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On the evening of the first day the government changed hands, in June 1977, the new prime minister, Menachem Begin, headed out for a meeting at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. As he got out of the car, he turned toward the entrance to the hotel, which was crowded with well-wishers. Among the guests at the hotel, Begin spotted a familiar face. He waved and smiled, and called, "Sir Isaiah, welcome to Jerusalem!" The face of the well-known British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, flushed.
"He shot the prime minister a hostile look and turned his back on him contemptuously," wrote Yehuda Avner, Begin's speechwriter, who was there and astonished by the incident. At the bar, Avner met the chilly Berlin, who remembered him from his work with Yitzhak Rabin. Berlin shot off a brief, emotional monologue.
"The essence of what he said was that he saw himself as an Oxford man, balanced and restrained … and could not, as a Jew, abide the fact that Menachem Begin was prime minister. He could not shake hands with the man. It was beyond him. He feared the damage that Begin might do to the state. He feared for the Zionist dream of Israel. He feared for the Zionist dream itself. His distress and embarrassment were boundless." It's as if this was written about the talk from the Left today. Not much has changed.
Berlin went on and said that all his life, he had been a Zionist who had espoused the two-state solution – a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state. That was a moral solution. The conflict was between two equal rights to self-determination … he, as a Jew, loathed violence and terrorism of any type … how could he shake hands with Begin, who in 1946 gave orders to blow up the very hotel they were in, at the cost of 90 human lives?
I was reminded of this anecdote, which appears in Avner's excellent book, "The Prime Ministers," this week when I read the flood of slander and curses from the Left about attempts by the Right to form an alliance with the radical Right. Where is Begin, mourned those whose fathers held him in contempt? Berlin was just one example of the deep contempt and superiority the old elite feels for the Likud and its leader. What did Berlin know that Begin did not? Nothing. Berlin wanted Israel not to embarrass him in front of his Oxford friends, even if that meant political suicide, just like progressive Jews in the U.S. currently treat Israel. Nothing has changed.
2
Note the blindness of the brilliant philosopher: "The conflict is between two equal rights to self-determination." If only that were the case. The truth is that while the Jews accepted the lie that the movement that opposed their return to Zion laid out, which turned the Arabs of Mandate Palestine into a nation and a people who had been in this land from time immemorial. The Arabs of Israel and the rest of the region never saw Zionism as a national movement. The conflict was never between two national movements. As far as the Arabs were concerned – including the Arab parties currently in the Knesset – Jews are simply another religion, and therefore have no rights to the land.
This is stated clearly in Article 20 of the Palestinian National Charter: "Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history. … Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong."
3
The nation-state law addressed this point exactly and exposed the depth of the Arab leadership's opposition to Israel's very existence as a Jewish state. It is important to read the petition filed by the Supreme Arab Monitoring Committee, the Joint Arab List, and the watchdog group Adalah, which makes it clear that what disturbed them about the law was the fundamental statement that the Jewish people have the exclusive right to national self-determination in their country.
The petition does not acknowledge the basic assumptions in the law's first article: "The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established." Therefore, there is no land of Israel but rather "Palestine" and it is not the historic homeland of the Jews, most of whom are immigrants from Europe. According to the petition, the Jewish people are not a nation, but a religion. At the most, their nationality is something new that was invented in the 19th century, so there is no room to discuss the implementation of the Jewish people's "natural, cultural, religious, and historical right to self-determination."
The last sentence of the first article in the law, "The exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people," is seen as something scandalous that establishes the superiority of one "ethnic group" (the Jews) over another ethnic group (the Arabs.) In short, unlike the rest of the peoples of the world, who can exert their exclusive nationality over the minorities in their countries (including in dozens of Arab states), only the Jews have no right to a country of their own, because according to the Israeli Arab leadership – and some of the Left in Israel and internationally – a Jewish state is a racist, apartheid entity that gives one privileged group that invaded the country in a colonialist plot against the "natives."
4
They accuse us of racism just because of our desire to exert our nationality, while their own stance toward the Jews is racist. The way they see it, we aren't a people, so we have no right to a Jewish state. The Arab parties have always taken the Palestinians' side. We haven't heard a shred of criticism from Arab MKs about the Palestinian Authority paying money to terrorists who kill Jews and paying more in cases where the murder was especially horrible and a stiffer sentence was handed down. These murders continue partly because the killers know that their families will be better off because of the salaries that are paid into their accounts. The Arab MKs have also worked to promote the boycott of Israel through various means and joined anti-Israel petitions throughout the world.
For years, the Left has been planning to re-take power by setting up an opposition phalanx that includes the Arab parties, just like what happened in 1992. A total of 61 MKs must recommend a left-wing candidate for prime minister. We have never heard a scrap of hesitation in the Left or in the media about the Zionist Left forming an alliance with those who are working to annihilate Israel as a Jewish state and see people who reward killers of Jews as legitimate leaders. Now they are clicking their tongues at the idea of an ad hoc alliance between the mainstream Right and Otzma Yehudit. It's immoral, they claim, to join forces with Kahanists. Hypocrisy is immoral, too. It's immoral to ally oneself with those who wish to revoke our right to exist as a Jewish state, act to promote boycotts against Israel and support the PA policies that compensate murderers of Jews. This selective approach turns the moral stance into righteousness designed to create political strife, not seek the truth.
It is important for Habayit Hayehudi, National Union, Otzma Yehudit, and Eli Yishai's Yachad party to join forces. An alliance for the sake of the election is not an ideological partnership. Religious Zionism and the Right should throw off the Left's yearslong perception of itself as their master, who determines the degree and boundaries of legitimacy the Right enjoys, while the Left itself has long since broken out of the bounds of the what consensus sees as legitimate. It's absurd that a political rival decides with whom you can ally yourself against them. We don't live by their dictates. The sign that a social elite is ready to lead is independence of thought.
