In search of one’s own land
STANLEY COUTINHO
When a race stakes its claim for a separate nation, several questions arise. Questions that the world may ask, ranging from arrogance to alarm; questions that the race asks itself, range from self-doubt to self-determination, interspersed with intense internal debates. And when that race is one that has been despised for no apparent reason, from time immemorial, the questions defy categorisation.
It is intriguing that the oldest monotheistic community known to man also has the longest history of being repeatedly subjected to exile, enslavement and annihilation. The Roman exile of 70 CE deprived the Jews of a home for around two thousand years. In all those centuries the anguish of Zion (seen in Psalm 137 and popularised by Boney M in the late 1970s) burned within them. In all those centuries, they suffered diverse forms of persecution – but it was the Third Reich that would bring out the most shameful display of man’s inhumanity to man.
It was, thus, in 1896 that Theodor Herzl (who believed that anti-Semitism would end if Jews had a country of their own,) wrote “The Jewish State”; a little earlier, Nathan Birnbaum coined the word “Zionism”, the movement for the re-creation of a National Jewish Home in the land of Israel. In 1897, Herzl called the First Zionist Congress, and according to Gordis, the book and the Congress transformed Herzl from a lone voice into a leader of an international movement. His message to the readers was simple – if you will it, it is no dream.
Daniel Gordis traces this “bold dream” through all those desperate times with scholarly detachment. Through his fluid narrative style we come to know of the internal debates and conflicts between the Zionists and anti-Zionists, between those who preferred the religious base and those who would be secular, between the diametrically opposed and fiery views of Begin and Ben-Gurion. We get a feel of the excitement in and around the Tel Aviv Museum on Friday, the 14th of May, 1948, as the “Declaration of Independence” was proclaimed to the world. The author says: Two millennia of exile ended, a new era of history dawned. And the reader almost expects Gordis to wax Wordsworth-ian: “Bliss was it that dawn to be alive ...” But, later in the day, Ben-Gurion was to remark ominously to Shimon Peres: Today, everyone is happy, tomorrow blood will be spilled.
Dispassionate as he would like to be, he calls the Balfour Declaration, the recognition of the Zionist Movement by “the most powerful empire on the planet”. That soubriquet displays chinks in the armour of scholarly detachment; but he goes on to a near-clinical analysis of the Declaration and its implications. In an otherwise historically significant document, he says, it is astonishingly ambiguous: it does not mention a Jewish “State”; there was no timetable, no map for creation of Israel without impinging on Palestinian rights and aspirations.
Subsequently, the British took control of Palestine but did not allow Jewish immigration into the territory; in fact, British attitude towards Israel hovered between ambivalence and hostility. But for all that, he acknowledges that the British left Palestine far more advanced than it had been when they received it; they built up the country’s infrastructure allowed the creation and cultivation of institutions that would form the backbone of a state.
Gordis’ detachment is best seen in the analysis of the arrest of Adolph Eichmann – the man responsible along with Nazi leaders for the “final solution” which meant the annihilation of six million European Jews. The arrest was condemned by everyone, including the UN Security Council. But back in Israel, Gordis finds a poignant moment: for all those millions murdered and tortured, gassed or burnt or buried alive – would some measure of retribution be finally found? When the announcement of the arrest was made, says the obviously goosebumped Gordis, “As if continuing the ten minute ovation that Herzl had received in [the First Zionist Congress] 63 years earlier, those in the plenum shook the hall with spontaneous and thunderous applause.”
The infant nation was not to be left alone, though – there were wars to be fought on literally every front. In addition, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring Zionism is a form of racism – rightly opposed by the US, for making anti-Semitism an international law. But “Israel” was a dream fulfilled, a dream of safety, of confidence, of pride of international admiration. All told the book carries a concise history of a very trouble people in search of their own, their native land. A fitting and worthy gift from Daniel Gordis to his nation as it celebrates the centenary of the Balfour Declaration.