William Van Wagenen

Religion and Human Rights
Final Paper ( Prof. David Little)

A Human Rights Critique
of the Zionist-Palestinian Conflict

The long and bloody conflict in Israel/Palestine centers largely on the concept of “rights.” Both Zionists and Palestinians speak, for example, of their “right of return.” For the Jews this means returning to the homeland of the Jewish Nation after two millennia in exile, while the Palestinians assert their right to return to their lands and homes inside of the Jewish state, from which they were expelled in 1948 and from which their return has subsequently been barred. Jewish settlers living in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza strip assert their right to settle and live in “Judea and Samaria”, while Palestinians assert their right to remain living in their homes in “Palestine.” Zionists speak of Israel’s “right” to “exist” and to “security” for the Jewish state, while Palestinians hold sacred their “right” to resist foreign occupation by “any means necessary.”
Though many take a particular side in the conflict, emphasizing the just cause of one party or the other, there are also many who see two equally legitimate yet conflicting claims to the land, making the conflict seem intractable and probably, in the end, impossible to solve. Palestinian Arabs have long lived in Palestine, but at the same time, the Jews were “there first” and, after the Holocaust, don’t they “deserve” a state of their own? The problem lies, such people claim, in the fact that “extremists on both sides” refuse to relinquish some of their rights claims for the sake of peace. If only the “extremists” would be willing to sacrifice some of their dreams, and join the attempts of the “moderates” to come to a negotiated compromise, then perhaps peace would be attainable.
The recent death of Yasser Arafat signaled in the minds of many a new opportunity for peace talks to resume, because while he was alive there was no “partner for peace” with whom the Israelis could negotiate. With Arafat’s passing and the recent election of the “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas, as President of the Palestinian Authority, hopes for peace were renewed. Contrary to the extremists from the Islamic parties, such as HAMAS, who wish to “destroy the Zionist entity,” Abbas recognizes “Israel’s right to exist,” and renounces the terrorism and violence against Israel by which this second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, has been characterized. Shimon Peres, leader of Israel’s dovish Labor Party, speaking of Abbas said, ''A moderate man was elected, an intelligent man, an experienced man. Let's give him a chance. There is a new legitimate Palestinian leadership whose leaders definitely are against terror and war.'' Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, of the more hawkish Likud was also positive, though still somewhat skeptical. ''The main thing that needs to be concentrated on now, following yesterday's election, is that the Palestinians take action in the field of terrorism. . . [Abbas] will be tested by the way he battles terror and acts to dismantle its infrastructure.”
While Arafat the terrorist was shunned by the White House in recent years, marginalized in his besieged compound in Ramallah, US hopes for Abbas are high, as his recent invitation to Washington from President Bush confirms. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, commenting on administration attempts to spread democracy in the Middle East, called Arafat’s death “a moment of opportunity.”
The acknowledgement of the conflicting rights claims of both Jews and Arabs to the region goes back to the beginnings of the Zionist movement, which had as its goal the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then a province of the Ottoman Empire. Chaim Weizmann and the Zionist leadership won a great victory in 1917 when the establishment of a Jewish homeland became official British policy with the issuance of the Balfour Declaration. In it the rights claims of both Zionist and Palestinian are evident. It states:
His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Though the declaration posited a commitment to the rights of the indigenous Arab population, the contradiction between these rights and the “right” of Jews to establish a national home in Palestine was later conceded privately by Lord Balfour when he said, “the four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs and future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”The stage for a long and bloody conflict had been set.
But what exactly did the right of the Jewish people to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine entail, and what was the philosophical basis upon which this right rested? Similarly, of what did the rights of the indigenous Muslims and Christians then living in Palestine consist, and what was their philosophical basis? The two conceptions of rights with which we must deal are “human rights” on the one hand, and “national” or “historic rights” on the other.
The idea behind “human rights” as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, essentially contends that “there is something about each and every human being, simply as a human being, such that certain choices should be made and certain other choices rejected; in particular, certain things ought not to be done to any human being and certain things ought to be done for every human being.” It is hopefully axiomatic to the reader that no innocent person, simply by virtue of being human, deserves to be raped, murdered, tortured, dispossessed of her belongings, expelled from his home, imprisoned arbitrarily, and so on. Further, most would agree that every person, simply by virtue of being human, however poor or socially distasteful, deserves to have a roof over her head, food to eat, and medical care if ill or sick.
This idea is based fundamentally on the “conviction that every human being is sacred.” The idea that every human being is sacred, though not an exclusively religious idea, correlates strongly with the concept of the Hebrew Scriptures that all men and women were “created in the image of God” and in the New Testament teaching that we “love one another” including our enemies, because we are all “children” of our “Father in heaven.” When an innocent person is tortured, for example, it is a violation of the sacredness of that individual, and thereby offensive to all those who acknowledge that sacredness. Because this sacredness exists by virtue of being human, such a conception of rights applies equally to all humans, whether of our same nationality, race, tribe, religion, or not. These rights are thus “universal”, independent of culture, geography, age, belief, and so forth. In short, “there is nothing. . . culture-bound in the great evils of human experience, re-affirmed in every age and in every written history and in every tragedy and fiction: murder and the destruction of life, imprisonment, enslavement, starvation, poverty, physical pain and torture, homelessness, friendlessness.”
From the concept of the sacredness of each human being we derive a general basis for morality, namely, that which preserves these basic human rights is in and of itself good, while actions which violate these rights are in and of themselves bad. This leads to the question of whether these rights are absolute, namely whether there are any circumstances under which they can be violated. One may here adopt an essentially pacifist position, arguing that killing, torturing, and so forth are wrong under any circumstances. Some Christians endorse this view out of an attempt to follow the example of Jesus, contending that he forbade violence in all forms. Other Christians adopt the position of the just war tradition, arguing that the commandment, “thou shalt not kill” is not absolute, and is qualified by the responsibility to come to the aid of others who are being harmed, which responsibility natural law makes evident. Though prohibited generally, there are specific instances when killing, torture, and other such acts, can be undertaken, though only for the sake of the preservation of human life, which is sacred. Thus when faced with the choice of killing aggressors for the sake of preserving innocent life, it is moral, though regrettable, to violate the sacredness of other human beings. Permission to violate the sacredness of human beings is extended further by the utilitarian position, which allows for violating the sacredness of innocent life, with the expectation that this will preserve the lives, and therefore sacredness of more innocent people than it will violate. The allied decision to directly firebomb civilian areas in Germany and Japan, as well as dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were justified by the assumption that engaging in such atrocities against innocent civilians was morally correct because it would bring the war to a quicker conclusion and therefore save more innocent lives in the end.
The second conception of human rights with which we will concern ourselves is based not on the sacredness of human beings per se, but on the sacredness of nations. The most prominent example of Volksrecht, or the “right of peoples and races” is to be found in the ideology of the national socialist or “Nazi” party established by Hitler in post WWI Germany. Volksrecht, so it is argued, is a universal natural right given to a specific nation or people in a specific time, under specific cultural conditions, and in a specific place. The Volk or nation is defined as an exclusive ethnic community, which becomes a “biologically living unit” (biologischen Lebenseinheit) with a common ancestry, language, and historical experience. “Above all are the natural common characteristics of the nation: race and life in a specific space, the homeland.”
Thus Blut und Boden (blood and soil) are the basis of natural values and of any true culture. The goal of the Hitler government became the “cultivation of the great traditions of our people” for the sake of “building up a true community of the entire German nation.” It was important to “shield the German entity from all foreign influences”, “keep German blood pure through racial hygiene,” as well as “abolish all foreign, western institutions and replace them with a national-ethnic state apparatus” because “the state is in principal only a means to an end, which end is the preservation of the racial existence of the people.” This conception of the state is in contrast to the liberal state, which is dedicated to serving the interests of all its citizens, rather than those of the dominant ethnic group.
Thus Hitler’s voelkische Weltanschauung (nation/ethnic based world view) demanded that preservation of the nation become the highest moral good. As one Nazi official articulated in 1926, “everything which is useful to the nation is right, anything which damages the nation is wrong.” The individual, upon whom rights schemes in liberal conceptions focus, became subordinate to the nation, prompting other Nazi slogans such as “You are nothing, your nation is everything or “First comes the nation, then comes the individual.” The establishment and preservation of “a new community of people” would “serve as an article of faith” to replace religion.
Any “rights” which humans might possess are derived from their membership in that nation, rather than their simple status as humans. Thus some humans are sacred, but only as a consequence of their membership in the nation, which is itself the bestower of rights. The 1920 Nazi party platform therefore declared that only members of the German nation could be citizens of the ethnic German state to be constructed in the future, while members of the German nation can only be those possessing German blood. As a result, “those who are not citizens will be allowed to live in Germany only as guests, and must be subject to separate legislation for foreigners.” Naturally this would exclude Jews, Slavs and Gypsies from citizenship, who, though they were born in Germany, spoke German, and at that time enjoyed citizenship rights under the Weimar Republic, were in fact no more than “guests” in another nation’s homeland, possessing no true “right” to remain there, nor to whatever property they might own.
While stressing that non-Germans did not belong, the Nazi party program advocated the amalgamation of all Germans into a “Greater Germany.” This prompted Hitler’s 1937 invasion and annexation of the Sudetenland, a province of Czechoslovakia containing a large number of ethnic Germans, as part of his demand for more Lebensraum (living space) for the German people.
Thus when Hitler came to power and the persecution of Jews began in earnest, Jews in Germany responded in one of two ways. Those who held a liberal, universalist conception of rights based upon the sacredness of human beings as such, as described above, advocated resistance to the Hitler government and struggled to maintain those rights Jews had gained during the enlightenment. German Jews were citizens of Germany, had been born and lived there all their lives, and should be treated on equal footing with those of ethnic German origin, as should Slavs, Gypsies and others. They had a right to remain in the country, and to their property and possessions. Most Jews taking this stand were communists or democratic socialists, and believed that Jews could be assimilated into any national culture in which they lived.
Other Jews, in contrast, held a voelkische Weltanschauung as did Hitler, and therefore agreed that German Jews were aliens or “guests” in a strange land who deserved no basic rights because they were not themselves living in their homeland as members of a nation. In fact, all Diaspora Jews throughout the world were living in exile, and the only hope for the survival of the Jewish people, particularly considering centuries of horrific anti-Semitism, was to establish the Jewish nation once again in its historical homeland, Palestine. The solution to the Jewish Question was not to struggle for equal rights for Jews throughout the world, but to go to the place in which Jews would enjoy their national rights, just as Germans rightly enjoyed their national rights in their own homeland, Germany.
While the German voelkische Weltanschauung is referred to as National Socialism or Nazism, the Jewish manifestation of the same is referred to as Zionism. Shimon Peres, quoted above, described this Jewish voelkische Weltanschauung as follows:

The Zionist movement was primarily political, even though it drew upon cultural sources which were steeped in the Jewish religion. Its aim was to rescue an entire nation in the only way which appeared effective – concentrating it and settling it anew on the soil of its historic homeland. This can be understood only when one sheds the optical illusion about the Jewish nation. Judaism is widely considered to be merely a religion, but it is most decidedly a national religion which has managed to hold together an entire people with a specific identity for thousands of years. Judaism is a comprehensive concept, compounded of monotheism, an inalienable link with the Land of Israel, the values of justice, truth and peace, and whose adherents share a common tongue – Hebrew, the language of the Bible – and believe in a common destiny anchored in a common past. The Jewish faith, the Jewish entity, the Jewish homeland and the ideal of righteousness are indivisible. The return to Israel is thus not an exclusively religious concept but comprises also the realization of a national ideal and a collective national obligation. It was this vision which gave birth to modern Zionism, and it was Zionism which gave reality to the vision. Zionism emerged at an hour in the long history of the Jewish people when they had no other choice but to renew their settlement in the ancient land. . . Persecution was the almost constant Jewish lot in whatever period and place Jews found themselves. . . Zionism was thus a movement not only of national liberation but also of social redemption. The land settlement movement was founded with great hopes, and it is one of the few in the world where the hopes were so rewarded. It has remained a unique form of society to this day, a dramatic bastion exemplifying the efforts of man to live in accordance with his ideals. . . Zionism is the return of a nation to its source, its homeland, its destiny.

The importance of Jewish blut in the perfection of the Jewish nation, was articulated in 1914 by the Zionist anthropologist Ignatz Zollschan:

A nation of pure blood, not tainted by diseases of excess or immorality, of a highly developed sense of family purity, and of deeply rooted virtuous habits would develop an exceptional intellectual activity. Furthermore, the prohibition against mixed marriage provided that these highest ethnical treasures should not be lost, through the admixture of less carefully bread races . . . there resulted that natural selection which has no parallel in the history of the human race. . . If a race that is so highly gifted were to have the opportunity of again developing its original power, nothing could equal it as far as cultural value is concerned.”

Despite Jewish blut, “social redemption” could not be obtained, however, without “settlement in that ancient land.” Jewish blut meant nothing so long as the Jewish people were separated from Jewish boden. The Zionist youth organization Hashomer Hatzair republished in 1936 an article declaring, “The Jew [in exile] is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline,” while in 1935 the American Zionist Ben Frommer wrote, “The fact is undeniable that the Jews collectively are unhealthy and neurotic. Those professional Jews who, wounded to the quick, indignantly deny this truth are the greatest enemies of their race, for they thereby lead them to search for false solutions, or at most palliatives.” Other early Zionist Jews held similar views of the state of the Jews in exile. “For Micah Yosef Berdichevsky the Jews were ‘not a nation, not a people, not human.’ To Yosef Chaim Brenner they were nothing more than ‘Gypsies, filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded, dogs.’ To A.D. Gordon his people were no better than ‘parasites, people fundamentally useless.’”
As a result, Chaim Greenberg, writing in the New York based Jewish Frontier in 1942, after the evils of German anti-Semitism had become painfully clear, regretfully recalled the time when “it used to be fashionable for Zionist speakers (including the writer) to declare from the platform that ‘To be a good Zionist one must be somewhat of an anti-Semite’. . . To this day Labor Zionist circles are under the influence of the idea that the Return to Zion involved a process of purification from our economic uncleanliness. Whosoever doesn’t engage in so-called ‘productive’ manual labor is believed to be a sinner against Israel and against mankind.”
The desire to overcome this “unhealthy and neurotic’ condition while in exile and the “parasitic” occupations in which many Jews were engaged, motivated Zionists to emigrate to the Jewish homeland. It is for this reason that this “return,” with its accompanying manual labor and land settlement, “was founded with great hopes,” as Shimon Peres explained.
Confirming the validity of Zionism’s sister ideology, Nazism, Jacob Klatzin, co-editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica wrote in 1925 that, “If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism, we deny the rightfulness of our nationalism. If our people is deserving and willing to live its own national life, then it is an alien body thrust into the nations among whom it lives, an alien body that insists on its own distinctive identity, reducing the domain of their life. It is right, therefore, that they should fight against us for their national integrity. . . Instead of establishing societies for defense against antisemites, who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies against our friends who desire to defend our rights.”
Similarly in 1932, Harry Sacher a leader of the World Zionist Organization at the time, commented that, “For Zionists, Liberalism is the enemy; it is also the enemy for Nazism; ergo, Zionism should have much sympathy and understanding for Nazism, of which anti-Semitism is probably a fleeting accident.”
That many Jews embraced the Nazi/Zionist conception of the nation as sacred, while people deserve and enjoy rights only as a consequence of their membership in such a nation, had horrific human rights consequences for the Jews who did not heed the Zionist call to emigrate to Palestine, as well as for the indigenous inhabitants of what would become the Jewish homeland.
With the outbreak of WWII, rather than lobby for Jewish immigration to western countries such as the United States and Britain in addition to Palestine in order to save as many Jews as possible from extermination, the Zionist policy demanded immigration to Palestine only. Then Zionist leader and future prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion applying the fundamental moral tenet of the voelkische Weltanschauung, that “Everything which is useful to the nation is good, everything which damages the nation is wrong”, stated that, “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.”
But this strange sense of priorities, putting the rights of “history” above those of the Jewish children then being slaughtered, was marked not only by indifference to the individual lives of Jews in the Diaspora, but by contempt for them, because they, rejecting Zionism, had chosen not to immigrate to Palestine. Joachim Prinz writes in Wir Juden,

We want to posit instead of assimilation something new: undertaking the yoke of joining the Jewish people and the Jewish race. Only a state based on the principle of the purity of the nation and the race can possibly endow dignity and honour on those Jews who themselves subscribe to this principle amongst our own people. It cannot desire to have sycophantic Jews. It must demand from us recognition of our absolute uniqueness and qualities, since only those who give full honour to their own uniqueness, their own blood, could gain the respect and honour which are bestowed by similarly inspired nations subscribing to the same principle.”

But just as those anti-Zionist Jews, who refused to undertake the yoke of “joining the Jewish people and the Jewish race” by which they could become deserving of “dignity and honour” through emigrating to the Jew’s historic home of Palestine, were considered “filthy dogs,” and “not a nation, not a people, not human” by the Zionists, so too were the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine. Shimon Peres was asked by an interviewer in 1998, “Here you were, a Zionist coming to Palestine for the first time, and you set foot in the Jewish homeland and saw Arabs in an Arab city. What impression did this make on you?” To this question he replied, “We knew Jaffa was an Arab city. We knew there were Arabs in it. We knew they could be very dangerous or servile. But they were considered by us neither a nation nor a people. They were so-called Arabs.” And thus they had no right to live in their own land and country, which in fact belonged to Europeans who were “setting foot” in Palestine “for the first time.” Though inhabited by some 700,000 thousand Arabs at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Zionists could publicly declare Palestine, due to their belief in their Volksrecht, to be “a land without a people, for a people without a land.”
But in contrast to the Germans who were already in possession of “their” homeland, needing only to “shield the German entity from all foreign influences” and “keep German blood pure through racial hygiene” by deporting or exterminating a small percentage of the state’s population, the Zionists had the task of conquering a land which “belonged” to them but which in fact they did not possess and barely inhabited. Even Hitler’s attempt to create a Greater Germany by annexing the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia was made easy by the existence of a large and enthusiastically pro-Nazi ethnic German majority there. The Zionists faced the much bigger task of manufacturing a large Jewish presence, securing the country from one of the world’s great powers, the British, by either negotiation or armed struggle, and ridding it of the indigenous inhabitants to ensure not only a large Jewish presence but a also a Jewish majority, making the creation of an ethnic Jewish state possible. Further, the German Volk’s title to the land of Germany was self-evident, according to the logic of a voelkische Weltanschauung, by the current and longstanding German presence in the land. Zionist claims to Palestine were more tenuous as they must have realized when they arrived in the Jewish homeland and discovered only “Arabs living in an Arab city” rather than fellow Jews. The Hebrew Scriptures, as a historical rather then religious document, became the Zionist deed to Palestine. It proved the previous existence of the Jewish nation in that land thousands of years before, thus giving Jews from Europe a “historic right” to Palestine which superseded the rights of the people actually living there, again, if only one accepts the logic of a voelkische Weltanschauung.
That the indigenous Arab population had no right to exist in Palestine and would have to be done away with was assumed from the beginnings of the Zionist movement. Many thought, as did Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, that the problem could be solved as following: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country . . . expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
Others, recognizing that Palestinians were attached to their land and villages, knew that the colonization of Palestine and displacement of the Arab population could only be accomplished by more violent, forceful methods. Vladimir Jabotinsky, a leader of the revisionist Zionist movement, reflecting on the long history of European and American colonization, came to this conclusion:

I don’t know of a single example in history where a country was colonized with courteous consent of the population. . . . Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. . . They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervour that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. . . This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.

In the end, many in the Zionist leadership acknowledged that ethnic cleansing, or expelling the indigenous population by force, was the only method available of realizing their dream of a Jewish state. Yishuv executive Yosef Weitz stated in December of 1940 that “It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples. . . If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us. . .The only solution is a Land Of Israel . . . without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises. . . There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries. . .
David Ben-Gurion was equally explicit: "The compulsory transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the first and second Temples. . . We are given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government and sovereignty – this is national consolidation in a free homeland." Thus the assertion of the Jewish “national and historic right” to Palestine could only be realized at the expense of massively violating the basic human rights of the indigenous population. With the UN vote to partition Palestine in November 1947, hostilities broke out between Palestinian and Zionist forces. On February 8, 1948, in the midst of the hostilities, Ben-Gurion commented to the Mapai Council:
From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema [East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood]. . . there are no [Palestinian] Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, it has not been as Jewish as it is now. In many [Palestinian] Arab neighborhoods in the west one sees not a single [Palestinian] Arab. I do not assume that this will change. . . . What had happened in Jerusalem. . . . is likely to happen in many parts of the country. . . in the six, eight, or ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population in the country.
By May 14th, 1948 the long struggle for the creation of a Jewish state was realized, as Zionist forces had conquered seventy-eight percent of historic Palestine and were thus able to declare the birth of the State of Israel. The “War of Independence” resulted finally in the flight or expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians, thereby securing the desired Jewish majority within the borders of the new state, consistent with the previous posturing of Ben-Gurion, Weitz, and others. In 1967, Israel Eldad, one of the leaders of LEHI, a pre-state Zionist paramilitary organization, confirmed that “had it not been for Deir Yassin,” a 1948 massacre in which LEHI participated, “half a million [more] Arabs would be living in the state of Israel” as they would not have fled the country out of fear, and consequently, “the state of Israel would not have existed.” Eldad goes on to invoke this example as proof that the Arabs who did remain, should be “expelled . . . one way or another. . .” Thus, the massacre and expulsion of the vast majority of indigenous Arabs and the consequent theft of Arab property were pre-conditions for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine which had now become “wide and spacious” for Jewish settlement. Though most people consider killing others to take their land and property abhorrent, Menachem Begin, leader of the pre-state Zionist paramilitary group Irgun, and later Prime Minister of Israel, boasted that the Jewish state came to be “by fire and blood” because “the final aim of that war [was] to bring back the people of Israel – all of them – into the land of their own, and to bring back the land of Israel – all of it – to its people, its rightful owners.” But the realization of the Zionist dream was not complete with the establishment of the Jewish State in only part of “Greater Israel,” as the Zionists claimed that those areas left unconquered (primarily the West Bank and Gaza Strip) also belonged to Jews as a result of the “natural and historic right” of the Jewish nation to possess it. When discussing whether to accept the possible partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab, as recommended by the Peel Commission in 1938, Ben-Gurion made clear that this was an unacceptable final arrangement because, "No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land of Israel. [A] Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning . . . Our possession is important not only for itself . . . through this we increase our power, and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its entirety. Establishing a [small] state. . . will serve as a very potent lever in our historical effort to redeem the whole country.”
After the Zionist success of 1948, Menachem Begin looked forward to the future conquest of the remainder of Palestine as well. He declared:
The homeland is historically and geographically an entity. Whoever fails to recognize our right to the entire homeland, does not recognize our right to any of its territories. We shall never yield our natural and eternal right. . . We shall bear the vision of ultimate redemption, and we shall bring it into realization. When the day arrives, we shall materialize it. This is an historical rule: a line passing through, or drawn by, someone, as a separation between a Nation’s state and a People’s country – such an artificial line must disappear.”

Nineteen years later, in 1967, the State of Israel was successful in realizing this “ultimate redemption” as Israeli forces conquered “Judea”, “Samaria” and Gaza. In 1972, Begin commented further on this same theme: “So it happened between June 5th and June 11th, 1967. Since then, it is our duty, fathers and sons, to see to it that the artificial line which disappeared never returns. We must not yield our natural and eternal right.” Agreeing fully with Begin, “the former commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weizmann, regarded as a hawk, stated that there was ‘no threat of destruction’ but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria [in 1967] was nevertheless justified so that Israel could ‘exist according to the scale, spirit and quality she now embodies’”, namely with the West Bank and Gaza under her control. For over three decades, the Israeli government has faithfully assured that the “artificial line” has not returned.
What constituted the “liberation” of the West Bank and Gaza for the Jewish people, however, meant the death and further displacement of thousands of Palestinians, life under military occupation for the rest, and the systematic expropriation of Palestinian land. Though East Jerusalem was annexed to become the “eternal and undivided capital” of the Jewish state, annexation of the rest of the territories was not possible as it would “change the very nature of the Jewish state, incorporating within it a large, subservient and resentful Arab population.” Additionally, should the Arab population ever become a majority, they would be able to, by peaceful, democratic means, vote the Jewish state out of existence. The return in 1967 of the long troublesome “demographic problem” of having too many Arabs in a Jewish state could effectively be avoided by maintaining Israeli control over these areas, while putting the Arab population under the rule of an Israeli military administration (to which the Palestinians inside Israel proper had been subjected until only a year before) and leaving them as Jordanian citizens or stateless. The newly conquered areas could still be “redeemed” by confiscating both private and public Palestinian land for “security reasons”, upon which settlements for Jews only could be established, their residents enjoying the benefits of Israeli citizenship. “To describe a situation where two populations, in this case one Jewish and the other Arab, share the same territory but are governed by two separate legal systems, the international community customarily uses the term ‘apartheid.’ Prof. Amnon Rubinstein has coined an alternative phrase, ‘enclave-based justice,’" while the Nazis spoke of subjecting “guests. . . to separate legislation for foreigners.”
The “acceleration of the installation of military settlements and permanent agricultural and urban settlements in the territory of the homeland” had become one of the government’s “essential goals” by 1969. Moshe Dayan explained that “the settlements established in the territories are there forever, and the future frontiers will include these settlements as part of Israel,” despite the fact that “from the point of view of the security of the state, the establishment of the settlements has no great importance.”
In the last few years however, the dream of a Greater Israel has begun to fade and it is only the Israeli far right, particularly the religious nationalist groups such as Gush Emunim who continue to refuse ceding even one inch of “Jewish” land to Palestinians. This change is evident in the broad Israeli consensus that a weak, demilitarized Palestinian entity, euphemistically called a “Palestinian state,” should be allowed, as the status quo of direct Israeli occupation and continued settlement of all of the West Bank and Gaza is untenable. The Israeli peace camp, represented most prominently by Peace Now and the Israeli Labor party, headed by Shimon Peres, have acknowledged that it is wrong for Israeli Jews to rule over the Palestinians and have recognized the need to establish such a Palestinian entity. But was this change of heart of the Israeli Zionist left spurred by a new belief in the sacred nature of human beings rather than nations? Or was the morality and logic of a voelkische Weltanschauung still somehow being applied?
The rationale of the Israeli Zionist left in attempting to end the direct rule of the occupation and replace it with a form of Palestinian autonomy, not statehood, but autonomy, was expressed by Peres. When asked whether the 35 year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza had corrupted the “character of the Jewish state” or the “moral fiber of its people and army,” Peres replied, “It affected it. We escaped in time. The Oslo agreement was the escape. . . we were looking for an occasion to bring an end to it. And finally we did end it. It was a regrettable experience, being an occupier. But I don’t think it really corrupted us.”
Peres, pondering the negative affects the occupation, with all the human rights abuses and atrocities the Palestinians have suffered at the hands of the Israeli Army in the last 35 years, could only wonder whether the occupation had been good for the Jewish nation, failing to observe that the tragedy of the occupation might possibly lie in the similarly “regrettable experience” of Palestinians living under harsh military rule, replete with arbitrary arrest, long term detention without trial, home demolitions, curfews, attacks on unarmed protesters, beatings, torture, confiscation of land, and the like.
Rather than acknowledge the gross violations of the human rights of Palestinians as a motivation in “bringing an end” to the occupation, Prime Minister Rabin, also of the Labor party as is Peres, explained that the purpose of the “peace process,” namely the Oslo accords, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize, was as follows:

“I prefer the Palestinians to cope with the problem of enforcing order in the Gaza [Strip]. The Palestinians will be better at it than we were, because they will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the Association for Civil Rights from criticizing conditions there by denying it access to the area. They will rule there by their own methods, freeing – and this is most important – the Israeli soldiers from having to do what they will do. . . The Israeli Army will remain in the Gaza Strip to defend [the settlements], and to guard all confrontation lines. It will also control the Jordan River end to end and all bridges on it.”

Regarding the settlements, Rabin further stated, “I wish to remind you we made a commitment . . . to the Knesset not to uproot any settlement in the framework of the Interim Agreement, nor to freeze construction and natural growth.” Though this was mentioned in regards to the Interim Agreement, Yitzak Shamir indicated that this “interim” period could last indefinitely.
The strategy of the “peace camp” was further articulated in an interview with General Bisan of the IDF Central Command with the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz. The paper describes the General’s plan “envisaging the maximal defence of all existing Jewish settlements and the partition of the West Bank into enclaves containing Arab localities. Each enclave is to be surrounded by bypassing roads, settlements and Israeli Army fortresses. . . If Israel ever decides to withdraw its troops from any downtown area of an Arab city [of the West Bank], the plan is to guarantee that the Israeli Army will continue to rule that city from the outside. I take this opportunity to stress that no Jewish settlement whatsoever will ever be removed from its place”.
For his part in the Oslo accords, Rabin was assassinated by a right wing religious Zionist, not because they disagreed that, “what is useful for the nation is right, what damages the nation is wrong,” but because they simply had different views of what was truly “useful for the nation.” To Rabin’s assassin, the “historic right” of Jews to conquer and settle all of Greater Israel had become a religious obligation, leaving no room for the pragmatic attempts of the seculars to consolidate Israeli control of the territories through a partial hand over of land and sovereignty.
But by 2003 it wasn’t just the Labor party recognizing the need to return “Jewish” territory for the sake of saving the Jewish state. A senior Israeli official told the New York Times that, "The dream of Greater Israel is no longer there. We have to adjust our sights." The reason was explained in the same article by Dan Meridor, an adviser to Prime Minister Sharon: "If we don't have a border within a short period of time, one day we will get up and hear Arafat or his successor say, 'I don't want a Palestinian state. I want just one thing: Annex me' " which if Israel were to do, would create an Arab majority in a democratic Jewish state. If this were to happen, in the prophetic words of the radical right wing Rabbi Meir Kahane, “the Arab becomes the immutable reality that makes strong Zionists run and weep in their closets. He is the ghost of the basic contradiction between a Jewish-Zionist state and western democracy. He is the nightmare for the Hellenist who shrieks that in a democracy the Arab has the right to become a majority and to peacefully undo the Jewish State that the declaration of Independence of Israel creates.” Because the “only democracy in the middle east” is also a “national-ethnic state apparatus” which “state is in principal only a means to an end, which end is the preservation of the racial existence of the people” along Nazi lines, the current government is now faced with heeding Kahane’s call to “move the Arabs out” or establish a full fledged Apartheid regime within Israel proper. Though no one seems to be concerned about the Israeli apartheid regime in the “disputed territories” of the West Bank and Gaza, implementing such a system in Israel itself must be avoided because, as Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s deputy prime minister remarked, “I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organizations that shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle against us.” Suddenly the rationale for the “Disengagement plan” becomes clear: Get out of Gaza, with its huge Palestinian population and the accompanying demographic dangers, in exchange for official White House approval to keep and eventually annex the densely populated Jewish settlements around Jerusalem, which effectively cut the West Bank in half, making a Palestinian state with viable borders an impossibility.
But even if the Disengagement Plan proves successful, there are still large numbers of Arabs who are citizens of the Jewish state, living in Israel proper. If only long standing Israeli attempts to, in the words of Israeli military hero Meir Har-Zion in 1979, “create a situation in which for [Palestinians], it is not worth living here, but rather in Jordan or Saudi [sic] or any other Arab state,” the preferred strategy because “I do not say we should put them on trucks or kill them,” had been more successful, the Israeli government would not be faced with such a dilemma.
Going back even further, had David Ben Gurion and the Zionist army “finished the job” in 1948, the current “demographic problem” could have been avoided once and for all. Zionist historian Benny Morris concluded in the course of his research that,

there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves. . . if the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself. . . The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake."

He then postulates that a future “transfer” along the lines of 1948 of Palestinians may be necessary to save the Jewish state.
Returning to Olmert, though he is concerned with trying to save the “biologically living unit” of Israel as an ethnic Jewish state, he mentions no concern for the basic human rights of the Israeli Jewish populace. Though a full and complete withdrawal of the Zionist army to the 1967 borders, coupled with a removal of the settlements and a vigorous defense of those borders, would easily have solved Israel’s “security” problem years before, he and the rest of the Likud government refused to do so, happily allowing suicide bombers from the West Bank to enter Israel and kill a few dozen Israeli citizens every year. But then, sacrificing the good of the Jewish nation by ending the settlement effort, merely for the sake of saving a few Jewish lives, would not be properly “weighing” the “history of the Jewish people.” One wouldn’t want Ben Gurion to roll over in his grave.
On the other hand, when the Jewish state itself is suddenly threatened, not by violence but by demographics and the prospect of a peaceful democratic change in the nature of the state, suddenly the conviction that “No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land of Israel” loses its resonance, necessitating changes. Apparently having internalized the voelkische Weltanschauung which tells them that “you are nothing, your nation is everything” the Israeli populace is undisturbed by this, and continues to vote the champions of Jewish volksrecht into power.
So while the volksrecht of the Jewish people to establish a “national home” in Palestine, as acknowledged in the Balfour Declaration and which tramples virtually every human right of the indigenous Arab population, leads us to this new “moment of opportunity” in the peace process in which the “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas is expected to do his part to preserve the “biologically living” Zionist entity at the request of Sharon’s masters in Washington by cracking down on the Palestinian resistance groups, what is it that a peace process based instead on a conception of human rights calls for?
Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), declaring a Palestinian’s “right to life, liberty and security of person” makes any Zionist conquest by “fire and blood” illegitimate, necessitating Israel’s unconditional withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, which it conquered in 1967. Article 17, stating that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property” makes illegitimate the confiscation of Palestinian land upon which Jewish settlements have been built, both within Israel during and after the war of 1948, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 during the course of the occupation. Settlements in the occupied territories should therefore be evacuated, and compensation given to the refugees of 1948 for their confiscated land and homes. Article 5, stating that, “No one shall be subjected to torture,” calls for an immediate halt to the torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Article 9, stating that “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,” necessitates the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, while article 13, stating that, “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country, calls for the return of the 1948 refugees to their lands, or areas near their traditional lands inside of Israel. Article 15 stating that, “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality” demands that a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza be created so that their inhabitants will no longer be stateless, as well as granting Israeli citizenship to the 1948 refugees who were denationalized as they were ethnically cleansed during the course of the war. And finally, article 20 requires that Israel end its military regime in the occupied territories so that Palestinians will have the “right to take part in the government of [their] country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.” If Israel refuses to respect the human rights of the Palestinian people, then, as the preamble of the UDHR states, Palestinians will “be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression.”
Ironically, when searching to find a group advocating a human rights based solution to the problem, we do not find it among supporters of a state that is the “symbol of human decency,” or from members of “a society in which moral sensitivity is a principle of political life” to use the New York Times description of Israel. Instead, such view-point is present among the “disparate terrorist elements,” of the Palestinian resistance movements, to use the same paper’s description of Hamas.
Citing their human right to rebel “against tyranny and oppression” as Israel refuses to end the criminal occupation, cease confiscating Palestinian land, release Palestinian political prisoners, and allow the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, a Hamas spokesperson recently stated, “Our position is clear: once the aggression stops, then we can talk about achieving a truce.” Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the paraplegic spiritual leader of Hamas assassinated by Israeli Occupation Forces last year, stated the matter clearly:

I say this one more time so that everyone understands. We do not hate the Jews as Jews. We do not fight the Jews as Jews. We are fighting (people) who take our rights and our land, and our homes and our houses. We are fighting those who kill us. We want Truth. We are not the aggressors against anyone. We do not oppress anyone. The Palestinian people want to return to their homes. For that reason, we are prepared to live with the Jews in the best possible circumstances, in brotherhood and a spirit of cooperation.
But they must not infringe our rights. If my Muslim brother, of the same mother and father, took my land I would fight him. I would fight my brother, though he was from the same mother and father."

But if Hamas is only fighting for its human rights, why have they vowed to destroy Israel, denying the right of the Jewish state to exist? Yassin explains further,

Attempting to destroy the Zionist entity does not mean “we want to throw the Jews into the sea. The Palestinians always say that they want to live on the lands of our forebears and that all of us - Muslims, Jews and Christians – will live together in the spirit of democracy. But the problem is that the Jews don't
want to give the others their rights. They want to establish a racist regime. We have never imposed our principles [of wanting to establish an Islamic state], nor do we want to dictate them with force. There is no dictate. To each his own religion in a state that will respect all the human rights.

Though destroying the Jewish state peacefully and democratically, by allowing the return of the Palestinian refugees and giving them citizenship in Israel, would violate the volksrecht of the Jewish people, it would not violate their human rights. Jews in Israel would live in a state of all its citizens, just as we do in the United States. Everyone’s right to life, liberty, property, democracy and so forth would be protected, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. Just as no one would acknowledge the right of the German “ethnic state-apparatus” of the Hitler regime to exist, or the white ethnic state of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, neither should we recognize the right of the Jewish state to exist. We must distinguish between national/historical rights, which give license to murder, steal, and conquer, and human rights, which protect life and consider it sacred.
People often acknowledge that the Jews deserve the “special” right of a homeland and ethnic state because of Holocaust. But the tragedy of the Holocaust was not that 6 million Jews were brutally exterminated, but that the human right to life of 6 million innocent human beings was violated. Giving license to Zionists to violate the human rights of a few million more human beings, who want nothing more than to live in their homes and villages in peace, as recompense, does nothing more than perpetuate the incalculable suffering which was suffered by 6 million human beings during the Holocaust. Rather than compensate or make up for the Holocaust, it shames it, allowing Jews to commit crimes similar to those committed by the Nazis, while receiving inspiration from the same ideology. Acknowledging the validity of Zionism and the volksrecht of the Jewish people brings peace to no one, including the Jews. Instead, it keeps the spirit of Nazism alive, long after it should have been dead and buried. Just as those who considered the human life of all peoples and races sacred wished for the death of Nazism, so too should we wish for the death of Zionism.