Zionist Argument: Permission of the Nations

Claim: The oaths do not apply to the State of Israel, since it was founded with the UN’s permission.

Facts:

1) One of the oaths is that the Jewish people must not go up to Eretz Yisroel as a wall. There is a disagreement among the commentators as to whether this oath applies to any mass immigration, or only to armed conquest. Even those (such as the Avnei Nezer and the Ohr Somayach) who say that only conquest is prohibited, but mass immigration with permission from the ruling power, such as the Turks or the British, is permitted, never discussed the idea of founding a sovereign state. Neither did the British, at that point in time. Founding a sovereign state means effectively ending the exile, and is a violation of the oath against “forcing the end,” one of the additional oaths listed in the Gemara.

2) The nation that permits immigration has to be the nation ruling the land, not other nations. The two-thirds majority of the UN who voted for a Jewish state in November 1947 did not include Britain, who ruled the land at that time. So according to the Avnei Nezer and Ohr Somayach, the UN resolution would have been halachically ineffective even to permit immigration, much less a state.

3) The State of Israel came into being only through a war; the Israelis had to fight for every inch of the land. That is definitely “with a strong hand” according to all opinions. It makes no difference who fired the first shot. The land was vacated by the British and left ownerless to whoever would succeed in taking it. Neither the British nor the UN made any effort to implement partition. Competing for an ownerless piece of land with military force is no different from invading a piece of land with military force.

4) The State of Israel conquered many areas not allotted to them by the UN. The partition plan called for a Jewish state in 55% of Palestine but at the end of the war in 1949, the Israelis controlled 78%, including Jerusalem, which was supposed to have been an international city. In 1967 they conquered the remaining 22% and much more.

Zionists argue that Eretz Yisroel was not an ownerless tract over which two equal groups were fighting. They claim they got it first, and everything else was self-defense. Step 1: The land was ownerless. Step 2: The UN resolution gave it to the Zionists, who declared their independent state. Step 3: Then, the following day, several Arab armies attacked the newborn state. So the war was not a war to take over Eretz Yisroel – they had already done that. It was a war to defend the Jews of Eretz Yisroel.   

But if I walk into your house and declare it mine, and, when you resist me, I fight back, is that self-defense? Who is the aggressor? I am, of course. Declaring someone else’s land yours is an act of aggression. True, here there was no sovereign power from which the Israelis took the land. The previous government was the British, and they left voluntarily. But the point was to illustrate that self-defense is not defined by who attacks physically first. There are actually three possibilities. 1) If someone attacks my house, which has always been mine, then he is the aggressor and I am just defending myself. 2) If I walk into someone’s house and declare it mine, then I am the aggressor. 3) If there is an ownerless house and two people want it, the fact that one of them happens to be the first one to declare it his does not make his opponent the aggressor. They are both equally aggressors. This last case is the analogy that best describes 1948.

The UN resolution didn’t make the Zionists into the defenders, because as explained above, the UN was only making a recommendation. It wasn’t their country. Imagine that all the countries in the UN except America voted to give the Jews the state of New York for a country of their own. And the Jews held a meeting and declared independence in the state of New York. And then the American army came to fight them. Would it then be self-defense to fight back against the American army? Of course, in that analogy the land does have a prior owner, whereas Palestine did not. But the point remains true that the UN’s recommendations do not determine sovereign ownership.

Some Zionists argue that the Arab countries all agreed to the rules of the UN, and therefore although they voted against a Jewish state, since they were outvoted it is as if they agreed to it.

But even if that were true, it would be irrelevant because the bottom line is that there was a war and Jews would not have gotten control of the country without a war. Taking the land through war is prohibited by halacha. To put it another way: If you think agreeing to abide by the rules of the UN amounts to agreement to give the Jews the land, so be it, but even if a ruling power really did agree to give the Jews its land and then later retracted its offer, and the Jews had to fight for it, that is considered “with a strong hand”.