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The Jewish Claim to the Jewish Land

Eliezer Berkovitz (Sh'ma 8/157, SEPTEMBER 15,1978)

Jews are a strange people. For many centuries they have been homeless, forever believing in the return to their ancient homeland. The faith was absurd. It was contrary to all the laws of history. Now that it has found its affirmation in history, that the absurdity of the expectation has become vindicated in reality, the Jews are plagued by a bad conscience. After the Six Day War every other nation would have undertaken the most intense settlement of what in the ideology and the faith was regained homeland. In Israel, however, one of the major issues dividing the people is the controversy over the question, how much of the land to return. In the entire history of the race man has never witnessed such a phenomenon - certainly not in cases when a victorious people believed that it was regaining what duly belonged to it, but not even on the innumerable occasions of outright conquest. Today, it has become necessary to recall our moral claim to the land of our fathers.

One should distinguish between the claim to the land and the day-to-day political problems that require solution. The moral basis of the claim must be independent of all political issues. While possession has been an adequate argument for claim in most of the history of the nations, it does not satisfy the conscience of many Jews. It is for this reason that the moral quality of the claim of the Jewish people must be valid for the entire area of the historic Eretz Yisrael. For if it is not valid for all of Eretz Yisrael, within the frontiers as they were understood through the ages, it can have no moral force for any part of it.

For the believer in the Torah there is no problem. Eretz Yisrael is the land that God gave to the children of Israel for eternal possession. It is the ever-recurring theme of the prophets that, notwithstanding their exile, the bequeathing of the land to the Jewish people remained unrevoked and that the day would come when "the children would return to their borders" (Jet. 31.16). However, this faith in the return has its significance in the secular dimension as well. Through the centuries the faith was a statement to the world. It was saying to the nations: We are here! We are still around! This land was taken from us by force. We claim it. It is our inheritance. The faith was the eternal protest of the Jewish people against whoever held sway over the land of Israel.

Land Should go to Those who Need it the Most

One might, of course, say: Such a protest has little force in history. This may indeed be true. One of its major weaknesses is that it is unique. It is the only case in human history of a nation continuing its existence for two millenia in exile and forever claiming its lost homeland. This, however, does not invalidate the moral power of the protest or the ethical quality of the claim. However, the protest was acknowledged and the claim affirmed by the nations themselves by implication all through the long centuries of Jewish exile. For implied in the discriminations, persecutions, expulsions, plunder and massacre in Christian and Moslem lands was the ever-recurring statement, not in so many words, but more impressively by acts of criminality: "Jew! You don't belong here; you are the stranger!" The ultimate logic of such a statement is either the gas chamber or the homeland. Since it is our conscience with which we are concerned, the gas chamber alternative need not trouble it.

In the light of the Jewish experience one may draw on one more source of ethical validation. This earth does not belong to those who possess it in over-abundance, but to those in greatest need of it. Nowhere in the world is any Arab persecuted, simply because he is an Arab; nowhere in the world do Arabs live in the shadow of gas chambers, real ones of the past, possible ones of the future; nowhere in the world is Moslem culture, civilization, religion in jeopardy. Finally, let us not forget that all the Arab-Israeli wars were started by the Arabs. He who starts a war runs the risk of losing it. To wage war on the principle, "If I win, I win and if I lose, I win too," is the acme of international brigandage.

Correct Policy is to Reduce Human Suffering

Unfortunately, a measure of human suffering has been involved in the Jew's return to the land of his fathers. It is, however, time that Jews understand the disturbing fact that history is guilt. It is one of the tragic aspects of the human condition that, thus far, there has been no history without guilt. The only people that went as a nation guiltlessly through their history has been the Jewish people in the long centuries of their exile. However, even that is only relatively true. For, to the extent that they might have educated and trained themselves to resist the crimes committed against them and did not do so, they too share in the guilt of the nations. The toleration of evil is also guilt. It makes no difference whether the evil is done to others or to oneself. In each case its toleration strengthens the hand of the evildoer and encourages him to greater crimes.

What then might be the right course of action by a nation in the midst of a world in which all history is guilt? I suggest that the answer ought to be to pursue a course of action that nationally as well as internationally tends to reduce the measure of history's guilt by reducing the sum total of human suffering. If Israel's return to the borders of 1967 will, indeed, reduce the sum total of human suffering, Jewish as well as Arab, it is ethically right; if not, it is unethical. If, on the other hand, Jewish settlements and military presence in Judea and Samaria are the means for reducing the danger of war and thus limiting the extent of human suffering, it will be such action that will reduce also the sum total of human guilt, Jewish and Arab, in the area. The question can only be decided in the light of the realities of the situation. However, political arrangements may not weaken the Jewish people's [ultimate] claim to the land of their fathers. The Jews of the state of Israel are, as yet, not the Jewish people.