Jews built a refugee nation in Israel. May they have peace this Independence Day | Opinion
Nationalism united the German states and the Italian states in the mid-19th century, becoming Germany and Italy. But nationalism was not immediately fulfilled among all of those whose minds and hearts were touched by the ideal of liberation as a single people.
The spirit of nationalism changed the direction of the historic Jewish people. It invigorated pioneer, young and mostly socialist Eastern European Jews to replant themselves in their ancestral land. They fled death from Russian pogroms to construct the Jewish nation literally from the ground up: as farmers and egalitarians in their Biblical homeland.
Nationalism birthed other ideas of regeneration as well. Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg) wrote in a modern Hebrew to animate a secular Jewish people’s reimagined culture. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda moved to Palestine to reconstruct the ancient national language of the Jewish people, used primarily by scholars for the previous 2,000 years. Idealists created socialist settlements called kibbutz, and others founded collectives in the land, called moshav. All comprised components of national liberation.
The deaths of a half million Jews in White Russia because of revolution and World War I, and the vicious, genocidal murder of 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust, ended the cultural versus political Zionist debate, for without a homeland the world’s Jews faced death from suddenly hostile governments such as Russia and Germany. The Jews required a land and government of their own to escape 2,000 years of persecution.
Irrespective of Jewish nationalist aspirations, France and Britain divided the defeated Ottoman Empire after World War I. They created Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Transjordan and the British Mandate in half of Palestine, namely Cisjordan. These were their colonialist projects to protect and exploit their interests in the Middle East.
But the inhabitants of these lands were not colonialists. Even the Hashemite rulers moved from Mecca to rule over Syria, Iraq and Jordan. The Jews of Palestine envisioned the British colonialist enterprise not as a European extension, but as their escape from persecution in every land they inhabited, including every Arab Muslim nation and the European nations that murdered them. Eventually, the Jews were expelled from all Arab countries without compensation for property or wealth. But instead of claiming refugee status, they invested themselves in reviving the land on which they resettled.
The modern Middle East was originally founded as a colonialist European project, but the nations of the Middle East, created equally by the League of Nations and its successor the United Nations, are independent states with equal status of origin and authenticity. Many nations have had their boundaries redrawn since World War I. The Jews who resettled in Israel, who escaped persecution or were expelled by their countries, became a refugee nation — 60% from Arab lands, 40% from other countries, including refugees from Nazi occupied Europe.
Israel was established first on purchased land, and then by legal international agreement, according to international law. It’s not a colonialist project. It’s the result of opposition to European colonialism, to establish a nation of refugees from European and Arab persecution.
Convincing the Arab nations to accept Israel’s existence has taken 76 years thus far. First Egypt, then Jordan, then the United Arab Emirates, and hopefully next Saudi Arabia have accepted to live with Israel in peace. Along the way Jordan’s King Abdullah, and Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin were assassinated for their peace efforts.
The path to peace is treacherous. But that’s the only reasonable path forward: peace between sovereign nations, ruled by their own people.
May 15 is Israel Independence Day, both on the Hebrew and Gregorian calendars, just like in 1948, the first Israel Independence Day. Israel has changed my life dramatically, and the security of every Jew in the world. Even in the midst of war, today is a day to stand up for and celebrate Israel’s existence, the first independent Jewish commonwealth in 2,000 years, and a haven for the Jewish people. Am Yisrael chai. The People, Israel, lives.
Mark H. Levin is founding rabbi of Congregation Beth Torah in Overland Park.
