Why Israel Has the Right to Exist

The compassion of the world has been stirred into action by the terrible images coming out of Gaza over the past three years. The Green Party motion, passed on Sunday October 4th, confidently identified the one root cause of all this Palestinian suffering as “Zionism”. This is defined as a “racist” and expansionist “ethnonationalist Jewish” political ideology that created Israel from the beginning as a “settler-colonial” enterprise requiring “exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population”. Because the State of Israel was “designed” to be “an apartheid State committing genocide” through “ethnic cleansing” of the “Palestinian people”, its “illegal occupation of Palestine” must be brought to an end. It must be said, if any of these severe and emotive descriptions were accurate, how could any self-respecting political party not agree and devote itself to opposing the evil ideology that is to blame?

In practice, this motion calls for the creation of “a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital”, through the return of all “Palestinians and their descendants”. This would surpass the Jewish majority, creating a 23rd Arab-majority state out of what had been the world’s only Jewish state, and again removing Jewish authority over their holiest city. To accomplish this, the Palestinians are entitled to “struggle to achieve that liberation by all available means under international law”, while the UK is urged to support them through a campaign of “boycott … divestment … and sanctions” against Israel, and to de-proscribe Palestine Action from the list of terrorist organisations. In effect, this motion declares that Palestinian self-rule is the only solution to end their suffering, and a two-state solution of independent co-existence alongside the Jewish state is not enough. Any Jewish sovereignty is inseparable from “Zionism”, so self-determination for Palestinians must replace that of the Jewish people.

None of this is unfamiliar within the pro-Palestinian movement. In fact, it is entirely consistent with the 1968 Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, never revised despite repeated promises to do so by Yasser Arafat during the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. That charter denied that Jews are a nation, only a religion; it denied all “historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine”, contradicting the Bible and archaeology; and it insisted on “armed struggle” to “liberate” Palestine from all Jewish immigrants since the 1880s, not limited to the so-called 1967 borders. The Green Party motion therefore represents a return to the pre-Oslo Palestinian position, that the Jews have never had any right to a national home in that land. Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state, because it is irredeemably racist.

When faced with such a comprehensive litany of accusations, it is tempting for those who have dear Jewish friends or family to take the lifeline offered by the motion itself, and agree to detach “Zionism” from the Jewish people who are a protected “religious or ethnic” group. It is safest to join the voices condemning the actions of the Israeli Government, and insist that British Jews ought not to be blamed for those actions, as the IHRA definition of antisemitism explains. A second more risky approach would be to try to take issue with each of the numerous accusations made against the State of Israel, such as “settler-colonialism”, “ethnic cleansing”, “apartheid”, or “genocide”. Yet to do so allows those who hate Israel to define the conversation and reinforce extreme accusations that are each demonstrably false according to the strict definitions of these terms. In fact, Israel consistently shows more genuine compassion for Gazan civilians even in wartime than their own warmongering and deceitful Hamas tyrants, whose self-destructive brutality we recall on this anniversary.

The best approach, therefore, may be to address this whole question of the Jewish people and the land head-on, at the level of ideas. The Green Party motion goes deeper than actions to target the idea of Zionism itself as uniquely racist. The truth is in fact precisely the opposite. The uniquely Jewish idea of God’s love for every nation, tribe and language, forms the foundation of our international world order where every people group has its own inherent dignity and equal value regardless of size or strength. If so, then the ancient Jewish hope of eventual restoration as a nation in their ancestral land, a reality after 2,000 years, offers living historical proof that every other people group can also receive its own inheritance, including the Palestinians. Drawing on Jewish political theory, Yoram Hazony’s influential book The Virtue of Nationalism is valuable further reading. In what follows, after briefly summarising the ideological core of Zionism according to Jewish Scripture and tradition, we will then return to some of the contested historical facts since the 1890s.

The ancestors of the Jewish people, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob/Israel, each received the divine promise that through their descendants “all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Genesis 12; 26; 28). In each instance, this altruistic raison d’être of the nation was explicitly linked to living within the specific land given to them, the land of Canaan. Settling the land was to be the means of blessing all nations; the two are not opposed in Jewish theology. In fact, the Law of Moses taught that Israel’s God gives to every nation its territory, and warns Israel not to try to take the smallest portion allotted to its neighbours (Deuteronomy 32:8-9; 2:5,9,19). What he gives, however, he can also take away, from Israel as much as from other nations, and he gave centuries of advanced warning to each alike (Genesis 15:16; Leviticus 26:14-45). Yet for Israel at least, exile would never be the end. Moses and the prophets guaranteed that their God would regather them to their land and to himself (Deuteronomy 30:1-10; Jeremiah 31). That sequence of first physical and then spiritual restoration would prove their God’s unearned favour (Ezekiel 36:22-38), his faithfulness to his promises despite human frailty.

Israel’s scriptures envision the age-to-come perhaps surprisingly not up in heaven but rather on a renewed earth, when every nation will enjoy its own fruitful land in harmony with its neighbours. The famous words of the prophets Isaiah (2:4) and Micah (4:3) are inscribed outside the United Nations in New York: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” But the way to achieve this is spelled out in the preceding two verses: the nations will make pilgrimage to the temple of Israel’s God in Jerusalem and his “instruction will go forth from Zion” to render fair decisions for the nations. Zion will be the hub of international justice and harmony, and when the “dispersed of Israel” have first been gathered, then “my house will be a house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:6-8; quoted by Jesus in the New Testament). The common Jewish desire to return home and worship their God on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City is consciously inclusive of all nations. Their ancient capital city will be “the joy of the whole earth” (Psalm 48:2). Since biblical times, Zionism has represented a hope to bless all nations.

Throughout two millennia of wandering, therefore, every facet of Jewish tradition has been infused with the longing for Jerusalem, for Zion, many generations before it was given the name ‘Zionism’ in the 1890s. After every meal, and in every synagogue service facing Jerusalem, traditional blessings pray for restoration to the land and rebuilding of Jerusalem. Every annual Passover festival ends with the wish, “Next year in Jerusalem!” The glass smashed to conclude every wedding symbolises the loss of Jerusalem, remembered “above my highest joy” according to the popular psalm ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ (Psalm 137:6). And every time the Jewish people were expelled from nation after nation – always the easiest one to blame for the latest natural disaster or government failure – some would consider making the difficult trek back to the land. Only in the 1880s, after more than two centuries of British Christian political lobbying for Jewish restoration to the land, did a Jewish return movement of sufficient momentum begin to turn the utopian dream into a reality.

The Bible’s 1,500-year history of Israelite-cum-Jewish history in the land of Canaan before the common era, now amply augmented by archaeological investigations, proves beyond question that the Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel. Its southern region, also known as Judah or Judea, is where the name ‘Jew’ comes from. The Greek name Palaistinē was used for the land as early as Herodotus (fifth century BC), and David M. Jacobson argued that this word’s similarity with palaistēs, Greek for ‘wrestler’, suggests a deliberate translation of the name ‘Israel’ meaning ‘wrestles with God’. Even so, by the first century AD the name carried connotations of Israel’s ancient long-extinct enemies the Philistines. So when the Roman emperor Hadrian wished to punish the Jews for their costly revolt in AD 132–135, he dissolved ‘Judea’ into a new region ‘Syria Palestina’ as an insult, also renaming Jerusalem. Throughout Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman imperial eras, there was never a distinct political entity called ‘Palestine’, nor was Jerusalem the capital of any state except the short-lived Crusader kingdom. Even the Arabic language later shared by most of its inhabitants was itself an imperial language of colonisation introduced by seventh-century Muslim invaders, which disguised ongoing treasured ethnic distinctions.

From the first large waves of Jewish aliyah (immigration) into the land in the 1880s, through to the civil war launched by Arabs against the prospective Jewish state in November 1947, every single acre of Jewish land was not stolen but paid for. This was usually wasteland or swampland, bought at exorbitant prices from absentee Ottoman landlords, or under the table from the same local Arab rulers who publicly condemned any who would dare to sell to the Jews. The Jewish farmers reclaimed desert and malarial swamps with great effort and innovation, restoring agricultural capacity and improving life expectancy and living standards for Jews and Arabs alike. Arabs actually flooded into the land during the British Mandate period, and “vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period [since 1921]”, wrote Roosevelt in 1939.

By the time of the First World War, both Jewish insurgents in western Palestine and Arab insurgents in eastern Palestine assisted the British in expelling Turkish Ottoman imperial forces from the region. Turkey surrendered its colonies to the victorious allied powers as the cost of losing the war. Yet US President Woodrow Wilson insisted that Britain and France not add to their own empires but instead assist the indigenous peoples to achieve statehood through the ‘Mandate’ system of the new League of Nations. Britain was duly assigned ‘Palestine’, covering the whole of what became both Jordan and Israel, and the first ‘two-state solution’ for Palestine was therefore Churchill’s decision in 1921 to partition it down the Jordan River. This left an Arab Palestine (named ‘Transjordan’) to the east in 78% of the land, and a Jewish homeland to the west in the remaining 22%. For the latter, though, Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration also required that the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities be strictly protected, a clause agreed by the early Zionist leaders. Thus, both Arabs and Jews were recognised to be indigenous to that land, each deserving national homelands side-by-side, and the League of Nations formally required Britain to encourage Jewish immigration and close settlement to establish the Jewish national home.

Though some accuse the Jews of plotting to expel the Arabs, there is no evidence for any such policy. On the contrary, even the most Right-wing early leader, Jabotinsky, intellectual forebear of Netanyahu’s party today, repeatedly rejected Arab displacement. He himself criticised the British Peel Commission in 1937 for recommending a population exchange to reduce intercommunal tensions. Though its report called him an “extremist”, “at least I never dreamt of demanding the Arab inhabitants of the Jewish state to emigrate”, he said to British parliamentarians, calling this “a most dangerous precedent”. Up to his death in 1940, he insisted that Arabs would be full citizens in the prospective Jewish state, participating equally “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life”. If the most ‘militant’ Zionists took this view, how much more did mainstream Zionism promote Arab-Jewish coexistence, as witnessed in the writings of Ben Gurion and others (see Efraim Karsh’s Palestine Betrayed).

What then of al-Nakba, ‘the Catastrophe’, as Palestinian Arabs call Israel’s War of Independence? Was that not undeniable ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Arabs, two-thirds of the Arab population? First, it must be noted that this war was initiated not by Jews but by local Arab leaders in November 1947 to assert their rejection of the UN Partition Plan approving creation of both a Jewish and a (second, after Jordan) Arab state within western Palestine. Efraim Karsh has done meticulous archival research to show the true causes of Arab flight from each region of what became the Jewish state. Since Jewish municipal leaders repeatedly begged their Arab neighbours to stay (as also in Israel’s Declaration of Independence) to no avail, it is clear that significant blame must fall on the local and regional Arab leaders who not only abandoned their people but even insisted that they evacuate their homes and regions. Sadly the pattern has only repeated itself throughout the decades since. Incitement to violence against Israel by Islamist, Marxist or nationalist Palestinian Arab leaders has resulted time and again in more displacement of their people. Whereas Israel’s highest priority is security and peaceful coexistence, even in exchange for land, the Palestinian Arab leadership’s priority seems to be not self-rule, which it has repeatedly turned down, but resisting Jewish self-determination in any part of the land. Both the PLO and Hamas charters (1968, 1988) attest to this.

The international legal foundations of the Jewish state of Israel derive not so much from the 1947 United Nations vote, which was non-binding, but from a treaty of the victorious allied powers at San Remo in 1920 and a unanimous decision in 1922 by the League of Nations, predecessor of the UN, that Britain prepare western Palestine for a Jewish national home. On Britain’s departure in May 1948, the Jews were the only ones to declare a state, and according to the universal legal principle of uti possidetis juris, post-colonial states adopt the existing colonial territorial boundaries as state borders on independence, unless otherwise agreed by treaty. Since the Arabs had refused to sign any treaty with the Jews, and the immediate attacks by six Arab states were aggressive and thus illegal, Israel’s borders legitimately extend ‘from the River to the Sea’. After invading, Jordan’s occupation of its so-called ‘West Bank’ was rejected as illegal even by the Arab League. Jordan enforced total ethnic cleansing of Jews, even from Jerusalem’s Old City, until Israel’s defensive Six Day War in 1967 enabled the reunification of the holy city and restored freedoms for all religions.

The subsequent history of the former West Bank, or ‘Judea and Samaria’, earns it the accurate designation ‘disputed territory’, since Israel denies ‘occupation’ of land to which it has a rightful claim. This legally complex and ideologically fraught Gordion knot is the worst place to look for proof of Israel’s ‘Zionist’ intentions towards its neighbours. Far better evidence can be witnessed in the impressive diversity, freedoms and opportunities Israel affords to its many minorities within Israel-proper, surpassing all its neighbouring countries despite the inevitable room for improvement (as we also have in Britain). By contrast, territories under elected Palestinian governments consume vast quantities of international aid with nothing to show for it except huge inequalities between rich and poor and generations radicalised in their schools to hate the Jews and die as martyrs. Is that what the Green Party really wishes to extend across the whole land?

Three years ago today, the October 7th attack was named ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ by Hamas, explicitly signalling its fervent religious motivation. Perhaps the question we should really be asking is not whether Zionism is racism, but whether it is in fact the only antidote to a very different ideology. Rather than seeking to escape this world, let us partner with the Jewish people to restore its goodness, and as their Scripture says, “Choose life!”

Dr James E. Patrick studied theology at Cambridge and completed a DPhil at Oxford.  He has served as an officer of the Society for Old Testament Study and lectured in Old Testament for Spurgeon’s College, London.  He is currently Chairman of Love Never Fails, an alliance of 25 British Christian pro-Jewish organisations.  With Colin Chapman, he has co-authored Two Histories of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Grove Books, 2026).