Sunday, February 05, 2006

A couple of excerpts from the 1978 book written by Rabbi Meir Kahane Z"H , "They Must Go." Think and judge for yourselves, do some research. The spaces indicate where I skipped to another section of the chapter.


There is an ultimate insoluable contradiction between the State of Israel that is the fulfillment of the 2,000-year-old Jewish-Zionist dream and the modern nation-state that sees all its citizens as possessing equal rights and privileges. There is an ultimately immutable clash between that part of Israel’s Declaration that created the Jewish state and the part that promised “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens,” even though they be Arabs and not Jews. There is – let it be said once and for all – a potential confrontation between the Jewish-Zionist state that was the millennial dream of the Jewish people and modern concepts of democracy and citizenship.

We are pained, embarrassed, thrown into intellectual agony. We hasten to avoid such talk. It is unnecessary, dangerous, irresponsible, better left unspoken. Nonsense!
Far better to meet the issue, deal with it boldly and courageously, explain it to our children and ourselves, than to have it explode in our faces tomorrow.

There is nothing for which the Jew needs to apologize. A people that has suffered ecumenical agony and that has been deprived of the rights that other nations demand for themselves own no one an explanation. The Middle East sees Islamic republics in which the Arabic quality and the Muslim character of state are inscribed in the constitution; who shouts about Arabic “racism”? Africans insist upon the blackness of their state, and exclusiveness of culture and identity are the foundations of scores of nations. Who apologizes? The Zionist state is Judaism, the need for a land of the Jews where the people can escape Holocaust and build a distinctive Jewishness that will flourish.

The very kernel of longing for a homeland through nearly 2,000 years of exile was the belief that the Jews were a separate and distinct people. In a world in which we recognize the right of self-determination for Papua, who will challenge Jewish rights?

Moreover, the Jews constituted a unique people in that they were at one and the same time a religion and a nation, a religio-nation, which had lived as a unique society and culture in its own land – Eretz Israel. On the one hand they suffered unparalleled horrors and massacres in their wanderings in foreign lands. They knew no peace in any country in which their numbers grew large and their quality shone through. There was no society, religion, or economic or social system that gave them permanent haven and rest. Jews were burned to death, drowned, cut to pieces, converted to death, Inquisitioned to death, Crusaded to death, Islamized to death, pogromed to death, and Auschwitzed to death. The Jews learned a bitter lesson in their twenty centuries of being strangers, of existing as a minority. The lesson? It is not good to be a stranger. Never be a minority. Never again!




….The Jew has no moral right to an Israel that is a non-Jewish state. But in a Jewish state let no one insult the Arab by insisting that he is equal and that it is “his” state, too. It is this ultimate contradiction between the Jewish character of Israel and the democratic right of the Arab to aspire to all the rights t hat Jews have – including to have an Arab majority in the land – that will never give the Arab rest or allow him to accept the status quo.

From the very beginning non-Jews understood this far more easily. Most Jews instinctively sensed the contradiction but could not give up the idea of a Jewish state, and so they repressed the reality. But Gentiles conversant with the problem had no such difficulties. Alvin Johnson, president emeritus of the New School for Social Research, discussed the “Palestine” problem in January 1947, one and a half years before the establishment of Israel. Writing in Commentary magazine, he stated: “It would be no simple matter to establish and maintain a Jewish majority in Palestine…. It is entirely realistic to say that the Arabs of Palestine do not want to live as a minority under the Jews, no matter what formal guarantees are given of minority rights… A national minority must expect to be oppressed. Even if it is no more oppressed that the Sudeten Germans and Slovaks in Czechoslovakia, the minority will consider itself oppressed…. I submit, the Arab-Jewish problem in Palestine cannot be solved under the scheme of majority-minority nationalism.”

Thirty-two years after Johnson made his precise observations, the majority-minority situation he warned about was in existence – more than three decades of Jewish majority rule with formal guarantees to an Arab minority.



…. Araba, the Galilee Arab village. Na’ama Saud is a young Arab Sabra. He teaches school, teaches the young Arab generation of Israel. A reporter for Maariv, Yisrael Harel, asks him (May 28, 1976) whether he accepts the fact of Israel as a Jewish state with himself as a minority with equal rights but no national ones. Saud replies: “Today I am in the minority. The state is democratic. Who says that in the year 2000 we Arabs will still be the minority? We are today about half a million Arabs in Israel. Today, I accept the fact that this is a Jewish state with an Arab minority. But when we are the majority I will not accept the fact of a Jewish state with an Arab majority.”

No comments: