A Durable Peace by Benjamin Netanyahu Read Free Book Online Page A

public opinion unhesitatingly adjudicated in favor of the Jews.
    Why was this so? The Arabs now assert that at the time of Versailles, the Jews had no political rights over the land, that
these developed upon the Arabs then inhabiting it—and that therefore the original sin in favor of Zionism was committed by
the international community not in 1948 (the year of Israel’s founding) or in 1967 (the year Israel gained control over Judea,
Samaria, and Gaza) but in 1917, when the British government endorsed theBalfour Declaration promising the Jews a national home in Palestine.
    Yet clearly the leaders of the international community of the day viewed things differently. They believed the Jewish people
enjoyed a unique historical and political right to the land, one that took precedence over any potential claim by the local
residents in that small backwater of the recently defunct Ottoman Empire.
    What were the sources of the widespread recognition of the Jewish people’s historical rights to the Holy Land? To answer this
question, we must first examine the nature of such historical rights generally.
    There are those who believe that a theoretical discussion of the rights of nations is meaningless, and that in practice the
configuration of states is a product of many competing forces that ultimately settle themselves by means of a simple rule:
The more powerful prevails. This may be true if the question is raised in purely empirical and not in moral terms. If might
makes right, then the last conqueror is always right. Israel, by this definition, is therefore the rightful and undisputed
sovereign in the land. But this is clearly not the criterion with which to address the Jewish national restoration. If, as
Winston Churchill said in 1922, “The Jews are in Palestine by right, not sufferance,” 26 then it is crucial to understand the moral basis of the Jewish state.
    In the case of the Jewish national claim, the central issue is this: Does a people that has lost its land many centuries ago
retain the right to reclaim that land after many generations have passed? And can this right be retained if during the intervening
years a new people has come to occupy the land? Advocates of the Arab case commonly present these questions, and they answer
both of them in the negative. Further, they add, if the Jews have a historical “quarrel” with anyone, it is not with the Arabs
but with the Romans, who expelled them from their land in the first place. By the time the Arabs came, the Jews were gone.
    These arguments, forcefully and clearly presented by the Arabside, are seldom challenged by the Jews and their supporters, but they deserve to be addressed. Most people have some familiarity
with the first millennium of Jewish history, the period described in the Bible: how the Hebrew slaves of Egypt were transformed
into a nation by their flight to freedom and their adoption of the Law of Moses, and how they returned under Joshua to build
their national home in the land of their fathers. Fused into a unified state by David in 1000 B.C.E. , * they subsequently pursued their unique quest for political and religious independence against a succession of empires. The
biblical historical account ends shortly after the restoration of Jewish autonomy under the Persian king Cyrus (“the Persian
Balfour”) in 538 B.C.E. Alexander the Great, who took over the land from the Persians, did not grant the Jews sovereignty, but in 167 B.C.E., under the Hasmoneans, they successfully revolted against his successors, only to lose their independence once more to Rome
in 63 B.C.E. 27 Yet while the Jews were subjugated for considerable parts of this first millennium and a half of their history and even experienced
exile (the deportation of the northern ten tribes by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E. , and the Babylonian Exile in the sixth), they responded by driving their national roots deeper into the soil.
    How, then, were the