The
news from Jerusalem today on the "nation state" bill was tragic, albeit not unexpected.
Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist Movement, famously said, "If you will it, it is no dream."
Has the dream died?
Theodore Herzl's dream was understandably narrow. He pressed the Zionist movement because he concluded, in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and the pogroms that had been sweeping eastern Europe, that Europe was not a safe place for Jews. And that, indeed, absent having a state of their (our) own, there could be no safety. He was not uniquely wedded to the idea of having the state in the Holy Land. At the time of his death, he was exploring the possibility of placing it in Uganda. A product of Europe, Herzl may well have not seen the humanity of non-European peoples as being equivalent to Europeans; so any place outside of Europe would do, even if it meant displacement of others. Herzl's successors, like David Ben Gurion, did, in fact, recognize the universal humanity of all peoples, which is why the Israeli Declaration of Independence, discussed below, spoke of equal rights for all. When I think of the dream, I think of the dream as expressed by Ben Gurion and his allies.
Herzl died in 1904. Four decades later, it became clear that Herzl's fears were warranted. The truth of the Holocaust confirmed Herzl's worst nightmare.
So, from the point of view of the surviving remnant of European Jewry (and their cousins in North America), the creation of the State of Israel was a necessity.
Sadly, there was a potential fatal contradiction in Israel's creation in 1948: Another people, the Palestinian Arabs, had also been oppressed by colonial powers (first the Ottomans, then the British) and they also had a claim to the land. The Israeli
Declaration of Independence sought to accommodate that reality: "The State of Israel . . . will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel;
it will ensure compete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
The key question for the generation of Ben Gurion was whether Israel could remain true to those founding principles. To a great degree, the State was able to do that in its first two decades, notwithstanding the displacements of the war that followed the 1948 Declaration. But then, in 1967, faced with the imminent threat of military destruction, Israel fought and won the Six Day War. Suddenly, it found itself occupying more than a million Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. I remember, as a college student, fearing that if Israel was not able to divest itself of the newly occupied territories, it eventually would have to chose between being a just democracy and being a Jewish country -- and that it would almost certainly choose the latter to the exclusion of the former.
And then, a decade later, a political faction which advocated annexation of these lands, regardless of the fact that such annexation would require the expulsion or permanent subjugation of those millions, took office. The Begin Administration sought to "create facts" on the West Bank through an aggressive settlement policy. The later Rabin Administration sought to move in a different direction toward a peaceful, two-state solution with the West Bank Palestinians, but the assassination of Rabin in 1995 by an Israeli extremist later resulted in a return to power of the Begin coalition. And the chain of events leading us to this sad day slowly seemed to take on an inevitability.
Jews both in Israel and the Diaspora recognized the terrible challenge. It was, in my view, best expressed by Leonard Fein. Reading the "true story" he "made up" is instructive. I first heard him tell the story at an Americans for Democratic Action Executive Committee meeting in the mid-1980s. I refer to it as the "We Don't Hunt" story. Here is a version published by The Forward in 2008.
https://forward.com/opinion/13385/the-energizing-power-of-a-dreamt-tomorrow-01853/ It is short, and I cannot express it better than he did, so please read it.
More and more, over the years, we (and still I say we) became the hunters. We became like the tribes who conquered and oppressed other tribes. We perpetuated the cycle that has plagued the human race for as long as "civilization" has existed. Maybe this was inevitable. I do not know. But what I do fear is that the humanist dream of Zionism -- that it could establish a Jewish Homeland without oppressing others -- may be dead.
I was born into the Diaspora. I am alive only because my grandparents left Europe for the United States before the Holocaust. I take very seriously the Jewish and American values with which I was raised. Many of those values are under attack in Israel and in the United States. Those values are worth standing up for. Peter Yarrow's
Light One Candle is both an anthem and a reminder:
Light one candle for the Maccabee children
With thanks that their light didn't die
Light one candle for the pain they endured
When their right to exist was denied
Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice
Justice and freedom demand
But light one candle for the wisdom to know
When the peacemaker's time is at hand
Don't let the light go out!
It's lasted for so many years!
Don't let the light go out!
Let it shine through our hope and our tears. (2)
Light one candle for the strength that we need
To never become our own foe
And light one candle for those who are suffering
Pain we learned so long ago
Light one candle for all we believe in
That anger not tear us apart
And light one candle to find us together
With peace as the song in our hearts
Don't let the light go out!
It's lasted for so many years!
Don't let the light go out!
Let it shine through our hope and our tears. (2)
What is the memory that's valued so highly
That we keep it alive in that flame?
What's the commitment to those who have died
That we cry out they've not died in vain?
We have come this far always believing
That justice would somehow prevail
This is the burden, this is the promise
This is why we will not fail!
Don't let the light go out!
Don't let the light go out!
Don't let the light go out!
Songwriters: Peter Yarrow
I do not know from where we will be able to protect the light in the years that come. But we cannot let the light go out.
