February 27, 2004

"The Remnants of Zionism"

I heard a respected leader of a non-Orthodox community point out that Orthodox Jews constitute the majority of those living in the West Bank and Gaza. They also constitute the majority of those opposed to a unilateral withdrawal from these areas. Orthodox Jews, he argued, are the principle obstructionists to any settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. "Is real estate worth more than life?" he asked.

It isn't, but Arabs have stoked the fires of antisemitism to a degree almost comparable to pre-Holocaust days, making the existence of a Jewish state and its historic borders more important to Jewish survival than ever.

Zionism grew out of two disparate roots. Moshe Haas and Rabbi Tzvi Kalisher were its first progenitors. Haas's dream was to settle Jews upon land where they would become agrarian rather than city and townspeople. Which land was not important to him, but he preferred Eretz Israel because of its Jewish past. Rabbi Kalisher saw Israel as a never ending major component of Judaism's sacred teachings. Both lived and created their respective movements in the mid-nineteenth century. Jew hatred in Europe and elsewhere intensified, leading to the creation of political Zionism at the turn of the twentieth century. Jews ultimately concluded that they could not trust their destiny to any country but their own. Many of Europe's Orthodox rabbis were strongly opposed to Zionism but others, inspired by the call to return to Zion, saw it as a prophetic fulfillment and a practical defense against the onslaughts of antisemites. Today's settlers are proud followers of Rabbi Kalisher. Most Orthodox Jews living on the West Bank and Gaza are neither extremists nor fanatics; they are what is left of Zionists in Israel.

After the Holocaust, most of world Jewry said, 'Ein Breira,' there is no alternative. And in 1948, Israel, the Jewish State, was born. On that day, the Arabs, rejecting the United Nations plan for land partition into two states, one Jewish, one Arab, went to war. The Arabs continued to aggressively attack in full-blown wars and wars of attrition. In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was created by the KGB. The Soviet Union's concern had nothing to do with whose land it was, but their support for a revolutionary Arab movement was designed to destroy the Jewish State, which provided the Americans a foothold in the energy rich Middle East and hegemony in that all important region.

I heard this respected leader also say that we should be practical and put an end to old-fashioned ideology. "There is terrorism out there and its malignant cells are metastasizing in every nook and cranny of this world," he said.

I would like to ask him if a settlement of the Palestine-Israel conflict would put an end to al Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency and the Islamist revolutionaries on the march everywhere. He would probably agree that it wouldn't, but he would probably also say that a settlement would bring an element of peace into Israel.

If a division of the land and two states sharing Eretz Israel would bring a genuine peace, it would be worth pursuing, but there's no such realistic hope. The Palestinian insurgency and its ongoing terror against Jews is a major component of a world wide Islamist revolution. These revolutionaries are an integral part of Arafat's Fatah and the openly violent Palestinian groups.

Perhaps some day, Palestinians will take serious note of their revolution's folly and put an end to the use of terror as a means of political achievement. Until then, the Palestinians are the impediment to peace, not the settlers.

On the day that terror ends, all of Israel's citizens will welcome the sacrifice and compromise required of them. The Zionist founders taught the virtue of peace from its beginnings.

Peace is achieved in two divergent ways. The first is by death, the result of unrelenting violence, hate, and falsehood. The second is by respect for life and the moral and physical well-being of each party's people. The settlers are following the paths of Zionist halutzim, the passionate and courageous ideals held by men and women who took a wasteland, the result of Arab-dereliction, and made it an Eden. The settlers are respecting life and well-being. Israel needs them and even more, it needs their Zionism.

Shabbat Shalom