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, was chanted in cantillations, or nusahot, from all corners of the diaspora. The announcer provided historical background: the wall was built by King Herod the Great. Now we are back.
The messianic expectations sparked by Israel’s capture of Jerusalem and all of the Land of Israel only grew in the subsequent years. Many of those inspired by the millennia of history that these stones had witnessed, a history that they believe reveals the unfolding of God’s plan, refuse to see, cannot see, or support as necessary the means through which Israel, which possesses the most sophisticated surveillance equipment and the strongest military in the Middle East, plus the only nuclear weapons in the region, rules the people who have intruded on Jewish sacred sites by living their lives among them for centuries.
*****
An apartheid system keeps Palestinians in the occupied territories under Israeli rule while denying them citizenship, thereby preserving an 80 percent Jewish supermajority among the citizens of Israel, while politically erasing the 36 percent of Palestine’s population who are non-citizens living under Israeli rule. Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza changed Israel’s occupation administration there from direct to indirect rule, but without removing the occupation, granting Gaza sovereignty, or providing for Palestinian citizenship.
Israel’s apologists respond to the charge of apartheid with rhetorical prestidigitation that makes Palestinians disappear before your very eyes. They ridicule the charge of apartheid by pointing to Palestinian members of Israel’s Knesset (parliament), judiciary, and army, directing attention away from the five million stateless Palestinians of the occupied territories on whom Israel has imposed military rule for 57 years to remnants of Israel’s pre-1967 order. This is misdirection, a trick known to every magician.
Apartheid in the West Bank has been reinforced by armed and increasingly uniformed Jewish settlers. The settlers’ political movements, whose representatives hold the balance of power in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believe that conquering the Land of Israel and disenfranchising its non-Jewish inhabitants are the most important Biblical commandments, whose fulfillment will hasten the coming of the messiah. They consider relinquishing Jewish sovereignty over even a centimeter of the Land of Israel as a violation of those commandments. Even before the Nation-State Law, they denied that non-Jews have any political rights in the Land of Israel and called for their expulsion or worse if they protest.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines apartheid as a system “in which one racial group is deprived of political and civil rights.” But for the fact that the difference between Jews and Arabs is ethnic, national, or religious rather than “racial,” Israel meets the definition. The varying legal statuses of Palestinians ruled by Israel, from non-citizens without rights to second-class citizens with limited rights, mark Israeli apartheid as different from other versions, but it meets the definition, nonetheless.
Apartheid alone, however, is not a permanent solution to the problem of “keeping Israel a stable and strong Jewish state.” Demographic trends will increase the Palestinian share of the population in both pre-1967 Israel and the entire “Land of Israel.” Despite efforts to depict it as something else, apartheid also contradicts Israel’s carefully crafted image as a “Jewish democracy,” indeed “the only democracy in the middle east.”
When Jabotinsky proposed the Iron Wall, the Jewish population of Palestine was 83,794, 11 percent of a total of 757,182, according to the 1922 census conducted by the British mandate. To create the demographic basis for a Jewish National Home, the British mandate for Palestine, passed by the League of Nations in July 1922, provided that the mandatory government “shall facilitate Jewish immigration . . . and facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews who take up permanent residence in Palestine.” The mandate also provided that this should take place “while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced,” but in that very sentence it denied to the population of Palestine the right to enact immigration and naturalization laws, a right that the governments of the U.S. and U.K were then exercising to halt Jewish immigration into their own countries.
This closing off of alternatives to Palestine increased the likelihood that immigration would create an overwhelming Jewish majority there. According to the American Jewish Yearbook of 1926-1927 (5687), at that time nearly two thirds of the world’s Jews, 9.6 million people, lived in Europe. The vast majority lived in countries where they were menaced by antisemitism, with the largest concentrations in: Poland, the USSR (European parts), Romania, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria, for a total of 8.2 million people, 56 percent of the world’s Jews. Many of their co-religionists had already emigrated, mostly to the U.S., where many more would have gone as well, had the U.S. not slammed shut the golden door with the Johnson-Reed immigration act of 1924.
About 365,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine during the interwar period. Their numbers rose rapidly after Hitler came to power in 1933, reaching a peak of over 66,000 in 1936. The Palestinians responded to the growing prospect of a Zionist takeover of Palestine with a general strike in 1936 and then by an armed revolt that lasted until 1939. Unable to suppress the revolt by violence alone, the British decided to restrict Jewish immigration, just when it was most needed, and which the war soon made nearly impossible.
Wrong as they had been about Palestine, Zionists understood better than anyone the mortal danger threatening the nearly 10 million Jews of Europe. Herzl’s dreams about Palestine proved false, but his nightmares about Europe came true beyond his imagination. After the war, the Yishuv and then Israel tried to rescue as many Holocaust survivors as possible, but the Nazis had slaughtered most of the Jews whom the Zionists had expected to immigrate. If European states had continued to persecute the Jews without exterminating them, millions more, unable to storm the gate guarded by Lady Liberty, might have tried to get to Palestine.
Their numbers might have created the overwhelming Jewish majority that both Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky expected. In addition to the nearly 800,000 Jews who immigrated to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa in the 1950s, as many as 1.7 million immigrated from the USSR after 1970 and from its former republics after 1991, but without the missing millions they were still not enough.
The only massive Jewish population remaining outside Israel is in the United States, but despite American Jewish fears of rising antisemitism, the divided and besieged Israel of today cannot attract many Americans. So much have the tables turned that dozens of Israeli families have sought refuge under the protection of the Jewish Community Center of Krakow, Poland, a mere 45-minute drive from Auschwitz.
*****
Israel thought it had taught the Palestinians that they could never breach the iron wall, but on October 7, 2023, Hamas showed that with enough cunning and brutality, there is no wall that cannot be breached. Apartheid behind an iron wall no longer suffices to assure the security of a “strong and stable” Jewish state. A growing minority of Israelis proclaim it, while many more avert their eyes from it, deny it, or oppose it, but the logic of the state’s policy points toward genocide.
Israel will not herd Palestinians into cattle cars that transport them to gas chambers and crematoria, or force entire villages to strip naked and dig mass graves, before being shot and bulldozed into them, but those who have eyes to see and ears to hear know that defeating Hamas and recovering the hostages are hardly the only objectives of the operation in Gaza: Israel is making Gaza uninhabitable. Many killings of civilians reported in detail take place despite the absence of credible evidence of the presence of Hamas fighters. The latest sleight of hand to make the slaughter disappear is the attempt to discredit the casualty figures issued by the “Hamas-led” Gaza ministry of health. Even if the numbers of verified casualties are questionable, no one has yet reckoned the thousands more buried under the rubble of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, universities, libraries, repositories of public records, food and water storage facilities, and anything else that might sustain Palestinians’ survival. Israel claims that the ratio of combat to civilian casualties shows that it is taking extraordinary care to protect civilians, but that argument depends on the unverified figures that Israel gives for “terrorists” killed. Israel identifies “terrorists” based on artificial intelligence and has defined kill zoneswhere any Palestinian is presumed to be a terrorist. Haaretz quoted a reserve officer who said that "As soon as people enter [the kill zones], mainly adult males, orders are to shoot and kill, even if that person is unarmed."
The January 26, 2024, order of the International Court of Justice responding to the application of South Africa, mentions casualty numbers only twice, quoting a report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the submission to the court by South Africa. The reported number of casualties does not figure in the reasoning that led the court to find that there is “a real and imminent risk” of genocide in Gaza. Discrediting numbers that are immaterial to the charge of genocide is another act of misdirection.
The blockade of food, fuel, and energy announced by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, 2023 together with Israel’s March 24, 2024, banning of UNRWA, the main source of humanitarian aid in Gaza for the past 75 years, have created a situation where, according to an April 24 statement by the World Food Program, Gaza “could surpass famine thresholds of food insecurity, malnutrition and mortality in six weeks.” According to WFP director Cindy McCain on May 4, 2024, there is already a “full-blown famine” in Northern Gaza, and it is spreading south.
In the midst of this, on January 28, fourteen members of the Israeli cabinet attended a joyous conferencewhere over a thousand participants celebrated with religious dancing and songs the opportunity to build Israeli settlements in Gaza and orchestrate the “voluntary” transfer of Palestinians out of that territory. Extremist settlers have already started building an “outpost” in Gaza, the first step toward a settlement, without hindrance from the army. They have also accelerated the building of outposts on the West Bank.
Together with evidence of intent cited by the International Court of Justice in its January 24 judgment, the above actions constitute evidence that, to establish a Jewish majority in Palestine, Israel is engaged in the intentional destruction of the at least a part of the Palestinian people, which meets the definition of genocide in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. A prominent Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, warns of the signs of impending genocide, while Amos Goldberg of the Hebrew University, concludes that it is already under way.
Insisting that the Jewish people’s right to self-determination must take the form of an ethno-state in Palestine confronts Israel and its U.S. supporters with a dilemma that neither is willing to admit. With 500,000 armed settlers led by messianic extremists on the West Bank, the two-state solution is little more than an excuse for doing nothing. Israel will continue to exist within its current de facto borders, from the river to the sea. There it can be either Jewish or a democracy. It cannot be both. Its continued existence as a Jewish ethno-state with a majority of Jewish citizens depends on apartheid, genocide, or a combination of the two.
How long such a situation, and the violence it inevitably provokes, will last, depends, unfortunately, above all on the United States, which supplies Israel with military matériel and political support. Israelis and Palestinians are locked in an intimate conflict that they cannot break by themselves. And as long as the United States is deceived by dreams and tricks that seem to make Palestinians disappear, it will be unable to help them either.
[1] According to Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1998, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, “The prospective Jewish state was to have 55 percent of Palestine and a population of approximately 500,000 Jews with an Arab minority of close to 400,000. (Another 100,000 Jews lived in Jerusalem.)” 600,000 Jews including Jerusalem plus 400,000 Arabs gives a total population of 1,000,000; 600,000 was 60 percent of that.
[2] Lustick, Ian S.. Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (p. 23). University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition