February 9, 2001

"Colonialists,  No- We Are Home"

Few Jews and almost all non-Jews understand what Israel, the Jewish state, is about. Arab propagandists persist in referring to Israel as a colonial entity, a residue of foreign colonialism, a people who came to occupy a land which is not theirs. Saeb Erakat, the principle Palestinian negotiator, says that there never was a Temple in Jerusalem; it was probably somewhere in Yemen. In a parting interview, Denis Ross, a Jew, admitted that in all the years of his service as an American intermediary between Israel and the Arabs, what hurt him most as a Jew was Arab denial of the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount. 

What bothers me most is Israel's secular left and their numerous supporters in the United States who have either maliciously or unknowingly given credence to the Arab lie. In my conversations with Jews of divergent stripes, I often hear, "Well, we did take the land from Arabs." Others go even further arguing that the cause of Zionism is a form of contemporary imperialism, the result of pressure placed upon the United States by rich American Jews to impose a western state for a people unwanted by other countries. . . another outrageous lie.

Zionism did not begin with Theodor Herzl. Jews are neither colonialists or a people who decided to occupy a land because they had no other place to go. The Jewish yishuv, settlement in the land of Israel, has been consistent for more than a thousand years. It is not that we have returned after a two thousand year exile. A cursory review of Jewish life in this land, from the days of Roman occupation, will show a continuous Jewish presence there. We really never left, and thus did not return. We are still there as we always will be.

The last and only state to exist upon this soil is a Jewish one. From the fall of the second Jewish commonwealth to the rise of the Jewish state of  Israel, no other indigenous people lived upon this land as a nation. Arabs, basically nomadic ones, came and left, but history has never known a Palestinian government, nation, culture or religion. The current Palestinian Authority is the first Arab government entity to occupy part of the land. 

Zionism, as we know it today, resulted from the vision of two men who lived in the early Nineteenth Century, Moses Hess and Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer. Hess was a German socialist, an avowed follower of Karl Marx who later in life underwent a significant change. Deeply affected by the suffering of his fellow Jews, he wrote Rome and Jerusalem and declared, "A thought which I had stifled forever in my heart is again vividly present with me; the thought of my nationality inseparable from the inheritance of my ancestors, the holy land and the eternal city, the birthplace of belief in the divine unity of life and in the future brotherhood of all men. This thought, buried alive, had for years throbbed in my sealed heart commanding outlet. But I lacked the energy necessary for the transition, from a path apparently so remote from Judaism as mine was to that new path which appeared before me in that hazy distance only in its general outlines." Hess fathered the secular Zionist socialist movement, but even he recognized that Jews must preserve their nationality and that their religion is the means by which this could be accomplished. But he foresaw a time when Jews would establish sovereignty and then form a Sanhedrin when the religion would be modified to modern needs. Clearly, his perspective of Judaism must be argued. But one thing is certain, even Hess saw the religion of the Jews as the link, bond and right to this land. Those who eventually followed the Hess ideology were determined to sever Judaism from their nationalism, and many of them today even deny Jewish nationhood as well, thus bearing the great burden of responsibility as contributors to the Arab myth that Jews are colonialists. Without the religious belief, ties and legal rights to the land, the basis for Israel's historic right, the Jewish state does become an illegitimate occupier. 

On the other hand, Rabbi Kalischer inspired and stirred an existing love for Zion. . .a Torah Gaon, genius, whose monumental works reveal extraordinary Torah erudition and creativity. A man of unswerving piety, he firmly believed that the hour of Messianic redemption would be brought when Jews returned to the land they really never left. Kalischer's followers came from different parts of Europe and joined existing communities and built new ones upon unoccupied land: Petach Tikva, Nes Tziona, Rishon Letzion, etc. Kalischer did not parochialize his passion for rebuilding Jewish life in the land. His support extended to all who lived in Israel, especially the sick and hungry Jews in existing communities. 

From Moshe Ben Nachman to the Gaon of Vilna, a period of seven hundred years and thereafter, Jews came at different times to occupy their homes upon the land they never surrendered. 

Israel is not the result of the homelessness of the Jews after the Holocaust. This greatest of all human tragedies gave impetus to an historic movement and idea. Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisroel is as old as the Torah which commanded "And thou shall dwell therein." Moshe Hess himself learned that Judaism is the soul and spirit of our people and its right to the land whose deed is etched for posterity in Torah. It was Kalischer, more than anyone else, whose Zionism was a major component in the ultimate Torah theology, who gives credence to our claims to that land. Our Arab neighbors will accept Israel as a fact and discover the folly of their false propaganda when all Jews promulgate the truth. Israel as a state/nation is an old historic fact, and unlike the British colonialists, the Ottoman occupiers and the Islamic conquerors, all of whom who have left, Jews will never leave because we are home. 

"For G-d will save Zion, and will build the cities of Yehuda: that they may dwell there, and have it in possession. The seed also of his servants shall inherit it: and they that love his name shall dwell there." (Tehillim 69: 36 & 37)

Shabbat Shalom