Where is the homeland for the Jews? Where did they originate?

http://www.wzo.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=1625

The Meaning of Homeland

The Zionist Imperative

The Jews' right to the land of Israel is comparable to that of a 'drowning man to grasp the only plank that can save him.' Because of our historical connection to it, this is the only land to which the Jews would have come to establish a homeland, but the land is not 'holy.' However, this is also the Palestinians' homeland, and that makes for a tragic clash of rights.

To Be a Jew

The land of the Jews could not have come into being and could not have existed anywhere but here. Not in Uganda, not in Ararat, and not in Birobidzhan. Because this is the place the Jews have always looked to throughout their history. Because there is no other territory to which the Jews would have come in their masses to establish a Jewish homeland. On this point I commit myself to a severe, remorseless distinction between the inner motives of the return to Zion and its justification to others. The age-old longings are a motive, but not a justification. Political Zionism has made political, national use of religious, messianic yearning, and rightly so. But our justification vis-a-vis the Arab inhabitants of the country cannot be based on our age-old longings. What are our longings to them? The Zionist enterprise has no other objective justification than the right of a drowning man to grasp the only plank that can save him. And that is justification enough. (Here I must anticipate something I shall return to later: There is a vast moral difference between the drowning man who grasps a plank and makes room for himself by pushing the others who are sitting on it to one side, even by force, and the drowning man who grabs the whole plank for himself and pushes the others into the sea. This is the moral argument that lies behind our repeated agreement in principle to the partition of the land. This is the difference between making Jaffa and Nazareth Jewish, and making Ramallah and Nablus Jewish.)

I cannot use such words as 'the promised land' or 'the promised borders.' Happy are those who believe, for theirs is the Land. Why should they trouble themselves with questions of morality or rights of others? (Although perhaps those who believe in the promise ought to wait humbly for the Author of the promises to decide when the right moment has come for Him to keep it.) Happy are those who believe. Their Zionism is simple and carefree. Mine is hard and complicated. I also have no use for the hypocrites who suddenly remember the divine promise whenever their Zionism runs into an obstacle or an inner contradiction (and go charging off in their cars with their wives and children every Sabbath to cherish the dust of the holy places.) In a nutshell, I am a Zionist in all that concerns the redemption of the Jews, but not when it comes to the 'redemption of the holy land.' We have come here to live as a free nation, not 'to liberate the land that groans under the desecration of a foreign yoke,' Samaria, Gilead, Aram, and Hauran up to the great Euphrates River. The word 'liberation' applies to people, not to dust and stone. I was not born to blow rams' horns or 'purge a heritage that has been defiled by strangers.'

Why here of all places? Because here and only here is where the Jews were capable of coming and establishing their independence. Because the establishment of the political independence of the Jews could not have come about in any other territory. Because here was the focus of their prayers and their longings.

To tell the truth, those longings were organically linked with the belief in the promise and the Promiser, the Redeemer, and the Messiah. Is there a contradiction here? As I have already said, religious feelings helped a secular, political movement to achieve an aim that was historical, not miraculous or messianic. The ancient yearning for the land of Israel was part of a total faith in the coming of the Redeemer. Faith, side by side with a common destiny, maintained the continuing unity of the Jewish people. But let us not forget, or allow others to forget, that it was not God or the Messiah or a miracle or an angel that achieved the independence of the Jews in their own land, but a secular, political movement with a modern ideology and modern tactics. Therefore, the Zionism of a secularist may contain a structural fault. I do not intend to gloss over this fault with phrases and slogans. I accept this contradiction, if such it be, and I say: here I stand. In our social life, in love, in our attitude to others and to death, we the non-religious are condemned to live with inconsistencies and faults. And that goes for Zionism too.

Consequently, my Zionism may not be 'whole'. For instance, I see nothing wrong with mixed marriage or with conversion, if it is successful. Only those Jews who choose to be Jews or who are compelled to be Jews belong, in my view, to this tribe. For them, and only for them, the State of Israel is a present possibility. I would like to make it an attractive and fascinating possibility.

I do not regard myself as a Jew by virtue of 'race' or as a 'Hebrew' because I was born in the land of Canaan. I choose to be a Jew, that is, to participate in the collective experience of my ancestors and fellow Jews down the ages. Albeit a selective participation: I do not approve of everything they approved of, nor am I prepared to continue obediently living the kind of life that they live. As a Jew, I do not want to live among strangers who see in me some kind of symbol or stereotype, but in a State of Jews. Such a State could only have come into being in the land of Israel. That is as far as my Zionism goes...

Right Against Right

As I see it, the confrontation between the Jews returning to Zion and the Arab inhabitants of the country is not like a western or an epic, but more like a Greek tragedy. It is a clash between right and right (although one must not seek a simplistic symmetry in it). And, as in all tragedies, there is no hope of a happy reconciliation based on a clever magical formula. The choice is between a blood bath and a disappointing compromise, more like enforced acceptance than a sudden breakthrough of mutual understanding.

True, the dispute is not 'symmetrical.' There is no symmetry between the constant, eager attempts of Zionism to establish a dialogue with the local Arabs and those of the neighboring states, and the bitter and consistent hostility the Arabs, with all their different political regimes, have for decades shown us in return.

But it is a gross mistake, a common oversimplification, to believe that the dispute is based on a misunderstanding. It is based on full and complete understanding: We have repeatedly offered the Arabs goodwill, good neighborliness, and cooperation, but that was not what they wanted from us. They wanted us, according to the most moderate Arab formulation, to abandon the idea of establishing a free Jewish State in the land of Israel, and that is a concession we can never make.

It is the height of naivete to believe that but for the intrigues of outsiders and the backwardness of fanatical regimes, the Arabs would realize the positive side of the Zionist enterprise and straightaway fall on our necks in brotherly love.

The Arabs did not oppose Zionism because they failed to understand it, but because they understood it only too well. And that is the tragedy: The mutual understanding does exist. We want to exist as a nation, as a State of Jews. They do not want that State. This cannot be glossed over with high-sounding phrases, neither the noble aspirations to brotherliness of well-meaning Jews, nor the clever Arab tactics of 'We will be content, at this stage, with the return of all refugees to their previous place of residence.' Any search for a way out must start from a fundamental change of position preceded by the open-eyed realization of the full extent of the struggle: a tragic conflict, tragic anguish.

We are here because this is the only place where we can exist as a free nation. The Arabs are here because Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinians, just as Iraq is the homeland of the Iraqis and Holland is the homeland of the Dutch. The question of what cultural assets the Palestinians have created here or what care they have taken of the landscape or the agriculture is of not relevance to the need to discuss their right to their homeland. Needless to say, the Palestinian owes no deference to God's promises to Abraham, to the longings of Yehuda HaLevi and Bialik, or to the achievements of the early Zionist pioneers.

Current talk about pushing Palestinian masses back to oil-rich Kuwait or fertile Iraq makes no more sense than would talking about our own mass emigration to 'Jewish' Brooklyn. Knaves and fools in both camps might add: 'After all, they'll be among their brothers there.' But just as I am entitled to see myself as an Israeli Jew, not a Brooklyner or a Golders Greener, so a Palestinian Arab is entitled to regard himself as a Palestinian, not an Iraqi or a Kuwaiti. The fact that only an enlightened minority of Palestinians seems to see it that way at the moment cannot prejudice the national right to self-determination when the time comes. Let us remember ' with all the reservations the comparison requires ' that it was only a Zionist-minded minority of Jews that ' justly! ' claimed the right to establish a Hebrew State here in the name of the entire Jewish people for the benefit of the Jews who would one day come to a national consciousness.

This land is our land. It is also their land. Right conflicts with right. 'To be a free people in our own land' is a right that is valid either universally or not at all.

As for the war between Israel and the neighboring Arab states, it is an indirect outcome of the confrontation between us and the Palestinians. Of course I am not going to explain everything away in terms of 'devotion' or 'brotherliness' on the part of the neighboring states. I only want to emphasize that the strife that has developed in the land of Israel must be resolved here, between us and the Palestinian people. There is nothing tragic in our relations with Cairo, Baghdad, or Damascus. The war they are waging against us is basically a war of aggressors against victims of aggression, even though our neighbors are armed, as usual, with self-righteous rhetoric. The Arab-Jewish tragedy does not extend, therefore, to the whole Middle East, as the Arab states claim, but is confined to this land, between the sea and the desert...

Between Two Possibilities of Zionism

I believe in a Zionism that faces facts, that exercises power with restraint, that sees the Jewish past as a lesson, but neither as a mystical imperative nor as an insidious nightmare; that sees the Palestinian Arabs as Palestinians Arabs, and neither as the camouflaged reincarnation of the ancient tribes of Canaan nor as a shapeless mass of humanity waiting for us to form it was we see fit: a Zionism also capable of seeing itself as others may see it; and finally, a Zionism that recognizes both the spiritual implications and the political consequences of the fact that this small tract of land is the homeland of two peoples fated to live facing each other, willy-nilly, because no God and no angel will come to judge between right and right. The lives of both, the lives of all of us, depend on the hard, tortuous, and essential process of learning to know each other in the curious landscape of the beloved country.