Friday, May 12, 2023
From Ian:
Israel at 75: A Conversation
Israel at 75: A Conversation
by Liel Leibovitz, John Podhoretz, Dan Senor, Ben Shapiro, Meir Y. Soloveichik and Bret StephensDeclaring Independence, 75 Years Later
This conversation took place over Zoom on April 27, 2023. Liel Leibovitz is a columnist for Tablet and wrote last month’s cover article, “The Return of Paganism.” John Podhoretz is the editor of COMMENTARY. Dan Senor is a member of COMMENTARY’s board of directors and the co-author of Start-Up Nation. Ben Shapiro is the author of The Right Side of History and host of The Ben Shapiro Show. Meir Y. Soloveichik is a rabbi and academic who writes the Jewish Commentary column in this magazine. Bret Stephens is a contributing editor to COMMENTARY and a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the New York Times.
JOHN PODHORETZ: In 1948, the Jewish population of Palestine—just as it was about to become Israel—was 716,000. It is now 7.1 million, a tenfold increase, 75 years later. This very radical experiment that under almost preposterous circumstances, and horrible circumstances, was undertaken. Other experiments in the creation of new nations had taken place, of course, in the wake of World War I, and proved illusory or weak or incredibly destabilizing. The other great incepted nation of the 20th century was the Soviet Union. It lasted 74 years. Israel has made it to 75. Why did this experiment in nation-building succeed?
Meir Soloveichik: I can answer that question with Jeremiah 16:14: “Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; But, The Lord liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers.”
What Jeremiah was predicting is that there would come a time when the Jewish ingathering will be so beyond questioning that it will be seen as a providential miracle, or perhaps the providential miracle of Jewish faith. This is not, of course, to say that human initiative—indeed, genius—played no role in the founding of the Jewish state, or in the inception of the Zionist movement that was at the heart of the endeavor. But even with that in mind, what has occurred is so stupefying that something greater, someone greater, is revealed behind this series of events.
On a recent trip to Israel, I took the new high-speed train from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. When I came back to New York, I took out my train ticket and saw the words in Hebrew: Rakevet Israel, “Train of Israel.” And I suddenly remembered The Jewish State, Theodor Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet. His idea of that state seemed fantastical at the time, but Herzl spoke as though it could absolutely come into existence again. But in the section where he discusses what language the residents of the Jewish state will be speaking, he writes that, of course, they’re not going to speak Hebrew. He says it will be akin to Switzerland, where everyone, he says, will speak their own language and miss the country of their origin. That Hebrew train ticket means that Israel has exceeded even Herzl’s most incredible imaginings.
Liel Leibovitz: Since Solly dropped the H bomb and invoked Herzl, I want to offer one of my favorite thought experiments. We’re now 152 years after the Risorgimento, which unified the Italian city-states. Today, if you were to walk the streets of Napoli and ask any Italian if they consider themselves a Garibaldist, they will look at you as if you’d just fallen from the sky. What was once a national movement to kind of create a homeland for a group of people who could define themselves as Italians achieved its goal a century and a half ago and vanished. But here we all are speaking of ourselves as Zionists, which many people are taught was some kind of 19th-century national movement to rebuild the Jewish homeland for the Jews for reasons of safety and to protect us against anti-Semitism. I think it is becoming increasingly clear that the Israeli story really makes very little sense independently of the Jewish story. And seen as such, it is simply the fruition of the ancient, theological, emotional, philosophical, historical story of the Jewish people. This is not to downplay the tremendous ingenuity, courage, sacrifice, and valor of people who did so much and gave so much for this to become a reality.
Amid the sturm und Drang surrounding the judicial reform proposals put forward by the new Israeli government, which many have called a “constitutional crisis,” the words of the Jewish state’s former attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, were especially telling. In decrying the proposed reforms and what would happen if they take effect, Mandelblit said, “What remains of the Declaration of Independence? It will just become a piece of paper we can throw in the trash.” Mandelblit’s reference to Israel’s Declaration of Independence sent me back to the text itself in search of answers. Just as I had remembered from my Zionist upbringing, which included regularly listening to David Ben-Gurion’s famous reading of the Declaration on May 15, 1948, Israel actually has no constitution, despite the fact that the Declaration promises one in the future.Debunking the claim that Israel is a ‘settler-colonial project’
A fascinating new book by Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Zigler tells the story of the writing of Israel’s Declaration of Independence and offers some insights into why, 75 years after its founding, Israel still has no written constitution. Israel’s Declaration of Independence offers readers a ringside seat. As in any good story, there is a hero, in this case David Ben-Gurion. Rogachevsky and Zigler tell the stirring story of how Israel’s first prime minister wrestled with earlier drafts of the Declaration in the final hours before he declared Israel’s statehood and, mediating among competing Zionist ideologies, put his own indelible imprint on the final document.
The book builds on the work of Yoram Shachar, who discovered the earliest draft of the Declaration, written in late April 1948 by a young government lawyer named Mordechai Beham. Rogachevsky and Zigler carefully trace the development of the Declaration from Beham’s draft through subsequent versions hastily composed by Tzvi Berenson, Herschel Lauterpacht, Moshe Shertok, and finally Ben-Gurion during the frenzied days before the British Mandate ended. Taken as a whole, the various versions offer readers a tour of the diverse and often competing political philosophies that framed the modern Zionist movement.
One integral part of the settler-colonial claim is the argument that, unlike Arabs, Jews are not indigenous to Palestine. But that turns history on its head. Jews populated Palestine at least a millennium before the advent of Islam and the subsequent Arab conquest. They have lived there continuously ever since.
Moreover, a report by Moshe Aumann, Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880-1948, shows that Palestinian Arabs are not as indigenous or historically connected to the land as people like Khalidi would have us believe. Aumann cites studies showing that most Palestinian Arabs are the descendants of immigrants from other countries who arrived after 1882. That included large-scale Arab immigration into Palestine between the two world wars. The main cause of that immigration was “Jewish development, which created new and attractive work opportunities and, in general, a standard of living previously unknown in the Middle East.”
Aumann concludes: “The constant influx of non-Palestinian elements, Arab and non-Arab, even before 1882 and certainly after that date, puts an entirely different complexion on the alleged and largely assumed ‘antiquity’ of the Arab element in the Palestinian population.”
But the biggest problem with the settler-colonial argument is this: At least half the Jewish population of Israel is made up of Mizrahim, whose families were expelled from Arab countries before and right after the founding of Israel. They are non-European and just as indigenous to the Middle East as any Arab.
Lyn Julius details the history of those expulsions in her seminal book, Uprooted. She writes that “after the Second World War, Arab states passed Nuremberg-style laws to undertake the wholesale eviction of their Jewish citizens and the theft of their property.” Hundred of thousands of Jews were then expelled from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. In every one of those countries, the Jewish community predated the Arab conquest by centuries.
Altogether, 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries. More than half a million fled to Israel. Those expulsions were largely inspired by the anti-Semitism of the Nazi collaborator and propagandist Amin Al Husseini who, at the time, was the leader of the Palestinian national movement. Thus, Arabs are hardly in a position to complain that Mizrahim sought refuge in Israel or to claim that Mizrachi immigration to Palestine was a settler-colonial project.
The history of the Jews in the Middle East is still not widely known. As Julius notes, “the story of the forgotten Jewish refugees is invariably omitted from Western coverage of the Israeli-Arab (or more commonly, Israeli-Palestinian) conflict.” Moreover, “Propagandists eagerly exploit this ignorance to perpetuate the lie that Israeli Jews are all from Europe and America.”
Khalidi is a good example. In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, he mentions Mizrahim twice, very briefly, referring only to those who were indigenous to Palestine. He fails to acknowledge those who were refugees from Arab countries. That lets him maintain the falsehood that Israel is a European-style, settler-colonial project. It also helps him avoid the fact that half the “colonists” in Israel are there because of Arab anti-Semitism.
That’s not historical analysis. It’s intellectual dishonesty.
