A Nation Like Ours
GELERNTER, DAVID
A Nation Like Ours Why Americans stand with Israel. BY DAVID GELERNTER A philosopher's job is to show you what you would otherwise miss because it is right in front of your nose, too close to...
...Israel won new territory in wars provoked by its enemies...
...Find out where the United States came from...
...No one has ever had any trouble understanding "Kill the Jews...
...Pretty soon," the Syrian prime minister is said to have notified a British diplomat, "the Arab armies will teach the Jews a lesson they will never forget...
...BY DAVID GELERNTER A philosopher's job is to show you what you would otherwise miss because it is right in front of your nose, too close to focus on...
...That's how America got its homeland, and that is why Israel belongs to the Israelis...
...politics...
...then look up Israel...
...In the years immediately after the First World War, Martin Gilbert writes, less than 10 percent of the land area of Palestine was under cultivation...
...And once they arrived in their new lands, everywhere they looked they saw empty space, and so they naively assumed that there would be room for everybody...
...New England settlers took this commandment personally...
...There is an easier explanation...
...It was based on scrupulous reciprocity and mutual friendship...
...The indigenous Indians and Palestinians confronted America and Israel with roughly similar moral problems David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...they are self-made nations in a world where most nations had nationhood handed to them on a silver platter...
...The Rothschilds were definitely a help, but Jews all over the world chipped in...
...Of course, the Jews had to buy the land on which they settled...
...Gordon wrote that Jewish settlers must have the "moral courage" to approach the Arabs humanely, "even if the other side is not all that is desired...
...Proto-Americans arrived here and proto-Israelis over there uninvited, from Europe, and set about making homes for themselves in the large empty spaces between indigenous settlements...
...Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everybody...
...After the First World War, Turkish Palestine became the British Mandate...
...This they did...
...A Frenchman or Japanese is so far removed from nation-building that he no longer has any moral stake in it...
...The founding settlers of America and of modern Israel were offered victimhood on easy terms, and turned it down cold...
...In 1947, the U.N...
...The Russian civil war was under way, and "Russian Jewry," Ussishkin noted, "is undergoing fresh torrents of murder and rioting...
...What we want, he said, is to "renew our own lives and revive the national and cultural tradition which has come down to us from ancient times...
...They danced in the streets...
...Both were dedicated to education, and determined to found universities...
...The Arabs and Turks were hardly likely to give it away, to Jews least of all...
...Today it is no accident that America and Israel tend to understand each other—even to empathize with one another—not invariably, but on the whole...
...Some set out in obedience to God's will—or, as Americans used to call it, "manifest destiny...
...As the Jewish settlement grew, Jews repeatedly made clear their willingness to share the land with Arabs...
...Jews are powerful and influential in this country...
...In 2000 Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed, once again: two states, side by side...
...Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia attacked the Jewish State at birth...
...In the mid-1600s, William Bradford described the Pilgrims' treaty with the Indians, "which has now continued this twenty-four years...
...In any case, a stand-up philosopher would suggest that they drop it and look at a history book instead...
...But Americans understand them...
...He did not want to be rescued...
...Before the Puritans departed Southampton for America in 1630, the Reverend John Cotton preached them a sermon on II Samuel 7:10—"Moreover I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own and move no more...
...Of course in Palestine, some of the indigenous inhabitants were Jews...
...the energy and struggle that created France or Japan are none of his business...
...Yet the Bible insists that Jews were not the aboriginal inhabitants of the land of Israel...
...There is no injustice...
...Both had faith in the redemptive sanctity of labor on the land—the Jews (if anything) even more than the New Englanders, although the New Englanders were probably greater believers in Israel's God...
...No analogy between Palestinians and American Indians will fly...
...In pre-1917 Ottoman-ruled Palestine, as in colonial New England, settlers from Europe built villages in a harsh, beautiful countryside where they had come to be free...
...they felt the pressure at their backs...
...We conceived the idea and put it into practice bit by bit...
...The U.N.'s finicky, snaking-around partition line created an Israel within which Jews were the majority, but left more than 100,000 Jews out in the cold— Jews who lived in Jerusalem, which was supposed to be internationalized, or in lands assigned to the Arabs...
...Both communities relied on universal military training for self-defense...
...Because we built it...
...True, Jews have lived there in unbroken succession since the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in the year 70...
...Some set out for the territories because of patriotism—to strengthen Israeli security (which, Lord knows, needed strengthening...
...The Jewish National Fund was established to collect money for land purchases in Palestine...
...The JNF's sky-blue collection-boxes became fixtures wherever Jews lived...
...Nowadays, enlightened people find the very idea of America's "manifest destiny" too ludicrous even to sneer at...
...But American and Israeli settlers had to leave Europe...
...For the Jews this wasn't much of a state, and its borders were laughably indefensible...
...Perhaps save the world from Nazi and Japanese tyranny, defeat Soviet communism, and serve as an inspiration to freedom-loving peoples everywhere...
...We don't lessen the significance of those crimes by noting that Indians committed crimes against the settlers too, and crimes against other Indians...
...from the start...
...They started out with roughly the same peaceful intentions towards the indigenous inhabitants...
...The differences are too deep...
...But if no Jew had ever set foot in America, the United States and Israel would tend to understand each other nonetheless—because they are two of a kind...
...proto-Israelis were returning home...
...American settlers (the tragic fact is) committed gross crimes against American Indians...
...Why does the United States belong to Americans...
...Both are pick-up nations created out of ideas, with populations drawn from all over the globe...
...America pushed its borders out deliberately...
...The Jews never have forgotten, and never will...
...Why is there harsh injustice done," Churchill answered, "if people come in and make a livelihood for more, and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves...
...Thus Israel's founders and the Israeli people publicly and explicitly endorsed the idea of Jewish and Arab Palestines side by side...
...Israeli settlers had similar goals...
...But a stand-up philosopher might ask: What would a nation have to do to prove this absurd thesis, that its emergence represented "God's will...
...True, Jews were hounded out of their homes in Europe and the Arab Middle East, had nowhere else to go, and demanded the right to live...
...culture as Bishop Desmond Tutu and certain leading French statesmen, this sympathy merely goes to show the power of American Jews in U.S...
...The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be desert for thousands of years...
...The Arabs fought savagely—if you were wounded, better die than fall into their hands—and when the war was over, some one percent of the Jewish population was dead...
...David Ben-Gurion, later Israel's first prime minister, welcomed British support for Jewish settlement in Palestine—but the Jewish people themselves, he said, "only they, with body and soul, with their strength and capital, must build their National Home and bring about their national redemption...
...Europeans can't conceive of creating a nation in such a manner...
...Americans and Israelis still remember that nations do not create themselves...
...They still are...
...No Arab cultivator need be dispossessed for the Zionists to make substantial land purchases...
...The Arab response had the virtue of simplicity...
...God said to Abraham: Venture forth from your land, and from your birthplace, and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1...
...Some set out to find cheaper, wider-open living spaces...
...In settling America, proto-Americans were venturing forth...
...They have lived them, as Israel is living them today...
...It's never too late for world leaders to learn the facts of life...
...Indeed, their hostility is all the more reason for our humanity...
...But they accepted the plan, joyfully...
...They were more than entitled to all they wanted...
...Both communities were saturated with Scripture...
...He washes his hands of them...
...Israeli settlers are not all alike...
...No killing or exiling of Indians would have been necessary for the settlers to realize their goal, as they laid it out in a ballad in colonial Virginia: "We hope to plant a nation, where none before hath stood...
...But the Jews had not been thrown into the sea...
...Both had a moral seriousness that was fundamentally alien to modern Europe...
...The potential of the land, on which fewer than a million people were living on both sides of the Jordan, was regarded as enormous...
...Would that be a start...
...The rest, whether stony or fertile, was uncultivated...
...In both cases, newly accessible lands were irresistible to a certain segment of the population...
...he only wanted Jews to be allowed to rescue themselves...
...To Bishop Tutu and the French establishment, such sentiments are no doubt mysterious...
...At times, the Turks were hard put to see the point of Jews altogether...
...They had fought their way outward to the "1967 borders...
...It's hard to tell whether the bishop and the French elite are against Jews, or merely against Jews' having opinions...
...In one of Mel Brooks's worst, funniest movies, he played a "stand-up philosopher," and we could use some stand-up philosophy right now...
...In the years before the First World War, A.D...
...The Hebrew Bible, with its guileless, tactless, relentless honesty, is the same sort of PR disaster that modern Israel has become...
...Reasonable people will differ about what it all means—but if there were more philosophers on the scene, we would be less apt to reject ideas without thinking about them...
...The United States has long since acknowledged and deeply (even bitterly) regretted its own crimes...
...If you want a homeland, you must create one...
...To see why, you don't have to be Bishop Tutu or some eminent Frenchman resurrecting tired but ever-popular Nazi theories about the satanically persuasive Jew...
...Why does Israel belong to Israelis...
...They were small minorities at first, far from home and (in many cases) in strikingly unworldly frames of mind...
...proposed to partition British Palestine into a Jewish state plus a new Arab state—an Arab Palestine...
...Have you ever wondered (a stand-up philosopher might ask) why so many Americans feel an instinctive sympathy for Israel that Europeans can't understand...
...The Arab response was a fresh wave of murder and mayhem...
...According to such noted experts on U.S...
...at Passover 1917, all Jews were expelled from Jaffa and Jerusalem...
...In 1937, a British government commission called on Winston Churchill to address the future of Palestine...
...They chose to create new nations out of nothing instead...
...When Menachem Ussishkin addressed the Paris Peace Conference as a Zionist delegate in 1919, Jews had ample grounds for self-pity...
...But he rejected victim-hood...
...They share them...
...would it not be "harsh injustice" to the Arabs, he was asked, if Jews were allowed to enter Palestine at will, become a majority and eventually set up a Jewish state...
...The same Hebrew names rushed like brook-water through both societies...
...You drain swamps, lay out farms, build houses, schools, roads, hospitals, playgrounds, movie theaters, office parks (and don't forget the discount souvenir shops...
...But ultimately, the land of Israel belongs to Israelis for the same reason America belongs to Americans: Because Israelis conceived and built it—and what you create is yours...
...But in other ways there are remarkable similarities between proto-Israeli and proto-American settlers, especially New Englanders...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 35
