A Durable Peace (7 page)

But in 636, after a brief return of the Byzantines under Her-aclius, the Arabs burst into the land—after having destroyed
the large and prosperous Jewish populations of the Arabian Peninsula
root and branch. The rule of the Byzantines had been harsh for the Jews, but it was under the Arabs that the Jews were finally
reduced to an insignificant minority and ceased to be a national force of any consequence in their own land. The Jews initially
vested their hopes in the “Ishmaelite conquerors” as they called them in contemporary sources, but within a few years these
hopes were dashed as Arab policy became clear. Unlike previous conquerors, the Arabs poured in a steady stream of colonists,
often composed of military battalions and their families, with the intention of permanently Arabizing the land. In order to
execute this policy of armed settlement, the Arabs relied on the regular expropriation of land, houses, and Jewish labor.
In combination with the turmoil introduced into the land by the Arab conquest, these policies finally succeeded in doing what
the might of Rome had not achieved: the uprooting of the Jewish farmer from his soil.
³¹
Thus it was not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from the Jews.

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.