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Saving the Drean
Yitzchok Adlerstein

Saving the Dream

Yitzchok Adlerstein

If disbelief characterized your response to the stories about the controversial new history textbooks in Israel, pat yourself on the back. You were right to trust your instincts.

Writing in Commentary ("Was Zionism Unjust," November) Hillel Halkin shows that the three new books on the Arab-Zionist conflict are all paper tigers. These works were authored by left-leaning, post-Zionist historians who claim to have benefited from the opening of old Israeli archives over the last two decades. Several common themes run through them. The founding of the State should not be envisioned with a halo, but darkened by "original sin." The Palestinians were driven into exile; defensive wars were really premeditated acts of aggression by militarily superior forces, not an outnumbered David fending off an Arab Goliath; Israeli intransigence insured that opportunities for peace were unrealized, so that Israel could continue its expansionism and maintain its citizenry in a state of siege.

Halkin shows how the authors themselves return to undo their own assertions. The harshest of the three later admits that "the desperate plight and heroism of the Jewish fighters are not in question…The inability of the Arabs to coordinate their diplomatic and military plans was in no small measure responsible for the disaster that overwhelmed them." Opportunities for peace were not really so opportune. Stubborn Israeli leaders would, they later concede, have gladly sat down to peace talks with any Arab leader so disposed. Deir Yassin was not premeditated; far fewer were killed than the accepted figure. There was no systematic expulsion policy. Most Arab refugees left because there was a war going on around them, not because of any ethnic cleansing.

Briefly stated, the familiar story of the founding of the State emerges unscathed: Jewish heroism against great odds, Arab flight that was essentially self-generated rather than imposed by Israeli actions, and the suicidal nature of further capitulation to the Arabs.

The real issue that historians should ponder, Halkin continues, is the fascinating disagreement between the Labor Zionists and Jabotinsky regarding the inevitability of using force against the Arabs. The Laborites insisted for decades that the resident Arabs had no good reason to oppose expanding Jewish settlement. Jabotinsky, on the other hand, wrote in 1933 that "a voluntary agreement [with the Arabs] is unthinkable…Zionist colonization must either be abandoned, or continued against the will of the native population. It can only be furthered and developed [by] an Iron Wall that cannot be broken by them." In the words of one of the authors, "[The] Labor Zionists were reluctant to admit that military force would be necessary…Jabotinsky faced up to this fairly and squarely." Strangely, the three revisionists agree with Jabotinsky. As Halkin puts it, "The only way to have avoided nearly a century of conflict with the Arabs…was for Jews never to have gone there …in the first place. The only original sin Israel was conceived in was the sin of the Zionist dream itself.

While Jabotinsky may have been correct, says Halkin, he may also have been naïve, in overestimating the Jewish capacity to absorb the truth. Without deluding themselves building a Jewish state with friendly Arabs cheering them on, many Zionists would never have agreed to settle there. Without predictions of a bloodless evolution of a Jewish state, the Balfour Declaration and international support of its kernel idea would never have come into being.

In a different regard, though, Jabotinsky was correct. He spoke of a "sacred truth:" the right of the Jews to their homeland. Without a firm belief in it, he believed, the case for Zionism would collapse.

This is where Halkin finds the most destructive elements of the new revisionist histories. What they say is not so damning after all. What the new textbooks that are based on them do not say is demoralizing enough to endanger the survival of the State.

Their tone, Halkin complains, is too detached and "objective." The book "tells them nothing of what the declaration of a Jewish state in 1948 meant to Jews in Israel and all over the world…nothing of its roots in history…nothing of the thoughts and feelings of the young men and women who went into battle bearing this history on their backs…It could have happened in China or on the moon…What can one say of such textbooks? That they do not attempt to create in the young Israeli the slightest identification with his people or his country? That they make no connection between this country and 3,000 year of Jewish history?"

These are students who will soon enter the armed forces. What fierce loyalty and determination can the post-Zionist dream offer them on the battlefield? How much adrenalin will course through their veins as a consequence of the vision to be a "normal country that can live in and for the present entirely as ‘a state of all its citizens?’ "

By now, any traditional reader should be feeling an acute attack of deja-vu. The most famous of Jewish biblical exegetes begins his commentary with a question. If the Torah is primarily a legal work, why not begin with the laws and statutes? Why start with the Creation story?

Because, Rashi says, "If the nations of the world will say to Israel, ‘You are bandits, for you conquered the lands of the seven nations,’ Israel will say to them, ‘The whole earth belongs to the Holy One, Blessed is He. He created, and He gave it to the one who is proper in His eyes."

Many have realized in the nine hundred years since Rashi penned those words that the lesson was not chiefly intended for the nations of the world, who had no shortage of means to supercede Jewish historical claims. Rather, it was meant for Jews who would have difficulty sorting out competing claims for justice and legitimacy.

If Israeli kids are going to continue believing in an inalienable right of the Jews to their land, they are going to have to sink roots in a history that goes back much further than ’48 or the travails of the Diaspora. For millennia, Jews predicated their tie to the Land upon confidence in the veracity of the Biblical narrative and their Divinely ordained mission to the world. Ironically, it may have to be religion that saves secular Zionism.


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