A Durable Peace (8 page)

The final undermining of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel was followed by an unbroken centuries-long tradition of
intellectual and popular longing for restoration of Jewish sovereignty, most frequently evoked in religious themes. Pick a
century at random, and you will find not only wide expression of this Jewish yearning among the common people but moving poetic
and philosophic longings penned by virtually every leading man of genius. Thus in the tenth century, the Jewish philosopher
Saadia Gaon:

May it be your will, O Lord our God, that this era may mark the end of the dispersion for your people the House of Israel,
and the time for the termination of our exile and our mourning.
³⁶

In the twelfth century, the great Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, writing of Jerusalem, in Hebrew, from Spain:

O great King’s city, mountain blessed!

My soul is yearning unto thee

From the furthest West.

And who shall grant me, on the wings of eagles,

To rise and seek you through the years,

Until I mingle with your dust beloved

The waters of my tears?
³⁷

Later in the same century, the philosopher Moses Maimonides declared that the return to Israel was the only hope of an end
to Jewish suffering at the hands of the Arabs, of whom he writes that “Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate
us as much as they.” But he promises,

The future redeemer of our people will… gather our nation, assemble our exiles, [and] redeem us from our degradation.
³⁸

In the thirteenth century, the scholar Nahmanides went further, ruling that the return to live in the Land of Israel was an
obligation morally binding on every Jew
³⁹
—a stricture he would dutifully fulfill by coming to the land and helping to rebuild the Jewish community there that had been
nearly annihilated during the Crusades.

By the sixteenth century, the idea of a Christian-Jewish alliance taking the land back from the Moslems elicited enthusiasm
from many Jews in Italy and some of the Marranos (Christians of Jewish descent) of Portugal.
⁴⁰
Jewish exiles from Spain rebuilt the Jewish quarter in Hebron, and the Portuguese Jew Don Joseph Nasi rebuilt the city of
Tiberias with the permission of the sultan. This wave of return also sparked an unprecedented intellectual and cultural revival
in the Galilee city of Safed, which drew between ten thousand and twenty thousand Jewish immigrants by the end of the century.
The renowned Rabbi Yehuda Leowe of Prague, known as the Maharal, was no less clear that full-scale Return would have to come:

Exile is a change and departure from the natural order, whereby the Lord situated every nation in the place best suited it…. The
place [the Jews] deserved according to the order of existence was to be independent in the Land of Israel.
⁴¹

In the seventeenth century among the Jews of Poland, large-scale preparations for the Return began (and a few years later
abruptly ended) with the rise and fall of the would-be Jewish “messiah” Shabtai Zevi. Despite this disappointment, the Gaon
of Vilna and the Ba’al Shem Tov, the foremost leaders of eighteenth-century European Jewry, both inspired their students to
organize groups to come and settle in the land. One of the Gaon of Vilna’s
students described the great sage’s insistence that his pupils personally take up the responsibility of realizing the Return:

Who is greater among us in all the recent generations than our teacher, the Gaon of Vilna, who with his impassioned words
urged his students to go up to the Land of Israel and to work to ingather the exiles, and who frequently exhorted his students
to speed the end of the exile, [and] to bring the redemption closer by means of settling the Land of Israel. Almost every
day he would tell us with trembling emotion, that “in Zion and Jerusalem the remnants will see salvation,” and that we should
not miss it. Who can describe in words the concern of our teacher when he told us these things in his exalted spirit and with
tears in his eyes….
⁴²

Indeed, when the Zionist pioneers began arriving in the Land toward the end of the nineteenth century, they found the small
communities, built by the disciples of these great religious figures and by other Jews already on the Land, in Jerusalem comprising
the majority of the city’s inhabitants.

Thus, in spurts and trickles, sometimes even in streams, Jews went back to their land throughout the centuries. Some walked
the plains of Russia and, after pausing in Damascus or Beirut, entered Palestine from the north. Others sailed a pirate-infested
Mediterranean and landed in Jaffa. Once there, they joined the Jews of Hebron, Safed, or Jerusalem who down the ages had kept
an uninterrupted vigil over a ruined land. As a consequence, there was no period during which the land was devoid of Jews.
(In the villages of Peki’in and Shefar’am in the Galilee, Jews have lived continuously from ancient times until the present.)
⁴³

But a truly large-scale return was not possible until the emergence of modern Zionism in the second half of the nineteenth
century, when the traditional longing for Zion on the part of the Jewish multitudes and the scholars of the exile first found
practical political expression. Such works as Moses Hess’s
Rome and
Jerusalem
(1862) and Leo Pinsker’s
Auto-Emancipation
(1882) were able to build on ancient feelings to contribute to a belief in the possibility of contemporary action. In the
wake of the great anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in 1881, these longings were quickly translated into an emotional proto-Zionist
movement for the settlement of Palestine called Hovevei Zion, the “Lovers of Zion,” which in turn fostered the first large-scale
immigration to Palestine.

It was these towering ideas, emotions, and traditions that set the stage for the appearance of political Zionism a hundred
years ago, when the next to last of the series of empires that had occupied the land began collapsing of its own weight. It
was then that men of vision like Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau emerged, foreseeing the historic opportunity presented by the
Ottoman Empire’s decline. In addition to offering a concrete political solution—namely, the founding of a Jewish state—Herzl
also established the institutions, such as the World Zionist Organization and the successive Zionist Congresses, beginning
in 1897, that were to put his plan into action.

What Herzl was able to do was to translate a native, emotional Zionism that beat in millions of Jewish hearts into a political
movement that took account of the modern world. He understood the forces of politics and power, of personality and persuasion;
above all, Herzl was animated by a profound understanding of history and by a vision of the impending tragedy of European
Jewry and of the triumphant possibility of revived Jewish statehood. He therefore pressed the Zionist claim with all the urgency
he could muster.

While his disciples in many countries propelled the ideas of political Zionism toward the concrete goal of the founding of
the state, Zionist pioneers undertook the massive effort of settling a land that had been allowed to fall into disuse by absentee
Arab landlords living the good life in Beirut and Damascus. The Jews turned barren scenery, alternating between rock and swamp,
into productive farmland, dotted first with villages, then towns, then
cities. This effort was assisted by a few wealthy Jews, most notably Moses Montefiore and Baron Rothschild, who put up the
funds for many of the pivotal early projects. The first such enterprise was appropriately titled Rishon Le-Zion (“The First
of Zion”), an agricultural settlement founded in 1882 by Russian Jewish settlers who soon received Rothschild’s assistance.

When Abraham Markus, my maternal great-grandfather, arrived at Rishon Le-Zion several years later, in 1896, it was still a
cluster of red-tiled whitewashed houses springing up in the middle of a sandy wilderness. (Today it is prime real estate,
minutes away from Tel Aviv on the coastal highway.) One of the “Lovers of Zion,” Abraham wanted to be a scholar-farmer, planting
almond trees by day and studying the Talmud at night. By the time my mother was born in nearby Petah Tikva (“Gate of Hope”)
in 1912, the family was living, amid orchards they had planted, in a fine house with a promenade of palm trees leading up
to it.

But these luxuries were enjoyed only by the few “established” families; newcomers had to face much tougher conditions. When
my paternal grandfather Nathan arrived in Palestine in 1920, there were hardly any paved roads and virtually no modern transport.
The family disembarked from the ship in rowboats, as there were no mooring facilities in the port of Jaffa at the time. After
spending some time in Tel Aviv, the new Jewish suburb of Jaffa, they traveled for two days on a dirt road to Tzemah on the
southern shore of the Sea of Galilee. There my grandfather and my father boarded a boat to take the luggage to Tiberias five
miles away, while the rest of the family continued by carriage. It was late afternoon, and the sudden violent gales so typical
of the lake nearly smashed the vessel in two. They stayed overnight in Tiberias, then made their way by horse-drawn carriage
up the steep slopes to Safed, changing horses in Rosh Pina, another point of Jewish settlement in the barren wilderness that
was otherwise relieved only by sparse Bedouin encampments. As late as 1920, the trip from Jaffa to Safed took more than three
days. Today it can be done comfortably in three hours.

Beginning with the first wave of Zionist immigration in 1880 and continuing through successive waves before and after World
War I, the country was rapidly transformed. The Jews built roads, towns, farms, hospitals, factories, and schools. And as
Jewish immigration increased their numbers, it also caused a rapid increase in the Arab population. Many of the Arabs immigrated
into the land in response to the job opportunities and the better life afforded by the growing economy the Jews had created—so
much so that in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt was moved to observe that “Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921
has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period.”
⁴⁴

The improved economic conditions that the influx of Jewish industry and commerce created fueled a steep rise in income and
industrialization among the Arabs of Palestine that had no parallel in any neighboring Arab country. Thus by 1947, the wages
of the Arab worker in Haifa were twice what his counterpart was receiving in Nablus, where there was no Jewish presence.
⁴⁵
Similarly, the number of factories owned by Arabs increased 400 percent between 1931 and 1942, while the number of their
employees increased tenfold between 1931 and 1946.
⁴⁶

The most dramatic increase in Arab immigration was to the areas of Jewish habitation. Between 1922, the advent of the Mandate,
and 1947, the Arab population in the Jewish cities grew by 290 percent in Haifa, 158 percent in Jaffa, and 131 percent in
Jerusalem, as compared with 64 percent in Hebron, 56 percent in Nablus, and 37 percent in Bethlehem, where there were few
or no Jews.
⁴⁷
But the fact that Arabs migrated into what would eventually be a domain of millions of Jews hardly altered the prevailing
international conception that this was to be a Jewish land, albeit one with an Arab minority. Thus, the unceasing Jewish claim
to the land has been backed up in the last hundred years by unrelenting Jewish efforts to settle it and bring its open wastes
back to life.

* * *

However valid the Jewish claim has been, its relevance would have been mitigated if the Arabs had been able to show an equally
persistent claim to the land over the prior centuries. The Arab side makes precisely this claim today—that in recognizing
the Jewish historical claim, the men of Versailles disregarded the presence of a nation that had come into being in the intervening
period and that had developed unique cultural and historical ties to the land that overshadowed and superseded those of the
Jews. The world’s leaders, the Arabs claim, erred in believing that they were “giving a people without a land a land without
a people.”

Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, Woodrow Wilson, and many of the other statesmen of Versailles were men of education, intelligence,
and vision. But were they really so fired up with the passions of biblical restoration and humanist ideals that they were
simply blinded to the basic demographic and national facts on the ground?

In fact, they were not. They acted from a reasonable assessment of the well-known and well-documented situation in Palestine
in their day—anchoring their policies in facts that have since grown increasingly unfamiliar to many people.

The basic Arab claim is that the Jews seized Palestine from an Arab people who had lived there for ages and was its rightful
owner. At his speech at the United Nations in 1974, Yasser Arafat declared:

The Jewish invasion began in 1881…. Palestine was then a verdant area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of
building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture.
⁴⁸

Arafat and Arab lore thus date the beginning of the Zionist invasion at 1881, when the first wave of the modern Zionist immigration
began. (By then, Jews had outnumbered Arabs in Jerusalem for sixty years.)
⁴⁹

By now, the idea that the Zionists stole the land from its age
old native inhabitants has been so deeply implanted by Arab spokesmen that in many circles in the West it is almost impossible
to dislodge. But it is not supported by history. The description offered by Arafat and others of Palestine before the return
of the Jews as a verdant area teeming with people is flatly contradicted by the hundreds of eyewitness accounts of European
and American visitors to the Holy Land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the reports of the great archaeological
explorers from Robinson onward.