VENI, VIDI… DID I UNDERSTAND?

There is a question about Israel that seems to be asked more and more often, especially by younger people: Why should there be a Jewish state at all?

People are free to ask it. What I find increasingly difficult to understand is why Israel seems to be required, again and again, to answer it.

Because asking what Israel does is one thing. Asking whether Israel should exist is something else entirely.

We can debate any Israeli policy. We can judge its governments. We can argue about 1948, 1967, the settlements, Gaza, borders, the treatment of Palestinians, the proportionality of military operations, even the constitutional character of the state. We can investigate war crimes and, if they are proven, demand accountability.

All of that is legitimate.

But there is an enormous leap between saying that a state has acted wrongly and asking whether that state should disappear. And that leap deserves an explanation.

We do not normally ask whether Russia should cease to exist because of crimes committed by its government. We do not periodically reopen the question of Turkey’s right to exist because of its history with Armenians or Kurds. Pakistan’s conduct does not automatically turn Pakistan’s continued existence into an open question. We can challenge governments, borders, wars and policies without turning every dispute into a referendum on the political existence of the people involved.

Why does this happen so often with Israel?

Perhaps to answer that we need to go back much further than Gaza, 1967, or even 1948. Because the story did not begin there.

The Jews did not simply arrive in the Middle East one day and arbitrarily choose a piece of land on which to build a country. Israel, Judah, Jerusalem, Samaria, Judea: these are not names invented by the Zionist movement. They belong to a history stretching back almost three thousand years. There were kingdoms, destructions, exiles, returns, foreign rulers and, eventually, a diaspora that scattered much of that people around the world. But the religious, cultural and historical connection to that land never disappeared.

That does not mean other populations were not living there throughout those centuries. They were. Their descendants also have a history, an identity and rights that do not disappear simply because we recognize Jewish history.

That is precisely why the conflict is so difficult. We do not have one people with a history confronting another without one. We have two peoples who regard the same land as a fundamental part of their identity.

And yet something often disappears when Israel’s birth is viewed exclusively through concepts such as colonialism or settler colonialism.

For almost two thousand years, the overwhelming majority of Jews lived under the rule of others. There were periods when they lived extraordinarily well, although those periods were the exception. In many others they were discriminated against, expelled, dispossessed, persecuted or killed.

But the constant was something else: in the end, their security depended on somebody else. A king, an emperor, a religious majority, a government, or a society willing to tolerate them.

As long as that tolerance lasted, they could live. When it disappeared, they could flee – if they could find someone willing to take them in. And sometimes they could not even do that.

The Holocaust took that vulnerability to an almost unimaginable extreme. But it would be a mistake to say that the Holocaust created Zionism. Modern Zionism had emerged decades earlier, precisely because some European Jews had reached an uncomfortable conclusion: emancipation, integration and culture did not necessarily make antisemitism disappear.

Six million dead do not automatically grant........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)