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On the one hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is occupying another people. On the other hand, Israel is the only nation in the West that is existentially threatened. Both occupation and intimidation make the Israeli condition unique. Intimidation and occupation have become the two pillars of our condition.
There are more than half a million Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze in Palestine in 1897.
After all, Zionism was an orphans’ movement, a desperate crusade of Europe’s orphans. As the unwanted sons and daughters of the Christian Continent fled the hatred of their surrogate mother, they discovered they were all alone in the world. Godless, parentless, and homeless, they had to survive. Having lost one civilization, they had to construct another. Having lost their homeland, they had to invent another. That is why they came to Palestine, and why they now cling to the land with such desperate determination.
Activism is the revolt of the Jews against the passivity of their past. It is the rebellion of the Jews against their tragic fate and against acceptance of their tragic fate. It is not a specific goal or target, but momentum. Activism is the momentum of doing, of moving forward. Activism is the last attempt of the Jews to resist oblivion. Activism is the desperate rebellion of Jewish life against Jewish death.
The brutal events that took place between April and August 1936 pushed Zionism from a state of utopian bliss to a state of dystopian conflict.
With the new, merciless perception of reality came a new, merciless determination: We shall not retreat, we shall not concede. We will do all that is needed to maintain Zionism.
There was a significant difference between the Jewish and Arab atrocities in the first half of 1938. While the attacks on Jewish civilians were supported by the Arab national leadership and by much of the Arab public, the attacks on Arab civilians were denounced by mainstream Zionism.
The deeply religious Christian commando commander had no doubt as to the significance of the event. “We are here to found the Army of Zion,” he said to the one hundred young Jews before him.
Even when their legs betray them, they continue to march. Even when they fall, they get up again.
The forces closing in on the audacious national movement are just too strong: the Arab front, the German front, the collapse of European Jewry. The challenge facing his cadets is unprecedented. The thought of it actually makes Gutman shiver. Twenty years after it arrived in the valley, Zionism once again demands of its followers total mobilization and sacrifice.
A cliff we conquered and ascended A path we carved and cleared A trail we beat and blazed—to the abyss
“In this war, we Jews are the most lonely people, the most deserted and the most just.”
“We are orphans in this world. And as the world crumbles, our orphanhood intensifies. On the weak wings of the remnants of Israel living in Palestine was placed a heavy burden, more than we can bear. It might very well be that the entire future of Jewish history depends now on what shall happen with us. Without our being asked, the most enormous task of all was set upon us.”
“The fate of Israel is about to be decided as it was not decided upon since the destruction of the Temple, since we lost our land and liberty. Our history has not known such a time when the fire of destruction wil...
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“If we must fall, fall we shall, here with our women and children and all that we have,” said Tabenkin that summer.
“I do not wish for us to die in this land,” said Tabenkin. “But I do wish that we shall not depart, we shall not leave the land alive.”
“Masada shall not fall again.”
“Strong be the hands of our brothers building the land.”
In the words of Gutman’s best friend, Israel Galili, there is “no place to retreat. . . . We must guarantee that we stand to the last, defend ourselves to the end, hold on even at the price of extermination.”
In the words of Gutman’s mentor Yitzhak Tabenkin: “These half a million Jews should not retreat. Not even one of us should survive. We must stand here to the end for the future right, the self-respect, and the historic loyalty of the Jewish people. So we are told by Masada and even before Masada. So we are told by the destruction of the Second Temple.”
In the words of the former leader of Poland’s Zionist movement, Yitzhak Gruenbaum: “The trouble with the Jews of the Diaspora was that they preferred the life of a beaten dog to death with honor. There is no hope for survival once the Germans invade. If, God forbid, we shall reach the mom...
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Tabenkin again: “We, the Jews, have no option of retreat and evacuation. Some say that women and children must be saved. There is no place to save them. There is no justice in the demand to save women and children. . . . We must have no illusions: We face annihilation. Will the Germans leave behi...
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“Our feeling is that of ultimate loneliness. . . . There is no way to know how many Jews will remain alive. . . . There is no guarantee that the Nazis will not exterminate the entire one hundred percent. . . . Bitter is the knowledge of our solitude and the knowledge that the world is our enemy.”
“Every Hebrew boy in the Land of Israel now weighs as ten, as we have lost Jewish communities ten times as large as the Jewish community of Palestine,” writes Gutman, inspired by Tabenkin. “In the black shadow of this fact, you, the young working generation of Israel, must carry on the founders’ endeavor and be a leading torch of light to the resurrection of the nation in its land.”
The mid-nineteenth-century French physiologist Claude Bernard was the first to overturn the conventional understanding that life is an adjustment to environment. Adjustment to the surrounding environment is death, argued Bernard; the phenomenon of life is that of preserving an internal environment contrary to an outside environment.
But the miracle is based on denial. The nation I am born into has erased Palestine from the face of the earth.
The two denials are actually four: the denial of the Palestinian past, the denial of the Palestinian disaster, the denial of the Jewish past, and the denial of the Jewish catastrophe.
So we rejected Moshe Dayan’s notorious statement, ‘The sword shall devour forever.’
Instead of sticking to the sound, rational position of ending occupation simply because it is immoral and destructive, the Left endorsed the unsound and irrational belief that ending occupation would bring peace.
At the age of one hundred, Zionism proved to be strong and potent. Once again it performed the miracle of something-from-nothing.
There are only four paths from this junction: Israel as a criminal state that carries out ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories; Israel as an apartheid state; Israel as a binational state; or Israel as a Jewish-democratic state retreating with much anguish to a border dividing the land.
Seven circles of threat: Islamic, Arabic, Palestinian, internal, mental, moral, and identity-based.
As I see it, Israelis are diamonds in the rough. And Israeliness is an iridescent kaleidoscope of broken identities that come together to form a unique human phenomenon.
