The Four Pillars Of Israel’s Right To Exist
I take it for granted that it Israel’s right to exist is self-evident; I have learned to my chagrin that this is not nearly as universally shared as I would prefer. For those who question it, I present the following (I don’t claim it as complete – if anyone has additional arguments, feel free to add to the list).
I. The right to self-determination. Our great Declaration of Independence put it this way:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
The United States, of course, was rebelling against the English Crown when those words were penned; Israel was formed by Jews of the Diaspora whose attempts at assimilation in the societies of Europe had been met by a sudden upsurge of anti-Semitic pogroms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the Nazi terror of the 30′s and 40′s. Jefferson’s words still ring very true, however, particularly the last clause regarding new guards for future security.
The right to self-determination is not only an American ideal, however; to quote the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights of the United Nations:
The right to self-determination of peoples is a fundamental principle of international law. It is enshrined in article 1 of the Charter of the United Nations, in article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as in other international human rights instruments. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides for the rights of peoples to self-determination besides the right of ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion or to use their own language.
But why in Palestine? We come to the second pillar.
II. The ancient claim to the land of Israel. Those who call for the migration of the Israelis to Europe or elsewhere are fundamentally ignorant or intentionally dishonest; it is the land itself that is so important to the Jews, not just the concept of a state. Indeed, the Jews were offered land in East Africa by colonial Britain, but the offer was refused: it was the ancient homeland that was the core of the Zionist vision.
The world’s first monotheistic religion, Judaism, treated Israel as the Promised Land for God’s Chosen People. The desire to return to this land was ever present among the Jews. This is not a religious fable, but a historical fact going back centuries. To quote the Jewish Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel:
ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.
Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma’pilim and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.
In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.
This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.
The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.
Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.
In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.
On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.
This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.
III. The confirmation of the international community. As the Zionist movement gained ground in the late 19th century, it become clear that the international community would have to be take some sort of action regarding the Jews and Palestine. Beginning with the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate of the League of Nations, the ties between the Jews and their historic home became internationally recognized. Following the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, the United Nations recommended the partitioning of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, and one Arab, in 1947. Israel declared its statehood in 1948, fought the first of many wars with its neighbors intent on its destruction, and was admitted into the United Nations as a full-fledged member state in 1949. (These matters are discussed in depth numerous places – you could begin here, if you so desired).
There is no serious question of Israel’s right to exist in the area of international law. It is a settled matter.
IV. The moral case for Israel. Israel is an ally of the United States; it is a democracy. It is a land populated by a people who have been severely wronged throughout their history, and who were very nearly exterminated by the Nazis. It is a nation that is surrounded by enemies, and it faces terrorism as a near-daily fact. We say that we support democracy and freedom in the Middle East – how could we turn our backs on Israel? How can we make a stand against terror and ignore Hezbollah and Hamas?
Israel needs our support, but it should be freely given. When we ask what right Israel has to exist, we open wounds that are centuries old, and we apply to Israel a standard that we apply to no other nation. I close with the words of Menachem Begin:
Our right to exist–have you ever heard of such a thing? Would it enter the mind of any Briton or Frenchman, Belgian or Dutchman, Hungarian or Bulgarian, Russian or American, to request for its people recognition of its right to exist? Mr. Speaker: We were granted our right to exist by the God of our fathers at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization four thousand years ago. Hence, the Jewish people have an historic, eternal and inalienable right to exist in this land, Eretz Israel, the land of our forefathers. We need nobody’s recognition in asserting this inalienable right. And for this inalienable right, which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unexampled in the annals of nations. Mr. Speaker: From the Knesset of Israel, I say to the world, our very existence per se is our right to exist!
Hi there
You’ve made very good points regarding Israel’s right to exist (it’s quite ridiculous this has even become a topic, as you mention, no other country has ever had to justify its existence, but that’s another issue). Might I suggest another point: There were Jews living in Israel throughout history, before the European Jews returned to Israel after the Holocaust, before Sephardi Jews fled from their oppressors in their respective countries, there have ALWAYS been Jews there, and they were the only ones doing anything with the land. When exiled Jews returned to Israel, there were bits of land bought from the Arabs, with good money, which the Jews cultivated and turned barren and diseased land into a country that exports fresh produce. Oh, then the Arabs, who laughed at the Jews and called them crazy for working useless soil, suddenly cried for their stolen land.
And one more point: Before the Israelis won the land in the 1967 war,
Gaza was owned by Egypt, the West Bank was owned by Jordan,
and there were no “Palestinians.” The so-called Palestinians are really just refugees who refuse to go back to their countries. Cry as they may, Israel has given them a better life than their countries of origin, that is why they stay.
My main semantic point on the last thread was muddled. I’ll try again. I feel no country has a right to exist, but perhaps they have a right to be a sovereign nation (point I), if that is the will of the people. I concede that point no problem. If the will of the people within the country becomes something else, or within a small portion of the region becomes something else, does not that small portion of the region have a right to break apart from the already existing nation? Regardless of how the Palestinians came to the region, they are there and they would rather have their own state in the land of their choosing [i.e. where they are located]. If they have that land, they need some of the land with water on it too. Do they not have a right to exist then by the same logic that Israel does?
The main crux I’m getting at is this, just because these four points are understood by us (the U.S. and most of those in the U.N.), that doesn’t mean other people/nations live by these apparent truths. We have to understand this and instead of trying to kill the other nations and calling them anti-Semitic (even if they are) we ought to use a bit more diplomacy when dealing with this matter. This is not currently being done and it’s a damn shame.
The other tertiary questions I brought up were more devil’s advocate type questions, but they are valid. Why should the average American who is struggling to provide for their family care about Israel’s plight? These four points don’t really engage the public to say “oh, yeah, good call, some of my paycheck every month ought to go to help that nation”, regardless of whether or not they ought to. Currently the marketing of this issue to the nation is terrible. Every so often people need to be reminded of this. Granted, the media does a terrible job at showing every single mistake Israel makes without giving anywhere near the amount of air time to the suicide bombings that are occurring at the same time.
Mark: You might want to check out your monotheism claim. Also, thank you for the debate. I wasn’t deliberately trying to ruffle feathers, but I like to look at all avenues.
Also, if an ally is doomed to failure, it doesn’t make much sense to be their ally anymore. That’s all I was getting at in the last thread. Not saying this is the case here, only that if we are ever put in the position where Israel is about to be taken over by another nation, I don’t think it is in our interest (even morally) to step in and try to take the land back over for the sake of Israel. Accept the people who are displaced or want to move and go on with our lives. Israel is just as susceptible to takeover as any other small nation throughout history. They know this and that is why they are all required to be in the military.
Of course, I would prefer to renounce war entirely like Einstein and Russell (insert pithy “Russell said the Russian gulags were just great and thus he is discredited as a source of all things logical” comment anytime you please), but that makes me a crazy lefty nutjob.
Roni: As for the contention that no other country has had to justify it’s right to exist, tell that to any conquered nation throughout history.
Mike, your monotheism link is broken – do you mind posting it again?
Furthermore, Roni is just way off in his assessment about the Palestinians. There were not even 100,000 Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1922 and there were over 500,000 Muslims, then, in a matter of 20 years in was 500,000 and 1,000,000, respectively. That is an enormous demographic shift in 20 years and it is completely understandable to me why the Arab population might have been a bit angry because of this. The Palestinians/Arabs in the area [most was being sold by absentee Arab landholders, who, as it turns out, were in it for the money] had very little say in how many Jews were being allowed into this territory. Then, some organization (the U.N.) allows the Jewish population to have a country? It would be like allowing 135,000,000 Mexicans into the US in 20 years (which is pretty well impossible as Mexico only contains 107,000,000 people…) and then giving them a chunk of the country.
To pretend that these events did not occur is to do a great disservice to the discussion being had.
Mark, it was just the wikipedia link. Sorry, didn’t check it.
Also, it does state “one of the oldest known”. The others include some that did recognize other gods as enemies to be killed by the ‘one’ god. Etc. I just wanted to make clear that there were indeed others that were very similar to a monotheism. Oh, as it turns out, you said nothing about monotheism anyway. I think I’m senile.
As a side point, I have terrible reading comprehension (as you may have noticed from other threads). I only got a 620 on my verbal SATs. When you have no idea what any of the twleve words means (or parts of speech they are a part of) in the analogy section, you know it’s going to be a long day…Thank god I’m good at math.
I’ll agree with Mike that our obligation to help Israel is not sold properly at all. A lot of this has to do with the fact that so much of the progressive left and the isolationist/realpolitik right want to suppress the idea that we might have moral duties to other countries. The far left essentially believes that all cultures deserve equal respect and choosing Israel over Iran is illegitimate, whereas elements of the right either want us to ignore the rest of the world (see Pat Buchanan) or weigh everything we do in the crucible of self-interest (pick your favorite: Scowcroft, Kissinger, etc.). For both of these groups, it’s absolutely unthinkable for someone to say Israel is better than its neighbors and a force for good in the world. If we could just say to the American people that Israel is a freedom-loving place that is at the mercy of marauding terrorists and other such barbaric monsters 24/7, and that what they would like more than anything is to have such “small” concerns as figuring out how to provide for a family (as opposed to the ones about how to keep a family from exploding), I think we could make some headway.
As to your other point, Mike, I don’t agree that just anyone has a right to self-determination. The Confederate states had no right to leave the Union and we showed them exactly what we thought of their “opinion”. I am willing to concede that different circumstances require different answers, and I am also a supporter of the so-called two-state solution, so that might not mean a lot. But the question is certainly more complex than mealy-mouthed UN nonsense would have you believe.
Tuesday’s Best of the Best
There are lots of great columns, articles, editorials, blog posts and more out there again today. Here are some of today’s best of the best. (Check back for updates.) Dennis Prager, RealClearPolitics.com, ‘World Opinion’ Is Worthless It’s when worl…
Left out is that Israel is the ONLY Jewish nation on the earth and many, many others are actively hostile, even openly (more often covertly) murderous to Jews “wherever you find them”. Jews were driven out of Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and a host of lesser entities. The Palestinians so called could and should be able to settle and prosper in any of these other nations, especially as they were nomadic overwhelmingly if we are going back to the historical claims Mike seems to want to explore. But to hell with all that… Israel is a decent polity. The closest thing the Arab world has to offer is Jordan, excepting the nascent Iraqi state. Why should we expend blood and treasure, Mike? Because these jackasses are coming for US, meaning YOU if they may. How can you not know that? What a disgrace. But of course the first person interests are not all there are, to decent people.
If you believe that the Jewish people have a right to the land based upon a homeland argument, then you must also agree that the U.S. should give back the land to the Native Americans or at the least give them a state. Are the Jewish Americans ready to give up thier homes to the Native Americans? Probably not. Peace to all.
Look, I’m certainly not going to defend our treatment of Native Americans…we should have handled things differently. Do two wrongs make a right?…
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO COMPARISON WITH MEXICO.
1.ENGLISH MANDATE ON PALESTINE INCLUDED ALSO JORDAN (TRANSJORDAN). THE BRITISH GAVE
IT TO KING ABDULLAH AS A REWARD FOR ITS HELP AGAINST THE TURKISH RULERS OF THE MIDDLE EAST (OTTOMANS).
2.THE REMAINING PART ,WEST BANK FROM JORDAN TO MEDITERRANEAN SEA WAS NOW PALESTINE WHICH SHOULD HAVE BEEN SHARED BY PALESTINIAN ARABS AND PALESTINIAN JEWS.
3.29 TH. NOVEMBER 1947 THE UN VOTED IN FAVOUR OF A PARTITION OF PALESTINE. THE JEWS AGREED THE ARABS NOT. MAY 14TH.1948 ISRAEL DECLARED ITS INDEPENDENCE.THE DAY AFTER THE BRITES LEFT PALESTINE AND ARAB COUNTRIES ATTACKED THE NEWBORN ISRAEL.
[...] the Israeli’s were worshipping a golden calf. Well, check out the second video and the 4 pillars mentioned by Obama are in the protocols. (Notice he does not say what those pillars, (here is one of them outlined) [...]