WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Israel’s President Rivlin rightly told foreign diplomats assembled at Yad Vashem this week on International Holocaust Remembrance Day that Israel is not a colonial project or Holocaust compensation. He and Yad Vashem’s chief historian dated modern Jewish presence to decades preceding the Holocaust. But the case can be made for continuous physical Jewish homeland presence for the past three thousand years. “Trust me, I wrote a book on it.”
Israeli President Rivlin This Week: “Israel Is Not Compensation for the Holocaust” – Historically Correct, But Not Historically Correct Enough
“The State of Israel is not a colonial project, and not compensation for the Holocaust…. The State of Israel came into being from the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in its own homeland.”
– Reuven Rivlin, President of Israel, to foreign diplomats at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 25, 2018
Per a Jerusalem Post article Friday, Israeli President Rivlin spoke these words to foreign diplomats attending an International Holocaust Remembrance Day event Thursday at Yad Vashem. The article said that President Rivlin “noted that his own family came to the Land of Israel well over a century before the Holocaust and said that other Jewish families were already living here before the arrival of his own ancestors.”
The JPost article continued that Prof. Dina Porat, chief historian at Yad Vashem, “endorsing Rivlin’s contention,” stated “… the State of Israel came out of Zionism that was there 70 years before the Holocaust.”
These are both well-intentioned honorable statements, but I think they sell us short in dating modern Jewish presence in the land of Israel to the late nineteenth century Zionist movement. Uninterrupted physical Jewish presence in the land of Israel runs deeper, three millennia deeper. A few years ago, I set out to show it.
Eminent British historian-theologian James Parkes wrote in his book, Whose Land: A History of the Peoples of Palestine, that the Zionists’ “real title deeds” had been written by the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement” (p. 266). I didn’t read that in historian Parkes’ book (which I did eventually read, and commend to you). I read it, years ago, in Samuel Katz’ classic work Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, where he quoted it with approval in making the case for “the continuity of Jewish life in Palestine since the destruction of the Second Temple” (pp. xvi-xvii).
Parkes’ words – the Zionists’ “real title deeds” – stuck in my head over the years, but along with an uncertainty. Certainly, if it is true that we Jews had maintained a significant organized homeland-claiming presence all through those long dark Hadrian-to-Herzl centuries, we ought to be vociferously making that “We Never Left!” case. But we aren’t making that case (for which Parkes bitterly criticized us in Whose Land), so maybe that case isn’t really there strong enough to be made?
And then, one night at a Zionists’ gathering in someone’s home, I met a part-time book publisher, and chatted with him about books crying out to be written for Jews. I told him if we could connect the homeland Jewish presence dots between Hadrian and Herzl, that would be such a book. He told me, if you can write it, I’ll publish it.
So I took a shot at connecting those dots. When I set out, I knew as much about the past two thousand years in Palestine as on Pluto, but I learned about Mamluks (and Tulunides and Ikhshids) and other post-Second Temple Palestine rulers, all of whom turned out to be foreign empire invaders, making modern Israel the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. And I learned (President Carter et al to the contrary notwithstanding) that the Romans did not exile the Jews after defeating Bar Kochba, but that the Jews continuously remained in the land, very much “in spite of every discouragement,” and not as stray individuals, but as the organized, openly-Jewish, homeland-claiming Yishuv.
*** I learned (and wrote) that following the Great and Bar Kochba revolts, which were major wars of the Romans, the Jews not only remained but shared in the land’s prosperity and continued to build and refurbish synagogues all over the country; that their rabbis and scholars wrote the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud; that the Romans-Byzantines recognized the Patriarch as head of the Yishuv until the Fifth Century; and that the Yishuv, as such, fought in its own battalions alongside the 614 Temple-and-autonomy-promising Persian invaders.
*** I learned and wrote that the Yishuv materially aided the 630’s Muslim invaders against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs, and were recognized and rewarded for that; and that we know today of organized Jewish activity including academies and religious writings in Jerusalem and elsewhere during the Muslim dynasty era. Historian Bahat, in The Forgotten Generations, was able to construct a map of about a hundred Jewish communities throughout the land during ninth century Abbasid rule of this country the size of New Jersey.
*** I learned and wrote that the 1099 Crusaders themselves wrote that “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them at Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew was the last to fall,” and of “Haifa … which the Jews defended [for a month] with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.” I learned and wrote of a pilgrim who came on the Crusaders’ heels, who wrote of “the region called Judea” between the Jordan and sea.
*** I learned and wrote that for over 200 years in the Crusaders’ wake, the land was part of the realm of the Mamluks, non-Arab Turks and Circassians who overran the area, and of the substantial records we have of Jewish life in Jerusalem (including a fifteenth century Jerusalem Jewish timeline I constructed from several sources) and elsewhere.
*** I learned and wrote of Jewish life in the Jews’ four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land during the four centuries (1517 – 1917) of Turkish misrule, which drove the land’s population down to its lowest of recorded times, famously memorialized by Mark Twain and others; of the Yishuv’s pre-Zionist nineteenth century revival, and that it was to an already-reviving Yishuv to which the Zionists’ came.
The opening scene of the first draft of my book that I sent to the publisher was set in the Second Temple’s smoking ruins. He emailed, “But what about King David and all of that stuff?” I fired back that, for purposes of this book connecting the dots between Hadrian and Herzl, King David and all of that stuff didn’t matter. But it did matter, of course. That chain of dots didn’t commence in a vacuum, but in the history of a small ancient people of whom Churchill could have unassailably said, “Never have so many been so influenced by so few.” So Chapter One became Chapter Four, and Chapter One as published, “Israelite Origins,” invites the reader “to come along with me on this deepest of quests for peoplehood roots.”
The Jewish people’s homeland history tale, so far as it is told in my book, ends with Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, re-proclaiming sovereign Jewish homeland presence in Israel. In that two-page final chapter, “Israel Again,” I quote all the justifications for Israel’s rebirth – ancient presence that wrote and gave the Bible to the world, return to and rebuilding the land, Zionist and international documents recognizing the homeland Jewish connection, homeland peoples’ natural rights, etc. (“Unassailable,” as Sharef in Three Days called them)– that Ben-Gurion, Zionist to the core, recited that day. I end by saying that he might have added one more: The Jewish people’s real title deeds had been written, in Blood & Fire, by the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.”
At this week’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel’s President Rivlin rightly told foreign diplomats assembled at Yad Vashem that Israel is not a colonial project and not compensation for the Holocaust. I would that he could have taken them then next door to a Continuous Homeland Jewish Presence Museum, vividly documenting and displaying that continuous presence.