Jewish national liberation

Jewish national liberation

So let me talk about our movement of national liberation and how we came to live as a free people in our own land. For the Jewish people, that movement is known as Zionism.  Its name carries the Jewish connection to Zion, Jerusalem. Through millennia of exile, we always maintained a connection to Jerusalem and the land of our forebears. It has resided in Jewish thoughts and prayer:

If I forget thee o Jerusalem may my right hand lose its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. (psalm 137)

Even in the absence of a national movement, Jews have lived continuously in the land for thousands of years and once again constituted a majority in Jerusalem by 1844. But as the people of Assyria know too well, there is a difference between merely being allowed to live in ancestral lands and living there as the sovereign power. As Winston Churchill said, the Jews are in their ancient lands not by sufferance but by right.

It was not until the end of the 19th century that the Jewish yearning to return took the form of an organised, secular, political movement which was capable of achieving its solitary goal – the re-creation of a Jewish State in the historic Jewish homeland.

That is perhaps the first lesson to be learnt of the Jewish struggle for national self-determination. To succeed, the concept must be transferred from an ideal, a dream into a plan. To quote the greatest leader of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, “if you will it, it is no dream.” And that ‘will’ must take the form of a movement capable of mobilising and leading a people, making representations to governments and winning the support of states and individuals of influence.

A further essential feature, perhaps THE essential feature of Jewish national liberation was its leaders. The Jewish people have been blessed with great leaders throughout our history. Visionary leaders, men and women of action, capable of transforming the world. From Moses and Abraham through to our great sages like Maimonides, and to our military and political leaders from Joshua to the Zionist leaders like Herzl and Jabotinsky.

These men, these leaders each through their own experiences and perspectives were able to do essentially the same thing – they had the power to inspire, they were blessed with incredible energy, passion and devotion to their cause and they were able to transfer concepts that were theoretical into something real and tangible and to make them happen.

To succeed, a national movement need leaders and without men of action like Theodor Herzl the aspiration for Jewish liberation would have come to nothing.

To realise the dream of self-determination a nation also needs allies. You cannot expect others to fight your battles for you but you also cannot expect to be granted autonomy without the support of those capable of making such a grant. In the case of Jewish liberation, the support of the great powers and of notable patrons at the helm of these powers was central to the success of the movement.

For us, the support of the British, who controlled Palestine after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was essential to achieving a Jewish national home. And for a variety of reasons that support was won. For one, among the British ruling class there was a genuine sympathy for the Jewish cause and an almost romantic attachment to the concept of the revival of a Jewish national home in the Promised Land. The Prime Minister Lloyd George, Foreign Secretary Balfour and of course Winston Churchill all strongly supported the Zionist cause. Jewish loyalty and contribution to the countries in which they lived was also critical to earning support. One example was Chaim Weizmann, the leader of British Jewry who would become the first President of Israel. He was also a brilliant chemist and invented an explosive propellant that was absolutely critical to swinging the war in favour of the Allies. This earned him the gratitude of those who had it with their powers to make his dream a reality.

But all this was not enough.

What mobilised enormous support for the idea of Jewish national liberation was a series of events that proved that such a movement was essential. You see, a theory or a proposition can only win broad support when events show it to be true, and more importantly, show it to be urgent.

Zionism emerged as a response to antisemitism. And the idea of national liberation was one of a number of competing movements within the Jewish world that promised to free the Jews from their suffering. There were also those who argued for assimilation or for the pursuit of emancipation within the societies in which the Jews lived. Many believed that if the Jews did everything that was asked of them, surely in return they would receive equal rights, freedom to practise their faith, the protection of the state, be allowed to live in peace and dignity. So went the theory. But the flaw with this theory is that it assumes that people who hate another simply because of their race are rational and can therefore we swayed by rational considerations. That they can be persuaded to abandon their hatred. That if only we changed our behaviour, they would change their behaviour towards us. And history has proven such a view is both false and highly dangerous.

Assimilation did not work for the Jews of Russia or Poland or Germany and it will not work for the Christians of the Middle-East. Those who are conditioned to hate you will always hate you and your actions will have no bearing on that whatsoever.

Now the rival movement to assimilation was the idea of national liberation. But it took several crucial events in the history of the Jewish people to prove the futility of assimilation and the necessity of liberation.

The first was the Odessa Pogrom. The term pogrom, I know is used in Assyrian literature today. It is originally a Russian word meaning thunder strike and described the brutal rampages of rape and murder perpetrated against vulnerable, defenceless Jewish communities in Tsarist Russia. Sometimes they were spontaneous. Other times they were ordered from above. Often they would occur on Jewish holidays. At the time of the Odessa Pogrom in 1881, the leading voice for Jewish assimilation in Russia was Leo Pinsker who argued that by winning the support of the liberal Russian intelligentsia, the Jews would be emancipated from their persecution. Pinsker founded a Russian-language newspaper, developed relations with the Russian elite, urged his people to modernise and adapt. Promised them that this was the path to their salvation. This would end the pogroms, end the forced conversions, end the large-scale deportations, end the exclusions from universities and professions, end the misery and the pain. But then in 1881, like a thunderbolt out of the clear sky, the most devastating pogroms yet were brought to bear on the Jews of Russia. The worst of them was in the city of Odessa, the centre of modern, progressive Jewish life in the Tsar’s empire, where the Jews were seen to be safest. The attacks were the work of the local intelligentsia as much as the commoner on the street and the police and authorities watched and participated, completely debunking Pinsker’s belief in being able to count on the ruling classes for protection. Pinkser was shown in the harshest terms that there was no one in Russia on whom the Jews could rely.

He would abandon the futility of attempting to appease his tormentors. Now a convert to the national idea, Pinsker would tell a friend: “we have discovered the aim of our lives in our innermost, deep conviction.” That aim was the emancipation of his people through a national home.

Just a few years later, another giant of the Zionist movement had his own awakening. Theodor Herzl was a highly assimilated Viennese Jew. For him, there was no doubt that assimilation would save the Jews of Europe. He spoke no Hebrew, knew little of Jewish history, his attire, his manner his world view were that of a typical bourgeoisie European. He too would experience a thunderbolt that would change everything.

He was a correspondent for a popular newspaper and was sent to Paris to cover the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus was a decorated soldier in the French Army, a career soldier, who also happened to be a Jew. He stood accused of passing military secrets to Germany. He was found guilty but later acquitted of all charges in a trial that still serves as a leading example of a miscarriage of justice. What Herzl witnessed inside and outside the courtroom transformed him. Drefyus was not tried on the facts of the case but on the question of whether a Jew could truly be loyal to France. Inside the courtroom he witnessed terrible elitist antisemitism. Outside, the hordes chanted, ‘Death to Jews.” Herzl understood that if a man like Dreyfus, a decorated soldier who had given his life to the French state, entirely assimilated could have his loyalty questioned, and in France no less, a secular, enlightened state that staunchly guards civil liberties, would not be accepted the Jews would never be truly accepted.

Herzl wrote in his diary: “In Paris, above all, I recognised the emptiness and futility of trying to combat antisemitism.”

Pinsker and Herzl came to understand that hatred was unchanging, but the Jewish people had the capacity to change their fortune and to seize control of their fate. They were prophetic. More importantly, they were leaders and men of action. Herzl formed the World Zionist Congress and set out winning international support for the idea of a Jewish State.

Just decades later, under cover of War, we saw the final evidence, the final irrefutable proof that no matter how loyal or how assimilated, the Jews of Europe would never be accepted and would never be safe.

Raul Hilberg, the great Holocaust historian later described the history of the Jews of Europe like so:

First, they said you cannot live among us as Jews – and we were forcibly converted or murdered
Then they said you cannot live among us – and we were expelled
Finally they said, you cannot live – and we were murdered

By 1917, the British had pledged that the Jews would be granted their state in their ancestral lands. But it took the destruction of the European Jews on an industrial scale to finally prove that we would never be safe there.

For a movement of national liberation to succeed, you need all of the things I mentioned, leaders, support, a cohesive political movement, but most of all, most of all, you need to realise that only by liberating yourselves, only by having the ability to control your own destiny as a people, only through national self-determination can you defend yourselves from persecution and live in the freedom and dignity that the people of Assyria deserve.

Finally, I want to talk about the shared history and indeed future of our two peoples. The similarities between the Jews and the Assyrians are extraordinary.

We are two ancient peoples with roots in the Middle-East. We are monotheistic and our ethics come from the Judeo-Christian tradition. But there is much more.

Our patriarch, Abraham, the father of the Jewish people came to Canaan, later the land of Israel from the city of Ur in Iraq.

Our ancestors also once spoke Aramaic.

We both once ruled great kingdoms in our ancestral homes – though in truth your kingdoms were far greater than ours.

We were both conquered peoples and became minorities in our homes.

We have been scattered and dispersed throughout the world yet culturally and genetically we remain distinct people.

We persevere, we are obstinate, we endure, we survive.

And the fact that you are here as Assyrians, that I stand before you as a Jew is testament to our survival, in spite of the Holocausts and pogroms that our two peoples have endured, in spite of Ottoman and Nazi, Hamas and ISIS, we are still here.

But I speak of our common histories not out of mere curiosity but because of what these similarities represent and obligate us to do. You see, people that come from essentially the same place, that share values, that share histories of persecution and suffering, whose rights are denied to this very day owe a duty to each other. And we the Jewish people owe you a duty to speak and to act when crimes are committed against the Assyrian people. We have a duty to speak and to act when your struggle for liberation and self-determination in your ancestral home remains unfulfilled. We have a duty to act and to speak when Jihadists threaten the people of Assyria and commit atrocities against you. Because it is precisely our similarities and our shared values that explain our shared enemies. It is because we represent the same thing that we are hated by the same people. And so let us share the burden. Let us lend our voices to the struggles of the other for when we speak for each other our words carry far greater weight and conviction than when we merely speak for ourselves.

I want you thank you all again and to say that the Jewish community carries the Assyrian people in our prayers and in our thoughts during these difficult times.