The Jewish Power Blog: From the River to the Sea

Between the burden of the past and the vision of the future lies the messy present. We cannot escape our past victimization and victimizing – nor build a better future – unless and until we find a way to resolve the present, active, conflict. The Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa, for example, could not occur until the Apartheid regime – and the violent opposition to it – had been dismantled. Only when the ongoing oppression and violence had ended could the victims and perpetrators cooperate to move away from their bitter memories of the past.

So, in our case, what is to be done? What seems to be the dominant approach, currently, is one based on a struggle for total victory: either the Jews will achieve fulfillment of the somewhat vague biblical promise of sovereignty “from the [Euphrates] river to the sea” (e.g., Ex. 23:31), or the Palestinian nation-state will rule “from the [Jordan] river to the sea.” In this zero-sum game, one nation will need to surrender its claim to self-determination, or face expulsion or worse. If each side comes to the table with this claim as a starting position for negotiation, then a geographical compromise seems possible. But if either side comes with a religiously based absolute refusal to negotiate any compromise, then… well, there is no future here for anyone.

Theodor Herzl envisioned a liberal democracy, with happy coexistence of Jews and Palestinians; and his cultural Zionist nemesis, Ahad Ha’am, sharply condemned what he saw as the unjust treatment of the Palestinians by the settlers of the first wave of Aliyah (~1900). This tension between the drive to achieve national self-determination in the land and the commitment to our Jewish moral identity has troubled Zionist thinkers and leaders ever since. While Herzl thought it natural to seek to implement his plan for a Jewish polity within the context of the colonialist world in which he lived, turning to the Ottoman and British empires and other European powers for support, it seems fair to say that the settlers and their supporters abroad saw themselves not as colonists exploiting others and others’ land, but as natives reclaiming their birthright that had been unjustly stolen by the colonial powers of yore (Babylonia, Rome, Islam). They were often troubled (and divided) over what should be their relationship with the current natives. Until the Holocaust, a vision of some kind of federation of two national polities had broad support. Even Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, which was the forerunner of today’s right-wing Likud, said about state sovereignty, “France is a state, but so is Kentucky.”

In its early years, Zionism was opposed by most of the Orthodox world, for two main reasons: a) it threatened to undermine the traditional community and the halakhic framework; and b) a well-known Talmudic midrash was understood to forbid mass immigration to the land of Israel, and rebellion against the condition of exile – until messianic times (Bab. Talmud Ketubot 111a). Yet the pull of the Zionist vision, especially in the context of the Tsarist oppression of the Jewish masses, engendered a creative compromise that allowed many Orthodox Jews to embrace the movement: if we posit that we are now living in messianic times – the beginning of the era of redemption – then rejecting exile and building a state in the land are not forbidden but actually commanded.

Early on, this compromise had the unintended consequence of undermining the vision of a liberal, “normal” modern state taking its place among the family of nations. For example, when partition into two states was proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937, as a solution to the conflicting claims of Jews and Palestinians, many Orthodox Zionists opposed it as a violation of the messianic process of realizing the biblical promise of “from the river to the sea.” The Zionist Congress of 1938 endorsed partition, but only after a long and bitter debate, by a vote of 299-166. The opposition then went quiet, but was resurgent after 1967, and currently holds the levers of power in the coalition government.

If we are living out the apocalyptic drama of redemption, then rational planning, diplomatic compromise, liberal values, the family of nations – all these are irrelevant, obsolete, sacrilegious. We have attained power in order to fulfill God’s promise of total victory; empathy for gentiles can finally be discarded as an exilic artifact. And, it turns out, if that is the belief that determines our actions, then we are in good company, because it is essentially the same belief, painted green, that drives Hamas.

Of course, implementing partition after all the years and all the blood is a daunting challenge. It will require hard decisions, arduous negotiations, and courageous leadership. And the hardest step will be for Israel’s leaders to say, out loud, without gagging, without their fingers crossed behind their backs, that they support the right of the Palestinian nation to self-determination within their ancestral homeland, parallel and equal to the right of the Jewish nation. In order for this to happen, we will have to publicly and forcefully reject the apocalyptic vision, as we did, not without struggle, in the cases of previous messianic movements throughout our history. Allowing the modern, liberal, rational, utopian Zionist movement to be sucked into apocalyptic fatalism, into violent messianism, will leave us with neither two states nor one, but with none.