Published
in the Jewish Herald Voice – June 14, 2007
MUSINGS
# 23
LEGITIMACY.
By
Emil Steinberger
How
did a country smaller than the
state of New
Jersey become
a center of
worldwide obsession? Since the end of the Second World War, dozens of
new independent
countries were established throughout the globe. Most continued their
existence
essentially unmolested. Some ran into difficulties either with their
ancient
rivals or with local political situations, while others were simply
unprepared
to govern themselves in the twentieth century. None however, caught the
international attention merely because of their existence, geography
and
ethnicity, as did Israel. Its re
establishment
in 1948 was greeted by a violent, including military reactions from
neighboring
Arab countries. This violent reaction continues ‘till now and has
spread beyond
the neighboring countries into distant Muslim lands. For political and
probably
also for other reasons, the Muslim reaction is met with a tacit
acquiescence by
a number of non-Muslim states throughout the world. Ever since its
rebirth
after the Second World War, the primary political issue dogging Israel
is the lack
of recognition by the ‘Muslim World’ of its right to exist, in other
words a
refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy.
WordNet
defines legitimacy as, 1.)
“Lawfulness
by virtue of being authorized or in accordance with law”.
2.)”Undisputed
credibility.”
Wikipedia
defines legitimacy as,
1.)
“Anything
that is able to withstand extensive scrutiny into whether or not it
conforms to
the accepted standards and principals…“ 2.) Refers
in general to the peoples'
acceptance of a law,
ruling, or a regime
itself as valid.
The Free
Dictionary defines
legitimacy as,
“Lawfulness by virtue of being authorized or in
accordance with law.”
According
to the
above definitions, the legitimacy of Israel has
been clearly
established by its millennia old history and more recently by the
action of the
United Nations General Assembly when it passed, on November
29, 1947,
a partition plan for the region. This was embodied in the UN Resolution 181 that defined the outline of
the
settlement that created both a Jewish and a Palestinian homeland. The
partition
plan divided the area into three separate entities: a Jewish state, an
Arab
state, and an international zone for Jerusalem.
The
Provisional Government of Israel in agreement with U.N., proclaimed the
new
State of Israel on May
14, 1948.
The United
States
recognized on that same date the
provisional Israeli government as ‘de facto’ authority of the new state
(De Jure recognition was extended later, on
January 31). On May
15, 1948,
the neighboring Arab states refused to accept the formation of a
Palestinian state, as per U.N. resolution 181, and invaded the newly
created Israel,
igniting
the first Arab-Israeli war.
What
went wrong? The legitimacy was
there by definition, but the historical, emotional, cultural and
religious background
was poorly understood by the populations in the Arab worlds and
politics took
over. Perversion and incomplete knowledge of the history of the regions
and their
inhabitants allowed for teaching that portrayed Israel as a new country and culture whose band of
imposters usurped into the midst of an ancient well established ‘Muslim
World’.
The propaganda stated that the Jews came to ‘Palestine’ from
the
‘outside’ from all over the world allegedly to take a segment of Arab
land away
from its historically rightful owners
in order to establish, on their ancestral lands, a new
country---labeled “Israel””.
Obviously,
nothing could be further from reality. A brief summary of pertinent
historical events
may shed some light on this issue.
After a several millennia-long religious,
cultural
and politically independent presence of a Jewish
(Hebrew)
states in the lands of Israel, Titus,
the Roman
Emperor, conquered during the first century B.C. the latest independent
Jewish state
at that time, the ‘Kingdom of Judea’. He
converted it into
a Roman “Client State” ruled by a Rome-appointed king, ‘King Herod’. In
70 A.D.,
in response to the rebelliousness of the conquered Jews, Titus
destroyed the ‘Second Temple’,
massacred
several hundred thousands Jews and initiated expulsion of a large
segment of
the native Jewish population to Asia, North
Africa and Europe.
During
the first hundred years after Jerusalem and its
Temple were
destroyed,
the Jews still hoped to return, as they did several times before, to
their land
and rebuild it. The Court of 70 Elders, the Sanhedrin, was still intact
and although
the Jews were chased out of Jerusalem, many
lived in
small communities throughout the lands of Israel. However,
Emperor
Hadrian, who reigned after Titus, was determined to eradicate all
vestiges of
Judaism in Judea. This
provoked a
series of rebellions among the Jews that in turn resulted in further
repressive
responses, including widespread murders of Jews remaining in Caesarea and in
some of the
other Judean towns. The latter sparked a major rebellion on the part of
the
Israelites led by Simon Bar Kochba (A.D. 132-135). Under
his leadership, Jerusalem was
liberated and an
independent government set up. Coins were struck and the
temple was partly restored.
However,
after three years of Judea’s
independence,
the Romans, under Hadrian’s leadership, re conquered Jerusalem, and
killed Bar
Kochba. To destroy connections between the Jews and Jerusalem,
Hadrian forbade
the Jews, under penalty of death, from ever entering Jerusalem.
Although, many
Jews ended up in exile, they never forgot Jerusalem. For the next 1900 years
they prayed while facing in the direction of Jerusalem for
return to
‘Eretz Israel’ (Land of Israel).
In 324
A.D., the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to
Christianity and renamed
Aelia Capitolina Jerusalem. Notably, in 362 A.D., Emperor Julian the
Apostate
who opposed Christianity, reopened Jerusalem to the
Jews and
allowed them to return.
Julian
rescinded all the anti-Jewish laws that his
uncle Constantine had instituted. He issued an edict that the Temple be
rebuilt in Jerusalem. This
caused a
great deal of excitement among the Jews who started returning to Jerusalem from
everywhere in
the world to help in rebuilding the city. Unfortunately, their hopes
were unmet
when an attempted reconstruction of the temple exploded and went up in
flame.
This was interpreted as the will of God and the Jews were again exiled
to
become wondering people without a homeland. What was left of the Temple Mount was
allowed to
turn into a heap of rubble upon which emperor Justinian began
constructing, in
534 A.D., the foundations for the New Church of St. Mary. Nevertheless,
despite the severe persecution, there
were still more than forty Jewish communities surviving by the sixth
century in
the Holy Land.
Having
suffered three centuries of
Christian intolerance and spasmodic episodes of violence, Jews welcomed
the
Arab invaders who, in the seventh century, reached and conquered the Holy Land. At
this point in
history, a substantial number of Jews lived in all parts of the Holy Land, both
in towns and
in villages and on both side of the Jordan
River.
Upon
return of Christianity to the Holy Land in the
eleventh
century, the Crusaders almost "wiped out" the Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Acre, Caesarea and Haifa. Again,
some Jews
remained alive and whole "village communities of Galilee
survived."
Actually, during the subsequent couple of centuries, there was a small
but constant
flow of Jews, particularly from Africa, back
to the Holy Land and Acre became
a seat of a
famous Jewish academy. Despite strong pressures to convert to
Christianity, a
majority of the Holy Land Jews vehemently resisted all of these
attempts.
After the Spanish Inquisition, a robust Jewish
life flourished in the Holy Land.
However, in 1518,
three years after the establishment of the Ottoman’s rule, "the
prosperous
Jewish community in Hebron, had
been
plundered, many Jews killed and the survivors forced to flee",
nevertheless,
by 1540, Hebron's Jewry
recovered from
this assault and reconstructed its Jewish Quarter. In 1561, Sultan
Suleiman I of
the Ottoman
Empire
allowed many Jews to return to the Holy Land. Some
settled in Jerusalem,
but the majority went to Safad where, by mid-16th century, the Jewish
population had risen to about 10,000, and the town had become a
thriving
textile center. Moreover, by 1563 the first Jewish printing press
outside Europe was
installed in Safed.
An interesting quirk of history, probably a for runner of the 19th
century’s Zionist movement, occurred in 1799 when Napoleon, during his
Egypt campaign,
wrote a letter to the “Jewish Nation” offering Palestine, under French
protectorate, as a homeland for the Jews (“The rightful
heirs of Palestine”, as he put it). This letter did
not lead anywhere, particularly since it was written relatively close
to the
subsequent defeat of Napoleon’s armies in North
Africa.
The
19th century ushered an
invasion of the Holy Land, Lebanon and Syria by
missionaries,
scholars and politicians. Holy Land again
became a
crossroads of commerce for the three continents and an “area of
interest” to
the United
States of America. The
Jewish
population grew rapidly and Jerusalem outgrew
its
geography necessitating development of neighborhoods outside the city
walls. By
1880, the Jewish population of Jerusalem
constituted a
majority. The Hebrew language was revived and the stage was set for the
development
of Zionism.
Thus, to summarize the
demographic character of Jewish life in Israel the
following
could be observed: During the reign
of King David, some 1000 B.C., there was a
rapid growth of population of Israel
(apparently
primary Hebrews), reaching almost 2 million people. The population grew
until
the first century A.D. when it peaked at almost 3 million. Following
expulsion of
the Jews from the Kingdom of Judea, its
total
population dropped to about 500,000 and stayed at this level until the
turn of
the twentieth century. It did not begin to rise until the establishment
of the
British Mandate, and later, associated with markedly accentuated Jewish
immigration to Palestine,
reached 2.3
million by the end of 1949, shortly after the State of Israel was
established. In
the twenty first century, Israel’s
population
reached 6.2 million. Its Jewish population approached five million. Of
the
estimated more than 1.2 million non-Jews, 936,000 are Moslems, 131,000
Christians, and 101,000 Druze.
This
brief review clearly demonstrates the lack of any veracity to the
claims that
Jews are not the people with original roots in the Land of Israel.
However, the summary
illustrates the woes of Jews in Israel during
the two
millennia since the destruction of Kingdom of Judea but
never
abandonment of the land. It illuminates brightly the evidence that Jews
lived there
continuously for millennia, despite constant harassment, persecution,
periodic
massacres and periodic expulsions. Thus, despite all odds, Jews
persisted on
the lands of Eretz Israel during
its entire
history. Now, after centuries of abuse, rape and depletion of the land
itself, exacted
by the various invaders, return of Jewish settlers from throughout the
world stimulated
a rebirth of the soil of Eretz Israel in the
manner of a
“Phoenix from
the Ashes”. The
Israeli settlers converted deserts, swamps and marshes into land
flowing with “milk
and honey”. This was accomplished despite a constant deadly harassment
from surrounding
neighbors.
Unfortunately, a large group of political
activists
expounds a highly inflammatory and emotional rhetoric directed at
general Arab
population, particularly at the school age generations, a rhetoric that
had highjacked
a religion (Islam) and with its help is extolling the idea that Israel must be
wiped out
from the surface of the earth and the Israelis massacred. This criminal
exhortation,
had been formally practiced by Arab leaders for decades, as in the
words of Ahmed
Shugayri the PLO head who exhorted ‘Palestinians’ prior to the Six Day
War with
the wards, “We shell destroy Israel and its inhabitants”. Similar ideas
are
voiced by the various Muslim leaders even now.
The
Author may be reached at: esteinberger1@comcast.net
Further
information at: http://esteinberger1.home.comcast.net