An essay in universal history

12. THE STATE OF ISRAEL

The horrors of the Jewish Holocaust gave a great moral boost to the Zionist cause, and many thousands of survivors after the war decided to emigrate to what was shortly to become the Zionist state of Israel. However, the British, who still controlled the Holy Land under a UN Mandate, had had extreme difficulties in preserving the peace between the Jews and the Arabs, and now were determined to stop this new exodus from Europe into the country. Illegal immigrants were prevented from landing, and were deported – usually to detention camps in Cyprus. The Zionists of course protested against this, and world opinion, appalled at the revelations of the Holocaust, was on the whole on their side.

But the problem went deeper than a simple refugee crisis. During the war, the British and Americans had agreed on a plan to give refuge to displaced Jews – some to their former countries of origin, and very many to prosperous countries around the globe. Thus America under Roosevelt offered to take 100,000 Jews – an offer that was upped to 400,000 in 1947 in a bill put forward by Congressman William G. Stratton. But the Zionists would have none of it. To put displaced Jews anywhere other than Palestine would have endangered the plan of a Jewish state, for it would have eradicated the necessity for such a state. It also meant that there would be less money going from America to Israel – and the Jews there would have to live on remittances for the foreseeable future. So the real interests of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were sacrificed by Jews for the sake of the dream of a Zionist state.¹³⁶
The powerful American Zionist lobby worked together with Zionist terrorism inside Palestine to undermine British resolve. Three future leaders of the Israeli state – David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir – at different times took up arms against the British in order to drive them out of their promised land and open the gates to unrestricted Jewish immigration. In July, 1946 Begin’s Irgun blew up the King David hotel in Jerusalem, and Shamir’s Stern Gang committed even worse atrocities against soldiers lying in their beds. The Zionist state of Israel would be brought into existence by Jewish terrorism against both British and Arabs…
Chaim Weitzmann and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which represented the mass of Palestinian Jewry, denounced the violence. But it worked… For, as Martin Gilbert writes, “the British will to rule had gone: Jewish terror and heightened national aspirations, and Arab determination not to allow a Jewish State to emerge, created a situation where the British Army could no longer maintain control. A severe economic crisis in Britain added to the determination of the government in London not to be saddle with a growing burden, involving extra troops, mounting expenditure, and the anger of the British public that the terrorists and the agitators were not being crushed or even curbed. If India and Burma could be given up, where Britain had been responsible for far greater numbers of people over a much longer period of time, and had been faced with problems on a much larger scale, then so could Palestine be given up. Attlee and his Cabinet decided to hand the problem to the United Nations.
“The British government in London had reached the end of its tether. Throughout the year [1947] there had been killings everywhere in Palestine which shocked both British and Jews… No more than 12,000 of the half million Jews in Palestine were believed to be members of the two terrorist organizations. But 100,000 British soldiers were employed searching for them. The Jewish Agency’s own defence organization, the Hagana, also found itself in a series of confrontations with the British. For their part, British soldiers were frequently called upon to help Jews who were being attacked by Arabs…”¹³⁷
Meanwhile, at the request of the British, the United Nations were working out a plan to partition the land between two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with an international zone in Jerusalem. The Zionists then put into motion “Operation Partition”. Enormous pressure – not excluding bribes and threats – were put on UN member nations to vote “the right way”. Thus “Bernard Baruch was prevailed upon to talk with the French who could not afford to lose interim Marshall Plan aid. Through former Ambassador William Bullitt, the adviser to Presidents passed a message in a similar vein to the Chinese ambassador in Washington.”¹³⁸ On November 29, after many delegates had been “persuaded” to change their votes, thirty-three nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union and the entire Soviet bloc, voted in favour of the plan. Thirteen nations were against, including all the Arab states and Greece, while Britain was among ten states that abstained…
Stalin’s reason for accepting the plan, writes Paul Johnson, “seems to have been that the creation of Israel, which he was advised would be a socialist state, would accelerate the decline of British influence in the Middle East… Thereafter the Soviet and American delegations worked closely together on the timetable of British withdrawal. Nor was this all. When Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948 and President Truman immediately accorded it de facto recognition, Stalin went one better and, less than three days later, gave it recognition de jure. Perhaps most significant of all was the decision of the Czech government, on Stalin’s instructions, to sell the new state arms. An entire airfield was assigned to the task of air-lifting weapons to Tel Aviv.”¹³⁹
If this seems surprising in view of Stalin’s violent turn against supposed Jewish conspiracies in the Soviet Union only a short while later, and the Soviets’ consistent support of the Arabs against Israel in later decades, we should remember the “dialectical” relationship between the two horns of the Jewish Antichrist, Israel and the Soviet Union, since their virtually simultaneous birth in November, 1917. The Bolshevik revolution was created mainly by atheist Jews who cared nothing for Jewish national aspirations. However, Zionist Jews came largely from the Soviet Union and shared its socialist ideals. Not that these East European Jews necessarily loved the Soviet Union – Begin was a survivor of the Gulag and the NKVD’s torture chambers.¹⁴⁰ But the spirit of hatred and revenge, which can exist with equal virulence in a nationalist or internationalist culture, was passed from the Pale of Settlement in the west to the Soviet Union in the north to the State of Israel in the south…
Although the vote had been passed in the Zionists’ favour, the battle was not over. The Arabs indicated that they would invade the land immediately the Jewish state was proclaimed. Nor did Jewish terrorism stop. Thus in April, 1948 a joint Irgun-Stern operation massacred as many as 250 inhabitants of the Arab village of Deir Yassin. Begin crowed: “God, God, Thou hast chosen us for conquest.”
Realizing that partition was unworkable, and would lead to war, as well as having many other consequences incompatible with the interests of the United States (the hostility of the oil-rich sheikhs, the intervention of the Soviet Union in the region), President Truman changed tack and spoke in favour of a temporary UN trusteeship in Palestine, while insisting that he was in favour of partition in the longer term. However, extreme pressure from Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist lobby, combined with worries that he could lose the Jewish vote at the November election, persuaded Truman to change tack again and recognize the Jewish state already on May 14. There was consternation at the United Nations, which was still working out the conditions for the internationalization of Jerusalem, and in the American foreign-policy establishment…
The injustice perpetrated by the partition is made clear in a few statistics. At the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 there had been 600,000 Arabs living in Palestine next to 80,000 Jews.¹⁴¹ Thirty years later, the proportional gap had narrowed but was still large: 1.3 Arabs facing 650,000 Jews. “Under the partition plan,” writes Lilienthal, “56.4 percent of Palestine was given for a Zionist state to people who constituted 33 percent of the population and owned about 5.67 percent of the land… This is the ‘original sin’ which underlies the entire Palestinian conflict…”¹⁴²
The Arabs invaded Israel immediately after her declaration of independence in May, 1948. Nine bloody months later, the Jews emerged victorious. “A truce, supervised by the United Nations, followed (during which a Zionist terrorist murdered the United Nations mediator). In 1949 the Israeli government moved to Jerusalem, a Jewish national capital again for the first time since the days of imperial Rome. Half of the city [the old part] was still occupied by Jordanian forces, but this was almost the least of the problems left to the future. With American and Russian diplomatic support and American private money, Jewish energy and initiative had successfully established a new national state where no basis for one had existed twenty-five years before. Yet the cost was to prove enormous. The disappointment and humiliation of the Arab states assured their continuing hostility to it and therefore opportunities for great power intervention in the future. Moreover, the action of Zionist extremists and the far from conciliatory behavior of Israeli forces in 1948-9 led to an exodus of Arab refugees. Soon there were 750,000 of them in camps in Egypt and Jordan, a social and economic problem, a burden on the world’s conscience, and a potential military and diplomatic weapon for Arab nationalists….”¹⁴³
Many Jewish refugees were driven out from other Arab lands: between May, 1948 and the end of 1967 about 567,000 of them fled to Israel.¹⁴⁴
“Between February and July 1949,” writes Peter Mansfield, “the new UN mediator, the American Ralph Bunche, succeeded in securing separate armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt and the Arab states (except Iraq, which nevertheless withdrew its troops). It was broadly agreed to fix a temporary frontier where the lines had been at the start of the negotiations, while certain border areas were demilitarized. Jerusalem was divided between the Arab east and Jewish west. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian administration.
“No peace treaty was signed. In December 1948 the UN General Assembly appointed a three-member conciliation commission to promote a final settlement and to arrange an international regime for Jerusalem, but all its efforts were frustrated. The Arab states refused to consider a peace treaty unless the Israeli government agreed to accept all Arab refugees wishing to return to Israel. Resolutions demanding that the refugees should be given the option of return or compensation for their property were constantly reaffirmed by the UN General Assembly, and it was on this basis that Israel was admitted to the UN on 11 May 1949. But Israel maintained that the future of the refugees could be discussed only as part of a general settlement. The impasse was complete. Half of the Palestinian Arabs had become refugees. Neither the new state of Israel nor its Arab neighbours could expect even a minimum of security and stability…”¹⁴⁵
*
What kind of state was, and is, the new Zionist state of Israel? Formally speaking, it is a democracy, albeit with minimal rights for the Arabs. In essence, however, it is an apartheid nationalist mini-empire, an “ethnocracy”, with international tentacles and underpinned by the Talmudic Jewish faith…
Paul Johnson has distinguished between four kinds of Jews: observant, assimilationist, Zionist and Non-Jewish Jews (non-nationalist atheists, socialists and Bolsheviks like Trotsky).¹⁴⁶ We can leave aside the assimilationists and Non-Jewish Jews, for whom their Jewishness was a matter of indifference, or even, sometimes, shame. The real question was: in what way did observant, religious Jewry differ from Zionist Jewry?
As we have seen, the leaders of Zionism were almost without exception East European Jews who had imbibed the socialist ideas of the Russian revolutionaries. However, they mostly came from religious families, and their Zionism required the familiar Biblical narrative of the chosenness, exile and return of the Jewish people as a justification for their violent acquisition of the land and refusal to share it on an equal footing with its Arab inhabitants. Whether they really believed in the stories of Abraham, Moses and Joshua is irrelevant (their attitude to them was often imbued with modernist skepticism common to most contemporary Europeans): the fact is that they needed to proclaim them for purely political reasons, and were prepared to make considerable concessions to the rabbis, the leaders of religious Jewry, for that purpose.
We see this especially in the Law of Citizenship, in the determination, as Shlomo Sand writes, of “who would be included among the authorized proprietors of the Jewish state that was being ‘reestablished’ after two thousand years in ‘Israel’s exclusive land’? Would it be anyone who saw himself or herself as a Jew? Or any person who became a Jewish citizen? This complex issue would become one of the main pivots on which identity politics in Israel would revolve.
“To understand this development, we must go back to the eve of the Proclamation of Independence. In 1947 it had already been decided that Jews would not be able to marry non-Jews in the new state. The official reason for this civil segregation – in a society that was predominantly secular – was the unwillingness to create a secular-religious split. In the famous ‘status quo’ letter that David Ben-Gurion, as head of the Jewish Agency, co-signed with leaders of the religious bloc, he undertook, inter alia, to leave the laws of personal status in the new state in the hands of the rabbinate. For reasons of his own, he also supported the religious camp’s firm opposition to a written constitution. Ben-Gurion was an experienced politician, skilled at getting what he wanted.
“In 1953 the political promise to bar civil marriage in Israel was given a legal basis. The law defining the legal status of the rabbinical courts determined that they would exclusive jurisdiction over marriage and divorce of Jews in Israel. By this means, the dominant socialist Zionism harnessed the principles of the traditional rabbinate as an alibi for its fearful imaginary that was terrified of assimilation and ‘mixed marriage’.
“This was the first demonstration of the state’s cynical exploitation of the Jewish religion to accomplish the aims of Zionism. Many scholars who have studied the relations between religion and state in Israel have described them as Jewish nationalism submitting helplessly to the pressures applied by a powerful rabbinical camp and its burdensome theocratic tradition. It is true there were tensions, misunderstandings and clashes between secular and religious sectors in the Zionist movement and later in the State of Israel. But a close examination reveals that nationalism needed the religious pressure, and often invited it in order to carry out its agenda. The late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz was more perceptive than most when he described Israel as a secular state in religious cohabitation. Given the great difficulty of defining a secular Jewish identity, and the highly uncertain boundaries of this impossible entity, it had no choice but to submit to the rabbinical tradition…
“Just as Israel was unable to decide on its territorial borders, it did not manage to draw the boundaries of its national identity. From the start it hesitated to define the membership of the Jewish ethnos. To begin with, the state appeared to accept an open definition that a Jew was any person who saw himself or herself as a Jew. In the first census, held on November 8, 1948, residents were asked to fill out a questionnaire in which they stated their nationality and religion, and these were what served as the basis for civil registration. In this way the young state managed quiety to Judaize many spouses who were not Jews. In 1950, newborn children were registered on a separate page without reference to nationality and religion – but there were to such forms, one in Hebrew and one in Arabic, and whoever filled out a Hebrew form was assumed to be a Jew.
“Also in 1950, Israel’s parliament – the Knesset – passed the Law of Return. This was the first basic law that gave legal force to what the Proclamation of Independence had declared. This law declared: ‘Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an aleh (immigrant)’ unless he ‘(1) is engaged in an activity directed against the Jewish people; or (2) is likely to endanger public health or the authority of the State.’ Then in 1952 came the law that granted automatic citizenship on the basis of the Law of Return.
“Beginning in the late 1940s, the world rightly viewed Israel as a refuge for the persecuted and the displaced. The systematic massacre of the Jews of Europe and the total destruction of the Yiddish-speaking people drew widespread public sympathy for the creation of a state that would be a safe haven for the remnant. In the 1950s, provoked by the Israeli-Arab conflict but also by the rise of authoritarian Arab nationalism, semireligious and not especially tolerant, hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews were driven from their homelands. Not all were able to reach Europe or Canada; some went to Israel, whether or not they wished to go there. The state was gratified and even sought to attract them (though it viewed with unease and contempt the diverse Arab cultures they brought with their scanty belongings). The law that granted the right of immigration to every Jewish refugee who was subject to persecution on account of faith or origin was quite legitimate in these circumstances. Even today such a law would not conflict with basic principles in any liberal democracy, when many of the citizens feel kinship and a common historical destiny with people close to them who suffer discrimination in other countries.
“Yet the Law of Return was not a statute designed to make Israel a safe have for those who were persecuted in the past, present or future because people hated them as Jews. Had the framers of this law wished to do so, they could have placed it on a platform of humanist principle, linking the privilege of asylum to the existence and threat of anti-Semitism. But the Law of Return and the associated Law of Citizenship were direct products of an ethnic nationalist worldview, designed to provide a legal basis for the concept that the State of Israel belongs to the Jews of the world. As Ben-Gurion declared at the start of the parliamentary debate on the Law of Return: ‘This is not a Jewish state only because most of its inhabitants are Jews. It is a state for the Jews wherever they be, and for any Jew who wishes to be here.
“Anyone who was included in ‘the Jewish people’… was a potential citizen of the Jewish state, and their right to settle there was guaranteed by the Law of Return. A members of the ‘Jewish nation’ might be a full citizen with equal rights in some liberal national democracy, might even be the holder of an elected position in it, but Zionist principle held that such a person was destined, or even obliged, to migrate to Israel and become its citizen. Moreover, immigrants could leave Israel immediately after arrival, yet keep their Israeli citizenship for the rest of their lives…”¹⁴⁷
This extraordinary inclusivity in definition was combined with an extraordinary exclusivity that excluded any Jew who embraced any other faith than Talmudism. Thus “in 1970, under pressure from the religious camp, the Law of Return was amended to include, finally, a full and exact definition of who is an authentic member of the people of Israel: ‘A Jew is one who was born to a Jewish mother, or converted to Judaism and does not belong to another religion.’ After twenty-two years of hesitation and questioning, the instrumental link between the rabbinical religion and the essentialist nationalism was now well and truly welded…”¹⁴⁸
*
The State of Israel does not appear to fit into any usual categorization of statehood. It is neither autocratic, nor despotic nor democratic in the ordinary senses of these words. It is both secular and religious at the same time, both globally inclusive of all “Jews” throughout the world yet perversely exclusive of those who have the greatest right to live on its territory. It is nationalist, and yet its nationalism is not defined by territory or blood (much as many Jews would like to define it thus), but by religion. The only remotely similar states, paradoxically, are its fiercest enemies, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. And yet neither the Arab nor the Iranian states have any Law of Return, any truly comparable myth of exile and return and redemption…
For fuller understanding, therefore, it will be worth examining what this single apparent exception to the main development of human history can mean, from the only point of view that would seem capable of comprehending it - the religious-eschatological.
A clue to our search may be found in the Abrahamic Covenant, in the relationship revealed at the very beginning of Jewish history between God, on the one hand, the sons of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, on the other. Isaac was the ancestor of the spiritual Israel, the Church of Christ, and Ishmael the ancestor of the carnal Israel, the people that fights God. Although the spiritual Israel is blessed, while the carnal Israel is accursed, still an important promise is given to the carnal Israel: that it will live in accordance with Abraham’s petition: “Let this Ishmael live before Thee” (Genesis 17.18). This life cannot be spiritual, because that is promised only to the spiritual Israel. So it must be carnal – physical survival and worldly power. At the same time, St. Ambrose admits the possibility that Abraham’s powerful petition could win spiritual life for some of the Jews – but only, of course, if they cease to belong to the carnal Israel and join the spiritual Israel through faith in Christ. For “it is the attribute of the righteous man [Abraham] to intercede even for sinners; therefore, let the Jews believe this too, because Abraham stands surety even for them, provided they will believe…”¹⁴⁹
The promise of physical life and prosperity has certainly been fulfilled in the extraordinary tenacity of the Jewish race, its survival in the face of huge obstacles to the present day, and - since its gradual emancipation from the ghetto in the nineteenth century, - its domination of world politics and business in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Moreover, since the carnal Israel is promised physical life and power, it is no wonder that since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and especially since the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, it has regained power over the land of Israel, driving out most of the Christians in the process, and may well recapture all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, as was promised in the Abrahamic Covenant. But it is important to understand that such a re-conquest, if it takes place, will not be by virtue of the Jews being the chosen people, as they and their Evangelical allies believe, but by virtue of the exact opposite: of their being the accursed people – Ishmael rather than Isaac. ¹⁵⁰ For of the two covenant peoples the people that is carnal is given physical gifts that are appropriate to its carnal desires.
For the truth may be, as an anonymous Russian writer has suggested, “that the very preservation up until now of the Jewish people is a result not of their being ‘chosen’, but as a result of their apostasy”. For, having renounced their birth-right, the Kingdom of God, they have received a “mess of pottage” instead – the promise of physical survival and worldly power. “If the Jews, having repented of the crime committed on Golgotha, would have become Christian, then they would have made up the foundation of a new spiritual nation, the nation of Christians. Would they have begun to strive in this case to preserve their nationality and government? Would they not have dispersed among other nations as the missionaries of Christianity just as the Apostles? Would they not have been strangers in a foreign land, not having a fatherland, like unto Abraham, but in this case with a higher spiritual meaning? All this happened with the Jews, that is, they became wanderers, not in a positive spiritual sense, but due to a curse, that is, not of their own will, but due to the will of chastising Providence since they did not fulfil that which God intended for them. Would they not have been exterminated en masse during persecutions as the main preachers of Christianity? Would they not have been assimilated among other peoples, so that the very name ‘Jew’, ‘Hebrew’, as a national name, would have disappeared and would have only remained in the remembrance of grateful nations as the glorious name of their enlighteners? Yes, and the very Promised Land and Jerusalem were given to the Hebrews not as a worldly fatherland, for which they are now striving, but as a prefiguration of the Heavenly Kingdom and the Heavenly Jerusalem, as a token of which Abraham and through him all the Hebrew nation coming out of Haran, renounced their earthly fatherland. For this reason the very significance of Jerusalem and the idea as a prefigurement would have passed away for the Jews, as soon as the Kingdom of God and the Heavenly Jerusalem would have become obtainable for them and would have become for them, as they are now for us, Christian holy places.” ¹⁵¹
Tragically, however, it was not to be: the Jews remain unconverted to this day. Even many Orthodox Jews believe that the foundation of the Zionist State of Israel was a grave sin. So must the foundation of the State of Israel be necessarily evil – and its crowning glory the enthronement of the Antichrist?...
Before jumping to this conclusion, let us recall Alain Dieckhoff’s interpretation of the thought of the nineteenth-century “Forerunners of Zion”: “In Jewish tradition there was only one true remedy for sin: repentance (teshuva), i.e. explicit renunciation of evil and adoption of behaviour in accordance with the Law. The idea of inner repentance was so essential that it was supposed to have coexisted with the Law before the proclamation on Mount Sinai, and even to have existed before the creation of the world. This was above all of an individual nature in Talmudic literature, but took on a collective dimension from the sixteenth century, under the impetus of the Kabbala of Isaac Luria. After that the return to a life of holiness ensured not only the salvation of the individual soul, but also restored the original fullness of the world. Teshuva was no longer limited solely to the existential level, within the narrow confines of the individual; it also concerned the historic level of the national group, and beyond that the cosmic level of mankind. Alkalai went so far as to consider, differing from the classical idea, that collective repentance must necessarily precede individual repentance. There remained the final question: what did this general teshuva involve?
"It involved physical re-establishment of the Jews in the Land of Israel to recreate the national community. Playing on the double meaning of the word teshuva, which strictly means return, Kalischer stated that collective repentance meant a geographical return to Zion and not, at least not directly, a spiritual return. So Jews who returned to Palestine were not breaking the religious Law, since in the first instance their return was a purely material one. It was only later, when they were gathered in Zion, that by the grace of God the truly supernatural redemption would start, bringing with it the individual repentance of every Jew and union with God..."¹⁵²
In other words, perhaps the return of the carnal Jews to their carnal homeland is a preparation, in God’s plan, a springboard, as it were, for their return to the spiritual Israel, the Church of God…