The Myth of Return

In politics, as in the other areas of human activity, myths can frequently be more potent than historical truth. One need only compare the general hagiography of the Founders of the United States with their own writings to see that these men have far more commonality with the members of the 107th Congress than they do with the personages on Mt. Olympus.

The establishment of the State of Israel a mere 51 years after the first World Zionist Congress in Basel is one of the more extraordinary events in human history. It was as if the Caesars had returned to the Mons Capitolinus, speaking classical Latin in the Forum. (The resurrection of the Hebrew language may be even more “miraculous.”)

The Seed of Abraham has spent far more time over the millennia longing for their lost homeland than they have spent living in it. From the psalmists’ “By the waters of Babylon/There we sat down and wept/When we remembered Zion” to the Orthodox Jews of today who pray three times each day for the restoration of the Temple (“May it be they will, 0 L-rd our G-d and G-d of our Fathers, that the Temple be speedily rebuilt and in our days”), this Hebrew plaint has echoed through history like no other.

This myth of return has been an intricate part of Jewish heritage from Biblical times to the present day. However, it took two world wars and a propitious configuration of political figures to make it a reality. Until 1948, one would have had to be psychotic to have seen this yearning as any more than a dream, a hope-against-hope, not unlike the cognate longing for the Messiah. (Justice Brandeis, a secular Jew, believed that a Jewish state would be the Messiah.)

Within the past quarter century, we have seen the creation of another irredentist myth in the Levant, which at this juncture has largely been accepted by most of the world as a fact. I refer, of course, to the Palestinian Arabs’ claim of expulsion from their homeland.

Just as the Prophet claimed a revelation that superseded that of Moses, so present day Israelis have found one of their oldest religious myths — exile and the hope of return — co-opted and turned against them. It is this belief of usurpation that fuels the Islamist shaheed (martyrs). Just as the Canaanites sacrificed their own children to Moloch (the primary reason that they were to be driven out of the land, so the leaders of the Palestinian Arabs send their children on murderous forays into the State of Israel.

To put it succinctly, Palestine has never been a nation or a people. The word “Palestine” derives from “Philistine,” one of the sea peoples who settled on the southwestern coastal strip of Biblical Canaan around 1190 BCE. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia says of Palestine:

The political status and geographical area designated by the term have changed considerably over the course of some three millennia. The E[astern] boundary has been particularly fluid, often understood as lying east of the Jordan and extending at times to the edge of the Arabian desert. (Emphasis supplied.)

In sum, over the millennia there may have been Palestinian Arabs, Palestinian Christians, and Palestinian Jews, but until the last quarter of the 20th century there has been no such person as a Palestinian. Until two decades ago, the conflict had been between Jews and Arabs, not Jews and Palestinians. This has changed in the eyes of most of the world.

Historically, the word “Palestinian” always carried geographical rather than ethnic connotations. For example, the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary contains an illustration of a 1905 note referring to “200 Russian Palestinians.” (It is interesting to note that the word “Palestine” was not even included in the original

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volumes of the OED, the last of which was published in 1928.) Thus, the term has had the same denotative meaning as, say, “Midwesterner” in the U.S. Until recent years, it never connoted statehood.

The above etymological sketch, gleaned from mainstream publications, is generally reflective of the historical record and few academicians would seriously disagree with it. However, no Islamist would accept this reading, nor, I suspect, would very many Moslems in the 22 Arab states publicly agree with any part of it. In point of fact, very few of the 1.2 billion Moslems worldwide even accept Israel’s “right to exist.” A liberal Moslem, after all, is one who says that Israel has a right to exist. The recent Saudi proposal recognizing Israel’s right to exist in exchange for unspecified territorial concessions was a tactical maneuver that quickly disappeared without a trace. The Arab consensus is still to the effect that “Israel should be pushed into the sea.”

What the destruction of the Second Temple is to the Jewish myth, the 1948 nakba (disaster) has become to the mythology of the Palestinian Arabs. No Islamist pays much attention to the fact that the Palestinian Arabs who left the land voluntarily did so at the behest of the six invading armies. The notion of some halcyon time, if properly manipulated, can serve as a powerful impetus for current action against a concrete enemy. Thus, Palestinian Arabs see the Jews, all Jews, as the sole reason why they are trapped in a refugee camp at Ramallah or Nablus, exiled from the idealized homeland that they only know from their grandparents’ stories and anti-Israel propagandists.

This longing of the Palestinian Arabs can only go back to 1948. The land of Canaan was ruled by, amongst others, the Assyrians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Christian Crusaders, Ottoman Turks, and the British (under League of Nations and later UN mandates). The Arabs were generally docile subjects compared to the Jews, who fought the Romans and later the British with the same fierceness that Palestinian Arabs have battled present day Israelis and for much the same reason: they were both contending against what they saw as an occupying force. If one accepts the premise that an exile can be ended, then it is but a small step to the shaheed, the suicide-bombers who have tipped the scales during Intifada II.

Within the context of Holy Islam, it is clearly permissible — and indeed lauded — to actively die for one’s faith, for example, by fighting someone who has or would dispossess the Islamic faithful from their homes. Since all Israelis allegedly participate in this process, all Israelis are legitimate targets for shaheed. (This is also why leading Islamic scholars do not pronounce the September 11 cadres “martyrs.” Islam is not at war with the U.S.)

Shortly after World War II, Gandhi was asked how his satyagraha philosophy would work against someone like Hitler who, unlike the British, had no compunction about slaughtering non-resisters. “The Jews should have committed suicide to present a witness to the world,” Gandhi said. Most commentators considered Gandhi’s comments rather fanciful at the time, but as a psychological matter this tact appears to be working for the Palestinian Arabs. The rest of the world seems to have been far more moved by the specter of these Arab youths self-destructing than by the Israelis they have killed. Israel, by its own admission, is losing the public relations war. The sacrifices to Moloch are proving fruitful.

The Arab states, by refusing to deal with the refugee situation, have made the Palestinian irredentist myth viable, just as the many secondary expulsions that the Jewish people endured over the centuries helped to make Theodore Herzl’s bold proposal a reality. Life in a refugee camp in Samaria, like life in a Polish shtetl, causes one to dream as an antidote to despair.

The fact that one of the above myths comports with the historical record and the other is (in this writer’s opinion) totally ersatz, means nothing in the geopolitics of 2002. It would be an irony worthy of Dr. Chekhov if a variant of the myth that lead to Israel’s creation ultimately was responsible for Israel’s Jews being “pushed into the sea.”

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