Israel a Colonial Enterprise?

UN Mandate, 1948

I note people accusing the Jews of stealing land from the Arabs in order to form the state of Israel. One correspondent compares the Israeli position to Italians laying claim to England on the grounds that it once belonged to Rome.

But that is not a fair representation of the history. The Jews did not take the land. Israel was mandated to the Jews in 1948 by the United Nations. If there was an injustice done to the Palestinian Arabs, it was done by the international community, not by the Jews. Canada had a vote in the UN General Assembly; the Jews did not.  To blame the Jews is scapegoating.

What do those who make this argument now propose? That the Jews, having been legally ceded the land by the UN generations ago, are now to be evicted due to the claims of some prior inhabitants? Aren’t such theorists guilty here of exactly what they are falsely blaming the Jews for?

If dispossessing the Arabs was wrong then, by the same standard, dispossessing the Jews would be wrong now.

I would allow that the original grant was unfair to the Arabs. The world community was giving the Jews someone else’s land. The recent attempt by Hitler to exterminate them no doubt made it seem pressing to the international community that the surviving Jews be given their own homeland, where they might be secure from such mass murder. 

Wherever that homeland was established, it was going to require the dispossession of whoever was currently living there. 

Perhaps it would have been more just to give the Jews a slice of Germany, rather than taking land from the innocent Arabs. But then, a small Jewish state would never seem secure from bigger neighbours in Central Europe. Ask Poland about that.

Perhaps Canada should have offered some of its own territory, rather than voting to give the Jews some of the Arabs’.

But then, Britain was indeed altruistically giving some of its own territory for the creation of this Jewish homeland. Britain had conquered the territory from the Ottomans in the recent World War.

And Palestine made the most sense, not necessarily because it was the ancient homeland of the Jews, but because it had the largest concentration of Jews anywhere. 

This was largely because of its symbolic important to the Jews, and largely because the British had already been legally bound, by League of Nations Mandate in 1922, to create in Palestine a homeland for the Jewish people. Accordingly, they were more or less bound to allow Jewish immigration into the area. 

Stalin made a parallel attempt to set up a Jewish homeland in Siberia, but got little uptake.

The only solution I can see is acceptance of the status quo.

The Secret History of Crimea

The Jewish Khazar Empire

As the Ukraine spirals further into chaos, and the Mideast crises drag on without sign of resolution, it is interesting to ponder what might have been.

In the years just after World War II, Molotov was largely in control of the Soviet Union, and the expected successor to Stalin. He had a plan, ultimately vetoed by Stalin, to make the Crimea a Jewish homeland.

There was a lot of sense to the idea. Unlike Palestine, the Crimea had recently been depopulated. Stalin had deported the Crimean Tatars for collaboration with the Germans. So the land was up for grabs. Moreover, it had a history of Jewishness. The local Jewish population was significant, and it had been part of the Medieval Jewish kingdom of the Khazars. If Arthur Koestler is right, modern Askenazi Jews are actually mostly Khazar by blood.

Molotov's wife was Jewish

The Zionists, for their part, were not terribly picky at this point as to where their homeland was to be, so long as they were given one.

Had the plan gone through, we might have avoided most or all of the ongoing strife in the Middle East, and certainly several wars. We might also have avoided the recent troubles over Crimea. From the standpoint of the Jews, the Crimea is more defensible over the long term than Palestine, and more fertile. Moreover, it is European, as were most of the Jews who colonized Israel. It would have looked far less like the last colony of imperial Europe.

Israel: Just a Bigger Ghetto

Sofia's Grand Synagogue

I was walking along a street in downtown Sofia one Friday evening several years ago. Gradually, through the dusk, I realized I was surrounded by a small gang of elderly people. All the men were wearing yarmulkes. I had stumbled upon the last remnants of Sofia's Jewish community heading for synagogue for the beginning of the Sabbath. Perhaps a score of aged men and women.

In 1944, Jews made up one quarter of the city's population.

What happened to them all? No, they were not sent to Hitler's death camps. Bulgaria never permitted that. Instead, they all emigrated to Israel after the war.

Sofia synagogue interior

I am not at all sure this was a good idea. I am not at all sure that Israel is a good idea. And I do not mean that it is bad for the Arabs, although no doubt it is. I mean it is bad for the Jews.

In fact, it has done Hitler's work for him: it has achieved his vision. Early plans and directives suggest that Hitler had no special interest in killing Jews. His original idea was to exile them—he thought to Madagascar, or somewhere else in Africa. This was also, not coincidentally, the original plan of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Palestine would have done nicely had the British allowed it. Hitler just wanted them out of Europe, so that they could not contaminate Europe's Aryan purity. Just as Herzl wanted an independent state to prevent Jewish assimilation.

Theodor Herzl

Hitler, in other words, was a Zionist. Israel has done exactly what he sought to do, but was unable to do. Is this a good thing?

And is it a wise strategy in terms of Jewry's ultimate survival to huddle into one small nation state? Isn't this a case of putting all one's eggs in one basket? Wasn't Jewry's previous strategy, of dispersion throughout the nations, in fact an unusually successful one? Where, by contrast, are the Assyrians, the Carthaginians, or the Visigoths today? It allowed them an escape hatch in all circumstances: suppress them in Spain, and they had connections and relations in Turkey; in the Netherlands, and they had contacts in Poland. Hitler, though he controlled all of Europe, was unable to eliminate them. In ten years, he managed to kill six million. By contrast, now two well-placed Iranian bombs could wipe out seven million Jews in an instant.

A passionate Zionist

Just as keeping all the Jews of a city in one ghetto made it easier to find them when a pogrom started, so concentrating all the Jews of the world into one twelve-mile-wide country seems on the face of it like herding them all into one big cattle train.

And it is, of course, apartheid, segregation. This has not always turned out well elsewhere. Nor did we ultimately find shipping all the blacks of America back to Liberia an entirely satisfactory solution for that minority group.

Moreover, if the Jews are really determined to set up shop permanently in one location, Israel is actually a remarkably bad choice. There is a reason why the Israelites have, historically, kept being thrown off this land. As have the Canaanites, the Philistines, and the crusading Franks. It is a natural thoroughfare, the only land route between Africa and Asia, the carrying point between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, wedged in between the two larger entities of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Trying to establish and hold an independent nation in this little corridor is rather like building your house in the middle of a highway, and hoping nobody will trespass. Not to mention, of course, that the place is a desert, a natural wasteland. The Zionists could have done far better by settling Argentina, Oklahoma, or the interior of BC. All of which were still more or less available.

A sheep among wolves.

At the same time, the loss of so much of its Jewish population, I suspect, has greatly impoverished Europe. I had this sense in Sofia, and it seems, on reflection, self-evidently so. Jews are responsible for a staggering proportion of European, as well as American, culture. It is the mission of the Jews, after all, according to the covenant, to be a light unto the nations. By retreating to Israel, they are abandoning this mission, and this religious duty. Is it any wonder that European culture now seems moribund and listless? The light has departed from it. If American culture seems still more vital, it is perhaps because fewer of its Jews have been tempted to leave for Israel. And abandoning their historic mission is likely to have the same enervating effect on Judaism.

Now, of course, as a result of Israel's existence, the Jewish witness has been stripped from the Muslim world as well. Distinct communities and subcultures all over the world, with their millennia of traditions, are being wiped out, as in Sofia, in a generation. Bahrain's synagogue stands idle. The Jewish community of Cochin, of over two thousand years' duration, older than France or England, is no more.

The abandoned Manama synagogue.

One suspects that, when the histories are written a hundred years from now, the State of Israel will be seen as a greater calamity for the Jewish people than the Holocaust itself.

Interior of Cochin synagogue.