Political Realism or Messianic Delusions? Israel's Dilemma on Anniversary of UN Partition Plan
It's the 77th anniversary of the UN partition plan, Resolution 181, which was passed on November 29, 1947, at a place called Lake Success, an early home of the United Nations near New York. This anniversary deserves more attention than it's getting, and not only because the resolution is a landmark in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It's also a reason to revisit a recurring and destructive feature in Jewish history: the conflict between political realism based on the practicalities of the modern international system and messianic delusions rooted in biblical promises masquerading as policy.
The choice political Zionism had to make in 1947 isn't very different from the choice Israel needs to make now. Anyone who thinks the Bible is an applicable political guide like Machiavelli's "The Prince," and anyone who thinks positively about the demographic reality of 7 million Jews controlling 7 million Palestinians in a sliver stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea – not incorporating them but not allowing them sovereignty – should seriously revisit the partition decision.
A ceremony on Moscow's Red Square in 2022. The Russian and Soviet empires were among those that dissolved due to internal corruption, rebellions or expensive and unsustainable external overreach.Credit: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP
In the last 2,500 years of Jewish history, the fault line between religious extremism and messianic nationalism on one side and the aspiration for normalcy, statehood and a place among the nations on the other has been manifested in many ways, but one characteristic emerges. Never in history has a people twice been expelled from its homeland as a result of indigenous political extremism, geopolitical myopia and arrogant self-righteousness.
And now, 76 years after the establishment of the modern State of Israel, this people finds itself once again stewing in a toxic mixture of God, Bible, nationalism and democracy.
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How many times in the last few years have you heard Israelis talk despairingly or hopefully about the inevitable division into "Israel" and "Judea," about the unbridgeable chasm between "Tel Aviv" and "Jerusalem," about the evolution of two starkly different Israels: a liberal democracy based on the 1948 Declaration of Independence and a theocratic, messianic, nationalist entity based on Masada?
How many times have you heard that Israel is made up of around six different tribes firmly adhering to rigid identity politics, sharing a dwindling narrative and having almost nothing in common but a constant external threat?
Those tribes are the secular-liberal democrats, the Sephardi religious Jews, the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox, the nationalist settlers, the immigrants from the former Soviet Union and the 20 percent of Israel's population who are Palestinians, for decades known to the majority as "Israeli Arabs."
How many times have you heard the deterministic statement that sovereignty plus a modern state structure is an alien concept to the political DNA of a people that for 2,000 years was stateless? The members of this nation lived in their own communities, were constantly persecuted and discriminated against, or they assimilated into their host countries, whether in Europe or the Arab world.
People gathering in Tel Aviv after radio broadcasts announced the UN partition plan, November 30, 1947.Credit: Jim Pringle/AP
And how many times have you heard that twice the Jewish people experienced sovereignty? First came the First Temple era (roughly 833 B.C.E. to 586 B.C.E.) and then the Second Temple era (536 B.C.E to 135 C.E.). But in both periods, real sovereignty and independence (in the sense that those existed at the time) lasted no more than 75 years and ended as a direct result of defiance against the dominant empires of the period.
Today Israel faces a dilemma not unlike those two episodes in Jewish history. Obviously the fantasies about a division into two countries or a canton arrangement are patently unrealistic, but that doesn't ameliorate the dilemma. Yes, the neighborhood is bad. Yes, a permanent state of war takes a toll. Yes, the geopolitical landscape has been eminently inhospitable. But has all that led to more realism or more messianism?
Israel has a historic choice to make. It's a binary choice between the approach of legendary Zionists Theodor Herzl, Yehuda Leib Pinsker, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion on one side and Elazar Ben Yair (of Masada fame), Shimon Bar Kochba (of the failed rebellion fame), Itamar Ben-Gvir (of no fame whatsoever) and Benjamin Netanyahu (of self-ordained historian fame) on the other.
Throughout history, hundreds of kingdoms have disappeared, empires have collapsed, states have emerged, states have vanished, states have disintegrated, states have imploded, nations have unified, states have been occupied for centuries, states have experienced formative or destructive civil wars.
An entire taxonomy categorizes those developments, but one category is unique: political frameworks – and later the modern "nation-state" – that lost sovereignty as a result of internal extremism and zealotry. That unfortunately is our category.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking on the war in September.Credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90
The ancient world and the modern world are both replete with examples of empires that dissolved due to internal corruption, rebellions or expensive and unsustainable external overreach: the Babylonian Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Hellenistic kingdom, the Roman Empire, the Spanish and Portuguese empires, the Dutch Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire in 1917 and the Soviet empire in 1991.
In the Far East, the Ming dynasty in China, the Mongol Empire, the Korean kingdom, the Chinese Republic (1912-1949) and the Japanese Showa-period empire (1912-1945) either collapsed, disintegrated or underwent changes on a magnitude that affected sovereignty.
Then we have the "vanished states" category. Piedmont-Sardinia and Sicily were merged into an Italian state by Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1861. Prussia was merged into a German state by Otto von Bismarck in 1871. The following century, the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria), Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union all dissolved mostly on their own volition for internal reasons. Texas, Bengal and East Pakistan were all ceded and then were incorporated into larger political entities.
As for civil wars, there are two categories: countries that were united as a result of a civil war, like the United States in 1865, Russia in the early 1920s and Vietnam in 1975, and countries divided by civil wars: China between 1927 and 1949 and Korea in 1953, as well as Congo and Sudan in the last few decades.
In "our" category, sovereignty and independence were lost as a result of internal extremism manifested both inwardly and outwardly. There are four unique examples in history: Sparta in 371 B.C.E., Nazi Germany in 1945, Imperial Japan in 1945 and the two Jewish kingdoms: Israel in 586 B.C.E. and Judea after the great rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E. that ended in the destruction of Jerusalem four years later, with a later spasm in the Bar Kochba Rebellion between 132 and 135.
Political Zionism succeeded not only because it was a just cause, but because from its outset it was practical, realistic and prudent.
The British took Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in 1917 and a British Mandate was officially established in 1923 by the League of Nations. This was based on the post-World War I peace agreements and the Anglo-French 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement that crudely carved the Middle East between the two colonial powers.
The Mandate reaffirmed the 1917 Balfour Declaration regarding a "Jewish homeland," and after an Arab rebellion in 1936-1939, World War II, the Holocaust and accelerated efforts by the Zionist leadership, the UN set up UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, which submitted its final report on September, 3, 1947.
The political leaders of the Yishuv, the pre-independence quasi-State of Israel, accepted the plan even though it was certainly less than what they had hoped for.
An ad by the United Zionists-Revisionists of America as seen in The New York Times in September 1947.
Not everyone accepted it. Right-wing Revisionist Zionists claimed that the plan "will not solve the Palestine problem!" – the headline of a New York Times ad on September 12, 1947.
They were right. It didn't solve "the Palestine problem," but if their approach had won, there would not have been a State of Israel. One signatory to the ad was the executive director of the United Zionists-Revisionists of America, a gentleman named Benzion Netanyahu.
Luckily, the all-or-nothing approach failed. The question is whether his son is trying to reverse the partition plan and is endangering Jewish sovereignty for the third time.