"THE HOMELAND IS IN DANGER": AN OPEN LETTER TO MENAHEM BEGIN
Talmon, J. L.
Last spring the distinguished Israeli historian Jacob Talmon published in the newspaper Haaretz an "Open Letter to Prime Minister Menahem Begin," criticizing the policies of the government...
...I am convinced that the annexation of the territories will not only fail to increase our security but will also weaken our ability to defend ourselves against hostile neighbors and international opposition...
...A religious claim will give a strong impression of hubris, an ambition of mastery, if it tries to subordinate the believers of one religion to those of another...
...Yet, France still demanded that the foreign kings' commitments toward France continue as valid obligations, since these other states had not yet liberated themselves from the monarchical yoke...
...Prime Minister, to draw your attention to the serious structural changes that have occurred during the decades since the Holocaust in the Jewish population centers that gave birth to Zionism...
...Clearly, the PLO has its sadists...
...But every liberation movement that attains independent statehood expresses—by the very act of joining the family of nations—its willingness to accept the rules of the international game by fulfilling two conditions: a readiness to accept international law and proof of its ability to maintain law and order within its own borders regardless of the nature of the regime...
...I am not concerned here with the rights of the Arabs regarding whose past and culture I have little knowledge or interest...
...Naturally, support from abroad only comes once the people themselves have risen in revolt and proved their stubborn resistance...
...If we accept that the State of Israel and its people now live under a state of siege and are completely isolated...
...Many began to make a cult of their past, for this was how they could emphasize their uniqueness...
...Thus the Jews faced a situation of danger precisely when their religious security had substantially weakened and their snobbish feelings of 447 cultural and intellectual superiority over their "boorish neighbors" were on the rise...
...And now our people are divided over the meaning and interpretation of the proposed "autonomy...
...The last word on Otto Bauer's and Karl Renner's Austrian experiment with autonomy was said at Sarajevo— the inauguration of the greatest international catastrophe till that day...
...This should have been its responsibility as the leading superpower of the period...
...All those who are not blinded by zealotry are bound to be very unhappy when they realize the terrible acts that have been committed by Israelis —individually and collectively—sometimes in retaliatory raids, sometimes in protective strikes, and sometimes because we have thought it a mitzvah to take vengeance on the helpless...
...In a talk a few days ago with one of Israel's most talented and important diplomats, we agreed that history would not absolve the United States from the fault of not entering into the arena long before 1973...
...And I am concerned with the quality of the people and culture that make up Israel...
...They resolved to separate religion completely from politics, just as they had once separated religion from science...
...Your concept of autonomy, Mr...
...I have also spoken of the important changes that have occurred in the position of the Arab world, thanks to its near-monopoly of the oil resources, which are so vital to our industrial civilization, and of the declining military clout and spiritual strength of the Western nations who are so close to us in tradition and spirit...
...that the Arabs are implacably resolved to annihilate us, and that we must therefore act accordingly—because we despair of any possibility of peace, or of international guarantees of borders, or of demilitarization arrangements, or of other solutions...
...And there is indeed the possibility that a PLO state might turn into a Soviet satellite...
...Should something fearful happen to American Jewry-despite the calculations of our millenarians who regard anti-Semitism as fuel for Zionism and a supplier of Israel's immigrants—an isolated Israel would not be saved from such a huge conflagration...
...And so they aim to suppress the spirit of pluralism and of skepticism, and to strangle any crtiticism at home or abroad...
...If we are so vulnerable that our entire security depends on a few kilometers of barren hills, what kind of bastion can we possibly be to anyone...
...There are those who say, "But our vital security interests make it imperative that we hold on to our sovereignty over all of the present territories of the Land of Israel...
...It was a response to an invitation to join the Holy Alliance, and it said that England would never undertake any blanket obligations—in this case, to put down rebellions wherever they might occur...
...God Himself, nature, and history divided the Land of Israel before it was ever divided by human decree...
...For this dream was one of the vital and beautiful aspects of Zionism, setting it apart from other national liberation movements...
...Needless to say, world public opinion universally denounces )the current policy as a violation of international law and, indeed, as a unilateral provocation that makes the idea of negotiation seem ridiculous...
...It sounds strange indeed when it comes, as it usually does, from those who never tire of repeating what a big power we are, and how we are the only secure bastion of the U.S...
...Yet, all these accusations, though not groundless, do not explain our condition or advance our cause...
...It seems that the rule of law and order has collapsed and that the government is too feeble and cowardly to implement its own decisions or to withstand the pressures of various interest groups...
...All this is happening while this movement's fifth column within the government succeeds in suppressing the voices of opponents...
...This strikes me as political folly...
...We are also witnessing the heart-breaking spectacle of the Russian "drop-outs"—redeemed from bondage with help secured from the largest superpower— immigrants who seemed to symbolize a miraculous resurrection of the dead...
...For these zealots believe that our courts have no jurisdiction when it comes to faith...
...They come to demonstrate our presence, to display our force—not to plow, to sow, or plant...
...Now, if you apply these ideas to our situation, who can guarantee that the Arabs on our side of the Green Line will not also demand "autonomy"—if it is going to be a permanent condition in the territories...
...Should, heaven forbid, Judea fall a third time, the Jews of America and of the world will have suffered an overwhelming blow...
...This camp believes that only thus will catastrophe be averted...
...rights that, in their present interpretation, are holy neither to the gentiles nor to most Jews...
...This argument from "security" surely must raise doubts in our allies' minds as to our ability to survive at all...
...This fearful wave of anti-Semitism deeply shocked the sensitive, assimilated, European Jews...
...Prime Minister, that we have reached such a point in our history...
...Any talk of the holiness of the land or of geographic sites throws us back to the age of fetishism...
...We must avoid pushing the Arabs into a position where they will feel they have suffered so much humiliation that they might as well use all their strength to die with the Palestinians...
...One of the greatest living Orthodox rabbis in America once told me that he does not know of one authentic holy site in the Land of Israel except for the Wailing Wall...
...I said that as a historian whose diagnosis, like that of a physician, must not be influenced by personal interests, I did not know of any instance where a conflict as complicated and tinted with emotion, irrationality, fears, and feelings of vengeance was ever solved without the involvement of a superpower, alone or in concert with other powers, to offer advice, mediation, and sometimes to impose a solution...
...they try to move borders, to upset the balance of power...
...Despite the usual boast of liberated nations of having achieved freedom solely by their own courage, there is almost no example in history in which a national movement did not require the active aid of at least one great power—whose support flowed from selfinterest, or from historic or ideological sentiments...
...Or is this merely the manifestation of a classically Jewish characteristic, which the Jews may have bequeathed to other monotheistic religions— namely the need to subordinate oneself to an idea, to a vision of perfection, to an ascetic and ritualistic way of life—instead of treating life as it really is, as did the Greeks, for example, who perceived reality as a challenge and sought to extract from life and nature all the possibilities inherent in them, in order to expand the mind and give pleasure to both body and soul...
...And all this is done in the name of preserving the nation's laws—as if the Bedouins were accustomed to living in Holland or Switzerland, as a brutal and arrogant general once said...
...The combination of political subjection, national oppression, and social inferiority is a time bomb...
...Let us admit that politics and political arrangements belong to this lower sphere...
...he believed that "any people without exception would fight against the colonization of their country at the hands of people of a different race who come from another country...
...The days of autonomies in the frail states that were erected on the ruins of the Czarist empire were short, hard-pressed, and without glory...
...It flowered late in the tremendous wave of movements that fought for national freedom after the French Revolution...
...The extremists in Gush Emunim, on the other hand, use religious sanctions in order to justify their activities in the territories...
...What place do Acco, Jenin, Halhul, or Gaza have in Jewish history, compared with Toledo, Vilna, Odessa, and Warsaw...
...Over the centuries and throughout the Diaspora, Jews have prayed, and still pray, for this return, night and day...
...The future of Israel and of American Jewry is interconnected...
...Is it not the way of a sect to remain insistently on the margins of history and to isolate itself from the world...
...There is the grave danger of civil war between Jews and Arabs—and Jews and Jews...
...and is not today's enthusiastic Zionism-by-proxy of millions of Jews in the Diaspora proof of this...
...The Jews were, so to speak, the "last to arrive at the feast" among the movements of national liberation...
...And so the search for identity and the desire to express it led national groups to an exploration of their roots...
...Even the Zionism of Rabbi Kalischer and Rabbi Alkalai was aroused by the wars of liberation that were being fought by the Greeks, the Serbs, the Hungarians, the Romanians, and the Bulgarians...
...I believe this disavowal reopened the Israeli-Arab conflict, after the family of nations had recognized the solution that was reached as a stable and accepted fact of political life, despite the friction, the incidents of terror, and the general bloodletting...
...Prime Minister, the real danger to the existence of the State of Israel 444 lies in continuing the Sisyphean attempt to defeat the Palestinians: whoever cannot see now the grave threat of a binational war is blind...
...In recent years, our status has been that of rebels against the international system...
...It is enough, for example, to recall the periodic ebb and flow in the movements of immigration into the Land of Israel in order to demonstrate that this is so...
...I am not an expert in these matters, but people whose opinion I respect claim that close inspection of these resolutions reveals more flexibility than was generally perceived...
...Modern Zionism was one of the last movements to espouse national liberation...
...Nothing is easier than to win applause for fulminations against the wicked gentiles, the stupidity and selfishness of the nations...
...In the eyes of most of the earth's people— that is to say, the cultures that do not know the Bible, the Covenant made between God and the Jewish people, or even our historic right to the Land of Israel—all this is not binding...
...and if we also accept for a moment that Jewry in the Diaspora is eventually bound to disappear...
...It does, however, inspire opposition if it disregards others' claims and assumes the right to impose its way, or to harm the rights, freedoms, and interests of others...
...but these were not the sparks that lit the great fires of political Zionism...
...And let us keep in mind that this belief engendered strong opposition to the recognition of one dominant language (German) or even of a Verkehrssprathe in the Austro-Hungarian Empire...
...The result is contempt for the courts...
...Therefore, when the age of self-determination had come, this people found itself persecuted, slandered, outcast, and homeless...
...So we won on the battlefield but were not strong enough to force our enemy to make peace with us...
...Is it home rule, with selected clerks performing duties that are essentially controlled by the Israeli government...
...His friend A bba Eban has kindly gone over the English version, which follows the original Hebrew text except for the omission of some opening reflections on the role of the historian and afew details local to the Israeli scene.—Eds...
...Without this force the caravans of history would not be on the move...
...This aspiration captured the imagination of the subjugated nations...
...The Soviet analogy is irrelevant: we have neither the material strength nor the requisite spiritual and moral toughness...
...The same holds true when we contemplate the struggle against a foreign invader and a repressive regime...
...It is the same wretched discrimination, extortion, robbery, fraud, and repression, on the one hand—and agrarian rebellion and military repression, on the other hand...
...My reader will forgive me for being so cruel as to commit to paper what many know but cannot bring themselves to utter: the melancholy truth that the Zionist national liberation movement achieved its goal at the very moment that it lost its standard-bearers...
...History's fuel is not to be found in abstract ideas or utopian desires for adventurism, or in romanticism—but in brutal force that cannot be withstood...
...Others were found to sign that document...
...Without the foundation that is represented by the writings of our prophets, we are nothing but a peculiar band of tribes that has given nothing to humanity except a lot of trouble, and that is now asking to expand at the expense of another people and to subordinate this other people's freedom to its own security needs, real or imaginary, as well as to its self-interest...
...Those who were born and educated there before that catastrophe find it impossible to imagine the Jewish streets of the East and Central European cities that were destroyed, the silence of the shtetlach of the Pale of Settlement, never again to be broken by the sound of prayers coming from the Bet Midrash and the hadarim...
...They were stirred by the concept of human dignity...
...This century has suffered much, and the Jewish people more than most, from similar groups of a "nation's finest," which always claim they are saving their country, in the name of a divine sanction that allows them proudly to trample on the laws of a democratic society and on human morality...
...More than one historian has asked in astonishment why, for instance, Lloyd George did not leave political life at the end of his extraordinary historic mission, or why Churchill insisted on remaining on as prime minister for his final term...
...it also harms our people's unity and alienates them from Judaism and from the State of Israel—for the majority of our people will not agree to go back to ghetto life...
...In the modern age, it is not land that is inherited but the consciousness and will of the people living in it...
...it is the record of interrelationship and objective change--and the presence (or lack) of human wisdom...
...Loyalty to a historic tradition is not expressed in a neurotic dependence on past models...
...So, for all the noise and tumult surrounding the settlements issue, who, really, are the defeatists—and who are the "brave patriots" who know no fear...
...Now, in our country, such corruption is no longer a masochists's bad dream...
...The very important result of the Six-Day War victory was that it appeared to many as a compensation for the martyrdom of the Holocaust, as a sign that the nation had heroically overcome its tragedy...
...Prime Minister, is an anachronism—a device to lull foreign public opinion...
...History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce...
...Is it loyalty to an ideal vision that no enemy, no suffering, no catastrophe will ever overcome...
...Israel, obviously, is surrounded by enemies prepared to drown it in a sea of blood...
...they invite the Jews of the Diaspora to disavow liberal values that have not only made it possible for them to reach positions of unprecedented influence— but values that represent a philosophy to which they are deeply committed...
...The winds around Auschwitz and Treblinka carry away the ashes of two million potential citizens of the State of Israel, people imbued with intense and genuine Zionist sentiment and the firmest Jewish roots...
...then—given the country's present economic strangulation 449 and its moral and spiritual disintegration—it appears that the Six-Day War was one of Nietzsche's "victories that turn into defeat...
...We now are using the rule of force to implement our historic rights...
...Those of us who speak out against the settlements are opposed by your supporters who ask, "Is not settlement the life-blood of Zionism...
...These settlements are more than a desperate attempt to hold onto the territory of our homeland...
...Gone are the Jewish girls who once greeted the coming of spring on the eve of Passover...
...After the Six-Day War, therefore, the Orthodox were much relieved, for now they could argue that the Holocaust had been the "birth pangs of the Messiah," that the Six-Day War victory was the Beginning of Redemption, and the conquest of the territories the finger of God at work—all proof that the vision of renewal and God's promises were being fulfilled...
...Is the River Jordan as wide as the Volga or the Mississippi...
...The chauvinist sectarianism that your government is encouraging (and so the version of East European religious orthodoxy to which it has granted special rights while denying such rights to all other forms of Judaism) not only fails to bring our people closer to Judaism...
...Prime Minister, the policies of your government are turning the State of Israel into an underground sect...
...For all the shame and pain we feel over the harm done to us by our neighbors because of anachronistic perverse policies, our fear should be greater over what these acts will do to us, to the Jewish people, and to our dream of social and moral justice and renaissance...
...This focus on the military has diverted much of our attention from the nation's economic and social problems— which have to be solved before there can be any effective military strength...
...It is an unfair struggle between two nations when one side can rely on military power, and the other must hold on with its bare teeth and fingernails to its impoverished, tired, and land...
...Even in the age of Jewish political rule in the Land of Israel, large portions of the country were either settled by other ethnic groups or controlled by foreign rulers...
...Hardly less alarming is the rampant assimilation of Jews in the Diaspora, only one generation after the Holocaust...
...At that time, the enlightened world agreed to apply unusual principles to the case of a people that had made a unique contribution to humanity, and had suffered persecution as had no other people in history...
...To focus solely on the dangers to security arising from the loss of the territories is a grave demagogic error...
...There was also the evidence that our military superiority was unshakable, that the PLO's terror was bearable, that the Arab population was passive, Egypt had broken loose from Russia, Hussein was liquidating the terrorists, the Arab countries were as usual fighting 439 among themselves, and America was not exerting pressure—on the contrary, it was supplying us with great quantities of aid and weapons...
...Political inequality leads invariably to social and economic inferiority, since the ruling nation, motivated by feelings of tribal solidarity and fear "lest they multiply and 442 become mightier," will try to restrict the growth and power of the subject population, denying it access to office, responsibility, and sensitive positions and, of course, to any activity defined as "subversive...
...Is it our inability to adjust to them and, consequently, a detachment from what Freud called "the reality principle...
...This new policy was a grievous error, and it had no chance of success...
...This process resembles the agrarian wars in Ireland, between colonizing English noblemen and Irish tenant farmers, or Prussia's policy concerning the Polish peasantry within its territory...
...it is a reality, and it is strangling us...
...Pursuing policies that harm the vital interests of other important states—flying in the face of accepted values, of an age—give rise to an opposition that will undercut such political initiatives...
...And Scheidemann resigned...
...Let us also admit that it is permissible, and perhaps even desirable, for the sake of aesthetics and conscience, to pay lip service to lofty principles at the beginning of any agreement—so as to alleviate our conscience and to be able to get down to the necessary compromises and pragmatic agreements...
...But the loss was felt later—once the first exuberance began to subside—about two or three years before the Six-Day War...
...The adherents of this second camp, Mr...
...Does anyone remember the slogan that Sharm el-Sheikh without peace is better than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh...
...And if the enthusiasm of the avant-garde succeeds in moving it a bit, it will be stopped when the power runs out...
...On the contrary, it was the Jewish people's religious life that received new sustenance through these Zionist, and political, developments...
...We witness with horror a massive emigration of our nation's citizens, among them many sabras [native Israelis...
...To do so is to sit deliberately on a volcano...
...for the term "occupation" went out of fashion with the French Revolution and every conqueror since has proclaimed himself a "liberator...
...The question is not a moral one...
...During the "Spring of Nations" of 1848, the Jews were the only national or ethnic #group that did not experience a national awakening...
...The idea of "personal autonomy," which you took over from the Austrian Marxists, was never proposed by them as an end in itself...
...Yet, today we see that the State of Israelis the "Jew among the nations"—isolated, an outcast without legitimacy in the eyes of its enemies, and a nuisance to its friends: its people divided over the all-decisive existential question, its economy on the brink of ruin...
...There will be no alternative to a PLO state, if we continue systematically to ignore the Jordanian option, or other possibilities that many seem to fear more than a PLO victory...
...A while ago, our Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir gave a perfect demonstration of this mentality when he said 438 that our generation was not "entitled" to give up Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip— implying that these territories were the heritage of all generations of Jews, past, present, and future...
...Today's settlers in the territories rely on our army's tanks, helicopters, and planes...
...Yet, has not Sadat given proof that there are other Arabs, too, who for one reason or another are ready to accept our existence...
...Moses Hess was inspired by the vision of the resurrection of Athens and of Rome—which he believed to herald, inevitably, the resurrection of Jerusalem...
...If we don't have the right to settle now, then what gave us the right to do it then...
...But it is a far stretch from this point to the sanctification of political frontiers that have gone through so many changes in the history of all nations and all times...
...And it is now 14 years since our unprecedented victory in the SixDay War, and two years after the historic breakthrough of Sadat's visit to Jerusalem...
...Yet, the state's first years counterbalanced some of this loss...
...England would, instead, deal pragmatically with situations as they came up, and consider each case on its own merits...
...Contemporaries and historians of the 1920s and 1930s who seek to explain the poor quality and lack of imagination of politicians, the cowardly policy of appeasement, and the inability to halt the great economic crisis attribute all this to the absence of the lost generation...
...Who has not heard of revolutions or uprisings that were attempted too soon or too late, before or after a change in the supporting factors inherent in a revolutionary condition, in a crisis, or in a particular international constellation...
...It is doubltful whether the young man from Gush Emunim who made the Elon Moreh appeal had any idea of the Pandora's box he was opening when he argued, crudely but in a seemingly honest manner, that he and his comrades wanted to settle in the place they had chosen, not for reasons of security but because God had commanded the Children of Israel to inherit the Land of Canaan...
...The world is not naive...
...Gone forever are the street debates between Zionists and Marxists...
...at least, not in the beginning...
...Silenced are the youth of the Hashomer Hatzair and the Betar who once sat around campfires that are now extinguished...
...I also would not insist on such solemn declarations as a condition for a dialogue...
...Many emancipated Jews saw the revolution as a sign that the hour had now come for the Jews to give up their unique status of "chosenness...
...Our task here is not to examine its immediate causes, but to try to understand its structural foundations...
...What should a leader do who is unable to shake off his youthful faith, even though in their hearts he and others are doubtful that it can be realized...
...Prime Minister, with all due respect to you as head of the government and as a fellow historian, permit me to make an observation, on the basis of decades of study of the history of nationalism...
...The driving force behind these movements was, and still is, the concept of human dignity, and of the right of every ethnic or national group to freedom and selfexpression...
...When the Allies' peace terms of Versailles were announced in 1919, he solemnly swore in an emotional address before the Reichstag: "This hand will not move to sign this disgraceful document...
...The goal of a return to Zion, of course, had been alive among the Jewish people ever since our exile from the Land of Israel...
...In considering these arguments, we should remember that history is a record of change...
...I have tried to point also to the rise of civilization and peoples who have no ties to the Bible and feel no obligation toward the Jews...
...The non-Orthodox nationalists soon caught this fever...
...The desire to dominate, Mr...
...This kind of Khomeiniism is likely to return us to the days when millions were ready to join the Crusades to slaughter millions of others in order to keep them from going to Hell, in their own way, and to the early militaristic days of Islam when Holy War was declared against non-believers desecrating the name of God and thereby insulting the believers...
...Most of our people either oppose or have strong reservations about the settlements...
...Jabotinsky, in contrast to his students, admitted that if "our faith is deep, so is theirs...
...But this catastrophe was nothing compared to the Holocaust that befell our people during the Second World War, resulting in the elimination of Jewish civilization from Europe...
...It was intended for ethnic groups living outside their "homeland...
...The religion, in a way, even prohibited them from doing so, for the law could be observed and the feelings of longing expressed anywhere in the world...
...And so these zealots speak of "the need of the hour," in order to whip up nationalist feelings and to exploit sources of religious mysticism—to fight, in the spirit of the oldtime Zealots against any form of wicked "Hellenization...
...It surely seemed natural that it would be promised a home, located in the territory with which it was historically identified and where it would live as a normal nation...
...Such settling, it seems to me, is tantamount to conducting a kind of war...
...When an Israeli minister and a former general [Arik Sharon] rebukes the American Jewish leadership for keeping silent during the Holocaust, he creates panic lest Israel is on the brink of destruction...
...After hundreds of thousands had been killed, or had died of hunger and plague, and entire nations had been destroyed, Europe grew tired of religious wars...
...Don't you understand," they replied, "for us, religion is total, and religious commandments and political practice are interdependent...
...it is a source of insecurity and perpetual alarm...
...However ancient, special, noble, and unique our subjective motives may be, the desire, at the end of the 20th century, to dominate and govern a hostile foreign population that differs from us in language, history, culture, religion, consciousness, and national aspirations, as well as in its economic and social structure is like an attempt to revive feudalism...
...The idea is simply not feasible, nor is its realization worth the price—as France learned in Algeria...
...I have referred to the lack of an effective Zionist response from the Diaspora in the form of mass emigration to Israel...
...Prime Minister, in the eyes of the majority of the nation, your allegiance to the faith of your youth, and your conviction of having a historic mission to deliver "the home of our fathers" intact to the coming generations appear more and more as an obsession...
...and this young man was provocatively inviting a Muslim declaration of Jihad and a Vatican pronouncement that since the Jews had rejected Jesus they were no longer the "chosen people" and thus God's promises to Abraham were now invalid...
...it was their burning desire to see the Jewish people in freedom—a member of the family of free nations...
...What is the difference between Degania in 1913 and Eilon Moreh in 1980...
...Yet, at the same time, it was unable to relinquish the territories for Zionist, political, and strategic reasons...
...This "Open Letter" attracted attention in Israel because of its fundamental character and because its author could not be accused of narrow partisan concerns...
...The extent of our Six-Day War victory encouraged this trend...
...The Heavens belong to God, and the Earth is mankind's...
...or that neither the great Arab civilization nor humanity in general would lose anything if a twenty-third Arab state was hot established...
...This is just like Qaddafi of Libya, who dreams of an Islamic Europe and feels an obligation to aid all, including terrorist anarchists, who seek to shake the foundations of Western civilization...
...The attempt to hold onto the captured territories has turned out to be not the sacred mission that will bring about our redemption and the climax of our history—but a trap, whose burden we cannot withstand without corruption and perhaps even collapse...
...In addition I have tried to outline the recent developments in the larger world, such as decolonization and its ideological and political consequences...
...It is quite reasonable to claim that the Jewish religion actually prevented the vision of redemption from being turned into a historical and political concept...
...For commitments or aspirations that exceed one's objective ability to carry them out are a trap...
...The same imperialistic brand of nationalism flooded Europe at the beginning of the 19th century, and everywhere it made hatred of the Jews its emblem...
...Our generation, singled out to be the trustee of this heritage, does not have the "right" to let these sacred lands slip out of our hands...
...These groups believe themselves subject only to their own law and rules...
...Prime Minister, that this attitude is likely to become a selffulfilling prophecy...
...Rebels seek to change things, if necessary by force...
...In short, our latter-day zealots are determined to adopt the doctrines of integralist nationalism whose French prophet, Maurice BarrBs, once defined truth as the angle of sight of the French national interest...
...In such an atmosphere nothing positive can develop, there can be no vitality, no joy in living...
...This now is a fact—for whatever reason...
...Historians remember very well what happened to the Maginot Line, the Siegfried Line, and even the Bar-Lev Line, and how the assurances of the war minister of Napoleon III that the French army was "prepared to the last button" were proven false—or claims that this or that natural barrier would save a nation from destruction...
...This notion stood in sharp contrast to the concept of an "autonomy" that is graciously granted to minorities by the sovereign people—a people that conceives of itself as the sole sovereign...
...but who can guarantee that this will not happen to any of our other Arab neighbors...
...We claim, similarly, that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are not conquered territories and that therefore the restrictions of international law do not apply to us, particularly with regard to settlement, confiscation of land, and so forth, since we consider these lands to have been "liberated...
...The Jewish image suffers as a result of such double-talk that does nothing to enhance our security or honor...
...The Romantic movement of the 19th century gave rise to modern Zionism and the modern idea of a national revival of the Jewish people...
...It made us forget that, in Nietzsche's words, "there are victories that are harder to bear than defeats," and that victory in battle is by no means proof of true and enduring strength, unless it is supported by other components, such as an adequate economic infrastructure, a homogeneous population, appropriate geopolitical factors, favorable world opinion, a network of alliances, political experience, and more...
...Prime Minister: "He hoped that it would bring forth grapes, but it brought forth sour grapes...
...Professor Talmon died this summer...
...This claim, by the way, has a long and respectable history...
...Wars of religion cannot be resolved by compromise, by "give and take a little...
...Prime Minister, view your historic achievement of peace negotiations with Egypt as an ambiguous success, while your supporters, the adherents of the first camp, hope that the Camp David agreements, by putting an end to any threat from Egypt, will grant us a free hand to rule over the occupied territories...
...We all were summoned to build new foundations, and to absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants...
...Every national liberation movement is initially a kind of rebellion against the international order...
...There would be paralyzing despair, breakdown, and a massive departure from Judaism...
...History abounds with examples of such legislative assemblies ending up by declaring their independence...
...This situation of perpetual terror and counterterror, retaliatory raids and protective strikes unleashes aggressive and evil impulses that the rule of law barely manages to control...
...The more time passes, the more polarized become both sides, and the Israeli public, too...
...Giving a minority autonomy makes sense— if it is intended as an interim solution for a specified length of time and as a chance to find out if the two nationalities in question can pass the test of coexistence, and can live together as neighbors, in peace...
...This is not the way a sovereign, law-abiding nation should operate, nor is it the way of a society whose openness, until now, has always been one of its most admirable qualities...
...When this happens here, will we use our soldiers to disband such a legislative assembly, and will we then put its insurgent leaders on trial for treason...
...It is now 33 years after the UN General Assembly's vote to establish a Jewish state and 32 years after the young state's soldiers, in the War of Independence, repulsed the Arab armies that threatened its existence...
...We can also point to endless examples of decent 448 men who were terrorists until they became cured of their frustration and reached positions of responsibility—such as Kenyatta or Mugabe...
...Nor will we find salvation in an "information" campaign, which solely consists of denunciations of the PLO as Nazis—if we do not put forward a constructive plan that is based on reasonable compromise...
...I do tremble at the thought of flag-waving PLO brigades streaming into the occupied territories, firm in their belief that they are taking only the first step toward the complete destruction of the State of Israel...
...One might argue that the Palestinians did not develop a collective consciousness, language, culture, or specific political framework of their own...
...Just as humanity cannot survive in laboratory conditions or sustain itself solely on pure substantiality—so we, too, cannot exist in the realm of purism and sheer elevation...
...The first camp is convinced there is an international conspiracy to create a PLO state that will be controlled by the Russians and will seek to destroy Israel, and therefore it is imperative to speed up and intensify the settlement process and to pursue an uncompromising policy, inspired by "courageous activism...
...The Christian nations, in as much as they still have attachment to the Bible, usually 441 treat the biblical stories (so—we must admit—do most Jews) as allegories produced by primitive tribes who had not yet reached a high level of abstraction...
...Your opponents, however, are fearful that the other parties to this treaty will continue to view this agreement and the proffered autonomy as nothing but a stage on the way toward guaranteeing a separate Palestinian entity...
...The government encourages the growth of extraparliamentary groups who defy the state and seek to impose their will upon it by force, bringing the dream of a renewed Jewish statehood to derision...
...Ironically, we have worked hard to convince ourselves that there is no possibility of compromise...
...Whoever speaks of the need for one people to rule over another for security reasons leads his audience astray...
...In those days, people already distinguished clearly between the sphere of the kingdom of mercy and the eternal sacred values—by which only God, kings, and saints were able to live—and the Vale of Tears where most mortal sinners are bound by laws by which we somehow manage to live...
...They witnessed a great explosion of Jewish energy, intelligence, vigilant tension, and feverish activity...
...Tragically, our victory in the Six-Day War has led our people to a loss of a sense of proportion regarding the strength of the State of Israel, and has shifted too much of our focus upon military matters, away from other significant factors vital to a democratic society...
...The term "historic rights" does not connote a Kushan (certificate of registration), a term that characterizes the special link between the Jewish people and its unique cultural and religious contribution to civilization—the spiritual bond between generations that connects the dispersed people to its ancient origins...
...This has led to the creation of extra-parliamentary groups, which now see themselves as agents of the national destiny and the saviors of their people...
...Indeed, for many, this victory was a testimony to the great change that had taken place in our people—a people that only yesterday had been led like sheep to the slaughter and was now conquering empires...
...We shall never be able to replace them...
...It is expressed in frank acknowledgment, with the necessary flexibility, of new and unexpected situations, while preserving the essential core of that tradition, which may take different forms at different times...
...There is nothing more contemptible and harmful than the use of religious sanctions in a conflict between nations...
...At this very time, in Eastern Europe, after the liberation of the serfs, millions of impoverished peasants and aristocrats flowed into the Jewish towns and cities...
...Between the two world wars, the term "lost generation" was widely used in countries that had fought in the First World War...
...or the Russian revolutionaries' call, "Now or never...
...There are some who argue that the Khartoum resolutions closed all the doors to peace...
...a historian does not ask who were the first settlers, for most of those have since been lost or have migrated...
...Such foolish remarks make it easier for American Jews to understand why Russian immigrants are leaving Israel, and why so many Israelis, too, are emigrating to the U.S...
...And the more Israel increased its weaponry, the more dependent it became on American aid and support...
...I was asked to express my opinion...
...You 450 will agree with me, Mr...
...But by now they have heard the news, and since then the world has not known a moment's peace...
...Or is this perhaps the sign of a tragic inability to live with the fact of the Holocaust and the reality it has left us with...
...it is quite another if behind him stand tanks, planes, missiles, soldiers, and police, ready to use direct or indirect violence...
...and of the entire West in the Middle East...
...0 Translated, from the Hebrew by Arthur H. Samuelson 452...
...I even have my doubts about the Cave of Machpelah," added this rabbi, who refuses to give any support to political rabbis...
...Is it possible that our intransigence could destroy any chance—as it has done in the past, when we were in a position of real strength—of accepting another possible kind of settlement, such as an agreement with Jordan, on the basis of partition...
...I have no doubt that the attempt to rule a million and a quarter Arabs against their will may result in corruption and make our beautiful dreams of national and spiritual renewal seem ridiculous...
...Let us compare, for instance, the wave of immigration in the 1920s with the huge waves of emigration today, during Israel's statehood...
...Resolution 242—succeeded in obtaining recognition as a people...
...What kind of sin would justify such punishment...
...This weakness is promoted by zealots who have lost all sanity and common sense and who receive their funding at the expense of tens of thousands of young people living in poverty, all because everything is dedicated to the pipedream that the settlements will be able to prevent the establishment of a PLO state and stave off the opposition of world opinion...
...But once the consciousness of a `eve" arises in an ethnic group that is in conflict with settlers alien to themselves, those arguments cannot cancel the fact, undesirable as it may be, that there may well occur a headon collision between two national movements...
...The most famous document in England's diplomatic history was written by Castlereagh, the Conservative counterrevolutionary, and not, as was thought, by the Progressive Canning...
...It will not be helpful to continue seeing all the good in ourselves and all the evil in others...
...If we allow evil and aggression and violence to run wild," said JaurBs, "then the whole earth will be corrupted, until it will no longer be fit for socialism...
...You never know what can happen in the Middle East, and since politics cannot long endure inactivity or deadlock, and since the indecisive usually let themselves be dragged after the resolute, the government and the moderates had neither the strength nor the conviction to oppose partisan attempts to establish settlements, spontaneously, or with the support of sympathizers inside the government who provided half-hearted assistance or accepted whatever the settlers did as afait accompli, or acted out of electoral considerations...
...Voltaire is said to have remarked that all men are born equal but that the population of Timbuktu has not yet heard the news...
...In short, is it a compulsive drive that makes us deny our essential human nature...
...It may well be that the most powerful force that can impel individuals, classes, and nations to act in the modern era is the determination to oppose the hereditary humiliation of an inferior position, arising from the subjection of one people by another...
...In our situation today, in contrast to what generations have considered our unique gift to humanity—the idea of the rule of the spirit rather than the rule of force—we are using that rule of force...
...An influential American journalist told me recently about "a dialogue of the deaf and dumb" he had held with members of Gush Emunim who had attempted to persuade him that theirs was a holy war...
...Before him is the example of the Social Democratic leader Philip Scheidemann, the first German chancellor of the Weimar Republic...
...Such claims (as the thinking majority of the country has known all along) are mere rationalizations for the pursuit of other goals...
...Such heralds and prophets of political nationalism as Moses Hess, Leo Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and even Ze'ev [V.] Jabotinsky did not draw their inspiration from religious experience or even from Jewish history...
...Nonetheless, Balfour was convinced that it was right to ignore the protests of 700,000 Arabs in order to rectify an old historic injustice...
...But then, around 1880, there rose up a murderous wave of mass anti-Semitism—ironically, just at the moment when it seemed as if the dream of human rights had triumphed throughout the world...
...They are also destroying the people's respect for its parliamentary institutions, for the democratic process, and for our judicial system and its moral authority...
...Who is not ashamed when confronted with the wretched sight of Bedouins being driven out, having to move on, again and again, from place to place—"for famine was in the land, and there was no pasture for the sheep...
...So it has happened that a government whose leaders were reared on slogans of Jewish pride and honor is now turning our state into an underground movement, using arguments and excuses so blatantly deceitful that they inevitably conjure up in the gentile imagination the figures of the contemptible scheming Jews of traditional anti-Semitic folklore...
...In a debate with Arnold Toynbee, right after the Six-Day War, I spoke in favor of what later became known as the "Jordanian orientation...
...We have already heard from two of your ministers of defense and from some generals that this just is not the case...
...It sustained us through centuries of dispersion...
...Last spring the distinguished Israeli historian Jacob Talmon published in the newspaper Haaretz an "Open Letter to Prime Minister Menahem Begin," criticizing the policies of the government with respect to settlements in the West Bank, expansionist and chauvinistic tendencies, etc...
...scorn for the rule of law and the rights of others—in short, wanton lawlessness in the guise of ardent patriotism...
...History does not stand still or repeat itself exactly...
...They wanted to heal the injuries to Jewish pride, and yearned for the Jewish people hereafter to be spared all humiliation and persecution...
...Conflicting views, frustrations, and feuds are now paralyzing the operation of that Coalition...
...Like the Catholic Church, it viewed nationalism as a serious secular competitor to religion and, to a certain extent, as the sin of hastening redemption, without waiting for the Messiah...
...Their strong will to live and their faith in the coming national and social revival were destroyed by suffering, humiliation, endless horror, and, finally, death...
...This alliance has led to the political isolation of the Jewish state and has succeeded in distorting the image of Israel and its historic and moral significance in world public opinion...
...The second camp believes that the moment has come for us to make peace with our neighbors, and that the effort to expand our borders and to force our rule on the population of the territories will dispel all chances for peace, and create dangers for our country from which there can be no salvation...
...It will be very difficult to prevent the situation from turning into a head-on collision between two peoples in a land that suffers from "agrarian famine...
...There comes a time in the life of a politician when he must weigh whether, in changing circumstances, he will be an asset or an obstacle in the service of his people...
...and settlements in the territories are crucially needed for our defense...
...No matter how frustrating it might be, we cannot expect the international community, whose guiding principle is the right of every nation and tribe to selfdetermination, to treat the Arabs of the Land of Israel, the Palestinians, as a group of bandits who have broken into someone else's home while the owner was away, and are now illegal squatters who must leave this place to make room for the returning owners, or settle for the status of second-class tenants with whatever autonomy the owner, now ruler of the land, deigns to grant them...
...This does not mean that bargaining over borders is impermissible, particularly if such a change will not lead to domination over a foreign population more numerous than it was in the age of feudalism...
...It does not believe the claim that a few trailers on a rocky mountain will block the path of a modern army or deter it...
...Almost every suppressed people then began to struggle for liberation—from the Eskimos to the natives of Papua, from the Basques to the tribes of Baluchistan...
...He refused to believe that they would sell "their country's future" for a mess of pottage...
...And so we no longer can expect the world to look upon our rights as so pressing that they ought to cancel out the rights of the Palestinians to self-determination...
...We Jews have learned in the Middle Ages to treat such declarations more like bargaining chips than obligatory expressions of practical intent...
...We should talk with anyone who is prepared to talk with us and, by doing so, is prepared to recognize our existence and our right to be here, and who is willing to declare so on the eve or in the course of the negotiations...
...Its aim was to supplement and realize territorial autonomy...
...The term referred to the millions of young men who had fallen in the war, but especially to those who 437 came from the elite, whose casualties— because of the unconventional and destructive method of fighting—were disproportionately high...
...On the contrary, these settlements are at present destructive of our vital interests and of our Zionist goals—and especially of peace with our neighbors, which is the precondition for achieving all other goals...
...I have never doubted that we reached a turning point when the government of Israel in the summer or fall of 1967 (right after the Six-Day War) abandoned its declared policy that Israel has no territorial claims and is willing to return all occupied lands in exchange for peace...
...These people, indeed, are saying something that is elementary to the historian: no matter how great the power of ideas or ideology in the shaping of history may be, the progress of history in the end is determined by various forces, and by various kinds of distress...
...Our refusal to treat the Palestinians as a collective entity has diminished Israel's legitimacy in the eyes of the world...
...I am concerned with Israel's security and welfare...
...I remember a meeting initiated by thenForeign Minister Abba Eban in 1969 between senior professors of the Hebrew University and the leadership of the Ministry of Defense...
...I am afraid, Mr...
...For this implies that Israel cannot exist at all...
...Is it an escape into a world of mythological thought patterns and emotions whose classic example may be found in Sabbatianism...
...Prime Minister, you should not regard these meditations as an attempt to defend the creation of a Palestinian or a PLO state...
...It is reasonable to suspect that there were those in the Israeli leadership and public who were relieved when the Khartoum conference created this impression, and when the "telephone call" from Hussein never came...
...Let us keep in mind that those who designed this sort of "autonomy" for the national minorities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire argued, and some believed, that the 443 empire's territory was not the sole possession of the dominant nationality—but that it belonged equally to all the ethnic and national groups that lived within its boundaries...
...It consecrates existing authority and the status quo...
...It is indeed dangerous to argue that the State of Israel is incapable of defending itself without holding onto the captured territories (granted, of course, some minor rectification of some borders will have to be made for authentic reasons of security...
...disregard for governmental decrees...
...Meanwhile, the Palestinians—termed "refugees" in the U.N...
...Your adherents believe that this will lead to the completion of the territorial homeland, that it will grant "personal autonomy" to its Arab residents —confirming Israel's sovereignty and our people's right to settle anywhere within this homeland's borders...
...This is not to say that Zionism lacked faith in God's promises, and in the hope of redemption, or that it did not derive sustenance from prayers that speak of the return to the land of our fathers...
...Do you remember Jean JaurBs' famous answer at the time of the Dreyfus affair to those who saw no reason for socialists trying to save a bourgeois officer from other bourgeois officers...
...Situations are created that are reminiscent of the stand of revolutionary France, which, by proclaiming the principle of the people's sovereignty, denied the obligations taken on earlier by the French kings vis -a-vis other kings at a time when they embodied the sovereignty of their states...
...Some people argue that it was not solely an internal dialectic—but rather the persecution of the Jews that was the principal reason for the rise of Zionism and for the sympathy extended to it by the best of the gentiles...
...In the last two or three years, the State of Israel sometimes has given the impression that it is far from scrupulous in its observance of the first condition, and that it is incapable of fulfilling the second...
...But our modern activists are not the pioneers who built roads where there were none, who outmaneuvered cruel enemies and avoided the danger of annihilation...
...The non-Jew pressed them: "What does the use of tanks and planes, the occupation of territories and political rule, have to do with religion...
...They did not like to speak or think about the Holocaust...
...Could the settlements really prevent the establishment of a PLO state—and how are they to assuage world opinion...
...Among the Arab population, there are signs of an organized rebellion instead of the reconciliation envisaged on the basis of the autonomy plan, which was to supplement our treaty with the largest Arab nation...
...And your opponents are afraid that the differences of opinion on this issue will intensify the conflict between the Arabs and an Israel that is now weaker as a result of its withdrawal from the Sinai and its oil fields...
...These early Zionist leaders were moved to take a more active role in Jewish life by this general awakening of interest in ethnic roots, dignity, and liberation...
...There is also the fact that throughout centuries of wandering, the Jews have been unable—because of historic memories and universal hostility—to strike roots as citizens and, no less important, to create a political entity in any other territory...
...Prime Minister, leads to perpetual fear and mistrust of the 445 subjugated people and creates terrible temptations that are stronger than any subjectively good intentions...
...The Jews, however, enthusiastically greeted the revolution as a victory for the ideal of the brotherhood of nations...
...What is the meaning of that widespread determination to return to where we were in 1939, and to go from there to the farthest reaches of our emotion, as if the ghastly bloodletting had never taken place and Jewish reality and global realities had remained unchanged...
...And this is not the product of a government that enjoys tyranny for its own sake—but of a weak government that pretends to be strong and is forced to camouflage its weakness with trickery...
...The Greeks in the 19th century were perhaps the first to succeed in kindling world opinion against their enemies by the use of a greath myth...
...It is one thing for the believer to remain within the boundaries of debate over passages in his holy books and theological commentaries...
...One of your [former] cabinet ministers [Ezer Weizman], Mr...
...A great many graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were lost in that bloodbath—and so were many of their equivalents in other nations...
...Let us face it, Mr...
...Dear Mr...
...They are a political act and its principal purpose is to determine who will rule or, as the settlers put it, "to show the Arabs who is the boss here...
...The combination of these two trends moved hundreds of thousands of young Jews to join the revolutionary, or nationalist, movements—or to leave their homes and emigrate to America...
...help us whoever can...
...Anyone who has taken a look at the history of the multinational empires of the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs at the end of the 19th century will shake his head at this idea exhumed from the historical junk pile...
...It seems to be an obsession that has no chance of realization and is a source of errors and disasters that are dividing the nation as well as the Coalition that you lead...
...All the bravery and martyrology of the Irish and the Poles, however, did not help them in the 20th century...
...We must be aware, of course, of the alliance between the Communist ideology (now transformed into the ideology of an imperialist power structure) and the national liberation movements...
...And yet, we must use our defensive capability to repel all who threaten our existence and seek to destroy us...
...Silenced are the prayers of lamentation, the women's "Don't cast us away when we have become old, when our strength has left us, do not abandon us," during the Days of Awe...
...Shrewd people realized that before the believers would have a chance to arrive in Heaven, the zealots on all sides would have turned the earth into Hell...
...From this follows the conspiratorial pattern in which these settlements are established, and the way they are fenced in, "for military purposes...
...These people consider themselves destined to operate in the territories without regard for a cowardly government or for our laws...
...Such a sect, however, is also capable of becoming an armed band of guerrillas, fighting with the instruments of modern technology—according to the patterns of a well-known Master Race...
...In our case, we are speaking of a sovereign people that holds on tightly to the ownership of land, to sources of water, to rights to unrestricted settlement— while permitting the national groups to which it has graciously given "autonomy" the right to care for the sewers, to immunize their children, and to maintain elementary schools while unable to determine the content or spirit of what is taught in those schools...
...and it must make them wonder if it is indeed worthwhile to give us the aid we are constantly requesting in order to guarantee our security...
...Since the government, for one reason or another, is unable or afraid to initiate its own settlement policy, an avant-garde of passionate zealots has emerged that proclaims itself the protector of the national destiny...
...Some people who once studied law, and who still respect what they then learned, even though they never practiced the•legal profession, love to make declarations of rights every other day...
...We decided to translate the letter for American readers and gained Professor Talmon's consent...
...The Jewish religion served as a substitute for redemption...
...The rebellious hostility of a subjected population, particularly if it is supported by millions on the other side of the border, neutralizes any degree of security provided by holding on to this hill or that stream, a strait or marsh, in an age of long-range missiles and bombs...
...The doctrines proclaimed by Israel's official spokesmen, or by spokesmen in good standing with the government, are directly opposed, or unacceptable, to the family of nations...
...What has produced this deterioration...
...I nstead of being a nation that is experiencing a renaissance, a nation that is courageous, and proud to be a member of the family of nations, we are manifestly returning to a mentality and a system of actions that rather befit an isolated and Diaspora-bound religious sect...
...Nor do we have the strength to establish the "Iron Wall" that Jabotinsky hoped would somehow force the Arabs to accept our existence without losing their self-respect...
...This option seems more promising and less dangerous than the one you have proposed...
...Prime Minister, and we do not have the power to force it on them...
...Or is it self-rule, based 451 on partition into two autonomous sections, with autonomous authorities in each of them...
...He received the first half of the translation and checked it personally but, alas, the heart condition from which he had suffered for some years became acute and he could not check the second half...
...no great power was prepared to tangle with Britannia, "ruler of the waves," or to risk tampering with the balance of the three great northern powers who regarded the dissection of Poland as basic to their alliances...
...Those Israelis who do not believe that the government's autonomy proposals are acceptable to the Arabs of the world are now asking that you preserve the possibility of reaching a real peace settlement...
...This remark is now relevant to the present analogy that compares "the towers and the stockades" in the Galilee of our founding days with the improvised colonization of today...
...In life, and certainly in political life, we are not interested in narrowly defined rights or principles, but in the conflicts between opposing rights that are in need of compromise, and that require a profound understanding of the prevailing circumstances...
...They ask that you preserve the chance for peace by an agreement on territorial autonomy, or even by agreeing to a Palestinian national home in exchange for effective guarantees and a federation with Jordan and a federal tie to Israel...
...A religious claim is valid when it relates to matters between people and their creator— to prayer, fast, atonement, faith, and ritual...
...Is this an eternal belief that will never falter or waiver...
...International law is usually on the side of the states that are in power...
...So why move...
...I have attempted here, Mr...
...Perhaps it is because such Arabs have concluded that they cannot annihilate us by force, and perhaps because they hope that the State of Israel will destroy itself through its own internal contradictions and its economic weakness, and perhaps because of apathy among Jews in the Diaspora...
...The majority, in fact, recoiled from the idea of total annexation...
...Prime Minister, has already publicly commented that "we are succeeding in making ourselves hateful to the whole world...
...And here we all remember Marx's poignant remark that history has a compulsion to repeat itself—in situations that may seem similar but are in reality radically different...
...I do not believe that the National Unity government and the Labor Alignment had a Machiavellian determination not to budge and not to give up one inch of captured territory...
...Our people now are divided into two camps...
...I regard this disavowal as a fatal error, a denial of the UN resolution on partition arrived at 20 years before that—and of the principle of partition itself...
...It is accepted among historians concerned with nationalism that continuity and the creation of a collective way of life are the foundations of nationhood...
...The seizure or purchase of land, "for public use," proceeds much in the same way...
...There is something repulsive in the kind of cynicism or naivete that claims that settlements are needed to create conditions of coexistence, while everyone knows that for the Arabs each settlement is another sign of dispossession and gradual conquest...
...I remember Zalman Aranne's impassioned cry to the Orthodox representatives in the Knesset: "I will never forgive you for not having produced a second Book of Lamentations after the Holocaust...
...Many among the Orthodox had difficulty accepting the Holocaust within the scheme of Providence and Jewish history, for they could not see the death of more than a million innocent Jewish children as punishment for sins of the whole Jewish people...
...Balfour was very aware of the contradiction between taking away the right of self-determination from the Arabs of Palestine—and doing so in order to grant the Jewish people a national home...
...The world refuses to accept the Revisionist version of Zionism, Mr...
...We have long preferred to disregard this fact...
...to put the Arabs in their place...
...The future of the entire Jewish people is totally dependent on close cooperations between Israel--as a culturecreating, open, and liberal society—and Diaspora Jewry, particularly American Jewry, some of which today is part of the elite of humanity...
...It is hard to believe that any population would agree to this sort of "autonomy," without a legislative assembly of its own, or that such people would settle for a mere "administrative council" subordinate to the executive authority of an alien sovereignty...
...Our generation can point to numerous counterparts of the PLO for acts of terrorism, both near and far...
...Are the mountains of Nablus as high as the Himalayas...
...The only way to bring nations to exist together in our day, ironic and disappointing as it is, is by separating them...
...We invite much trouble when we cling to principles as if they were the word of the Living God and, in doing so, we fall in with the fundamentalist zealots...
...It is no coincidence that Jewish orthodoxy was from the first suspicious of and even hostile to Zionism...
...It is not often that a historic problem of a people reaches so dramatic a point that we can characterize it, without exaggeration, with such slogans as that of the French Revolution's "Our country is in danger...
...Indeed, these zealots consider anyone who opposes them as nothing less than traitors...
...the reliance on Providence, on the Messiah, and on miracles, exempted Jews from acting in the here and now...
...One survivor, former English Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, devotes many heart-rending pages in his memoirs to express his sense of being one of the few survivors out of a large and closely knit fellowship...
...Claims such as those of Gush Emunim sound to the international community much like that biblical passage— "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou, Moon, in the Valley of Ayalon"—would sound in an astronomers' debate...
Vol. 27 • September 1980 • No. 4
