The Zionist Dream is Becoming a Nightmare

By Jerome Slater, Tikkun. Posted January 24, 2007.

Zionism's drive to create a state for the Jewish people was designed to serve two purposes. The most fundamental of them was to provide a refuge that would ensure the well-being and security of the Jewish people, wherever they were endangered by the ever-recurring historical cycles of murderous global anti-Semitism -- most recently, of course, the Holocaust. Beyond that, the Jewish state of Israel was to be a moral exemplar for all mankind, "a light unto the nations," the model of the kind of state that a liberal, well educated, sophisticated, and morally sensitive people -- "the people of the Book" -- could create.

The Zionist dream is becoming a nightmare. There is no place in the world where the Jewish people are more insecure than in Israel, in part, of course, because of the continuation of anti-Semitism, especially in the Islamic world, but also because of the policies and behavior of the Jewish state. As for its role of moral exemplar, today defenders of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians don't even bother to claim a higher morality; rather, they wish Israel to be judged as an "ordinary" state and typically complain bitterly that the West has a double standard, condemning Israel's human rights record but minimizing the even worse record of typical Arab autocracies. What a defense -- it's a long way from "a light unto the nations" to "better than Syria."

Zionism's "original sin" (in the language of many Israeli critics) was the political dispossession of the Arab peoples of Palestine, who had a more compelling historical case for political sovereignty over Palestine than did the Jews. True, Palestine had been the original Biblical homeland for the Jews, before the Romans had expelled them two thousand years earlier. But it hardly follows that this history gives the Jews an inherent right to the land in perpetuity, particularly in light of the incontestable fact that for thirteen hundred consecutive years the area had been largely inhabited by Arabs, and also because religious and historical claims to the land by both Muslims and Christians are no less powerful than those made by Jews.

Thus, the religious argument for Jewish sovereignty over Palestine is unpersuasive, and the argument based on previous possession of the land is even more so.

There is no place on earth that hasn't at one time or another "belonged" to a different people than its current inhabitants, and no place other than Palestine where it even occurs to anyone to argue that the passage of two thousand years is irrelevant to judging current land rights. Far worse, by blinding the Israelis -- and their equally unseeing supporters among diaspora Jews, especially in the United States -- to the reality of the conflict, these childish arguments have had devastating consequences for the Israelis and the Palestinians alike.

The tragedy is that these deeply flawed arguments for privileging Jewish claims to Palestine over those of its indigenous inhabitants were so unnecessary because by the early 1940s there was one incontestably good -- and sufficient -- argument. After the Holocaust, it was clear to people of good will everywhere that the creation of a Jewish state was now morally imperative, and that there was no practical place to put such a state other than in Palestine. True, this would create an injustice for the Palestinians, but one that could be mitigated by dividing the land of Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs. Tanya Reinhart puts it this way: "As an Israeli, I grew up believing that this primal sin our state was founded on might be forgiven one day, because the founders' generation was driven by the faith that this was the only way to save the Jewish people from the danger of another holocaust. But it didn't stop there."

Everyone knows, of course, that the Palestinians -- insisting on holding 100 percent of the land for themselves, regardless of the consequences for world Jewry -- refused to accept the UN's partition plan of 1947. What is not nearly so well known, however, is that Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, and most of the rest of the Zionist leadership also never truly accepted partition. Rather, they regarded their agreement to the UN plan as merely a tactical necessity, one that would later be reversed when Israel became militarily strong enough to resume its drive for Jewish sovereignty over all of the Biblical land of Palestine. And so they did, and so -- as Tanya Reinhart argues -- Israel continues to do today, in an only somewhat modified manner.

Thus, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no longer a continuation of an historically unavoidable "Original Sin"; rather,it has become an avoidable, ongoing, and ever-worsening sin. Avoidable because there was a reasonable chance that the conflict might have been resolved long ago, had the Israelis acknowledged the inevitable harms done to the Palestinians by the creation of Israel as well as the subsequent expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages, and resolved to do everything possible to make up for these injustices in any manner possible, short of abandoning the Jewish state in one part of the land of Palestine. Israel's failure to acknowledge its responsibilities and moral obligations to the Palestinians has turned a tragedy into a crime.

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Jerome Slater is University Research Scholar, SUNY/Buffalo