David Goldberg on Israel

I am as certain as can be that neither Justin Keating, who wrote two contentious pieces about Israel, nor your editor, who published them, are anti-Semitic. Hurling the charge of anti-Semitism is the first resort of those stuck for a better argument. It gets doubly complicated for them when Jews like me, both inside and outside Israel, have criticised Israeli actions. To call us anti-Semitic would be patently absurd, so they label us ‘self-hating Jews’ instead.

If Trevor White and Keating were surprised and shocked by the vehemence of readers’ reactions, at least they can take comfort from the fact that they were being abused in the relative tranquility of the Irish Republic, not in the USA. Sweet reason and Platonic logic have never been a feature of Middle East political discourse, least of all among Israel’s more rabid American supporters. But if Keating wants to dip his toes in those turbulent waters, he should at least get his background facts right. His two articles were a mÈlange of de-contextualised historical inaccuracy, speciously selective quotation and subjective personal opinion, which is why I would like to set the record a little straighter.

Let me begin with his first point; that the Jews of the Old Testament did not originate from Israel/Palestine and therefore to claim it as the birthplace of the Jewish people is ‘a self-serving and untruthful Zionist myth.’ He cites in support a partial snippet from My People, a book by Abba Eban. But as Keating well knows, after sketching in the Mesopotamian background of the nomadic early Hebrew tribes, Eban spends a large portion of his book recounting, with a great deal of information corroborated by biblical scholarship and archaeology, the long sojourn of the Hebrew people in its own land from some time after the Egyptian Exodus, circa 1250 BCE, until at least one hundred years after the death of Jesus, circa 135 CE.

During those 1400 years or so, Hebrew territory reached its largest extent under kings David and Solomon, from Phoenicia in the west to the Arabian desert in the east, and from the river Orontes in the north to the head of the Gulf of Aqaba in the south – all of what geographers now call Palestine, and then some. Mostly it was a long, wearying struggle against powerful neighbours, and after the return from Babylonian exile conducted in a reduced country about the size of Wales. To state, as Keating does, that the Jews occupied their kingdom only ‘briefly and intermittently’ is a travesty of the historical facts.

Nor, as he seems to think, did Jewish life cease in Palestine after the Roman captivity of 135. Not all Jews were taken off as slaves. Although Jewish existence since then has been predominantly in the Diaspora, a sizeable Jewish community remained in Palestine under successive Roman, Christian and Muslim rule. Its numbers declined during the Middle Ages, but Jews were always settled there, and under benign Ottoman jurisdiction they had become, by the 1850s, the single largest religious grouping in their most holy city of Jerusalem.

Keating’s second point is to question whether all the world’s Jews today are descendants of those Jews of two thousand years ago. Of course they are not. Are all the Irish today descendants of the original Celts? Ah ha, says Keating, that therefore invalidates any Jewish claim to the land and the right of return. He throws in another misleading literary reference to Arthur Koestler’s book The Thirteenth Tribe, which no scholar takes seriously, fancifully to suggest that all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the legendary conversion of the Khazar kingdom in the 8th century.

Now I am willing to concede that the Law of Return, promulgated in 1950 and granting every Jew, whatever his citizenship and wherever his domicile, the right to settle in Israel – is not the greatest piece of legislation since Solon the lawgiver and is overdue for revision. But it has to be judged in context, which Keating signally fails to do. It was passed two years after Israel’s establishment, five years after the end of World War II, in which six million European Jews had been murdered by the Nazis. Some 250,000 survivors languished in DP (displaced persons) camps, with no country willing to take them in. I don’t recall that Ireland, after its ambiguous war record and with more sheep than people on its rolling acres, exactly clamoured to grant them a haven (if you’re willing to dish it out, Justin, you must also be willing to take it). The Law of Return at least offered all homeless Jews citizenship and an identity.

Equally lacking in historical context or diplomatic reality are Keating’s fourth and fifth points; that neither the 1917 Balfour Declaration nor the 1947 UN Partition Resolution gave Zionists the ‘right’ to establish a state. The fact is, whether Keating likes it or not, that victorious nations and international bodies do arrogate to themselves the right to re-apportion the territories of defeated enemies. That is what the League of Nations did after World War I, when it carved up the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in central Europe and created artificial new countries in the Middle East out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire. And that is what the United Nations did in 1947, when it voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Zionists accepted the vote, but the armies of five neighbouring Arab countries immediately invaded. Due to its victory then and again in 1967, Israel today holds territory twice the size of what it was originally granted by the UN.

We can debate the legality of territory acquired by war, we can criticise Israel’s settlement policy and we can deplore the treatment of Palestinians, but just what does Keating mean when he writes that Israel’s actions ‘have rendered that [partition] resolution void’ and that in law and in equity ‘it has no validity?’ Is he saying Israel should be dismantled? If so, does he also advocate dismantling Zimbabwe, the so-called ‘rogue states’ of Iran, Syria and North Korea, and any other country that fails to live up to his exacting standards? It is here that his argument becomes a little sinister and sensitive Jewish antennae begin to twitch.

Let me, briefly, clear up some of his other errors and misconceptions.

Keating is wrong to affirm that in 1905 (he means 1903) the young Zionist movement seriously considered the offer of a national homeland in what is now Uganda. Only Herzl and a few of his supporters did. Controversy over the proposal nearly cost Herzl leadership of the movement; it certainly cost him his reputation and his health.

Keating is wrong to call Max Nordau ‘the great Jewish intellectual and moralist.’ He was a garrulous windbag of interminable speeches and unreadable books whose reputation did not survive his death. Nor upon learning that there were already inhabitants of Palestine did he really say that for the Zionists to colonise, there would be an injustice. That is an apocryphal story, intended to mock Herzl’s naive slogan of ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’. That there was and is an indigenous Arab population, and how to accommodate to it, has always been the insoluble problem at the heart of the Zionist enterprise.

Keating is flattering, but wrong, to credit Judaism with developing the idea of Democracy, along with those of Liberty, Justice and Righteousness. A cursory reading of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran would show him that their desired system of government is God’s kingdom on earth – a theocracy. Rights we take for granted such as universal suffrage, sexual equality and freedom of belief are all benefits of post-Enlightenment secular humanism to which religion has been forced to adjust.

Keating is wrong in trying to make a distinction between ‘Zionists’ (bad) and ‘Jews’ (good). The fact is that almost all Jews in the world, apart from those of the ultra-Orthodox far right or the extreme Marxist left, would define themselves as Zionists, if that means supporting the right of the State of Israel to exist within secure, internationally recognised borders. How that is achieved while also respecting the rights and national aspirations of another people sharing the same small stretch of land has eluded answer for over eighty years. The search for a just solution is not helped, though, by inflammatory articles like Keating’s, with their lurid phrases about Zionists having ‘abandoned’ and ‘betrayed’ Jewish values, or that defending Israel ‘endangers’ all that is best in the Jewish tradition. He concluded with the ringing peroration ‘I am ….pro-Jewish’. Maybe so, but he has a strange way of showing it.

Rabbi Dr David J Goldberg OBE is the author of The Jewish People: Their History and Their Religion and To the Promised Land: A History of Zionist Thought, both published by Penguin. His new book The Divided Self: Israel and the Diaspora Today is due out in March

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