THEY MUST GO - 1981
BY RABBI MEIR KAHANE
Declaration and Independence
[The moment the Memorial Ceremony started for our fallen soldiers in Ma’ale Adumim, the Arabs in the nearby towns started shooting fireworks. They were celebrating the death of our soldiers. Happy to say that the fireworks were stopped by our IDF. Tomorrow eve when we will be celebrating Israel Independence Day and will light the sky with fireworks; will be a day of sorrow for the Arabs. Let us read the following article and learn what Rabbi Kahane has to say about Arabs and Independence Day]
Declaration and Independence (excerpts)
“On the 29th November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz Yisrael. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish People to establish their state is irrevocable. This right is the natural right of the Jewish People to be master of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.
“Accordingly we, members of the People’s Council…hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz Yisrael to be known as the State of Israel.
“The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the ingathering of the exiles…”
Note the innumerable clear statements of what Israel is meant to be. The land is “the birthplace of the Jewish people.” The first words of the declaration of the state set the time. It is the birthplace of the Jew – not the Arab – and it is the Jews who were “exiled from their land”; it is the Jews “who kept faith with it” and “never ceased to pray and hope for their return.” Can we seriously expect the Arab to feel equal or to have a share in such a state? A declaration of independence that he is expected to see as his own begins by speaking of the land as the birthplace of the Jewish people. But, he is not a Jew. The declaration speaks of an exile and a dream of return, but the Arab was not exiled, and if anything the dream of return of the Jew was the hope of making the Arab a minority. For the Arab who dreamed of Jewish not returning, the Jewish dream is a nightmare!
When the Israeli Arab is told to rise for his national anthem, “Hatikvah” (the hope), and sing of “the Jewish soul yearning” and “the hope of 2,000 years,” can he be expected to feel empathy? Indeed, Israel’s resident self-hater, Uri Avnery, proposed in 1975 to change the anthem. His reason made eminently good sense if you were an anti-Zionist: the song’s motif of Jewish longing for Israel is not acceptable to Israel’s Arabs. When the Israeli Arabs looks upon the happy revelers on Israeli Independence Day, celebrating, in effect, the Arab defeat and the displacement of an Arab majority of Palestine by a Jewish majority of Israel, can he be seriously expected to join us? When, in the words of the Independence of Independence, the Law of Return opens the gates “for Jewish immigration,” and not Arab influx, for the cousins of the residents of Tel Aviv and not those of Nazareth, is it surprising that the Arab feels alienated from the state?
The concept “Jewish” is dinned into the Arab’s angry head every day. Well, he is not Jewish, and what perverse madness prevents us from understanding his alienation and rage? Has it never occurred to anyone that the very existence of a Jewish state in the land where the Arab was once the majority makes him uncomfortable and that is unacceptable to him?
The State of Israel came into being as the Jewish state, the sovereign homeland of the Jewish people. The State of Israel is the goal of Zionism, the movement of Jewish longing for a return to their homeland, a longing that began, not with Herzl in 1897, but with his great-great-ancestor, who wept as the Second Temple was destroyed in the year 70. The State of Israel is that homeland for which Jews pray three times daily, turning their faces, not toward Mecca or Rome, but toward Jerusalem. The State of Israel is the dream, vision, hope, tears, yearning of a Jewish people that suffered humiliation, exile, agony, poverty, Inquisitions, and Auschwitzes from its varied hosts throughout the world. The State of Israel is the Jewish conviction that “Never Again!” is a concept that can be realized only in a land where Jews control their own destiny, their own police and armed forces, their own guns to guarantee the kind of respect the Zhid, Kike, Yahud and Yevrei never quite received from the mouths, fists, and boots of the majority culture where he resided in nervous insecurity. The State of Israel is the Jewish demand for a land in which Jews can preserve and create their own specific tradition and way of life free of the spiritual and social assimilation of foreign abrasive culture.
The State of Israel is the Jewish demand for what every other people sees as its natural right. The State of Israel is not a request, a plan, or a petition. It is not a favor sought while crouching like some pauper at the back door of the nobleman’s mansion. The State of Israel is the Jewish demand and affirmation of right to the land. What the Arab state of Syria is to the Syrians, and the Polish state to the Poles and Burundi to Burundians and Muslim Pakistan to Muslim Pakistanis and Papua to Papuans, so is the Jewish state – at least - to the Jews.
There is nothing to be ashamed of. There is no need to grow defensive about this. There is no place for apologies. The land is ours, the state is ours; let us be proud, let us be joyful, and, above all, let us be convinced. Israel: the one land that the Jewish people have the right – and the obligation –to demand. Israel: the sovereign Jewish state, owned and controlled by and for the Jewish people. This is Zionism, this is Judaism; this is normalcy.
I do not feel sorry for the Arabs of Eretz Yisrael, no matter how much they feel that the land is theirs. I do not feel for them because I know that the land is not theirs, that it is Jewish. It is the one and only land that we have, whereas the Arab of Eretz Yisrael can find a home in any one of more than the twenty lands of his 100 million fellow Arabs. I feel not pain for one who robbed me of my land, no matter how loud his false claim to it. But as I feel neither pain nor guilt, I can understand this Arab and know the stupidity of the deception practiced on him. It is a deception that does not deceive; for the Arab of Eretz Yisrael may be a robber and murderer of Jews, but he is not a fool.
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