Palestine: The Dream and the Reality: A Survey of Jewish Nationalism

by RABBI MORRIS S. LAZARON

1

WE JEWS are people of sentiment. We are quick to feel because we are well acquainted with sorrow. And yet we are intelligent. If suffering has mellowed our hearts, it has also disciplined our minds. We are old too, and we should be wiser. At the end of the war, when the world will be reorganized, the future of millions of our fellow Jews will be determined. Certainly no voice could be more helpful or potent in the final and happy disposition of Jewish dilemmas than the voice of American Israel.

Grave tasks face us: we must maintain our institutions of religion, of Jewish education, our agencies of philanthropy, and all our communal activities here; we must measurably meet the cries for relief from abroad; we must lay the foundations for rebuilding Jewish life everywhere. Were it possible for us to act together we could accomplish so much more — we could ride the storm, serve our Jewish brethren everywhere, serve our country, the embattled cause of freedom the world over, and fulfill our historic destiny in the spirit of our religious heritage. These huge tasks require all our material, intellectual, and spiritual resources, all the statesmanlike leadership we possess.

I say act together, for it is not possible for all of us to think alike. Diversity of thinking is written in the record of Jewish history. No single philosophy or program will be valid for all Jewish communities everywhere. No group or party can speak for all Jews. Yet on the concrete problems of relief and reconstruction perhaps it is possible to reach certain practical propositions upon which all of us can agree. What is it that we Jews want from the war? Nothing more nor less than what our fellow citizens want. We want the victory of the Allied Nations because in that victory are bound up the freedom of man and the future of civilization. We desire opportunities for all peoples. We wish no punitive peace based on hate, because we know such a peace will not endure. We shall work for the security, the stability, of all men. We deeply pray as we fight for a peace based on righteousness, for we are taught that only “the work of righteousness is peace.”

For ourselves, we Jews desire the right to live as citizens anywhere in the world so long as we obey the laws of the land where we live. We desire to create in the post-war world such conditions as shall make impossible another eruption of the universal barbarism which parades as anti-Semitism. We desire to maintain and to extend the Palestinian settlement not only as a refuge but in the hope that from the ancient homeland may go forth beneficent and inspiring influences to enrich the life of the world. The homelessness of many Jews is but part of the vast world migration of other uprooted and driven millions, and we will share the obligation to rebuild their lives in happier lands.

It is on the question of Palestine and the place of Palestine in Jewish life that discussion among Jews centers.

For Jews the name Palestine touches profound depths of sentiment. For religious reasons, this feeling is shared to considerable degree by non-Jews as well. There is no difference of opinion among Jews on the question of promoting Jewish immigration into the Holy Land. Today when the Jewish communities of Europe are threatened with destruction, and when the need to find homes for the stricken wanderers is immediate and pressing, the age-old land has offered opportunity and hope.

It is natural, with so many doors closed, that Jews should seek homes in the land which cradled their forebears. It is also natural for all Jews to view with keen disappointment any policy which would sharply limit entrance to Palestine at this time. Profound differences of opinion, however, appear as to the place of Palestine in Jewish thinking.

In general, there are two groups. One looks to the establishment in Palestine of an independent Jewish state. Jews in this group believe the Jews to be a people like any other people, entitled for its own dignity to free political existence, and that the establishment of such a Jewish state will be the most effective instrumentality in stabilizing and normalizing what they allege to be the anomalous position — the “homelessness” — of the Jewish people of the world. United political action for world Jewry is their technique and program.

There are other Jews who refuse to make united political action the basis of their hope. They fear such a program as a departure from Jewish tradition. They appreciate and would conserve the sense of brotherhood among the Jews of the world, but they do not look with favor upon having that brotherhood take on the trappings of nationhood. They are pro-Palestine but anti-nationalist. They believe that the Jewish settlement in Palestine can serve its purpose as a refuge and center of Jewish life without the accompaniment of political considerations, which they deem not only unnecessary but dangerous.

They regard as a disservice the inclusion, in the Republican and Democratic platforms, of Jewish nationalist demands. Aside from the fact that the Palestine planks of both parties are obviously only political gestures, they are concerned at this implication that Jews vote as a bloc to which special appeal must be made. They further believe there is an American Jewish approach imbued with the free spirit of America.

They desire unity among Jews. They believe that here and elsewdiere Israel has survived and will survive as a religious community. They believe that a Jewish state or Jewish international political action will not solve the problems of anti-Semitism but will aggravate them by building barriers between Jews and their fellow citizens and by giving ammunition to the anti-Semite.

Palestine, they declare, can absorb only a limited number of Jews; the vast millions must continue to live throughout the world. They are unwilling to take the chance of prejudicing the status of those millions. They believe Jewish life in this country can be rich and creative. Their positive program urges greater effort to promote among Jews here a knowledge of Jewish history, literature, and tradition and to deepen the religious life of the American Jew.

Here, then, are the two positions. In one, Palestine is central; in the other, Judaism. In one, Judaism is a national religion with universalistic overtones; in the other, Judaism is a universal religion, and Jews and all who identify themselves with Judaism are the bearers and interpreters of this universal religion.

The purpose of this paper is to present the position of the Jews who deny the secular basis of Jewish life, reject the nationalist position, and conceive the Jews of the world to be a religious community.

2

THE Jewish feeling for Palestine is based largely on tradition and sentiment, plus desperate need. It is strengthened by anguish for loved ones who have suffered and are suffering miserably, by the wish to help them find a home in this distracted world. “All Israel are brethren” is a common phrase. But only in our times has the religious community of Israel been given a secular basis and a political goal.

The drive for a Jewish state derives from an infection. The contemporary Jew caught the nationalistic germ from the world about him. The alleged “ethnic consciousness” of the Jew, expressing itself in political form, rises out of the profound despair, the utter weariness, the apparent hopelessness of the Jewish struggle for existence, for security — the grievous and mortifying acceptance of himself as the hated wanderer never sure anywhere of a permanent home.

It is rooted too in the innate pride which resents discrimination and which would find compensat ion in showing the nations what he can do as a Jew. They, the peoples, rejected him, but he will create a new life in the old land and new ways of living, man with man; new prophets will rise to challenge wrong, and latter-day poets whose psalms will once more exalt the human spirit. In this way Palestine the mother country, Palestine the refuge, Palestine the spiritual homeland, became Palestine the Jewish state. Praiseworthy sentiments concerning Palestine, shared by large numbers of Jews, are transmuted by the feeling of hopelessness into a demand to be like other nations.

I recognize the sense of community among Jews; I reject the ethnic basis of Jewish life.

Furthermore, the official and immediate Jewish nationalist demands voiced in the Biltmore Platform of the Zionist Organization of America and adopted by the American Jewish Conference — a Jewish army, unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine under Jewish control, the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth — reveal inconsistencies which are hard to reconcile. They proclaim unreserved support of the United Nations, yet agitate for a Jewish army. They declare readiness to coöperate with the Arabs, but demand that the Jewish Agency have full control of unlimited immigration. They deny “diaspora nationalism” for Jews, but, demanding “international status for the Jewish people,” call upon Jews who are citizens of other countries to work for a political goal related to a land other than their own. No stable future for the Jew in Palestine or anywhere else can be built on such foundations.

It is Quite probable that the vast majority of American Jews, if given opportunity to help find homes for fellow Jews in Palestine and so to express their sense of Jewish solidarity and the sentiment which attaches to Palestine, — if given, in other words, a positive, constructive Palestine program, — will reject Jewish nationalism for themselves and their children.

The Jewish nationalist seems to believe that for the millions who must live outside Palestine the only future is “to be annihilated in a process of assimilation.” But these millions desire to remain Jews and believe they can remain Jews, good Jews, in the lands where they live. The Jewish nationalist agrees that the test of democracy is the attitude of the peoples to the Jews who live among them. But he apparently holds out little hope that this attitude can be civilized or that there will be surcease from suffering. He sees Jews outside Palestine as living always in uncertainty, under constant threat of expulsion.

This is a counsel of despair; it denies that there can be any progress, or that freedom and democracy will spread among men.

3

THERE have been and probably will be recurrent crises, upsets in world history, in which suffering compasses wide areas and involves many people — war, revolution, economic disasters. But the suffering of the Jew is also recurrent. It parallels world disturbance or follows it. Yet it occurs on its own and in periods when there is no great upheaval, though it is most frequently associated with some internal situation in the land where it is found. The persistence and prevalence of anti-Semitism are what distinguish it and what trouble us. It gives some semblance of truth to the claim that the situation is hopeless.

With the rise of the temporal power of the Church, economic and political persecutions were added to religious persecution. Generation after generation was bred in the instruction that the Jew had rejected the true faith. He was a being apart. Special conditions of life had to be created for him. Laws and regulations were set up to govern his relations with his Gentile neighbors. He was forced to live in ghettos, to wear certain garments. His occupations were limited. Thus temporal and spiritual authorities combined to set in motion a dual process of emotional and intellectual inbreeding which worked harm for the Christian and disaster for the Jew.

The more the Jew was persecuted, the more convinced he became of the truth of his Teaching. He fed his pride from the same source. The world shut him out, but he had his God and God’s gift — his Teaching.

It was an extraordinary but natural example of compensation. But like all compensations under such conditions, it did not make for completely wholesome attitudes, either towards himself or towards the world. The amazing thing about this aspect of Jewish experience is that the Jew was able to develop, shut off as he was, such a culture of heart and mind. The list of our unsung saints is as long as the list of our martyrs.

Eighteen centuries of enforced isolat ion developed much of what are commonly and wrongly called Jewish characteristics. Often the Jew was blamed for the very things which this separation from the peoples had caused. The robe of shame which at times he was forced to wear later became to the Jew himself the badge of his tribe. The Gentile saw and said: “The Jew is different.” The Jew said and felt: “I am different.” And for compensation he accepted and glorified this difference in thinking and practice.

It was not until comparatively modern times that brave spirits arose who were not hindered by theological or other prejudices. A now wind was blowing over the world. In the unfolding revelation of God, the spirit of man was groping out of darkness toward the light. The longing for freedom stirred the hearts of the peoples. Leaders arose in many lands who entered the lists in the struggle for political and civil rights for all men. And Jews in those lands where freedom was realized shared the new-won blessing. But the influence of the centuries was strong.

The Jew, struggling out of his sense of apartness after the first flush of freedom wherever he enjoyed it, still was victim of the sense of a difference between him and his fellow men, other than religious. The adjustment of the emancipated Jew was not complete either within himself or in his relations with his Gentile neighbors. Furt hermore, millions of his brethren still lived in lands where the old patterns were strong, persisting in the economic, social, political, — as well as religious, — status of the Jew. The Jew was constantly pulled back to the community suffering of his fellow Jews.

The world considered him different. It did not treat the Jew as an individual human being who may be good, bad, or indifferent. It generalized on the old patterns and applied the general antipathy to the particular individual Jew. Good Jews, bad Jews—they were all alike: an alien clan to be persecuted or pitied or tolerated.

This cruel situation still obtains. Only the very stout-hearted can stand against it. Under such circumstances it is natural that many Jews accept the philosophy of Jewish nationalism.

The heart of the problem is: Can anything be done by Jew and Gentile to break down this centuries-old misunderstanding? Need the Jew be always “different,” “alien,” “foreign,” in Gentile eyes or feel himself so in his own eyes? I believe much can be done by both Gentile and Jew if they care enough about it. Neither can effect the change alone.

Many throw up their hands and say: “Useless! Prejudice against the Jew is a fact in the world that can’t be changed. Accept it. Also accept the Jewish consciousness of folk and national difference, and proceed from there.”

There are logic and meaning in the position of the nationalists. Other peoples have a nationalist basis for their life. Among other peoples there are the religious, the non-religious, the irreligious. So with Jews. Other peoples have a land of their own. Jews should have a land of their own. With these basic presumptions accepted, the logic of the Jewish nationalist is irrefutable and all the political effort of Jewish nationalists becomes justified. There should be a Jewish army, a Jewish state, international political representation and all that goes with it. Logic demands, too, that for the time being there should be a Jewish government in exile. The idea was suggested among Jewish nationalists but never carried through, though the Jewish Agency in Washington or the Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs or the World Jewish Congress might qualify.

While it is possible to see the rationale of this position and the activities that flow from it, and to admit the right of Jews to espouse it and to act upon it, it is equally possible to see the rationale of the other side —Jews as a religious community scattered as other religious communities throughout the world — and admit the right of Jews to espouse it and to act upon it.

We are indeed at the turn of the road. This is perhaps the most important decision which the Jew in America and the world has had to face for centuries.

We have attempted the impossible. We have tried to have our cake and eat it too. We have tried to unite the utterly opposite. We have accepted the “folkist” basis of Jewish life, but we have insisted that we are followers of a universal religion. It cannot be done! We are either a people entitled to all the attributes of nationhood, including a state, or we are a religious community. We cannot be both.

4

FOR all the reversion to the brutal which the present war indicates, the progress of man is forward. This present time is but a temporary setback. Already the lines of a new, happier order are being drawn. The Atlantic Charter opened new vistas. The declarations of the Moscow Conference, the passage by Congress of the Connally Resolution, the creation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in which forty-four nations joined, the War Refugee Board, the Pope’s Five Points for Peace, the Malvern Conference statement, various denominational declarations on the peace, and the “Pattern for Peace,” the unprecedented proclamation on the post-war world by Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish leaders in October, 1943 — all these indicate that the people are determined to wrest blessing from the struggle. I do not look for Utopia after the guns are silent, but we shall indeed take a few steps forward, building upon the ruins of Versailles and the League a nobler structure of human and international relations.

The test of democratic civilization lies in its attitude to the Jews. Certainly the status of Jews in England, France, the United States, and even in pre-Hitler Germany indicates an advance over the Middle Ages. “ Eppur si muove — Nevertheless, it moves” is just as true of human life as it is of the earth. Temporary setbacks do not change the general direction. Jewish-Christian relations are changing today. Jewish-Christian relations are better today. They will be better in the long tomorrow. The present anti-Semitism in some quarters is matched by an increasing understanding of the Jew and Judaism and by sympathy and support of persecuted Jews in every country of the world. King Christian of Denmark is reported to have declared: “If the Germans want to put the yellow badge on the Jewish citizens of Denmark, I and my whole family will wear it as a sign of the highest distinction.”

Priests and Protestant ministers in France, Belgium, and Holland have been jailed, tortured, exiled, and killed for defending and helping Jews, and thousands of lowly Christian folk, revolted by the brutality of the Nazis, have justified their Christian faith by acts of compassion for the stricken children of Israel. As the magnificent statement of the Danish Bishops put it: “Notwithstanding our separate religious beliefs, we will fight to preserve for our Jewish brothers and sisters the same freedom we ourselves value more than life. . . . It is evident that in this case we are obeying God rather than men.”

All but the most prejudiced see today that antiSemitism is an instrument used by designing men to destroy society. To be hopeless is to reject the concept of progress in human life. In a real sense, it is to reject the existence of God. The physical suffering of the Jew may be the test of democracy, but the examples of Christian comradeship with Jewry, persecuted yet heroically faithful, might be the inspiration of world redemption.

It will not be easy to break down the old patterns, to educate the peoples to an appreciation rather than a suspicion and fear of differences, to deal without prejudice with the Jew. This is the Gentile problem. The same historic factors which have conditioned the Jew have molded the Gentile attitudes toward the Jew. To change the Jewish pattern is a problem primarily for Jews, but Gentiles can help. To change the Gentile pattern is primarily a problem for Gentiles, but Jews can help. Unless the Gentile yields to a process of re-education, nothing the Jew does will help.

While some progress has been made, earnest Christians and Gentiles will realize that much more needs to be done. It is not enough to mobilize church and religious agencies and to pass resolutions in meetings and conventions. Unfortunately, relations between Christians and Jews are for the most part on an economic basis only. Except for occasional communal projects, contacts between the two groups are all too frequently limited to business. The Gentile sells to or buys from the Jew; the Jew sells to or buys from the Gentile. It is inevitable under such conditions, when the tensions of hard times come, that the strain is felt on its only point of contact. Temper Christian and Jewish relationships with the warmth of friendly intercourse, mellow t hem with the waters of understanding, and we shall have a much firmer, more wholesome basis on which to build.

Gentiles, Christians, and Jews, white men, black men, brown men, and yellow men, Americans all, have shared in the cruel hardship and dangers of war, have seen that bravery and sacrifice are not things of creed and color. They must carry over into the tasks of peace the nobler impulses bred by the camaraderie of war.

But because Gentiles are in the vast majority — there are about 5 million Jews among the 130 million people here — a grave responsibility rests upon them.

Jews cannot dismiss the natural drive for homogeneity within any national group. It is basic. We must take this into consideration in any thinking about the future of the Jew in America. The Jewish nationalist and the “folkist” Jew give little thought to this important subject. They usually content themselves with castigating the non-nationalist Jew or attempting to floor him with the accusation: “You believe in American nationalism but not in Jewish nationalism.” They assume the two are parallel. They are not.

Israel Zangwill, in his essay on nationalism, differentiates between nations which have crystallized and those in the process of crystallization. He classifies the United States as a nation in the making, because of the great varieties of peoples and cultures which have come to its shores. This idea, however, does not imply the development of an American nationalism that will exclude differences. We desperately need in our country a chastened and changed attitude toward minorities.

But minorities must recognize the deep impulse in every nation toward homogeneity. It is a natural tendency in a maturing state. Sometimes the impulse takes the form of legislative compulsion. More often, in democracies, it is a more or less conscious movement toward some inner harmony resulting from the free interplay of social, economic, political, religious, racial, and cultural forces and groups. Majorities and minorities unfold, evolve, draw from, interpenetrate each other, contribute to — and change — each other.

The spirit of America has wrought mighty changes in everything it has touched.

The current concept of cultural pluralism recognizes the values of variety and represents a praiseworthy determination to accept differences. But Jewish nationalists should not delude themselves. Cultural pluralism is only a lodging for the night, a transition philosophy in the unfolding of American life. It is a wholesome but a temporary concept designed to tide us over a period of adjustment. It may endure for a century. But there is an inexorability in the laws of social evolution — a movement through diversity toward unity.

For the Jew to whom loyalty to a religious tradition is the foundation of Jewish solidarity, not suicide but the preservation of this religious tradition in the land of his habitation is the important object. For the Gentile, loyalty to his great tradition must be preserved. But suppose Gentile adj ustment is met by Jewish adjustment? History gives ample and eloquent testimony to this possibility. Jews and Gentiles are living together, working together, some of them even praying together. Who can predict what will result from this easy, natural interplay? Perhaps something greater and nobler than our present concepts of Christianity and Judaism, which will inform and change both. This need not make for the extinction of either, but for exaltation of both — each after its own genius.

American Jews might confidently reject Jewish nationalism and the ethnic basis of Jewish life and, at the same time, make the brave assertion of Judaism as a universal religion and the comradeship of Israel as a religious community.

5

MEANWHILE, the practical difficulties remain. The post-war world may be marked by great movements of population, even as the war itself. The extent of such migrations cannot now, of course, be determined. Jews all over Europe have been forced to leave homes where they have lived for centuries, as have Poles, Russians, Greeks, and other peoples among whom Jews lived. It is not too much to hope that with the implementation of the Atlantic Charter the rights and privileges of citizenship will be restored to Jews along with all those from whom these rights and privileges have been taken. Nor is it too much to believe that these rights will be guaranteed. Many Jews will return with their neighbors to the lands where their fathers lived. There will be Jews who will wish to settle in Palestine. Certainly the spadework has been done and the land is already prepared to receive as large an immigration as possible in the circumstances.

It must be remembered that the name Palestine evokes the ancient sanctities of Christendom and holy memories of the Mohammedan world. In this land the past reaches down into the present and the present draws upon the past, so that in the future of Palestine are involved not only the memories of three great religions and the needs and hopes of many Jews, but the tangled threads of many complex economic, political, and national problems that extend far beyond the boundaries of Palestine and concern a vaster population than those who now live within its borders.

These sobering considerations entered into the Balfour Declaration, which was a sincere attempt to satisfy the historic, sentimental, racial, religious, and other factors which crowd into that little land. These considerations are present in the picture today. And it is obvious to all reasonable men that they will continue to be present in any foreseeable future.

What, then, is to be done? In spite of the deeprooted differences among them, is it not possible for Jews to unite on a program of practical action so just, so statesmanlike, that it will rally the leadership of the world to its support and bring the greatest measure of help to our brethren? Surely the violence of partisanship among Jews should be submerged in the light of the tragedy of our brother Jews. And surely, too, the primary question is: How can we best help our brethren?

Any program in the very nature of the situation can only lay down certain principles, the details of which will have to be worked out over a period of years and in many discussions. The following principles, however, are basic: —

1. International guarantee of the rights of all Jews to residence and citizenship anywhere.

2. The rehabilitation of Jewish life in all its phases — relief, restoration to old homes, finding new homes — to be undertaken as part of the international coöperative effort of post-war reconstruction.

3. International guarantee of the largest possible Jewish immigration into Palestine; emphasis upon the economic development of the land in a series of fiveor ten-year plans during which specific tasks will be undertaken, the determination of its political future to be postponed till more favorable conditions shall have been developed, at which time a democratic self-governing commonwealth shall be set up guaranteeing equal rights for all its citizens and religio-cultural autonomy for those groups which desire it.

It is not labels that count, but life. This may be an excursion into Utopia, but since when have dreams and visions been banned from Church and Synagogue?