Power's world: Israel's Old Testament conquests

Each year, over the ages, at Passover time—which begins today—religious Jews have concluded their observance with the prayer, L'shanah haba'ah b'Yerushalayim!—"Next year in Jerusalem!"

Until the 20th century, though, few really believed in the notion of return to Jerusalem any more than most Christians truly believe in the Second Coming. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70, the Jews were thrust into the outer world—many into Arab countries (later to become Muslim countries) where they were largely extended protection and tolerance, as well as into the Roman and then Christian world, where they were accepted for many centuries. There were outbursts of truly virulent anti Semitism, but these came centuries apart.

Over two millennia, many big tribal groups have been dispersed: the Slavs, the Moguls, the Bantu, the Tamils, the Celts. The list is a long one, but only the Jews possess so clear an idea of where they want to go back to.

During the last thousand years, while the Jews were in the diaspora, the Arabs reinforced their settlements on the same land that some Jews yearned for, just as pre-Arab tribes had settled it in the time before Moses. When in 1897 the rabbis of Vienna sent a fact-finding mission to Palestine they reported back that the bride “was beautiful but married to another man.” Likewise, Theodore Herzl, the convenor of the first Zionist Conference in the same year, was not obsessed by a return to Palestine. Almost anywhere would do. Argentina was the first choice with its empty fertile spaces. The Uasin Gishu plateau near Nairobi, Kenya, was another.

But the Zionist conference overruled him. And the course of the First World War and the likely break up of the Ottoman empire led the British to think that Jewish control of Palestine would be more secure for British interests than Arab. In 1917 came the Balfour Declaration whereby the British cabinet declared that they viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The East was to be Westernised; this, at least, was how London saw it.

The only Jewish member of the cabinet demurred. Edwin Samuel Montague denounced the whole project as the reconstruction of the Tower of Babel. Lord Curzon, the former Indian viceroy, denounced it as an act of “sentimental idealism” and said that Britain had a “stronger claim to parts of France.”

The fact is that, according to the texts of the Old Testament, the ultra-religious, settlement-inclined Israelis have it right: the whole of Palestine belongs to them. Read Genesis. When the Lord spoke to Moses and told him that he would deliver the Jews from Egypt, he also said he would bring them into “a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.” In other words, the Jews were to conquer and displace other tribes who had been long possessors of the land now called Palestine, and even other tribes further south such as the Midianites. Later, again, in the Book of Numbers, the Lord told Moses to “vex the Midianites and smite them.” Moses and his army did. “They slew all the males” and took the women and children captive. Then Moses said to his commanders, “Have ye saved all the women alive?… Now therefore kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him.” Is this the proud history that present day Jews are fighting to uphold millennia later?

The point is that, if the Jews want the rest of the world's sympathy, they have to be able to justify their modern day presence in Palestine better than they do. And for this they have to recognise how wrong in contemporary terms their conquests, both old and new, are. Of course, 20th century European history—evil as so much of it was—will be hugely difficult to put right in the 21st century and cannot simply be undone. But if the Arab and Muslim world are generous, as they can be, they should let the Jews stay on within the 1968 borders. And let the Jews then, besides making the Palestinians free, share the water, their tremendous knowledge and their technical ability to help in lifting up the Arabs, rather than once again appearing to want to crush them underfoot.