Repository | Book | Chapter

… It is necessary to consider first of all what Judaism has to do with Palestine. First, the problem of the relations between the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine can be understood only if it is considered against the background of the close connection between the Jewish nation and Palestine. We, who have been considered by others to have betrayed the national ideal, feel more than other sections of the Zionist movement, that this connection between the Land of Israel and the people of Israel is a historical fact and even more, and that the connection is of supreme importance. And we maintain that this cannot be expressed by a national economic formula. It is unjust to speak in the same terms about this nation and this land and the interrelations between them that are used for ordinary nationalism, for this is an exceptional case, in which the accepted ideas are irrelevant. Our position rests on this uniqueness. The Jewish nation remained in existence in opposition to the laws of history because it was the organic bearer of a mission, which it bore not consciously or willingly, but by its very existence; it is the mission for which it was created and by which it lives. The view that a belief in a mission is not the empty consolation of the masses, comforting them for the fact of our dispersion, but something on which our very existence depends, is the underlying motif of what we call Zionism.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-07671-7_32

Full citation: