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.
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