Is There a Historical Right to the Land of Israel?

By Chaim Gans

A philosophical approach to a century-old question.

Surprisingly, it was Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism, who was explicit on this point. He openly argued that the demand for territorial sovereignty cannot be justified merely by resorting to historical rights. According to him, “The first question is, ‘Do you need land?’ If you don’t need it, if you are sufficiently provided for, it is then impossible to be backed by historical rights.”³⁴ In order to justify the Jews’ return to the land of Israel and their aspiration to establish a sovereign homeland there, Jabotinsky linked the historical right, predicated on the particularistic ties of a given nation to a given territory, with the ahistorical and universal right of every nation to national self-determination. The fact that he interpreted self-determination as a right founded on universal distributive justice, and one that ought to be enjoyed by all nations, is clearly expressed by his assertion that, “Self-determination means revision—revision such as the division of the Earth between the nations, so that those nations with too much land would give over parts of them to those nations which do not have enough, or are completely landless in order for every nation to be given the opportunity for self-determination.”³⁵

Moreover, Jabotinsky added the urgent need to save the Jews from persecution. As he testified before the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission, “it is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine would also prefer to be the Arab State No. 4, No. 5, or No. 6… but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation.”³⁶

In this context, it is worth highlighting that in explaining his demand to establish a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River to the Peel Commission, Jabotinsky did not invoke the historical rights argument, but instead resorted to pragmatic calculations, such as how much territory would be required for the millions of Jews in need of rescue to settle in the land of Israel. This number was based on some ideal of the desirable population density per kilometer given the prevailing circumstances in the land of Israel at the time.³⁷

In contrast to the position normally attributed to him, these and other statements by Jabotinsky indicate that his Greater Israel vision did not derive solely from the historical-rights argument. Rather, it was grounded in a more complex argument presupposing the distinctions which I made in the first parts of this essay, namely, the distinction between justifying the Jewish right to sovereignty (by resorting to the right to national self-determination), justifying the site where this self-determination ought to be realized (by resorting to the historical rights argument), justifying the territorial scope of this self-determination (by taking into account the number of Jews it must contain combined with some ideal of the desirable population density), and justifying the Jewish return to the land of Israel despite the fact that the territory in question was already inhabited by another national group (by resorting to the remedial justification of necessity in rescuing the persecuted Jews). Thus, while there is no doubt that Jabotinsky believed that the Jews’ right to self-determination applied to both banks of the Jordan, he also undoubtedly understood that it was out of the question to base this type of demand on historical-rights alone. However, this does not apply to many of his followers and political heirs who were entranced by the allure of blatantly amoral or religious readings of the historical-rights argument.³⁸

The statements made by Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion are instructive: They demonstrate that recognizing the limits of the historical-rights argument does not necessarily contradict the desire to establish a Jewish homeland in Greater Israel. Nonetheless, on its own, the historical-rights argument is not enough to provide a moral basis for this aspiration. Justifying sovereignty and territorial expansion requires additional arguments, some of which depart from the conceptual framework of national self-determination and the historical-rights argument.

Unfortunately, since the Six Day War, the concept of historical rights has become a tool of certain political factions that seek to rationalize the expansion of Jewish sovereignty to Judea and Samaria and, until recently, to Gaza as well. This use of historical rights assumes that these rights can justify territorial sovereignty. Fortunately, however, fifty-eight years after the founding of the State of Israel, the predicament of the Jews is very different from what it was like in 1948. As citizens of a Jewish state, the Jews have realized their right to self-determination and can now provide refuge to other Jews in other parts of the world, should they be in need of it.

Consequently, it must be recognized that employing the historical rights argument as a main defense for the continued occupation of Judea and Samaria and the Jewish settlement movement therein is not essentially different from Bismarck’s employment of this argument when he annexed Alsace-Lorraine, or from the propaganda campaign pursued by Milosevic when he refused to grant autonomy to the Albanians in Kosovo and attempted to expel them. In each of these cases, historical rights are presented as a sufficient basis for territorial claims. However, if the arguments presented in the three first parts of this essay are sound, historical rights do not constitute sufficient grounds for territorial claims.

Historical rights are not sufficient grounds for sovereignty, at least from the viewpoint of those who attempt to view it as a kind of universalistic moral argument. In this respect, there is a clear difference between the members of Gush Emunim, the extra-parliamentary movement of the Greater Israel ideology, and successive Israeli governments that backed this movement politically. Followers of Gush Emunim, affiliated with the messianic faction of religious Zionism, have never attempted to provide moral justification for the historical-rights claim. However, the governments headed by both the Labor party and (primarily) the Likud party, both of which are secular Zionist parties, are ideologically affiliated with Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, respectively. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that they have tried time and again to portray their reliance on historical right as a claim firmly grounded in morality and universal justice.

One might have expected those who profess to speak in the name of Ben-Gurion’s and Jabotinsky’s legacy to adhere to standards similar to those of their predecessors, namely, to understand the limits and limitations of the rights which they refer to constantly, and to act accordingly.38 It goes without saying that this is not the case, and the result is no less than tragic, both morally and politically.

Chaim Gans is a professor of law at Tel Aviv University. His two most recent books are The Limits of Nationalism (Cambridge, 2003) and From Richard Wagner to the Palestinian Right of Return: A Philosophical Analysis of Israeli Public Affairs (Am Oved, 2006) [Hebrew].

Notes

This article is based on sections of a book analyzing the justice of Zionism from a philosophical perspective, which the author is currently in the process of completing. He wishes to thank his colleagues at Tel Aviv University’s Law Faculty for their constructive analytic comments, as well as the historians Yosef Gorny, Yaakov Shavit, and Gideon Shimoni for their historiographic and bibliographic comments.

1. For a defense of this normative interpretation of ethno-cultural nationalism, as well as for a discussion of the appropriate normative interpretation of nationalist ideologies belonging to the civic type, see Chaim Gans, The Limits of Nationalism (New York: Cambridge, 2003), ch. 1.

2. Besides the Bund movement, the Volkspartei, influenced by the ideas of Shimon Dubnow should also be mentioned in this context. Whereas Zionism attracted Jews from both Eastern and Western Europe, the Bund and the Volkspartei existed exclusively in Eastern Europe.

3. Compare to the analogous distinction between special and general rights. See H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” in Jeremy Waldron, ed., Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford, 1984), p. 84.

4. For more on this, see Gans, Limits of Nationalism, ch. 5.

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: Prometheus, 1988), book 1, ch. 9, p. 28.

6. In support of this view, one could perhaps mention the fact it is subscribed to by authors as remote from one another as Ross Poole, an Australian philosopher who recently wrote about the Aborigines’ rights, and Yehezkel Kaufmann, a Jewish historian who wrote during the 1940s about the predicament of the Jewish people. Ross Poole, Nation and Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 127; Yechezkel Kaufmann, Exile and Foreign Land, vol. 2(Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1954), pp. 211-212 [Hebrew].

7. The Zionist movement was profoundly aware of this consideration. This is expressed in Israel Zangwill’s notorious description of Palestine as a land without a nation which should therefore be given to a nation without a land. Israel Zangvill, “The Return to Palestine,” New Liberal Review 2 (December 1901), p. 627. However, those who did not invoke this misleading description stressed the fact that the land of Israel was not densely populated as one argument in favor of a Jewish return. When justifying the Jewish right to the land of Israel, Ben-Gurion stated that it arose from “the depopulated state of the land of Israel.” Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University, 1995), p. 385.

8. Mabo v. Queensland (no. 2) (1992) 175 CLR1; Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997) 153 DLR (4th) 193 (SCC). On the claim that the return in these cases was based not only on the primacy of the groups in the territories but also on their formative connection with these territories, see John Borrows, “‘Landed’ Citizenship: Narratives of Aboriginal Political Participation,” in Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, eds., Citizenship in Diverse Societies (Oxford: Oxford, 2000), pp. 326-342; James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1993), pp. 153-154; Poole, Nation and Identity, p. 131; Richard H. Bartlett, “Native Title in Australia: Denial, Recognition, and Dispossession,” in Paul Haveman, ed., Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Auckland: Oxford, 1999), pp. 417-418.

9. There are obviously numerous additional differences between the return of native groups to their native lands and the return of the Jews to the land of Israel. The most conspicuous of these is that the majority groups ruling the New World uprooted the people returning to their lands hundreds of years ago, so that the ruling majority could be said to be liable for wrongs inflicted on indigenous groups. Many people would argue that if this kind of liability obtains between the Jews and the Arabs, then the onus of rectification is on the Jews due to the expulsion of the Palestinians and the refugee problem. There are those who would also make the opposite claim-that the Arabs are the last of a chain of conquerors of the land of Israel-and as such their obligation toward the Jewish people is identical to that of the ruling nations in Australia and North America toward the native nations. I will refrain from addressing this theoretical conundrum here. One additional important difference between the Jewish return to the land of Israel and the return of the native Americans and Australians in the wake of the judgments in the Delgamuukw and Mabo cases, is that the concessions made by the majority groups in order to repatriate the native groups did not involve massive violations of property rights and the destruction of the majority native group. However, these differences between the cases, and perhaps other differences, too, do not affect the present argument.

10. This distinction resembles the distinction made by John Rawls between ideal and non-ideal theories of justice. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard, 1971). An ideal theory establishes the principles that society should aspire to (locally or internationally) and endorse, under the assumption of full compliance with these principles. On the use of this distinction in the context of international law and justice, see Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination (New York: Oxford, 2004). As mentioned above, the view that high population density in a given territory precludes invoking formative ties as a consideration for determining the site of self-determination is valid, even within an ideal theory of distributive justice. On the other hand, the argument that the absence of institutions for applying these principles precludes invoking the formative ties as a consideration for determining the site of self-determination is valid only in the context of a non-ideal theory of distributive justice.

11. On this point, it is perhaps worth mentioning the distinction between practical and political Zionism, and to explore the differences between the Zionist enterprise in the land of Israel before the Balfour Declaration and British Mandate, and the activities after this point. From the outset, political Zionism sought political and legal support from the superpowers (Herzl from Turkey, Weizmann and Jabotinsky from Great Britain) and also international support (from the League of Nations and the United Nations) for the realization of its self-determination in the land of Israel; practical Zionism sought to establish demographic facts on the ground without this official backing. For the purpose of the present argument against the realization of the historical right, political Zionism had a clear moral advantage over practical Zionism. (Although, of course, it is entirely unclear if the leaders of the political approach were specifically motivated by moral considerations. It is more likely that they acted the way they acted for pragmatic reasons.) This advantage became even more significant in relation to Jewish settlement after the Balfour Declaration and, more importantly, with the onset of the British Mandate, which was backed by the League of Nations after World War I. This is so because it was reasonable to hope that if the British would fulfill the role assigned to them in the Mandate charter (namely, to promote the self-determination of the Jews in the land of Israel), it would be possible to minimize the expected risk of violence. But the claim that political Zionism had a moral advantage since the institution of the British Mandate proved to be true only to a limited extent. Firstly, there were those (mainly Jabotinsky and the Revisionists) who believed that the British Mandate failed to fulfill its role. Also, the British role as an international trustee involved many complex moral issues. And besides, the efficacy of international bodies and those who act to adjudicate and enforce disputes between national groups on their behalf cannot compare to the effectiveness of a country’s own internal legal system, which serves to adjudicate between individuals or organizations and enforces these decisions.

12. To illustrate this point, consider those who believe that Saudi Arabia should not have exclusive possession of its oil riches, and that it should divide them up with countries suffering from abject poverty, such as Somalia. A person subscribing to this position need not necessarily think that this principled position entails the conclusion that Somalia has the right to invade Saudi Arabia and appropriate its portion of the oil wealth in question. He might contend that Saudi Arabia should not be the only one to have to share its oil with other countries. Kuwait should also do this, and then, for instance, Chad, too, should benefit from this and not only Somalia. He might even contend that the re-allocation of resources should not be limited to wealth deriving from natural resources possessed by nations, but should also include wealth derived from human talents and investments. Furthermore, these questions of allocation should be regulated by a public system of principles agreeable to most or all its subjects and enforced by judicial and executive authorities capable of applying them in a coordinated manner to all, or at least to the majority of those to whom they apply. Consequently, any isolated and unilateral action against one of the parties subject to these principles would be at least partially unjust and might lead to bloodshed, even if the justice of the principle itself is undisputed.

13. A remedial justification or right is a justification or right that people have by virtue of harm caused to fundamental interests they have and/or harm caused to interests they have which are protected by primary rights. A remedial right is conferred in order to halt or remedy such harm. A primary right is a right that people have by virtue of interests they have in their everyday lives (as opposed to interests they have in emergency situations) and which justify the imposition of duties on others in order to protect these interests. Primary rights are granted in order to protect or promote these interests not only in cases in which they are being harmed. For example, our right not to be attacked is a primary right. Rights or justifications that we have to perform certain acts in order to rescue ourselves from attacks or rights to compensation for harm caused by attacks are remedial rights or justifications.

14. A similar distinction can be found in Reuven Gafni, Our Legal-Historical Right to Eretz Yisrael (Jerusalem: Tora Ve’avoda Library, 1943) [Hebrew], and in Joseph Heller, The Zionist Idea (New York: Schocken, 1949). Regarding these essays, see Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, pp. 355-357.

15. Although the indigenous populations in North America and Australia also seem to maintain the second interpretation of the historical rights argument.

16. “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel,” Official Gazette: No. 1; Tel Aviv, 5 Iyar 5708, May 19, 1948, p. 1. Less elegant versions of similar ideas appear in the opening statements of the proposals presented by the Zionists at the February 1919 Paris Peace Conference. See Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, pp. 352-353.

17. This component of the justification of the Zionist aspiration to re-settle the Jews in the Land of Israel has been a prominent part of traditional Zionist arguments, including those by early leaders such as Pinsker and Herzl, and later leaders such as Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, and Weizmann.

18. It could be argued that the case of a mortally wounded person breaking into a pharmacy to procure life-saving medicine is not really analogous to the Jews’ return to the land of Israel. The pharmacy case is a clear-cut case of preventing a greater and irreversible evil (the death of the person in need of the medication) by committing a lesser and temporary evil (the damage to the shop, and perhaps also to public order). On the other hand, even if the Jewish return to the land of Israel might perhaps have prevented a very great evil, it was nonetheless obvious from the outset that its consequences would not merely result in a minor and temporary injustice. In this respect, the case of the Jewish return to the land of Israel is not as clear a case as the pharmacy case of preferring the lesser evil, a preference which grounds the defense of necessity as a justification for action which otherwise would have been considered criminal. Some people will therefore hold the view that the necessity in question justifies not the act of the Jewish return to the land of Israel in and of itself but rather excusing the Jews from responsibility for this act. I do not share the latter view, but the scope of this essay does not allow me to elaborate on this point. Regarding the distinction between necessity that fully justifies a criminal action, and one that excuses from culpability without justifying the action, and for a generally illuminating and captivating discussion of the necessity defense in which examples that shed light on the question of the justification of the Jewish return to the land of Israel are cited, see George P. Fletcher, Rethinking Criminal Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), pp. 774-835.

19. Genesis 15:18.

20. See Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, p. 370. See also Arye Naor, Greater Israel: Theology and Policy (Haifa: Haifa University, 2001), p. 87 [Hebrew].

21. In fact, the arguments presented by the Lehi and the members of the “Israel Kingdom” faction were not only amoral but purposefully anti-moral. Those circles not only admitted their use of amoral arguments but took pride in doing so, while treating with contempt those who attempted to invoke moral arguments in order to justify the absolute right over the land of Israel.

22. For a similar position, namely, that the religious argument cannot have universal force but is valid only for believers, see Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, pp. 343-344; and Margaret Moore, “The Territorial Dimension of Self-Determination,” in Margaret Moore, ed., National Self-Determination and Secession (New York: Oxford, 1998), pp. 145-147.

23. The radical Revisionists made a similar point. See Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, p. 339.

24. The Historical Connection of the Jewish People with Palestine, revised edition of the memorandum submitted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine to the Palestine Royal Commission in November 1936 (Jerusalem: Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1936); Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, p. 354.

25. In “Three Stairs,” he states: “[B]ut there is one national right…. That we will also constitute ‘the majority’ in one country under the sun, one land in which our historical right is undisputed.” Emphasis mine. From Writings of Ahad Ha’am (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1947), p. 153 [Hebrew].

26. Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, p. 352. Emphasis mine.

27. The Balfour Declaration stated that the British government supported Zionist plans for a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. It was given to the Zionist movement on November 2, 1917 in the form of a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, then a prominent figure in the Jewish community in Britain.

28. As is ordinarily the case in the drafting of political documents, it was similarly the case in both the Basel Program and the Balfour Declaration that these documents were the end product of a process of balancing and compromising between divergent considerations and pressures. Max Bodenheimer was one of the authors of the Basel Program at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. In objecting to the Peel Commission’s Partition Plan in 1937, he explained that political Zionism was striving for a state in the entire country. The Basel Program’s reference to a secure haven for the Jews in the land of Israel and its omission of the idea of a state in the entire country was motivated by the understanding that Zionism could not press for its ultimate goals at such an early stage, and that it was preferable to wait until there was a Jewish majority in the entire county. See Shmuel Dothan, The Partition of Eretz Yisrael in the Mandatory Period (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1983), p. 97. See also Ben Halpern, The Idea of the Jewish State (Cambridge: Harvard, 1969), p. 30, on the considerations that motivated Herzl to propose the version of the Basel Program that was adopted by the Congress. One of the drafts that preceded the final version of the Balfour Declaration referred not to the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, but rather to the “reconstitution” of Palestine “as a national home for the Jewish people.” It was only pressure exerted by a British Foreign Office official which ultimately caused the Foreign Office to change the above version of the Balfour Declaration to the wording of the final and official version, see Dvorah Barzilay-Yegar, A National Home for the Jewish People: The Concept in British Politics and Policymaking, 1917-1923 (Jerusalem: Zionist Library, 2003), p. 30 [Hebrew]. In view of the above, there will no doubt be those who will question whether the wording of important official Zionist documents and public positions to which some leading Zionist thinkers subscribed provides sufficient evidence to substantiate my claim that the moral interpretation of Zionism should regard its extensive use of the idea of historical rights as rights in the land of Israel rather than as rights over all of the land of Israel. Their argument would be that the documents and the public positions in question do not really reflect the “authentic” position of Zionism.

To deal with this objection, a distinction must be drawn between two sorts of cases: Cases in which the transition from very ambitious goals to more modest ones is a result of acknowledging the constraints imposed by reality and morality on one’s ambitious goals, and cases in which this transition is the product of calculated tactics. Surely the waiving of ambitious goals and endorsement of more modest goals, when motivated by one’s acknowledgment of pragmatic and moral constraints does not necessarily indicate that the ambitious goals are the “authentic” ones. The fact is that many of us once entertained the thought of becoming millionaires or prime ministers but nevertheless gave it up in our acknowledgment of the constraints imposed on these ambitions by reality and by our personalities. This does not mean that these ambitions are our authentic ambitions, even though it would not be false to say that we might have actually fantasized about such possibilities. However, if we surrender ambitious goals for tactical reasons and express less grandiose goals instead, then it is indeed correct to argue that our first goals are the authentic ones, because the waiver relates only to the immediacy with which the goal is to be achieved or to giving it public expression. It does not mean that we have given up the goal itself.

It is not always possible to know whether a person’s surrender of a particular goal is real or tactical. Sometimes the person who has given up this goal is himself unable to accurately identify his real motivations for doing so. For reasons which are beyond the scope of this article, this is especially the case when political leaders abandon the goals previously defined for their groups. At any rate, even if a surrender of ambitious goals is merely a pretense motivated by tactical considerations, two points ought to be remembered: Firstly, relinquishing ambitious goals in favor of tactical goals may, though not necessarily so, express acknowledgment of the justice of the latter. My observation here is somewhat similar to one often made about hypocrites, namely, that their hypocrisy attests to their acknowledgment of the propriety of the standards which they only pretend to follow. Otherwise they would have no reason for feigning compliance with these particular standards. In other words, even if one could assume it is true that references by Zionist leaders and official documents to a historical right to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine rather than a Jewish state encompassing Palestine in its entirety were tactically rather than strategically motivated, nonetheless, the very adoption of such a tactic might have been a result of acknowledging the fact that morally these are the appropriate terms. (It is important to note here that this essay relates mostly to the moral question of what Zionism ought to have aspired to then, and what it ought to aspire to now based on the historical rights argument. It does not attempt to deal with what Zionism aimed for in actual practice. My above quotes from the arguments of Zionist leaders are intended to substantiate claims concerning their explicit or implicit positions on the morally possible goals of Zionism, not their positions on its goals independent of morality.) Secondly, even assuming that some of the authors of the Basel Program and the Balfour Declaration did engage in political conniving, and not in the acknowledgment of the moral and pragmatic constraints applying to Zionist goals, the factual questions concerning these people’s good faith, or even the assessment of their moral standing, should not be confused with the actual contents of the Basel Program and the Balfour Declaration, respectively.

29. Regarding the fact that Zionist ambitions with respect to the institutional form of Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel were modest, see Halpern, Idea of the Jewish State. Halpern examines this aspect of Zionist history from the Basel Program of the First Zionist Congress in 1897, to the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations’ Charter of the British Mandate, until the negotiations with the United Nations mission regarding the implementation of the Partition Plan of the General Assembly of November 29, 1947. Halpern contends that this modesty is one of the hallmarks of the Zionist movement, which distinguishes it from other national movements. However, it is not entirely correct to view modesty in this respect as a phenomenon unique to Zionism. (See my discussion in Gans, Limits of Nationalism, pp. 23-26). The modesty of Zionist aspirations regarding the institutional form of Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel is emphasized in many other history books. (See, for example, Joseph Gorny, Policy and Imagination: Federal Plans in Zionist Political Thought 1917-1948 (Jerusalem: Zionist Library, 1993) [Hebrew], which deals with the plans for something less than a state in the thinking of Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Weizmann and others. See also Itzhak Galnoor, Territorial Partition, Decision Crossroads in The Zionist Movement (Jerusalem: Ben-Gurion University, 1994) [Hebrew]. However, it is important to note here a significant group of historians, known as New Historians, who claim that the real goals of Zionism were much more ambitious than those expressed in the official decisions of Zionist institutions and by some Zionist leaders. They claim that the apparent modesty of many of the official decisions and statements made by Zionist leaders should be attributed to mere tactical considerations. See Benny Morris, “The New Historiography: Israel Meets Its Past,” Tikkun 3 (1988), pp. 19-24; Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan (New York: Columbia, 1988); Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-51 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).

30. Galnoor, Territorial Partition, pp. 75, 155-156.

31. Galnoor, Territorial Partition, pp. 158-159.

32. See the excerpt from a letter he wrote to his son, Amos, in 1937, after serving as one of the leading sponsors of the Twentieth Zionist Congress’ decision to accept the recommendation of the Peel Commission. David Ben-Gurion, Letters to Paula, trans. Aubrey Hodes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1968), p. 154. In supporting the Partition Plan, Ben-Gurion hinted at the possibility of expanding the state’s borders once established. For sources, see Naor, Greater Israel, p. 109, n. 29, referring to the minutes of the Congress (pp. 95-110 of the minutes); Shabtai Teveth, David’s Passion: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1976), p. 216 [Hebrew]; Galnoor, Territorial Partition, pp. 218-219.

33. David Ben-Gurion, Our Neighbors and Us (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1931), p. 188 [Hebrew].

34. Moshe Bela, ed., The World of Jabotinsky: A Selection of His Works and the Essentials of His Teachings (Tel Aviv: Dfusim, 1972), p. 221 [Hebrew]. The original source is a letter in English to Leonard Stein on March 9, 1922, Central Zionist Archives, file c-199.

35. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Writings, vol. 11 (Jerusalem: Sefarim, 1953), pp. 163-164 [Hebrew].

36. Vladimir Jabotinsky, Evidence Submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission: House of Lords, London, February 11, 1937 by M.V. Jabotinsky, on Behalf of the New Zionist Organization (London: New Zionist Press, 1937), p. 13. This and the above quote explicitly indicate that Jabotinsky’s argument for the right of Jewish return to the land of Israel was one of global distributive justice (between nations) in conjunction with the necessity argument. Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that I am not a historian, and certainly not an expert on Jabotinsky’s or Ben-Gurion’s writings, and I have not studied everything they ever wrote or published. The excerpts I have cited here appear in the secondary sources mentioned in these endnotes. I believe that these specific quotes suffice for the purpose of substantiating my arguments that pertain to these leaders.

37. According to Jabotinsky, this density should resemble Poland’s or Czechoslovakia’s, and not Belgium’s or Holland’s. Galnoor, Territorial Partition, pp. 170-171. For a substantiation of the claim that Jabotinsky’s argument for establishing a state on both banks of the Jordan (before the Peel Commission and on other occasions) was at its core pragmatic and was due to the need to save Jews in the 1930s, see also Naor, Greater Israel, ch. 2, pp. 76, 81. Naor, however, is of the opinion that Jabotinsky used this argument in his testimony before the Peel Commission only because it was presented to an outside party. This opinion is incompatible with the fact (which Naor himself refers to on p. 76 of his book) that Jabotinsky also used this argument in order to justify his Greater Israel ideology in the ideological platform of the Revisionist Zionists in 1928. Naor claims that Jabotinsky also had “fundamentalist” reasons for his maximalist ideology, but the excerpt which he cites to prove this (p. 82) is of an entirely practical nature. Benjamin Akzin attested to the fact that the Revisionist objection to the Peel Commission’s Partition Plan was based on considerations related to whether or not a Jewish state was capable of accommodating the millions of Jews in need of rescue during the 1930s. See Benjamin Akzin, “The Revisionist Zionism Position Toward the Partition Plan,” in Meir Avizohar and Isaiah Friedman, eds., Studies in the Palestine Partition Plans 1937-1947 (Sede Boker: Ben-Gurion Research Center, 1984), pp. 162-163 [Hebrew].

38. On this point, note the way Menachem Begin related to the ideology of Greater Israel on both banks of the Jordan. On the one hand, when he led the Herut party during the early days of the state, he based this ideology on arguments similar to those employed by the messianic religious Zionists, that is, mainly on the Bible and on “the covenant between the pieces.” See Naor, Greater Israel, pp. 95-96. On the other hand, he later revealed a willingness to reevaluate these ideas since the instrumentalist justifications which served Jabotinsky during the late 1930s—those associated with rescuing the Jews of Europe—had lost their force. In 1982, Begin tried to reassure King Hussein of the sincerity of his government’s intentions, since “[w]e, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, have no strength left, and therefore have no desire” to realize the historic right in Transjordan. See Naor, Greater Israel, pp. 91-92.

In the debate between left- and right-wing factions in Israel concerning Israel’s borders since the Six Day War, Greater Israel advocates often level the following accusation of (moral and logical) inconsistency against those willing to accept a territorial compromise within the pre-1967 borders: According to the Greater Israel activists, anyone who believes that the Jews deserve to settle in Tel Aviv or in Negba must also believe that they deserve to live in Hebron or Kedumim and vice versa. In other words, anyone who holds the view that it is unjust for Jews to settle in Hebron or Kedumim does not really believe in the justice of Zionism. It is possible to respond to this accusation of inconsistency even without the benefit of the distinctions made in this essay. For example, one could argue that even if the Jews do have the historical right to sovereignty in Hebron and Kedumim, this right may be compromised, for pragmatic and moral reasons. Willingness to compromise does not necessarily indicate inconsistency. And yet, the distinctions suggested in this essay provide an even stronger answer. For if one interprets historical rights as they should be interpreted—which in my opinion, is the interpretation implied by the sentiments expressed by the main leaders of Zionism in its formative years—that is to say, as an appropriate basis for determining the site of Jewish self-determination, but not for sovereignty and territorial expansion, there is no inconsistency at all in the willingness to realize this self-determination in only part of the land (and not on all of it). The truth is that the opposite is the case. If the historic right is only a consideration for determining the site of a nation’s right to self-determination in areas of its historic homeland, and if it cannot serve as an appropriate basis for territorial sovereignty over all the homeland territory, then the attempt to realize the right to self-determination over all areas of the homeland by virtue of the historic right alone is inconsistent. The real inconsistency is inherent in the notion that if living in Tel Aviv is justified, then settling in Hebron must also be justified. (For a more extensive discussion of the question of the logical and moral consistency of the Greater Israel ideology vs. the pre-1967 ideology, see Chaim Gans, From Richard Wagner to the Palestinian Right of Return: A Philosophical Analysis of Israeli Public Affairs (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2006), ch. 8, part 7 [Hebrew].

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