It should come as no surprise that some of the same angry leftists who stridently deny Israel’s “right to exist” similarly challenge the claims to nationhood of the United States of America.
After all, the two allied and embattled democracies achieved independence in the same way – the patient settlement of largely desolate and under-populated land, the building of a new civilization virtually from scratch, and a long, bloody fight against determined, sometimes implacable opposition.
In fact, Israel boasts a far stronger “right to exist” than does its American counterpart (or many other nations) because of its ancient claim to the disputed land, and long-standing endorsement by international organizations.
In order to place these realities in proper perspective, it’s first necessary to reject some thirty years of wildly irresponsible anti-Israel propaganda. First of all, it’s not true in any sense that the modern Jewish State ever supplanted or destroyed an existing nation of “Palestine.” From the time of definitive destruction of the ancient Jewish commonwealth in 70 A.D., the land that comprises the current State of Israel never enjoyed independent existence but, rather, passed back and forth among competing world empires—Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamaluke, Ottoman and British. Over the course of more than 1,800 years, no nation with the name “Palestine” appeared on any maps, anywhere. The distinguished Arab-American historian Philip Hitti, professor at Princeton University, testified to the Anglo American Committee in 1946: ‘There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.”
Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in 1867, shortly before the commencement of modern Jewish resettlement, and described it as “a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent, mournful expanse… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.” According to the careful population figures of the Ottoman Empire, in 1882 (at the very beginning of the modern, organized Jewish immigration back to the ancestral home), the total population of land between the Jordan and the Sea was less than 250,000 – in an area that today supports ten million people, Israelis and Palestinians.
The resettlement of the sparsely populated Holy Land by the descendants of its ancient inhabitants, however, did not take place solely in the modern era. Throughout Jewish history, waves of returnees came back to the sacred soil of their ancestors. In the 8th and 9th centuries, A.D., Jewish immigrants re-established major communities in Jerusalem and Tiberias; by the 11th Century, they had built new communities in Jaffa, Ashkelon, Caesarea and Rafah. In the 16th Century, more Jewish immigrants developed the famous center of mysticism in Safed and beginning in the 1700’s religious scholars and pilgrims intensely repopulated Jerusalem.
The Jewish connection to Israel, in other words, remained impassioned and unbroken for some three thousand years, while the British connection with North American began only in 1607 (with Jamestown) and 1620 (with the Pilgrims at Plymouth). No European settlers to the New World claimed an ancient connection to the land they discovered, developed, and gradually populated. Moreover, the Native Americans who preceded them came to the Western Hemisphere across the land bridge from Asia at the very latest some 13,000 years before the White Men arrived, while the Arabs appeared in Israel for the first time in the 7th Century.
If opponents of the modern Jewish State argue that Israelis have no meaningful claim on the land they occupy then on what basis do today’s Americans have a stake in the vast continent once inhabited by millions of members of hundreds of Indian tribes?
Moreover, the Jewish title to the land of Israel received long-standing recognition from international organizations that didn’t even exist at the time of American independence. On July 24, 1922, the 52 governments of the League of Nations formally recognized and endorsed the British Balfour Declaration calling for “reconstituting….a national home for the Jewish people” in the land with which that people enjoyed “historical connections.” Twenty-five years later, the United Nations (successor body to the League of Nations) validated this title with the partition plan, dividing the British Mandate in the area into two states—one Jewish, one Arab. The Arab leadership violently rejected that solution, but after Israel’s bloody war for Independence the UN recognized Israel as a full member state in 1949.
Unlike Israel, the United States won no international recognition prior to the commencement of our own war for Independence; we only won that acknowledgment after the courage and sacrifice of the patriots who waged our Revolutionary struggle. In the end, an estimated 25,000 Americans died in the war—nearly 1% of the Colonial population at the time. In a haunting similarity, Israel lost 6,373 fighters in its War of Independence—nearly 1% of the Jewish population of nation at the time. In the case of the American struggle, final victory only became possible through the direct intervention of France, and the participation (at the climactic battle of Yorktown) of a French fleet and army of some 20,000. In the case of Israel, foreign assistance remained strictly limited (the US imposed an arms embargo on Israel and the rest of the Middle East in 1947) and no foreign armies of any kind ever fought alongside the beleaguered Israelis.
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