legal-historical logic was not initially self-evident because during my youth and late adolescence, being a typical product of the Israeli education system, I believed without a shadow of a doubt in the existence of a virtually eternal Jewish people. Just as I had been mistakenly certain that the Bible was a history book and that the Exodus from Egypt had occurred in reality, I was convinced, in my ignorance, that the “Jewish people” had been forcibly uprooted from its homeland after the destruction of the Temple, as asserted so officially by Israel’s declaration of statehood.
But at the same time, my father had raised me according to a universalist moral code based on sensitivity to historical justice. It therefore never occurred to me that my “exiled people” was entitled to the right of national ownership to a territory in which it had not lived for two millennia, whereas the population that had been living there continuously for many centuries was entitled to no such right. By definition, all rights are based on ethical systems that serve as a foundation which others are required to recognize. In my view, only the local population’s agreement to the “Jewish return” could have endowed it with a historical right possessed of moral legitimacy. In my youthful innocence, I believed that a land belonged first and foremost to its permanent inhabitants, whose places of residence were located within its borders and who lived and died on its soil, not to those who ruled it or tried to control it from afar.
For instance, in 1917, when the Protestant colonialist and British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour promised Lionel Walter Rothschild a national home for the Jews, he did not—despite his great generosity—propose its establishment in Scotland, his birthplace. In fact, this modern-day Cyrus remained consistent in his attitude toward the Jews. In 1905, as prime minister of Britain, he worked tirelessly for the enactment of stringent anti-immigration legislation meant primarily to prevent Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe from entering Britain.14 Nonetheless, second only to the Bible, the Balfour Declaration is regarded as the most decisive source of moral and political legitimacy of the Jews’ right to the “Land of Israel.”
In any case, it always seemed to me that a sincere attempt to organize the world as it was organized hundreds or thousands of years ago would mean the injection of violent, deceptive insanity into the overall system of international relations. Would anyone today consider encouraging an Arab demand to settle in the Iberian Peninsula to establish a Muslim state there simply because their ancestors were expelled from the region during the Reconquista? Why should the descendants of the Puritans, who were forced to leave England centuries ago, not attempt to return en masse to the land of their forefathers in order to establish the heavenly kingdom? Would any sane person support Native American demands to assume territorial possession of Manhattan and to expel its white, black, Asian, and Latino inhabitants? And somewhat more recently, are we obligated to assist the Serbs in returning to Kosovo and reasserting control over the region because of the sacred heroic battle of 1389, or because Orthodox Christians who spoke a Serbian dialect constituted a decisive majority of the local population a mere two hundred years ago? In this spirit, we can easily imagine a march of folly initiated by the assertion and recognition of countless “ancient rights,” sending us back into the depths of history and sowing general chaos.
Never did I accept the idea of the Jews’ historical rights to the Promised Land as self-evident. When I became a university student and studied the chronology of human history that followed the invention of writing, the “Jewish return”—after more than eighteen centuries—seemed to me to constitute a delusional jump in time. To me, it was not fundamentally different from the mythoi of Puritan Christian settlement in North America or Afrikaner settlement in South Africa, which imagined the conquered land as the Land of Canaan, bestowed by God upon the true children of Israel.15
On this basis, I concluded that the Zionist “return” was, above all, an invention meant to arouse the sympathy of the West—particularly the Protestant Christian community, which preceded the Zionists in proposing the idea—in order to justify a new settlement enterprise, and that it had proven its effectiveness. By virtue of its underlying national logic, such an initiative would necessarily prove detrimental to a weak indigenous population. After all, the Zionists did not land in Jaffa port with the same intention harbored by persecuted Jews who landed in London or New York, that is, to live together in symbiosis with their new neighbors, the older inhabitants of their new surroundings. From the outset, the Zionists aspired to establish a sovereign Jewish state in the territory of Palestine, where the vast majority of the population was Arab.16 Under no circumstances could such a program of national settlement be completed without ultimately pushing a substantial portion of the local population out of the appropriated territory.
As I have already indicated, after many years of studying history, I believe neither in the past existence of a Jewish people, exiled from its land, nor in the premise that the Jews are originally descended from the ancient land of Judea. There can be no mistaking the striking resemblance between Yemenite Jews and Yemenite Muslims, between North African Jews and the indigenous Berber population of the region, between Ethiopian Jews and their African neighbors, between the Cochin Jews and the other inhabitants of southwestern India, or between the Jews of Eastern Europe and the members of the Turkish and Slavic tribes that inhabited the Caucasus and southeast Russia. To the dismay of anti-Semites, the Jews were never a foreign “ethnos” of invaders from afar but rather an autochthonous population whose ancestors, for the most part, converted to Judaism before the arrival of Christianity or Islam.17
I am equally convinced that Zionism did not succeed in creating a worldwide Jewish nation but rather “only” an Israeli nation, the existence of which it unfortunately continues to deny. First and foremost, nationalism represents people’s aspiration, or at least their willingness and agreement, to live together under independent political sovereignty according to a unique secular culture. However, most people around the world who classify themselves as Jews—even those who, for a variety of reasons, express solidarity with the self-declared “Jewish state”—prefer not to live in Israel and make no effort to immigrate to the country and live with other Israelis within the terms of the national culture. Indeed, the pro-Zionists among them find it quite comfortable to live as citizens of their own nation-states and continue to take an immanent part in the rich cultural lives of those nations, while at the same time claiming historical rights to the “ancestral land” they believe to be theirs for eternity.
Nonetheless, in order to preclude any misunderstanding among my readers, I again emphasize that (1) I have never questioned, nor do I question today, the right of modern-day Judeo-Israelis to live in a democratic, open, and inclusive state of Israel that belongs to all its citizens; and (2) I have never denied, nor do I today deny, the existence of the strong, age-old religious ties between believers in the Jewish faith and Zion, its holy city. Nor are these two preliminary points of clarification causally or morally linked to each other in any binding manner.
First, to the extent that I myself am capable of judging the matter, I believe my own political approach to the conflict has always been pragmatic and realistic: if it is incumbent upon us to rectify the events of the past, and if we are compelled by moral imperative to recognize the tragedy and destruction we have caused to others (and to pay a high price in the future to those who became refugees), moving backward in time will only result in new tragedies. Zionist settlement in the region created not only an exploitative colonial elite but also a society, a culture, and a people whose removal is unthinkable. There-fore, all objections to the right of existence of an Israeli state based on the civil and political equality of all its inhabitants—whether advanced by radical Muslims who maintain that the country must be wiped off the face of the earth or by Zionists who blindly insist on viewing it as the state of world Jewry—are not only anachronistic folly but a recipe for another catastrophe in the region.
Second, whereas politics is an arena
