Is There a Historical Right to the Land of Israel?

By Chaim Gans

A philosophical approach to a century-old question.

Clearly, this position was not held by all of Zionism’s early leaders. Three main approaches seem to have been endorsed by various Zionist leaders. According to one approach, the historical right of the Jews to the land of Israel justified political sovereignty over Greater Israel, namely, all of the land of Israel. Adherents of a second approach, who were aware of the limitations of the historical rights argument, sought to downplay Jewish nationalist aspirations by not demanding control of the entire territory. A third group of Zionist leaders aspired to establish a sovereign Jewish state within as much of the land of Israel as possible, but nonetheless seemed to suspect that the historical-rights claim would not be sufficient grounds on which to justify this course of action.

The first approach, according to which the Greater Israel ideology could be justified by means of the historical rights argument, was held by the radical factions within religious Zionism and Revisionism. Religious Zionists, who regarded the modern return of the Jews to Zion as a sign of the messiah’s impending arrival, viewed the historical right as deriving from the divine promise to Abraham in “the covenant between the pieces.” According to this position, the Bible confers a stamp of approval on Jewish sovereignty over all of Canaan, “from the Egyptian river until the great river… Euphrates.”¹⁹ Thus not only did the divine promise justify the Jewish return to the land of Israel, but it also determined the territorial scope to which the exiled nation should now return. The same applies to the radical Revisionists’ interpretation of the historical-rights argument. This faction’s ideologues, Joshua Heschel Yeivin and Uri Tzvi Greenberg, and the members of the Lehi group (an underground militia in pre-state Israel) were of the opinion that the Jewish right to sovereignty in the land of Israel required no moral justification—or, at least, no justification of a universal nature. The “Eighteen Principles of National Renewal” drafted for the Lehi by its founder, Abraham Stern, best expresses this ideology: “The Jewish people conquered the land of Israel by the sword. There it became a nation, and there alone it shall restore itself. For this reason the people of Israel are the sole rightful owners of the land of Israel. This right is absolute: It has not yet lapsed and cannot ever lapse.”²⁰ In other words, if having conquered a territory “by the sword” justifies sovereignty, and if, during various periods in history, the land of Israel was conquered in its entirety by the Jews, then the Jews are indeed the rightful owners of the entire land of Israel.

The only problem with the arguments of both the messianic faction within religious Zionism and that of the radical Revisionists is that they do not make the slightest attempt to provide moral or universally valid arguments.²¹The movement seems content with persuading those who already subscribe to its own tenets.²² Rabbi Meir Berlin, who was the honorary president of the World Mizrahi Movement, admitted as much in his speech to the Twentieth Zionist Congress in 1937, at which agreement was reached on the general outline of partition. “Nor are we claiming our right for reasons of moral rectitude,” he pronounced. “The basis of Zionism is that the land is ours, and does not belong to the Arabs.”²³

At the other end of the spectrum were those who did not demand Jewish sovereignty over Greater Israel. Among this group were Ahad Ha’am, Chaim Weizmann, the socialist Zionist movement of Hashomer Hatza’ir, the members of Brit Shalom, and also the Jewish Agency. The argument in the quotation below appears in a memo presented by the Jewish Agency to the Palestine Royal Commission in 1936 (and later submitted to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946):

It is asserted that it might similarly be pleaded that the Italians had a claim to a national home in Great Britain because that country had once formed part of the Roman Empire. The conclusive reply to that sophistic argument is that the Italians were never settled in England and that they have, and always have had, a home of their own in Italy, whilst the Jews are not merely the ancient rulers but also the former settlers of Palestine and never had and to this day do not possess any other national home. It is because of that homelessness and because “they have never forgotten” that the Jews have a claim to the restoration of their national life in Palestine.²⁴

The report’s admission that the Italians cannot claim sovereignty over Britain necessarily implies recognition that the historical right cannot be the basis for the right to sovereignty in and of itself. However, the quoted passage seems to imply that in cases of nations lacking a national home, the historical right can be a consideration in determining the geographical site for the realization of their self-determination. According to the passage, by virtue of the fact that they are a homeless nation, the Jews are entitled to renew their home in Palestine. It does not say that their state of homelessness entitles them to renew their sovereignty over all of Palestine. Similar wording, from which it may be understood that historical rights can serve as a basis for the establishment of a homeland in the land of Israel but not sovereignty over all of it, can be, as expected, found in the writings of Ahad Ha’am,²⁵ and appears repeatedly in other important Zionist documents. For instance, in the Basel Program at the First Zionist Congress, Zionism was defined as “striv[ing] to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine.”²⁶ The Balfour Declaration which Weizmann managed to obtain from the British government²⁷ speaks of the constitution of a national home in the land of Israel.²⁸ It is worth noting that these statements not only seem to recognize the fact that historical rights do not provide a basis for sovereignty over all of the land of Israel, but also imply that, quite possibly, these rights do not constitute a basis for sovereignty at all. Rather, they only establish the geographical site for self-determination, which may take several institutional forms.²⁹

Chaim Weizmann, for example, was well aware of the moral limitations of the historical-rights argument. For a long time, he supported the establishment of a binational state in the land of Israel, and in his testimony to the Peel Commission, he maintained that even if the Jews were to become the majority in Palestine, there would be no need to turn it into a Jewish national state.³⁰ This was also the position of the members of Brit Shalom and Hashomer Hatza’ir. The latter, for instance, were of the opinion that the Jews ought to return to all parts of the land of Israel, but believed that their national self-determination need not be realized by means of Jewish sovereignty over all of the land of Israel; binational cooperation with the Arabs would suffice.³¹ Yet the positions of such groups as Brit Shalom and Hashomer Hatzair with regard to the question of historical rights will hardly come as a surprise to those familiar with their ideologies. Really surprising are the positions and arguments expressed by David Ben-Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the leaders of the two main Zionist parties.

It is well known that Ben-Gurion was prepared to accept a territorial compromise for pragmatic reasons. Nonetheless, on many occasions he expressed the opinion that, in principle, the Jews had the historical right to sovereignty over all parts of the land of Israel.³² Even so, certain turns of phrase employed by the Zionist leader reveal that he was indeed aware of the fact that the historical rights argument alone was not an adequate basis on which to rest claims for the right to Jewish sovereignty over Greater Israel. According to Ben-Gurion:

[This right] stems from the unbreakable bond between the Hebrew people and its historic homeland; from the right of the Jewish nation to independence and national renewal in equal measure to that of the world’s other nations; from the status of the Jews in the diaspora as a wandering minority at the mercy of strangers; from the need to find a home for millions of Jewish immigrants; from the under-populated condition of the land of Israel; from the possibilities for settlement and the opportunity to make bountiful the earth of the land of Israel and its endless natural treasures, now lying fallow; from the Jewish settlement enterprise in the land over the last several generations….³³

Among other things, these words contain all the components of the argument I presented earlier for the Jewish return to the land of Israel, namely, the universal ahistorical right of all nations to self-determination, the particular historical right of the Jews in the land of Israel predicated upon the centrality of this land in Jewish identity and history; the fact that, at the time, the land of Israel was not densely populated to a degree that would have prevented Jewish immigration and settlement; and the Jews’ special need for self-rule since they had been at the mercy of other peoples in the diaspora. Ben-Gurion does not say that any one reason of the several he cited would suffice, in and of itself, to secure Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, or if some or all of them would be necessary toward this end. It is therefore impossible to conclude from his statement whether or not he was of the opinion that historical rights alone were enough to justify Jewish sovereignty over the entire land of Israel. However, the fact that Ben-Gurion raised all of the above points, and did not find it satisfactory simply to mention the historical rights argument, seems to indicate that he was sensitive to this argument’s limitations, even if he was not explicit on this matter.

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