Dr. Macho Shithead PhD

The Miracle They Cannot Forgive On the evening of 3 September 1897, in a rented hall in Basel, a Viennese journalist wrote a line in his diary that would sound insane to anyone who read it. At Basel, he wrote, he had founded the Jewish State. If he said so aloud, the world would laugh. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty, everyone would see it. Fifty years and two months later, on 29 November 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. Theodor Herzl had been dead for forty-three years. He had been wrong about almost every detail and right about the only thing that mattered. That is the story worth telling, and it has been buried under seventy years of accumulated slander so thick that most educated Westerners now believe the exact inverse of every load-bearing fact. What Zionism actually is Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. That is the whole definition. It holds that the Jews constitute a nation, that nations are entitled to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, and that the Jewish homeland is the strip of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jewish peoplehood was formed, where Jewish law was written, where Jewish kings ruled, and toward which every Jew in every exile prayed three times a day for nineteen centuries without a single year’s interruption. The word was coined by Nathan Birnbaum in 1890. The idea is considerably older than the word. It predates European colonialism by two thousand years and it predates the modern nation-state by roughly the same margin. When a Jew in Vilna or Fez or Baghdad ended the Passover seder with next year in Jerusalem, he was not indulging in metaphor. He was stating an address. Every other national movement of the twentieth century is granted this framing automatically. The Irish, the Poles, the Czechs, the Algerians, the Vietnamese, the Kurds. Their aspiration to a state of their own is treated as the natural expression of a people’s dignity. Only in the Jewish case is the identical aspiration reclassified as a crime, and the reclassification is itself the oldest tell in the book. The demand that Jews alone forgo what everyone else is granted by default has a name, and the name has not changed since the Middle Ages. Why the state was not optional The nineteenth century offered the Jews of Europe a deal. Assimilate, stop being conspicuous, dress like your neighbours, speak their language, serve in their armies, and you will be accepted as citizens. Millions of Jews took the deal in perfect good faith. They became German patriots, French officers, Austrian professors, Russian doctors. They gave Europe its physics and its music and its jurisprudence. The deal was a fraud, and it was exposed twice within twenty years. In 1881 the assassination of Alexander II triggered a wave of pogroms across the Pale of Settlement, followed by the May Laws that stripped Jews of the right to live in villages, hold mortgages, or trade on Sundays. In Odessa, a physician named Leon Pinsker who had spent his career arguing for Jewish integration into Russian society wrote a pamphlet called Auto-Emancipation. Its argument was brutally simple. The Jews were everywhere a ghost people, present without a body, and the world reacted to them with the instinctive horror reserved for ghosts. No amount of civic virtue would cure the world of this. Only a body would. Only a territory. Thirteen years later, in the most enlightened republic in Europe, a Jewish artillery captain was stripped of his rank in the courtyard of the École Militaire while a crowd outside the gates chanted for the death of the Jews. The correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse covering the degradation was Theodor Herzl. He had arrived in Paris a comfortable liberal who believed the Jewish question would dissolve in the acid of modernity. He left convinced that emancipation had failed in the one country where it had been given every possible advantage. Both men reached the same conclusion by different roads. Antisemitism is not a Jewish behaviour problem. It cannot be solved by Jews becoming better, quieter, more useful, more grateful. It is a permanent structural feature of societies that host a stateless minority, and the only remedy available to a stateless people is to stop being stateless. Europe spent the years between 1941 and 1945 proving them right with an industrial thoroughness that left nothing to argue about. Six million people were murdered because there was no government on earth obliged to defend them, no army that would come, no embassy that would issue papers, no navy that would sail. The St. Louis sailed from Hamburg in May 1939 with 937 Jewish refugees and was turned away from Cuba, from the United States, and from Canada. It sailed back to Europe. A quarter of its passengers were later murdered. And then, in the decades after 1948, roughly 850,000 Jews were driven out of Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Tripoli, Sanaa, Fez and Algiers, communities that in some cases predated Islam by a thousand years, their property confiscated, their citizenship revoked, their synagogues burned. They were absorbed almost entirely by a bankrupt new country of 800,000 people that took them in without conditions and without international funding, and today their descendants make up more than half the Jewish population of Israel. The world has never once been asked to consider them refugees. Zionism was the correct answer to a question that Europe and the Arab world posed with unmistakable clarity. The Jews who understood it early lived. The ones who waited for civilization to protect them died. The land they came to The Palestine of the nineteenth century was one of the most neglected backwaters of a decomposing empire. It had no separate administrative existence. It was carved among the vilayet of Beirut and the sanjaks of Acre, Nablus and Jerusalem, governed from Constantinople by men who regarded the posting as a punishment. Ottoman fiscal policy had ruined it methodically. The land code of 1858 required registration for title, and peasants who feared conscription and taxation registered nothing, allowing vast tracts to be consolidated in the hands of absentee notables in Beirut and Damascus who never saw the fields they owned. The tithe on tree crops was assessed in a way that made planting an orchard an act of financial self-harm, so the hillsides that had once been terraced and forested went bare. What timber remained was cut for the Hejaz railway. The coastal plain, denied drainage, reverted to malarial swamp. The Huleh basin in the north was a mosquito factory. The Jezreel valley, the breadbasket of biblical Israel, was standing water. The population figures tell the story without editorializing. The Ottoman census of 1878 counted something in the range of 460,000 people in the three districts. Fewer than half a million souls on ground that today sustains fifteen million between the river and the sea. Every Western traveller who crossed it in that century recorded the same impression, and they were not coordinating. Mark Twain, who went through in 1867 and had no interest whatever in Jewish national revival, described a country given over to weeds, a silent and mournful expanse where he rode for hours without meeting a human being. He called Jerusalem a village. The land was not empty. It was exhausted, depopulated relative to any capacity it had ever had, and dying. This is the territory that the first Zionist pioneers bought. Bought, at inflated prices, in cash, from willing sellers, with money raised from Jewish farmers and Jewish shopkeepers across Europe. In 1921 the Sursock family of Beirut, Greek Orthodox Christian grandees who had acquired the Jezreel valley from the Ottoman state and had never lived within two hundred kilometres of it, sold some 240,000 dunams of malarial marsh to Jewish purchasers at a price that would have bought prime agricultural land in France. The buyers drained it by hand. Many of them died of malaria doing it. That is the colonial conquest the world has been instructed to condemn. The immigration nobody mentions Here is the fact that detonates the entire modern narrative, and it comes from British colonial records rather than from any Israeli source. Between the census of 1922 and the end of the Mandate, the Arab population of Palestine grew at a rate that no natural increase in the region could explain. It grew fastest precisely where Jewish settlement and Jewish capital were most concentrated. Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, the three centres of Jewish economic activity, saw their Arab populations multiply several times over in twenty-five years. Nablus and Hebron and Gaza, wholly Arab towns untouched by Jewish investment, grew at a fraction of that rate. People do not migrate toward oppression. They migrate toward wages. The British knew exactly what was happening. The Hope Simpson report of 1930 noted illegal immigration from Syria and Transjordan and recommended that it be policed. Labourers came down from the Hauran in their thousands to work on the construction of Haifa port and to take jobs in the citrus groves. Winston Churchill, testifying before the Peel Commission in 1937, dismissed the entire premise of Arab grievance in one sentence, observing that far from being persecuted, the Arabs had crowded into the country and multiplied. The surnames remain in the phone book to this day. Al-Masri, the Egyptian. Al-Hourani, from the Hauran in Syria. Al-Mughrabi, from the Maghreb. Al-Halabi, from Aleppo. Al-Iraqi. Al-Yamani. A population that has occupied the same soil since time immemorial does not name itself after the places it came from three generations ago. So the true sequence runs in the exact opposite direction from the one taught in Western universities. Jewish immigrants bought derelict land, drained it, irrigated it, planted it, built ports and roads and power stations and hospitals, and generated the only functioning economy between Cairo and Beirut. Arab immigrants came from the surrounding countries to share in the prosperity that had been created. And their grandchildren now claim the moral status of an indigenous people dispossessed by foreign settlers. The miracles What the Zionists did with that land in a single lifetime has no parallel anywhere in the record of nation-building, and the details deserve to be recited rather than summarized. They resurrected a language. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda landed at Jaffa in 1881 speaking a tongue that had been liturgical and literary for eighteen centuries and vernacular in no household on earth. He raised his son as the first native Hebrew speaker since antiquity. Today nine million people argue, flirt, litigate and write software in it. No other dead language in human history has been brought back to daily use, and none ever will be, because the conditions cannot be reproduced. They solved water. Simcha Blass noticed a tree growing conspicuously larger than its neighbours and traced the cause to a slow leak in a buried pipe, which gave him the principle of delivering water drop by drop to the root rather than flooding the field. Netafim was founded on that insight at Kibbutz Hatzerim in the Negev in 1965, and drip irrigation now waters crops on every continent, feeding people who have never heard of Israel and would loathe it if they had. Israel today recycles close to ninety per cent of its wastewater, a rate more than four times that of the second-place country on earth, and draws roughly half its drinking water from the Mediterranean through reverse osmosis. A desert state in a region of perpetual water wars runs a surplus. They killed the swamps. The Huleh was drained through the 1950s, the Jezreel valley a generation earlier, and the World Health Organization certified Israel free of malaria in 1967, in a region where the disease had been endemic since the Bronze Age. They planted forests. The Jewish National Fund has put more than 240 million trees into that soil, making Israel one of the very few countries on the planet that entered the twenty-first century with more forest cover than it had at the start of the twentieth, while the Sahel and the Amazon went the other way. They rebuilt agriculture from nothing. The modern commercial cherry tomato was engineered at the Hebrew University. Israeli dairy herds produce more milk per cow than any others in the world. The country exports food while sitting on sand. They built a scientific culture out of refugees. Fourteen Nobel Prizes, six of them in chemistry, in a nation of ten million. Research and development spending running above six per cent of GDP, the highest of any country in the OECD and more than double the average. Intel opened its first design centre outside the United States in Haifa in 1974, and the processor at the heart of the original IBM personal computer was designed there, as was the architecture that saved the company thirty years later. The flash drive, the firewall, the pill-sized camera that photographs the small intestine, Waze, Mobileye, Copaxone, Iron Dome. A country the size of New Jersey, permanently at war, produces more of this in a decade than the twenty-two states of the Arab League have produced since the discovery of oil made them the richest accident in economic history. And they took everyone in. In thirty-six hours in May 1991, thirty-four aircraft with their seats removed flew 14,325 Ethiopian Jews out of Addis Ababa. Two babies were born in the air. It remains the only occasion in modern history in which Africans were transported en masse across the sea by a white-majority country for the purpose of making them free citizens rather than slaves. A million Soviet Jews followed after 1991 and were absorbed into a country of five million, which is the demographic equivalent of the United States admitting sixty million people in a decade and giving all of them passports. The verdict Zionism took a scattered, unarmed, systematically murdered people and gave them an army, a parliament, a currency, a language, a coastline and a future. It did this in fifty years, on ruined ground, with no imperial sponsor, while fighting off invasion in 1948, 1967 and 1973 and absorbing more refugees per capita than any state has ever absorbed. Measured by any standard the world applies to anyone else, it is the most successful national liberation movement of the twentieth century and one of the great constructive achievements in the history of the species. That is precisely why it cannot be forgiven. A failed Jewish state would be pitied. A modest one would be tolerated. What cannot be endured is a Jewish state that works, that wins, that feeds its enemies’ children through irrigation technology it gave away, and that stands as a permanent living refutation of every excuse offered by every neighbouring regime for its own squalor. Herzl was right in Basel. The world laughed, and then it stopped laughing, and now it has decided to be furious instead. Let it be furious. The trees are planted, the language is spoken, the water flows uphill through pipes into the Negev, and the flag is not coming down.