The Jewish Revolution – Jewish Statehood
Israel Eldad
A Times of Israel Book (Shengold Publishers) 1971
The Jewish problem continues to exist despite the fact that the Jews have a state of their own. For the Jewish state was never an end in itself. It was a means for rescuing the Jewish people from the threat of annihilation through conversion and destruction that began to loom large ever since the fall of the two Bastilles – the gentile and the Jewish.
The very existence of the Jewish nation may be a miracle in the sense that it runs counter to the natural processes of history. Its salvation, however, which many had been envisaging as a miraculous event, is proceeding in the most natural and realistic fashion through the reshaping of the land and the people and the establishment of a new reality in a mighty gust of greatness.
The cession of Shechem (Nablus) and Hebron and Jericho would mean that we have no claim to Tel-Aviv and Haifa, either.
Sources of Zionism – Two Old and One New
…until the period of emancipation, no one spoke about the Jews having emigrated. (24)
The devil puts on different guises before he finally gives up. (29)
The Jewish problem continues to exist despite the fact that the Jews have a state of their own. For the Jewish state was never an end in itself. It was a means for rescuing the Jewish people from the threat of annihilation through conversion and destruction that began to loom large ever since the fall of the two Bastilles – the gentile and the Jewish. (30)
New Zionism versus the New Left or The Joseph Complex
The present flirtation of many Jewish youngsters with the New Left cannot hold a candle to the spell that the socialist-communist ideal cast over the young Jewish generation at that time. It is no exaggeration to say that the best Jewish minds, the nation’s greatest mental and physical resources, were sacrificed on the altar of this new god. “The proletariat has no homeland!” – Could any slogan have appealed more to a generation of young, emancipated Jews who, as the descendants of a homeless nation, were deprived of the opportunity to assimilate en masse, as most of them would have liked to do? (33)
…Marxism as a scientific method, gave the sophisticated Jewish mind an opportunity to sharpen its wits not on the Talmud and on religious disputations, but on the more dignified disciplines of economics and sociology. (34)
The Jewish socialist revolutionaries, in their desire to escape the Jewish fate, were convinced they had found the perfect prescription: euthanasia. (35)
Zionism as Liberation, Revolution and Renaissance
…we should not try to analyse the tragic question of why Zionism experienced several decades of slow motion, when both immigration and settlement proceeded at a snail’s pace contrary to the wish of its visionary founder, Dr. Herzl, and in spite of the clouds gathering over Europe. (43)
Not only the Jews of the U.S.S.R. but the Jews of the whole world are living in exile, and however sweet the exile might seem, this does not detract from the fact that this is what it is. For Herzl, one Dreyfus affair was enough. He did not need the horrors of Auschwitz and the terrors of Russian Jewry to bring the truth home to him. (45)
Some of the Jewish youngsters of the West are fighting too, but not their own battles. They are again immolating themselves for the sake of others, giving their best for the liberation of others. And however just and important these liberation movements may be – the liberation movement of the Jewish people, unequalled in beauty and justice, is more important. (55)
Right Necessary and Possible
The very existence of the Jewish nation may be a miracle in the sense that it runs counter to the natural processes of history. Its salvation, however, which many had been envisaging as a miraculous event, is proceeding in the most natural and realistic fashion through the reshaping of the land and the people and the establishment of a new reality in a mighty gust of greatness. (58)
That most of the Left – the Communists more than the Socialists, or course – were against Zionism is obvious. They too, screamed that it was wrong, wrong because it ran counter to the Marxist doctrine that nationalism is a product of the class war and that once class differences are abolished national distinctions are bound to disappear. They also objected because the Jewish revolutionary potential might be diverted to a “narrow-minded” national course. Because Zionism harks back to age-old roots it was naturally branded as a reactionary movement. It is wrong, they said, because it strengthens the Right and leans on rightist, reactionary and imperialist movements. (60-61)
Liberal and leftist elements were not concerned about the spiritual existence of the Jewish people, nor are they to this day. Regarding its physical existence, they argued that in these modern times annihilation was inconceivable. … The world was making progress, becoming more liberal, more egalitarian, and certainly more civilised; so no minority need live in fear of its life. (61-62)
Thus they kept on protesting until Hitler and Stalin came to prove the contrary. (62)
Intermezzo, Rhapsody, Caesura
The new Jewish fighting spirit and self-reliance came as no little surprise to many gentiles. Perhaps it was General De Gaulle, the staunch Catholic, who best formulated their attitude: “We have always been merciful in our attitude towards the Jews, but they are ungrateful, a domineering nation.” De Gaulle, like so many good Christians eager to prove their Christianity by showing mercy to the Jews in spite of long accounts they had with them, in spite of the Jewish “denial” or “betrayal” of Jesus Christ, would no doubt have been willing to extend his compassion to persecuted Jews pleading for grace and forgiveness. But suddenly he was confronted by a new variety of Jews, who do not plead for mercy but want French Mirage aircraft instead, and do not even need French pilots to fly them because they have their own.
Are these really new Jews?
Certainly not. They are the same Jews, who have merely revived their former spirit, their former being which they were forced to submerge during their period of exile. Outwardly they might have been “Shylocks”, frightened little Jews, praying for the grace of heaven and appealing to the good gentiles, but in the words of the eternal song, “David the King of Israel was alive.” The song refers to David – not to Moses. Moses left his laws and commandments behind him. It was David, the King of Israel; whose untarnished survival was being asserted, because outwardly he no longer appeared to exist: neither his sovereign kingdom nor the great land he had conquered for his people. That is why this song more than any other was chosen to bolster the Jewish sense of security. David’s legacy was no substitute for that of Moses and the prophets, for prayers and scholarship and the Jewish way of life, but was kept intact in addition to all these for when the time and the opportunity would be ripe. (87-88)
Eretz Israel or Palestine
No other people in the world made this country; this country made no other people in the world. (101)
Israel and Ishmael
It is not true, as is sometimes contended, that Zionism ignored the Arab problem. The presence of Arabs in this country was never disregarded, and ever since the Balfour Declarations, Zionism has been acutely aware that the Arabs were opposed to it even in its minimum form. There were many who in their naivete believed that by proving to the Arabs how much we were benefiting the country we might convince them and change their minds. In vain. Others were so naïve as to think that by giving up the idea of an independent state we might be able to win them over. In vain. The truth is that in this respect the Arabs had a more straightforward understanding of the process of history than many a sophisticated Zionist. They realised that the Return to Zion was a serious matter, that it implied the return of the whole Jewish people to the land of Zion. When moderate Zionists tried to persuade them that this was not what was meant, they looked upon them as frauds, as purveyors of a cheap ruse. Only abnegation of the idea of mass immigration, the essence of Zionism, would have pacified them and temporarily, of course, reconciled them to the existence of an autonomous Jewish minority. (147)
Three Points of No Return
The cession of Shechem (Nablus) and Hebron and Jericho would mean that we have no claim to Tel-Aviv and Haifa, either. (168)
…reference should also be made to the greatest rabbinical figure of our times, the late Rabbi Abraham Hacohen Kook, undoubtedly as orthodox as any. His philosophy did not admit of any place in the world, including the secular, material world, as being devoid of some degree of godliness and sanctity. Still less so anything done for the sake of Eretz Israel and the Return to Zion, even if the doers are Jewish pioneers who fail to practice their religion. All material actions performed in Eretz Israel and on behalf of Eretz Israel assume a higher degree of sanctity, for they are done in a sacred cause and undoubtedly prepare the ground for the forthcoming spiritual revival. (171)
The spiritual revival will undoubtedly be the supreme stage of that miracle we are now witnessing: the renewal of Jewish statehood in Eretz Israel. Like anything else in this transformation, it will undoubtedly not come about quietly and peacefully. Its birthpangs will be no less painful than those that any great revolution has to undergo. Much that is old and obsolete will have to be discarded, as our Prophets have repeatedly urged us to do. The fundamental spiritual values of our ancient faith will be reaffirmed in all their truth, in the light of which those pseudo-values imported from seventy countries and cultures of the diaspora will melt away into nothingness, and many of the foreign idols we still worship will tumble. (171-172)
By Judaism we do not mean that anemic travesty of our creed that was evolved during the Emancipation, when such Christian concepts as proffering the other cheek, and showing forgiveness to one’s enemies were jumbled together into a kind of abstract Judaism divorced from the life and spirit of the people, and having no basis in the Law of Moses, in Prophecy or in sound Talmudic Judaism. The idea of redemption was voided of its Jewish, Scriptural and Talmudic contents and converted into an ephemeral Christian-individual concept having nothing to do with the Return to Zion, the ingathering of the exiles, and revival of the Kingdom of David and the recovery of the Promised Land. Needless to say, the everyday observance of the commandments was abandoned. In the flight from Jewish nationhood and in the craving for acceptance and conformism, a Mosaic religion was evolved that had little to do either with Moses or with religion. While Luther’s reform was revolutionary, nonconformistic, and profoundly nationalistic, all our reform movements until shortly before establishment of the State of Israel were ultra-conformistic and anti-nationalistic, aiming at an easy-going, bloodless Judaism. (173)
Israel
The nation that Moses led out of Egypt also had its dross. Far from being all righteous there were those who hankered after the fleshpots, worshipped the golden calf, were eternally dissatisfied, slandered the promised land and wanted to return to exile of Egypt. There were tribal communities inflicted with a sense of inferiority and discrimination, and hippies whoring with Midianite temple prostitutes. Moses, however, could take it easy and wander off in the desert for forty years until the rabble might die off and a new generation arise. We have to turn a desert country and what many consider a desert people into a fruitful land and nation, without having the option of wandering forty years in the desert.
Not only are we denied this option, but instead of twelve tribes we have seventy-seven diasporas to deal with, from India to Ethiopia, from San Francisco to the Atlas Mountains. On coming here they have no common language except the language of prayer, restored to everyday use. Their style of life ranges from the ultra-sophisticated to the primitive. Besides men of superior intellect there are illiterates and morons, religious believers and Communists, both divided into countless sub-sects, each convinced of having an exclusive hold on the truth. (179-180)