Jabotinsky on the Ethics and Morality of Zionism

 Zionism and Ethics

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Di Tribune, Stockholm, May 10, 1916

There is an opinion that the Jewish people have no “moral right” to claim control of Eretz Israel. The claim that it is immoral is that since the Jewish population of Eretz Israel is only 100,000, while the Arab population is 600,000, this would mean the demanding that a minority rule over the majority. Jews have no right to risk and harm themselves by insisting on such unfair demands. The only right we have is “free repatriation and settlement activity”, but nothing more…

…If power is in the hands of a government hostile to the very idea of Jewish settlement, then such a government will be able to nullify any paragraph without any effort. And for this there will be no need to prohibit repatriation and settlement activity directly, which would simply contradict the terms of the paragraph. There are thousands of other means for this purpose. Thus, for example, without mentioning the Jews, one can establish laws on the right to own property, or on the acceptance of citizenship, or municipal and political laws for repatriates, and so on. In this way, it is possible to bring about a situation where settlement activity itself (one way or another) will run up against an iron barrier. In the end, with the help of all sorts of "proclamations" and "administrative procedures", one can do with this or that paragraph whatever one pleases.

Therefore, the paragraph concerning free repatriation does not give any guarantees. It follows that we must abandon the idea of guarantees and get used to another idea, the essence of which is that the fate of settlement in Eretz Israel depends on the good will of this or that government. Or we must go straight to the point and demand real and genuine guarantees. The most reliable guarantee is this: to grant us power in the form of a "charter" or in any other form.

This is precisely what the Basel Program demands. But the people who signed it twenty years ago suddenly came to their senses and decided that it was immoral. And now they are trying to find a way to accumulate capital and preserve their innocence at the same time. One of them wrote to me not long ago: “I would propose an agreement that would be both fair and even democratic: we should not demand a ‘charter’ for ourselves, but simply autonomy for Eretz Israel. The parliament should be elected by the entire population, both Jewish and Arab. The right to vote should be granted to everyone who can read and write, regardless of nationality or sex.

The masthead of Di Tribune 

Under this system we would get approximately the following figures: the Jewish population of Eretz Israel is only 100,000 people, but all adult men and women can read and write; thus, the Jewish population with the right to vote would be approximately 40,000 people. The number of Arabs reaches 600,000 people, but almost the entire female population does not meet the stated condition, that is, half of the population immediately drops out; and even among the male population, especially in the villages, the art of writing and reading is not very widespread. And if we continue and go along this path, then it will be possible to introduce a system of educational qualifications.

This system exists in England and Belgium. It is based on the fact that people with, say, a secondary education have the right to two votes, people with a higher education - to three votes. If such a system is introduced, then we Jews will have an absolute majority in the first parliament. The first parliament should be elected in 10 years, and during this time we will be able to properly strengthen our position in quantitative terms. How do you like this plan?"

I do not know how to answer such a question. This may indeed be a wise plan, but it has a weak point, namely, that at its core lies the idea that such an idealistically just matter as handing over Eretz Israel to the persecuted Jewish people so that they can establish their national home there, such a deeply ethical moral matter appears so immoral and unjust that it must be covered up with all sorts of fabrications.

It is also characteristic and noteworthy that only the Jews come with such claims to “ethics”...It seems that only the Jews are required to be super-ethical. Moreover, our moralists themselves do not at all want local Arabs to be in power in Eretz Israel. They want the country to be governed by some power that is sympathetic to the Jewish settlement and its activities. Some believe that such a power could be Turkey, others prefer England. But both sides think that it would be extremely "fair" if the English or the Turks were in power in Eretz Israel, although their numbers reach approximately thirty thousand. Such a situation, as you see, would be fair. But when the Jews demand the right to rule in Eretz Israel, there is no justice in this, since there are only one hundred thousand of them.

…No one demands that a "charter" be issued to those one hundred thousand Jews who have succeeded in getting into Eretz Israel, despite the barbed wire entanglements which the Turkish regime places before them. Eretz Israel must be handed over to the whole Jewish people. And this people numbers eleven or twelve million people, that is, in fact, twenty times more than the six hundred thousand Arabs who live in Eretz Israel today. In the course of four years the Jewish people can send over six hundred thousand new repatriates across the ocean. And if we take into account the entire stock of its “emigration”, that is, the entire mass that can be considered potential repatriates without fear of making a mistake, then we get a population equal to eight or even nine million people.

We demand Eretz Israel in the name of these masses, and not in the name of the "Yishuv" that exists today. And our aspiration is not to obtain a "charter" only for those who have settled already in the country, but for the entire Jewish people. This people, by virtue of its perfection, will manage the settlement in the holy land, will plant culture on it, will attract investors to it; the handful of current residents of Eretz Israel - both Jews and Arabs - are an insignificant minority in comparison with this people.

Sometimes the Jews make a funny impression, despite the fact that their faces express honesty and sentimentality. They love to sigh over the bitter fate of their opponents, and sometimes even their enemies. I know dozens of Jews who, even now, after all that has happened, feel sorry for the poor Poles because the Lord God put them in an awkward position and brought upon them such a misfortune as the Jewish question. Thank God, our relations with the Arabs are better than our relations with the Poles. And so we sigh over their fate much more often and with greater rapture. Unhappy people, we say they are, because Eretz Israel is, in fact, part of the Arab territory, because they have lived on this land for many, many years, and suddenly we have arrived and want to become masters there. I look at the moral side of the current situation with somewhat different eyes.

The tribes that speak Arabic inhabit Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, Egypt, Tripoli, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mesopotamia. In a territory whose area (excluding the Arabian Peninsula) is as large as the area of all of Europe (excluding Russia), and is quite sufficient to feed a billion people, there lives only one national group - thirty-five million people. On the other hand, there is the Jewish people, a people persecuted, deprived of a homeland, who have no place of their own in the whole world. They strive for Eretz Israel because they have no other home and because everything that has brought glory to Eretz Israel in world history, all the splendor that was and is in it, all the superhuman functions that the country has performed, all this is the fruit of the spiritual development of the people of Israel. Compared with the entire vast territory inhabited by the Arab peoples, Eretz Israel constitutes only a hundredth part.

I do not know whether it is possible to speak of ethics in our time when such questions are discussed. But if it is possible, let me ask, what is ethics, in essence? Is it based on the fact that one should have much, another little? Is it based on the fact that the land, which is the basis of life, is concentrated in large quantities in the hands of one people, who are not even able to cultivate it, while another people, exiled and wandering like a dog in foreign lands, looks with great envy from behind a fence at the tempting desert? Where did this kind of ethics come from? And how can it be called ethics at all?

If they came with sword in hand to take Eretz Yisrael, we would be right before God and man, just as a beggar is right who takes from a rich man. The ethics concerning land relations between nations is, in essence, the same ethics accepted among the people of whom it is said in the Bible: from time to time there is a great harvest, and then he who has no land demands his share from he who has land in abundance. Instead of two million square kilometers, the Arabs will populate a territory of one million eight hundred thousand square kilometers. And thanks to this, a Jewish state will exist on earth, and one of the most pressing problems of history will come closer to its solution.

It is quite clear that the Arabs living in Eretz Israel have every right to demand that they not be expelled from there. That is a different matter. That is beyond any discussion and no one is going to expel them from there. There is plenty of space in Eretz Israel. The population density in Eretz Israel today is approximately twenty souls per square kilometer. In neighboring Lebanon, there are seventy souls per square kilometer; in Germany - one hundred and twenty; in Italy - one hundred and twenty-four; in Belgium - two hundred and fifty-seven; and in some densely populated areas of Egypt - three hundred and sixty-two. This is not the place to engage in puzzles and calculate how many people can live in one square kilometer in Eretz Israel in acceptable conditions.

But if we take Lebanon as an example, where the natural conditions are much worse than those in Eretz Israel, then, even then, if we calculate, we will find that in Eretz Israel there is room for at least another fifty inhabitants per square kilometer. It follows that we do not lay claim to the twenty occupied places, but to the fifty free ones, or to those deserted and abandoned places which, if only they fall into our hands, we can, with our labors, applying all our abilities, transform into an economically developed region and bring the population density in Eretz Israel closer to the level of civilized European countries. And in this way the question of the legitimate interests of the population of Eretz Israel now living will be resolved.

If there is a need to provide guarantees for the existence of their religion, language, property, personal rights, and the like, guarantees against possible tyranny or persecution on our part, then we are ready to provide them, regardless of whether the protection of their rights is handed over to a special international commission or to the consuls of the great powers. But no ethics can recognize either that they have a right of veto against Jewish settlement, or that a handful of half-savage people have the right to hold in their hands a territory that can feed millions, turn it into a desert, and close its gates.

I am not one of those people who believe that in the current situation it is naive and even unnecessary to express one's opinion in politics about the moral side of the issue. It is clear that the powers that be do not take the moral side into account, but the Jewish people cannot and should not give up their demands. We stand our ground and demand that the world hand over the land of our future into our hands, in the name of our entire history and in the name of all our suffering. In the name of that endless guilt that weighs down the conscience of the world. And it is strange to hear that there are people who do not understand this. But it is even stranger that the people who have doubts about the ethics of the "Basel program" are almost all Jews.

I myself had occasion during the war to talk about Zionism with political figures in England, France, Italy, Greece - and I have never heard such statements from anyone. People who are constantly in contact with government circles in England on questions of Zionism, and they have never encountered such excuses. The healthy political mind of a healthy people decides simply and clearly: it is impossible to imagine a settlement without real power. If the very fact of settlement is "ethical", then the power is ethical. If in relation to such countries as England, France, Italy, which in addition to colonies have enough of their own land, if it is ethical for them to settle colonies, then it is even more ethical in relation to a people deprived of any land at all. And only from the Jews are cries of protest heard. From this we can conclude that in this matter we are not talking about moral rights at all, but about fear of the idea itself.

^

You May Have Missed These Letters

In the Jerusalem Post:-

Police behavior...

Sir, - Police authorities have concluded that the officer who climbed aboard the tractor but did not shoot the terrorist acted properly. He determined that the driver had no pulse, and was therefore neutralized ("Police reject criticism over handling of bulldozer attack," July 8).

Had he fired his weapon, Batsheva Unterman would be alive today.

It took an off-duty soldier, "M," to take the initiative and end the carnage, in a near-replay of events at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva four months ago. There, while the terrorist was slaughtering teenagers inside, a policeman sat safely outside, ostensibly to prevent civilians from entering. He was also not officially censored.

"M" credited his action to his upbringing and the injunction in Leviticus 19: "Do not stand idly by while your neighbor's blood is spilled." In contrast, the police's guideline seems to be: "To protests by your fellow citizens apply violence, but to your enemies be indulgent and wear kid gloves."

TUVIA MUSKIN
Rehovot

...& misunderstanding

Sir, - Thank you for this clear rendering of the Knesset Internal Affairs Committee meeting. I'm proud of our having a moral police commander like the popular Mickey Levy, who testified about why the terrorist wasn't killed before he did more damage.

However, the source of this police failure becomes clear from his misquoting the Torah and seemingly being unaware of the full scope of Jewish teachings on attackers.

The Ten Commandments say "Don't murder," not "Don't kill." The Talmud explains that if someone sets out to murder you, kill him first. And the rabbis teach: He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful - as indeed happened last week.

So I disagree with MK Marina Solodkin that there is not enough professionalism in the police force. Yes, an error was made, but it was in understanding how to deal with wicked people.

For the same reason we needed the (Shai) Dromi Law, to tell us that we can and must defend ourselves most forcefully when there is a risk of acute danger to our lives.

M. HAGENAUER
Jerusalem

Civilian Targets

This Yesh Gvul sticker below I saw this morning



and it reads:-

CITIZENS ARE NOT A TARGET

and is intended to protest the occasional and unintended collateral damage caused by air strikes and artillery shelling of terrorists who hide amongst a civilian population.

I was wondering, does the same sticker appear on walls and telephone and electricity poles in Gaza in Arabic?

If not, would that not be a morality problem?

We Want More of Dror

Of Yehezkel Dror, the founding president of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, is a professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a recipient of the Israel Prize who also served as a member of the Winograd commission of inquiry into Israel’s war with Hezbollah in 2006, who wrote this:-

...in a world where the long-term existence of the Jewish state is far from certain, the imperative to exist inevitably gives rise to difficult questions, foremost among them this: When the survival of the Jewish people conflicts with the morals of the Jewish people, is existence worthwhile, or even possible?

Physical existence, I would argue, must come first. No matter how moral a society aspires to be, physical existence must take precedent.

Clear external and internal dangers threaten the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state. It is very likely that the collapse of Israel or the loss of its Jewish nature would undermine the existence of the Jewish people as a whole. And even given the existence of a Jewish state, less clear but no less fateful dangers threaten the long-term sustainable existence of the Diaspora.

...the Jewish people ought not be captivated by political correctness and other thinking-repressing fashions. When it comes to China, for example, efforts to strengthen the rising superpower’s ties to the Jewish people should trump moral-minded campaigns to alter Beijing’s domestic policies and handling of Tibet. The same goes for Turkey: Given its crucial peacemaking role in the Middle East, discussion of whether the Ottomans committed genocide against the Armenians ought to be left to historians, preferably non-Jewish ones.

That is not necessarily to condone China’s policies, or to deny Armenian history. Rather, it is to recognize that however just such moral stances may or may not be, the Jewish people must give primacy to existence.

...In short, the imperatives of existence should be given priority over other concerns — however important they may be — including liberal and humanitarian values, support for human rights and democratization.

This tragic but compelling conclusion is not easy to swallow, but it is essential for the future of the Jewish people. Once our existence is assured, including basic security for Israel, much can and should be sacrificed for tikkun olam. But given present and foreseeable realities, assuring existence must come first.

A Paradigm Analysis Applicable to Israel's Case

This, I found, is quite relevant to the way Israel is being treated:-

What we heard were discourses about "the end of history", the disappearance of antagonism and the possibility of a politics without frontiers, without a "them"; a "win-win politics" in which solutions could be found that favour everybody in society. Today social theorists like Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck argue that with the demise of communism and the socio-economic transformation of society linked to the advent of the information society and to the phenomenon of globalisation, the adversarial model of politics has become obsolete and that what we need is a politics "beyond left and right", a politics not any more structured around social division and without the us/them opposition.

This "post-political" discourse is accompanied by the promotion of humanitarian crusades, ethically correct good causes and the increasing reliance on the judiciary to deal with political issues. What this signifies is the triumph of a moralizing liberalism which pretends that the political has been eradicated and that society can now be ruled through rational moral procedures and conflicts resolved by impartial tribunals. It is the culmination of a tendency inscribed at the very chore of liberalism which, because of its constitutive incapacity to think in truly political terms, always has to resort to another type of discourse: economic, moral or juridical.

However the liberal incapacity to acknowledge political antagonisms does not make them disappear. Despites the fact that the key words today are those of "good governance" and "partisan -free democracy" no politics is possible without defining frontiers. The democratic consensus proclaimed by all those who celebrate the "centre" cannot exist without defining an exterior which by its very exclusion secures its identity and its coherence. Hence the necessity of defining a "them" whose existence will provide the unity of the democratic "we". But since one cannot think of politics in adversarial terms, this "them" cannot be envisaged as a political adversary any more. It is therefore on the moral terrain that the frontier is drawn. This is why the "extreme right" - a rather undifferenciated and unexamined entity - is increasingly presented as the personnification of the "evil them" against which all the good democrats should unite.

Clearly, what we are witnessing is not the disappearance of the political antagonism but a new mode of its manifestation. Given that it cannot be articulated in terms of a confrontation of hegemonic socio-economic projects, this antagonism now expresses itself in the moral register. What is at stake is still a political conflict but disguised as a moral opposition between "good" and "bad". On one side the good democrats who respect universal values and on the other side the representatives of evil, the racist and xenophobic right with whom no discussion is permitted and which has to be eradicated through moral condemnation.

The problem with this conflation of politics with morality is that it forcloses the possibility of posing what are the fundamental questions that a left-wing politics must address, those linked to the transformations of the key power relations in society and with the conditions for the establishment of a new hegemony. Moreover it does not help understanding the reasons behind the increasing success of right-wing populist parties and impedes envisaging how one can struggle against them on a truly political terrain.

The same criticism can also be addressed to the widespread identification democratic politics with the defense of human rights. Indeed nowadays there is a growing tendency to use the defense of human rights as the defining feature of democracy at the expense of the element of popular sovereignty which is seen as "old-fashioned". As Marcel Gauchet has pointed out, the fundamental shortcoming of a politics exclusively centered on human rights is that it has nothing to contribute to an understanding of the causes of present injustices. Indeed, by discrediting attempts to find explanations for what is deemed "inacceptable", it does not help designing strategies to come to terms with its causes. This is why such a politics is so often limited to discourses of denunciation.

Full article here.