Storms in the Negev 2023, or, Why Is History Mocking Israel

Storms in the Negev 2023, or, Why Is History Mocking Israel* Chaim Gans (bio) Keywords October 7, Zionism, Israel, Hamas, Storms in the Negev pogrom, 2023 pogrom, The Jewish State, Palestine people, Jewish people, Pinsker, Herzl, Jewish national emancipation, Territorial and constitutional policies, Ownership claim, Geographical identity If we would have a secure home, give up our endless life of wandering and rehabilitate our nation in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world, we must, above all, not dream of restoring ancient Judaea. . . . In order to arrive one day at a solution for our problem, we should not set our sights too high. Even without it, things are hard enough. This warning was made in the aftermath of the storms in the Negev pogrom of 1882 in the Russian Empire. This pogrom prompted Leon Pinsker to write his Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to his People by a Russian Jew and thereby raise the dawn over the Zionist idea.1 "After the terror of the bloody murders a moment of calm followed," he wrote at the opening of his pamphlet, "the only hope is that in those momentary intervals of calm we attempt a cure far more effective than those placebos to which our hapless people have been turning for 2000 years." The cure he proposed was "a tract of land from which no foreign masters can expel Jews".2 Theodore Herzl followed suit with his The Jewish State in 1896,3 when France was embroiled in the Dreyfus Affair. Naming the 1882 pogrom Storms in the Negev was inspired by Isaiah 21: "Like storms sweeping through the Negev, an invader comes from the desert, from a land of horror." In the context of the 1882 pogrom in the south of the Russian Empire, 'The Negev' was used synecdochically, to denote a southland. Israel does not need a prophet's inspiration to name its 2023 pogrom after the one that started the process of its creation in 1882. End Page 62 The 2023 pogrom occurred in the actual southland Negev desert to which Isaiah refers; and Gaza, the land of horror from which it swept, is largely Israel's own creation. With the 2023 Storms in the Negev, history makes a mockery of the way it has interpreted the "cure far more effective than those placebos" that Pinsker and Herzl proposed for the millennial persecution of the Jews. It mocks it because it has interpreted the prescription of "a large tract of land . . . from which no foreign masters can expel us"4 as if it reads "a large tract of land from which we masters may expel those who are not ones of us"—thereby turning the prescription into a poison capsule, a catalyst for the reappearance of the disease of antisemitism it was intended to cure. This reinterpretation turns on the choice of reason for selecting Palestine as the tract of land for realizing the national cure for the persecution of the Jews. The reason that was chosen states that the Jewish people acquired an ownership right over Palestine in Antiquity, a right that has not lapsed since. The reason that should have been chosen—and that still can and must be chosen—is the identity link that actually has never ceased to exist between Palestine and the Jews as a people that originated in this tract of land. Pinsker and Herzl proposed their national cure for Jewish persecution after the failure of the Jews' civic emancipation in Europe during the 19th century to constitute such a cure. Neither of them considered Palestine to be an essential component of the cure. "The goal of our . . . endeavors must be not the 'Holy Land,' but a land of our own", wrote Pinsker.5 "Palestine or Argentina?" asked Herzl.6 However, they both believed that if their proposed cure could be realized in Palestine, then "all the better."7 They, and those who took part in realizing their vision, held this view probably because they endorsed one or both of the two reasons mentioned above, namely that the Jewish people has a valid ownership claim over Palestine, and that as a nation it is identified with Palestine. The fact...