The Gene Wars---Is There a Historical Right to the Land of Israel? [very long, 2 articles]

Macedonian nationalists want Greece back, or at least its northern provinces. Their latest weapon is an obscure genetic study, which claims that while Macedonians belong to the older Mediterranean substratum of peoples, Greeks do not. Consequently, the study concludes, the Macedonians predate even the earliest Greek civilization.1 Among Macedonian political activists who believe that Greece “has held Macedonian territory illegally for… ninety-three years” and who dream of the re-unification of historical ethnic Macedonia, there is considerable excitement at the prospect of their view that Macedonians “are the oldest people living in the Balkans” being genetically corroborated.2 Welcome to the gene wars.

Genetically based claims to sovereignty are the newest tactics employed in old struggles over national sovereignty and borders.3 They are used to support assertions of historical primacy, the principle that the first of the nations still existing to have established collective life on a specific territory has a right to statehood there. The desire to claim historical primacy is so strong that national groups of recent origin and nations that arrived comparatively recently to the territory where they now demand sovereignty are inclined to invent histories alleging ancient roots. An example is the case of Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic.

When Ataturk set about fashioning a Turkish nation from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, he was confronted with the presence of the indigenous Greek and Armenian peoples of Anatolia, both of whom boast well-documented histories predating the Turkic speakers. The brutal ethnic cleansing and genocide by which Ataturk proceeded to eliminate these populations are well known, but less familiar is his re-writing of history in order to grant the Turks a claim to historical primacy. As Bernard Lewis explains, Ataturk’s narrative asserted that “the Turks were a white, Aryan people, originating in Central Asia… [who] migrated in waves to various parts of Asia and Africa, carrying the arts of civilization with them…. Sumerians and Hittites [an ancient Anatolian people]… were both Turkic peoples. Anatolia had thus been a Turkish land since antiquity.”4 And indeed, Ataturk’s remains lie in a grand Hittite-style mausoleum. Legal scholar Chaim Gans has also pointed out that the appeal of the historical primacy argument is such that national movements that were not, in fact, the oldest organized society on the territory where they claim sovereignty “do not try to deny the validity of the argument. What they do instead is construct a genealogy that supposedly demonstrates their kinship ties to extinct peoples who had occupied the disputed territories before their rivals.”5

For national movements that can demonstrate historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence of primacy, such as the Basques, genetics are simply added to the list of determining factors when claiming rights to a given piece of land.6 But for national groups that lack these proofs, such as the Macedonians, justification must be sought elsewhere. Recently, they have turned to the field of genetics.

As its advocates maintain, genetics can be used to trace the descent of a population; in this, it offers an appearance of scientific certitude that is compelling to those who wish to bolster their claims to territorial sovereignty. But, as this essay will demonstrate, genetic data in truth offer virtually nothing to such groups: Much of the information being marshaled to support claims of national primacy is culled from studies that are either flawed or misinterpreted. Moreover, even when high-quality research does indicate a specific ancient people among a modern group’s ancestors, such data are not magic bullets that enable the group to confirm, scientifically, whichever assertion of ancestry it wishes to be true.7 Rather, as we will see, rights to territorial sovereignty are legitimately determined by a much more complex array of considerations. Put simply, fighting wars for territory using the rhetoric of genetics is bound to be a losing proposition.

Claims that genetic studies validate ethnic territorial aspirations can-not begin to be evaluated without some understanding of the science involved. How does one “prove,” for example, that Macedonians are more closely related to other Mediterranean peoples than are Greeks? The answer begins with the molecules that code our genetic endowment, called DNA. Chains of DNA are composed of four smaller molecules, strung together much like beads on a necklace, with each chain paired with a complementary string of DNA. The two strands are then woven together in a double helix. Each of the component molecules-called “bases,” and known by the first letters of their names as A, C, G, and T-has a regular partner in the opposing strand: A always pairs with T, and C with G.8 When cells reproduce, in order to insure that each daughter cell has a full complement of chromosomes, the DNA helices are replicated as well, each strand producing a matching strand by attracting the complementary molecules, A, C, G, or T.

Since all humans probably descend from a small number of common ancestors, we would all share identical, or near-identical, genetic endowments if DNA replication worked perfectly. Indeed, any two randomly chosen humans will have 99.9 percent of their DNA sequences in common.9 But because of imprecision in the replication process-that is, mutation-DNA patterns have diverged over time.

Now, if our DNA patterns simply differed randomly from everyone else’s, the first shot of the gene wars would never have been fired. But matters are not that simple: Patterns of mutation are passed down from parent to child, and among groups that are largely endogamous (that is, mating tends to occur within the group) those patterns may come to be widely shared. Particular DNA patterns are therefore more prevalent among some groups than others, and knowledge of these patterns has allowed researchers to map the genetic closeness of different ethnic communities.10 Moreover, since mutation rates tend to be constant over time, the degree of difference in DNA sequences between two ethnic groups yields a rough approximation of when they branched off from the common human tree, allowing scientists to trace migration patterns across the globe.11 These are precisely the studies that have been recruited to support claims of historical primacy.

Three levels of analysis are used in the study of intergroup genetic differences:12 The earliest studies did not look at DNA, but instead inferred differences in DNA patterns by looking at the products of particular genes, such as blood type. Frequencies of types A, B, and O differ systematically across the world, as is true for other markers found on cell surfaces, such as those associated with the immune system. More recent work has looked at the variant DNA sequences of particular genes-called alleles-in different population groups. But studying gene products or even the sequences of individual genes, although still in vogue in some places, turns out to be a crude method of determining genetic relatedness.13 Today, machines that rapidly sequence DNA strands have made it possible to look directly at the variations in DNA itself.

DNA sequences are usually compared in one of two ways.14 Variation at a single site among the three billion base pairs is called a SNP (pronounced “snip”). For example, if sequencing of DNA bases shows that most people have an A at a given locus, but the person being tested has a C, a SNP has been identified in that person’s genome. Examining variation in SNPs at dozens or even hundreds of loci in the genome allows the differences between two populations to be quantified. In the second way that DNA sequences are compared, researchers can examine groups of SNPs that tend to be inherited as a set, usually because they are close to each other on a particular chromosome. These sets are called haplotypes, and studies can explore their frequency across populations. Whether looking at SNPs or haplotypes, the larger the number of sites in the genome that are examined, the more reliable are the findings regarding the genetic closeness of the groups being studied.15

To understand who is winning or losing the gene wars, one other distinction is important: SNPs and haplotypes can be examined in the genome as a whole, or in only part of the genome. Two parts that can be uniquely informative are the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. Since only men have a Y chromosome, and most of it tends to be passed down relatively unchanged from father to son, Y chromosome patterns can be used to track descent along the patrilineal line. The now-famous “Cohen haplotype” that is highly prevalent among male Jews who identify themselves as descendants of the biblical high priest Aaron is an example of such a Y chromosome haplotype.16 Similarly, mitochondrial DNA is separate from the rest of the genome and contained in mitochondria, which provide energy to the cells. Human mitochondria derive from the mitochondria in the maternal egg; both men and women inherit their mother’s mitochondrial DNA, but only women can pass their mitochondrial DNA to their offspring. Thus, examining mitochondrial DNA allows descent to be tracked through the maternal line. The recently announced finding that a large proportion of Ashkenazi Jews probably descended from as few as four women of Middle Eastern origin, for example, is the product of research on mitochondrial DNA patterns.17

With this basic understanding of genetics in mind, we can now turn to the use-or misuse-of genetic findings in the battle of territorial claims. The Macedonians, the Sami of northern Scandinavia, and the Palestinians are three groups that have seized upon deeply problematic interpretations of new genetic evidence to bolster claims to sovereignty. While each case is unique, they all share a common effort to “prove” direct descent from the most ancient of the nations who occupied a given piece of land.

Most of today’s Macedonians are in fact citizens of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, carved out of the remains of Yugoslavia in 1991, with many others living in northern Greece. They speak a Slavic language, part of a family of tongues brought to the Balkans by Slavic tribes in the sixth and seventh centuries, and first began to develop a unique national identity at the turn of the twentieth century.18 Nonetheless, as the title of a recent book explains, some of these citizens believe that they are in fact the descendants of Alexander the Great of Macedon, and as such “are not Slavs, but have a direct descent from the ancient Macedonians.”19 Consequently, they claim territorial rights to Greece’s northern province, also called Macedonia and part of the site of the ancient Macedon kingdom.

The study much ballyhooed by Macedonian nationalists for this purpose looked at the differences in DNA in a cell surface marker gene in thirty-one different populations from the Mediterranean basin, the Near East, and Africa.20 The frequency of variant DNA sequences, or alleles, in the Macedonian sample most closely resembled that found in a sample from Crete, and was similar to what was seen in almost all of the other Mediterranean groups. On the other hand, the frequencies in the three Greek samples were grouped with samples from sub-Saharan Africa, quite different from that seen in the other Mediterranean populations. To undermine Macedonian claims to northern Greece, Greeks prefer to portray them as Slavs, who are relatively late arrivals in the Balkans and therefore, they believe, without any entitlement to Greek land.21 Yet the genetic data on cell surface markers have been used by Macedonians to turn the tables on the Greeks. As the authors of the study themselves wrote, “Our results show that Macedonians are related to other Mediterraneans and do not show a close relationship with Greeks; however, they do with Cretans…. This supports the theory that Macedonians are one of the most ancient peoples existing in the Balkan Peninsula, probably long before the arrival of the Mycaenian Greeks in about 2000 b.c.e.”22 According to these findings, then, it is the modern Greeks whose legitimacy in the region is suspect.

The Sami (also called Laplander) have lived in northern Scandinavia since before recorded history. They speak ten distinct languages, and historically, the disparate Sami peoples had distinctive customs, religious traditions, and legends.23 All Sami languages are in the Finno-Ugric group, a linguistic family that reached Europe later and by a different route than the Indo-European languages ancestral to Norwegian and Swedish. The overwhelming majority of Sami today speak a Scandinavian language, live in modern homes, and have jobs in the modern economy. Like other Scandinavians, most Sami are lapsed Lutherans. Sami national consciousness arose only in the last decades of the twentieth century; today, some Sami have begun to speak of a “Sami nation,” and to promote a quest for self-determination. Moreover, as minorities in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and, to a lesser extent, the neighboring areas of Russia, they seek access to traditional herding and fishing territories, and the maintenance of their languages and culture.24 They have indeed made some strides: Sami parliaments exist in all three Scandinavian countries, though they lack the full apparatus of self-rule. Moreover, their cause has gained popularity among some non-Sami, who work with Sami activists in “helping the Sami people assert their unique identity.” They have now identified a thirteenth-century “Sami homeland… called Sampi or Samiland, which once occupied most of Norway, Sweden, and Finland,” and assert that Sami “are the indigenous people who live in northern [Scandinavia]….”25

Genetic claims on behalf of the Sami are somewhat more complex than those of the Macedonians, since no one denies that Sami (or proto-Sami) have been in Scandinavia for thousands of years. Studies of mitochondrial DNA have been of greatest use to the Sami; most show distinctive haplotypes found only at much lower frequencies in other European populations, and advocates for the Sami claim that these data indicate that the Sami were the earliest settlers of northern Scandinavia. As the website of the Swedish Sami Parliament puts it, “There has never been any reason to doubt that the Sami people have always been here.”26

The Palestinians are another example of a national identity that emerged in the twentieth century and has now turned to genetics to support its territorial claims. Culturally, religiously, and linguistically, they are part of the Arab people that arrived in the Levant as conquerors in the seventh century. Yet it remains unclear to what extent today’s Palestinians, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, descend from the conquered Christian population, some of whom are known to have converted to the religion of their Islamic rulers, or from the conquering Arabs or other Muslims who came to the region to take advantage of economic opportunities at various periods from the seventh century to the present.27 The historical record shows that an Arab army conquered the area, some local people converted, and some Muslims arrived later as immigrants; it does not show the proportion of the population accounted for by these events.

Because Palestinian Arabs are part of an ethnic group historically proud of having arrived as conquerors, the question of how to claim historical primacy has been the source of some perplexity among Palestinian nationalists. After all, the lack of evidence for Arab primacy jumbles the logic of their arguments. Various claims have been articulated; one holds that, “The Arabian desert and the area around it gave birth to a number of tribes and civilizations: Phoenicians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Hebrews, Canaanites, Nabateans, etc. These tribes continuously drifted out of the desert into the fertile areas of the Levant,” which, since all of its inhabitants throughout history were Arabs from Arabia, was always Arab.28 A separate style of argument simply states that the Palestinians are the original and eternal people of Palestine. “Palestine was conquered in times past by ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Muslim Arabs, Mamelukes, Ottomans, the British, the Zionists… but essentially (especially in villages) the population remained constant-and is now still Palestinian.”29

Another tactic has been to negate the Jewish claim to primacy by denying that Jews are in fact the descendants of the ancient Hebrews: “The claim made by the Zionists… that late nineteenth-century European Jews are direct descendants of ancient Palestinian Hebrews is what is preposterous here…. That they somehow descend from first-century Hebrews, despite the fact that they look like other Europeans, that they speak European languages is what is absurd.”30 Arthur Koestler’s book The Thirteenth Tribe is widely cited as proving “that most Ashkenazim are the descendants of convert Khazars [a Central Asian Turkic people that embraced Judaism to some extent in the eighth or ninth century, but disappeared from history not long thereafter] with closer ties to the Slavic people than to Semitic people.”31 They are, then, according to this view, mere interlopers in the Middle East with no historic claim to Israel.

The advent of genetic science has debunked the claim that Jews are descended from the Khazars, but it has bolstered other arguments that seek to sever the connection between ancient Hebrews and modern Jews. Palestinian nationalists have seized upon new genetic data to prove that, as Columbia University professor Joseph Massad says, “many can claim easily that the Palestinians of today are the descendants of the ancient Hebrews.”32 According to this narrative, some of the ancient Hebrews became Christians at the time of Jesus, and some became Arabic-speaking Muslims after the Arab conquest. Arguing by turns that they are the descendants of ancient Canaanites or ancient Jews who converted but never left the land, Palestinian nationalists claim a genetically based right to inherit the ancient Hebrew homeland.

Studies of Y chromosome haplotypes showed very similar patterns in Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, who were less closely, but still clearly, related to other Middle Eastern populations.33 Along the same lines, the research team that claimed to have established the Macedonians’ Mediterranean heritage also examined Palestinian-Jewish similarities in alleles for the same cell surface marker. Their conclusion was that “Jews and Palestinians share a very similar HLA genetic pool… that support[s] a common ancient Canaanite origin.”34 Thus, some Palestinian advocates now claim that Jews and Palestinians descended from common ancestors, with the Palestinians having remained on the land after most Jews were exiled, sequentially accepting conversion to Christianity under the Byzantines and Islam under the Arabs.35 Hence, Palestinians and Jews have at least equal claims to the land, with the Palestinians claiming a stronger position by virtue of what is taken to be their continuous settlement.

In each case, genetic data would seem to lend scientific proof to these groups’ claims of historical primacy. After all, if Philip of Macedon’s blood courses through the veins of the Macedonians, but not the Greeks, then Macedonian arguments for political control of his historical kingdom would appear to be enhanced in some ineffable way. Whether genetic data can carry this burden of proof is a question to which we will turn shortly; first, however, it is important to recognize that not everything purporting to be good genetics actually is. Many of the data or interpretations thereupon that have been enlisted in the gene wars are of dubious validity-including those relied upon by the Macedonians, Sami, and Palestinians. Given that claims of this sort are only likely to increase as more genetic data become available, understanding the problems with the methods and conclusions of these studies is essential to evaluating the contentions of competing groups.

Complex genetic studies are inherently challenging for the layman to assess. In theory, the peer review process used by scientific journals to determine which papers to accept for publication should ensure that published findings do not suffer from obvious flaws. But the process is imperfect, and the result is a body of scientific literature riddled with work of questionable validity, by virtue of either the data generated or the interpretations offered. The studies relied on by Macedonians, Sami, and Palestinians each illustrate some of the problems that afflict this area of research.

Recall that Macedonian claims are based on a single study showing Greeks to have a disproportionate percentage of sub-Saharan alleles of a particular cell surface marker, compared to the more typically Mediterranean pattern that they themselves display.36 The authors of this study succumbed to what can only be called scientific hubris in asserting that the cultural, historical, and genetic identity of Macedonians may be established according to their results. If there is a cardinal rule of science, it is to be exceedingly leery of drawing conclusions on the basis of a single study. After all, extraordinary claims such as this demand the strongest levels of proof. In the absence of any plausible basis on which to assert that modern Greeks descend in substantial part from sub-Saharan Africans, only truly convincing data, replicated independently, should be accepted as proof of that claim.

The primary defect of the Macedonian study is that the authors relied on a single genetic marker, the hla-drb1 gene, to determine the genetic closeness of a large number of ethnic groups from Africa, the Near East, and the Mediterranean. Commenting on the work of this research group, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza-probably the world’s leading expert on studies of this sort-and his colleagues stated, “Using results from the analysis of a single marker, particularly one likely to have undergone selection, for the purpose of reconstructing genealogies is unreliable and unacceptable practice in population genetics.”37 How many markers are appropriate? Experts suggest that distinguishing reliably between even distantly related groups from different continents requires roughly 60 SNPs for 90-percent accuracy, and perhaps 100-160 for 99-100-percent accuracy.38 Even if a smaller number of haplotypes can be used on account of their relatively unique characteristics (each haplotype incorporates multiple SNPs or other mutations), the right number for assessing the relatedness of populations will never be just one. As Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues conclude, “the ordinary process of [peer review]” should preclude publication of papers of this sort.39

Indeed, when another research group attempted to replicate the analysis of the hla-drb1 allele distributions among Macedonians, they found that their closest relatives were-of all peoples-the Greeks, the very group from which the Macedonians have been attempting to distinguish themselves.40 As would be expected, Macedonians and Greeks clustered with other European populations on genetic maps, far from the aggregation of North African and sub-Saharan groups. Although these results have not stopped Macedonian nationalists from proclaiming their lineage superior to that of the Greeks, they effectively neutralize the earlier study, leaving Macedonians bereft of scientific support for their claims.

A much larger body of work exists on Sami genetics-which creates its own set of problems. Studies of Sami mitochondrial DNA do indeed suggest links to ancient European populations, but examination of the Y chromosomes of the Sami presents a different picture. Studies have shown that many Sami men carry Y chromosome markers associated with other Finno-Ugric-speaking populations, such as Estonians and Finns.41 The expansion of Finno-Ugric-that is, the moment when the group speaking the parental language broke up, and languages in the family begin to diverge-is dated by linguists to between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago. Which is to say, Finno-Ugric speakers likely arrived after the post-glacial re-settlement of Scandinavia.42

The most probable explanation, though debates over the interpretation of the genetic data continue, is that as the glaciers receded from Europe, the continent was re-populated from southwest to northeast by survivors who had taken refuge in southern Europe. Sami carry a higher percentage of mitochondrial DNA markers from this group than do most European populations, and from this derive their assertions of indigeneity. Several thousand years later, the now-dominant Indo-European groups arrived from the east and, in all likelihood, some time later the major Finno-Ugric migration-carrying the markers found on many Sami Y chromosomes-began.43 Thus, based on their maternally transmitted DNA, we might say that the Sami are an ancient, indigenous population; looking at their paternal line, however, we might conclude that they are more recent arrivals even than the Scandinavian groups with which they contend for territorial sovereignty.44 In other words, like most ethnic groups today, Sami genetics reflect a mixture of populations over the millennia. Advocates, however, can be counted on to select the most supportive findings, and assertions of Sami indigeneity are never tempered by references to the Y chromosome data that undercut the absolute nature of the Sami narrative.45

The comparative genetics of Palestinians and Jews demonstrate other pitfalls in generating and interpreting data. When populations are genetically diverse for the markers of interest, as most groups are, the selection of the samples to be studied is crucial. Since the numbers of subjects involved are usually small by epidemiologic standards, selecting a truly representative group is critical to drawing valid conclusions. For example, the study that compared HLA cell surface markers in Palestinians and Jews looked at 165 Palestinians, 94 Moroccan Jews, and 80 each of Ashkenazi and “non-Ashkenazi” Jews, and it is not clear that efforts were made to avoid sampling persons from the same extended family, clan, or region, and who may thus bias the results toward their particular genetic profile.46 Likewise, is it unclear whether consideration was given to sampling those local populations most likely to have deep indigeneity in the region, such as Samaritans, Palestinian Christians, and Aramaic-speaking Christians. Surprisingly, many genetic studies provide little information about how their subjects were selected and what their characteristics are. For some kinds of medical research, whether the sample studied is representative of a broader population makes little difference. But when conclusions are being generalized to entire ethnic groups, what may be methodological fine points in other circumstances here become critical.

Moreover, given that current contentions about the genetic basis for Palestinian claims of historical primacy (or at least equality) are based on studies demonstrating similarity between Palestinian and Jewish genomes, the question “Compared to what?” becomes vital. For instance, when researchers at the Hebrew University reported “substantial overlap” between Israeli and Palestinian Arab Y chromosome haplotypes and those of Jews, they compared both groups to a sample drawn from northern Wales.47 Of course, when compared with people from Wales, Jews and Arabs indeed look quite similar. However, when they compared Israeli Jews with the same Arab sample, but this time included comparisons with Kurds, Armenians, Turks, Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Bedouin, the picture looked quite different. Although all of the Middle Eastern populations bore some similarities to each other (a fairly robust finding confirmed in other works), “Jews were found to be more closely related to groups in the north of the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to their Arab neighbors.”48 For some, this will evoke the biblical account of Abraham’s origins in Ur of the Chaldees, and raise the possibility that the story contains echoes of an ancient population movement. Alternatively, Jews, Kurds, Armenians, and Anatolian Turks may all carry the genetic markers of ancient indigenous populations of the Fertile Crescent, while Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin may largely descend from the Arab conquerors, with their distinctive genetic signifiers. All these hypotheses are highly tentative until confirmed or disproved by further genetic data. What is certain, however, is that one gets a very different picture of the genetic relatedness of Jews and Palestinians when their respective genetic portfolios are placed in the context of the Middle East, rather than compared with distant Wales.

What can we say, then, about the claim that genetic science has proven that “Palestinians are, in most cases, descended from the old Hebrew tribes”? Or about the alternative formulation that the Palestinians’ “ancestors, the Canaanites, were the original inhabitants of the land”?49 In short, existing genetic data lend no support whatsoever to these assertions. True, both Jewish and Palestinian genetic endowments bear some of the similarities found in most Levantine groups, but they differ substantially as well, and both groups resemble other Middle Eastern populations (other Arabs in the case of the Palestinians, and groups from the Fertile Crescent for the Jews) more than they do each other. Hence, there is no basis for the belief that Palestinians are descended from the Hebrew tribes.

The difficuly involved in comparing the genetic heritage of ethnic groups, however, does not mean that good studies cannot be conducted and their results accurately analyzed. Indeed, as DNA sequencing technology improves, genetic inquiry will no doubt be more common in the future. We therefore must begin to think about one critical question: How far can genetic evidence take us in establishing the competing claims of two peoples to a land?

Genetic data on ancestry are appealing to nationalists because of their aura of scientific certainty, but they will always be an uncertain descriptor of the relationship between modern groups and ancient peoples. At least four factors contribute to this inherent indeterminacy: (i) The limits of comparisons to ancient populations; (ii) the intrinsically mixed nature of almost all population groups; (iii) the variation in results depending on the markers examined; and (iv) the effects of pure chance. None of these problems is likely to be overcome by technical advances, and, taken as a whole, they suggest that genetics should have little or no role to play in the adjudication of disputes over sovereignty.

For example, both Jews and Palestinians, or at least some advocates in each group, claim descent from the ancient Hebrews who held sovereignty over the land. Without knowing what the Hebrew genome looked like, or even whether it was distinctive in any way from the surrounding populations, Jews and Palestinians are both left to compare themselves with other populations in the Levant to demonstrate their general degree of relatedness to the other peoples who are presumed to have lived in the region.50 Such data, however, only get one so far. For even if both groups could demonstrate an equal genetic relationship to the ancient populations of the western Mediterranean, there would be no way to know whether one of them was descended from the twelve tribes of Israel, while the other comprised the distant grandchildren of the Midianites or Phoenicians. This difficulty in fine-resolution comparisons to a population that no longer exists is not likely to be overcome by advances in science or technology.

In addition, both Jews and Palestinians, like all modern population groups, bear the genetic imprint of the ebb and flow of peoples over time. Roughly 15 percent of Palestinians and other Arabs carry mitochondrial markers associated with sub-Saharan Africa, probably the legacy of a slave trade of millennia and of the close ties between Yemen and the Horn of Africa.51 Such markers, however, are essentially absent in Jews. On the other hand, while Jews carry the genetic legacy of their Middle Eastern roots to a substantial degree, there is no question that infusions of genes from host populations occurred over the centuries of their existence in the diaspora. Similarly, like all modern Finns and Scandinavians, today’s Sami show descent from three population groups: Paleolithic Europeans, the Indo-Europeans who arrived next, and the Finno-Ugric migration that followed. Because no contemporary group is a pure descendant of any ancient people, genetic claims will always be a matter of degrees of relatedness. What is often mistakenly viewed as a black-and-white question becomes in practice something much more like distinguishing points on a continuum, and we are then left with the question: Should the difference of a few percentage points on a scientific table of genetic markers entitle a group to territorial control?

If this were not messy enough, the degree of genetic relatedness between populations will often vary depending on which marker is being examined. The conclusions that can be drawn about the indigeneity of the Sami may turn on whether one looks at their mitochondrial DNA or Y chromosomes. Similarly, some writers still want to claim a genetic influence for the Khazars on the Ashkenazi Jewish population (though the notion that Ashkenazim are entirely descended from the Khazars seems to have been retired).52 Assuming that a minority of Ashkenazi Jews carries haplotypes with Khazar origins-which is by no means certain-does that dilute the probative value of the much larger number of Jews with markers derived from the Levant? And if one person carries markers from both sources, into which category should he or she be sorted? How can one ever hope to resolve these questions?

A final complicating factor is the role of chance in determining genetic makeup. Two population groups starting out from the same origin but isolated from each other will, over time, begin to differ from each other-and from the parent population-on account of the random nature of mutation. Those differences will be enhanced by contingent events, such as the phenomena that population geneticists refer to as “founder effects” and “bottlenecks.” In the case of the former, when a small group breaks off from a parent population-such as the first Jewish merchants who migrated to Yemen-merely by chance, the proportion of haplotypes in its genetic endowment is likely to differ from that of the larger group. Over time, those differences may be enhanced by endogamous marriage and the chance survival of some group members as opposed to others. As for bottlenecks, should there be a dramatic decrease in population due to war, plague, or famine-as occurred multiple times with Jews in both Israel and the diaspora-followed by a resurgence in numbers, there can be a dramatic shift in the proportion of haplotypes in the group merely on the basis of who happened to survive. Hence, it is not improbable that of two groups that each split from a common parent population, one will undergo greater change in its collective genome than the other, and thus will bear a lesser resemblance to the parent group. Such chance phenomena hardly seem the right foundation on which to make determinations on the merits of two national groups’ territorial aspirations.

For all the acrimony aroused by countervailing genetic claims to historical primacy, then, genetics seems unlikely to contribute much to the resolution of contending claims of territorial sovereignty. But what, we may ask, is the relevance of historical primacy, for whose sake the gene wars were begun? Here, it seems, is the deepest flaw in the claims to land arising from the gene wars.

The claim of a people to sovereignty over a disputed territory must involve two contentions. First, there is the assertion-almost always contested by the rival claimant-that the people in question actually constitute a nation. Second, there is the assertion that this nation’s claim to sovereignty over the disputed territory is superior to that of any rival group. David Miller, a professor of political theory at Oxford University, offers perhaps the most thoughtful set of definitions on what constitutes a nation, and none of them involves genetics. The first of his five criteria is that “nations exist when their members recognize one another as compatriots.”53 In other words, they exist only at the will of their members. For example, Savoy has a national liberation movement, but as long as most putative Savoyards continue to think of themselves as French, the Savoy League is unlikely to get very far.54 Indeed, with some Sami caring strongly enough about not becoming a nation to form an anti-autonomy movement, Sami nationalists have a similar problem. So, too, are Palestinian nationalists challenged by the fact that some proportion of the population of the West Bank and Gaza prefer to identify as members of a larger Islamic umma, or nation.

Second, nationality “embodies historical continuity.” Members of a nation believe that, “Because our forebears have toiled and spilt their blood to build and defend the nation, we who are born into it inherit an obligation to continue their work, which we discharge partly toward our contemporaries and partly toward our descendants.”55 Belief in a shared future and memory of a shared past are essential components of national identity. This lack of a history as a nation makes it more difficult for the Sami, Macedonians, or Palestinians to build effective national identities.

Third, nationality is an “active identity.”56 Sovereign nations, of course, actively define, defend, and govern themselves, and even before gaining sovereignty, national movements routinely undertake such actions as creating a unique language (in the case of the Macedonians) or establishing a university (in the case of the Jews in Palestine prior to the declaration of statehood).

Fourth, “national identity… connects a group of people to a particular geographical place.”57 The Roma, or Gypsy, people are an example of a strongly identified ethnic group that has nonetheless been unable to organize an effective national movement because it lacks a connection to a homeland.

Finally, national identity requires that the people who share it should have “a common public culture.”58 The mundane markers of a common culture are language and religion, along with matters of style in dress, food, entertainment, and the like. Of these, language is the crucial factor; its role as conveyer of culture makes language as close to a sine qua non of national identity as there is. But there is also that amalgam of assumptions regarding such things as the role of government, the responsibilities of individuals, and the definition of concepts like honor and truth, all of which vary to a surprising degree from one nation to another, and all of which make up that very real but nonetheless hard-to-define entity that is a nation’s common public culture.

Noticeably missing from this list is any mention of genetic relatedness. Indeed, students of nationalism do not regard literal kinship as essential for the existence of a nation, although everyone is aware that almost all nations have myths of common origins. And like most myths, this one is functional; belief in a common descent is a powerful unifying force. And again, like most myths, this one contains an element of truth; nations usually do share a degree of common descent. However, very few if any nations define membership principally according to literal kinship. For example, no one would argue that the descendants of the several hundred thousand Poles who migrated to the Ruhr Valley at the end of the nineteenth century are anything but German, even those among them who have married only the descendants of other Polish immigrants. Nationality is a matter of culture, not genetics.59

Now, even if claims to membership in a nation are made on the basis of culture, not genetics, some weight is given to ancestry, both in public opinion and by many national governments. Thus an individual born in Alexandria or Baku who has no knowledge of Greek can receive Greek citizenship by demonstrating that his parents were of Greek ethnicity, although he may not have an ancestor born on Greek soil for many centuries. Nevertheless, it is not solely genetic kinship in a literal sense that defines nations; it is something more multi-faceted and complex.

Of course, the mere fact that a people constitutes a nation that desires or has already established sovereignty over a territory does not settle the question of its right to rule that land. Several criteria are widely employed in assessing the relative validity of such alleged rights, criteria that make a moral argument beyond what we may call the Genghis Khan approach: “I conquered it; therefore I own it.” They include: Self-determination, efficiency, corrective justice, and several types of historical criteria. It is probable that no particular case meets all of the criteria, and no single criterion is a trump card guaranteeing sovereignty in all cases. Historical primacy plays an important role, but is by no means the predominant one; hence, we examine it last.

Claims to sovereignty made under the rubric of self-determination are based on the fact that a group constitutes a majority of the population in a given territory. This concept is widely accepted. Difficulties arise not so much over the principle of self-determination as over the challenges of drawing borders when two or more national groups live in intermingled settlements. For example, the impossibility of creating a border that would leave Muslims on one side and Hindus on the other when Britain ended its rule of India left millions of people on the “wrong” side in 1948. No effort was made to arrange an organized exchange of populations between the newly created states of India and Pakistan, resulting in widespread massacres, the creation of millions of refugees, and a Pakistani state that has been largely cleansed of its indigenous Hindu population.

The principle of national self-determination, moreover, assumes that national identity is a settled thing; in reality, national identity may be undecided and potentially fluid, within limits. Although it was never possible that the Slavic-speaking people of what is now the Republic of Macedonia would choose to identify themselves as Turkish or Austrian, they had no distinct national identity in the nineteenth century. Thus Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia plausibly competed for the right to absorb the territory that would become Macedonia, along with its people. An additional difficulty with the principle of self-determination arises when differential birth and emigration rates change the ethnic equation. In 1948, Arabs were the clear majority in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The fact that there is, today, a Jewish majority in this area makes it more difficult for Palestinian nationalists to advance an argument for the Arab right to sovereignty over the entire land. The Arab majority in Judea and Samaria, on the other hand, makes it similarly difficult for Israel to justify expansion in those areas.

Efficiency-based and use claims are also widespread, derived from the Lockean idea that ownership can be established by the productive use of territory, or, likewise, weakened by failure to settle and use available territory productively.60 Efficiency-based arguments are most frequently appealed to in discussions of such settler nations as the United States and Australia, but the moral weight of efficiency-based claims is regularly acknowledged by the actual practice of governments worldwide. Think of the strenuous, expensive, and centuries-long Norwegian effort to create and maintain population centers north of the Arctic Circle. Oslo viewed the existence of Sami populations in the area as irrelevant to the goal of insuring that the North not slip from Norwegian control (and into the hands of expansionist Russia). Thus was remote Tromso provided with a bishop, a university, an economy, and a population, even though the region has few resources and would not be a viable settlement without massive government intervention.

Corrective justice is another strong argument on which to base a claim to sovereignty. Here, the argument is for restoring what has been wrongly taken away, usually by conquest. The argument for restoring sovereignty to the Korean nation after half a century of Japanese occupation was so strong that the case scarcely had to be made. Most cases, however, are more difficult. Indeed, both Palestinians and Israelis make corrective justice arguments for their rights to territory.

There is more than one variety of historical claims, but all of them require that the group “show that it is indeed, and has been continuously, the same cultural group as that which inhabited the relevant territories all those many years ago.”61 Evidence of prior sovereignty is probably the strongest historic argument that a national movement can make, a claim that strengthens with the length and recency of that rule. When the Slavic peoples of the Balkans moved toward the formation of modern nation states as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, Bulgaria was able to claim descent from an important medieval kingdom. Macedonia, by contrast, had last been a sovereign entity at the time of Philip of Macedon, with whom Macedonian nationalists can demonstrate no cultural continuity. The Sami and Palestinians are in a similar predicament, with no prior history of national sovereignty, or even of rule as a unified province.

The existence of a deep historical connection between a land and nation is also compelling; the strongest form of this argument is that the land in question is the nation’s “cradle,” with rights deriving from the fact that “the events thought to have formed the historical identity of a national group took place in specific territories.”62 The claim of Jews to Israel or of the Arabs to Mecca and Medina epitomizes these arguments.

Thus, the determination of the legitimacy of a claim to sovereignty involves the complex balancing of variables that may seem incommensurate, but somehow must be weighed one against the other. The partisans of a national cause can hardly be blamed for casting about for yet one more argument that might prove dispositive. Genetics, with its appearance of scientific objectivity, holds obvious-albeit illusory-appeal. For nations with strong claims to territorial sovereignty, genetic data will be irrelevant; for nations with weak claims, such data will always be inadequate. Advocates who look to genetics for a decisive victory are certain to be disappointed.

Diana Muir Appelbaum is the author of Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (University Press of New England, 2000), and is working on a book on nationalism. Paul S. Appelbaum is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine, and Law and director of the program in psychiatry, law, and ethics at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.

1. Antonio Arnaiz-Villena et al., “HLA Genes in Macedonians and the Sub-Saharan Origin of the Greeks,” Tissue Antigens 57:2 (2001), pp. 118-127.

2. Nikola Spasikov, “Elendzija (Cheater)!” Macedonian News, at www.maknews.com/html/articles/spasikov/elendzija.htm; Nikola Spasikov, “Gatanka (Puzzle)!” Macedonian News (May 2005), at www.maknews.com/html/articles/spasikov/gatanka_puzzle.html. For a map of historical ethnic Macedonia, see www.historyofmacedonia.org/ConciseMacedonia/map.html.

3. Although we have limited this paper to discussing claims being made by Sami, Macedonian, and Palestinian nationalists, there are other groups making similar claims, including the Lebanese, who claim to be the heirs of the Phoenicians (see “Proving History Through Science: Phoenicians Reborn Through the DNA ‘Alphabet,’ the Y Chromosome,” on the website of the Virtual Center for Phoenician Studies (http://phoenicia.org/genetics.html); and the Assyrian Christians, who claim to be the heirs of ancient Assyria (see the website of the Assyrian Heritage DNA Project, www.familytreedna.com/(zghblo45rkaxxrfmazpi15ng)/public/AssyrianHeritageDNAProject/index.aspx).

4. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford, 2002), p. 359.

5. Chaim Gans, “Historical Rights: The Evaluation of Nationalist Claims to Sovereignty,” Political Theory 29:1 (February 2001), p. 59.

6. Thus a Basque blog, Euskal Blog, can confidently reproduce a map of the Basque homeland, Euskal Herria, printed in National Geographic in November 1995 with a caption that began, “One nation in two countries, Euskal Herria, as three million Basques call their nation…” along with the news that, “Genetic studies show the Basques to be a people distinct from any other in Europe, rooted in the region of the Pyrenees and Cantabrian Mountains before Indo-European tribes arrived. As a saying goes, ‘Before God was God and boulders were boulders, Basques were already Basques.’” See http://txikilike.blogspot.com/2002_01_01_txikilike_archive.html.

7. Tariq Ali, “To Be Intimidated Is to Be an Accomplice: Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and Palestine,” Counterpunch, March 4, 2004.

9. Michael Bamshad, Stephen Wooding, Benjamin A. Salisbury, and J. Claiborne Stephens, “Deconstructing the Relationship Between Genetics and Race,” Nature Reviews Genetics 5 (August 2004), pp. 598-609.

10. Endogamous mating was characteristic of the pre-modern world, where geographic barriers generally determined the group from which one could choose a mate. War and migration could produce major disruptions in endogamy, and even among pre-modern peoples, there was also some new genetic material introduced at the margins of the populations as a result of contacts stimulated by trade. See, for example, Noah A. Rosenberg et al., “Genetic Structure of Human Populations,” Science 298, December 20, 2002, pp. 2381-2385.

11. See, for example, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, 1994). The statement above is a necessarily oversimplified description of the development of genetic differences across population groups. A number of additional factors determine the degree of divergence among populations. Many mutations that affect gene function are incompatible with life, or cause marked functional impairment; when they arise, these deleterious mutations are unlikely to be passed on to progeny, restricting change in the genome. On the other hand, positive effects on survival can accelerate dissemination of a mutation in a population; the relative protective effects of sickle cell and thalassemia genes on survival from malaria contribute to their widespread presence in malarial belts in Africa and parts of Europe. Hence, precision in determining the degree of relatedness of populations is increased if only areas of chromosomes that are not directly involved in coding for genes are examined. Other influences that can magnify differences across populations are the so-called founder and bottleneck effects. Founder effects relate to the restricted gene pool present in a small number of families that migrate to colonize new territories; their descendants will differ more markedly from the population of origin (and resemble each other more closely) than would be expected merely by the passage of time. The genetics of Ashkenazi Jews are thought to reflect a founder effect. Bottlenecks are related phenomena that occur when populations are markedly reduced in size, with a concomitant reduction in genetic diversity, only to begin to grow again afterward. Finally, geneticists talk about “genetic drift,” chance variation in the genetic makeup of populations that can accentuate differences among them over time.

12. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman, “The Application of Molecular Genetic Approaches to the Study of Human Evolution,” Nature Reviews Genetics Supplement 33 (March 2003), pp. 266-275.

13. In addition to the problems in generalizing conclusions from the limited number of genes (often a single one) that are used for these studies, interpretation of the data is often confounded by selective pressures. That is, since mutations in genes that code for proteins are likely to lead to deleterious or (less commonly) advantageous consequences, their spread through a population will be retarded or enhanced accordingly. Calculations of time since divergence, based on such data may be inaccurate, and differences between populations artificially reduced or exaggerated. To the extent that a highly beneficial mutation arises separately in two populations with little genetic relationship, examination of that gene alone will falsely suggest a close genetic relationship between otherwise distant groups.

14. Bamshad, Wooding, Salisbury, and Stephens, “Deconstructing the Relationship Between Genetics and Race.”

15. Other types of mutations that may lead to genetic diversity include insertions, deletions, or transpositions of genetic material in a chromosome. Like SNPs, any of these mutations can be a component of a haplotype.

16. Michael F. Hammer et al., “Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests,” Nature 385 (January 1997), p. 32; Mark G. Thomas et al., “Origins of Old Testament Priests,” Nature 394 (July 1998), pp. 138-140.

17. Doron M. Behar, et al., “The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event,” American Journal of Human Genetics 78:3 (March 2006), pp. 487-497. An added benefit of using the non-recombining portion of the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA for population studies is that so-called recombination events (crossing over of pieces of each pair of chromosomes), which occur in the rest of the genome and can complicate calculations of genetic distance, do not take place in these stretches of DNA. Differences in Y or mitochondrial DNA are almost solely due to random mutation, and hence provide more accurate estimates of the time when two population groups diverged.

18. Loring M. Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-ton, 1995).

19. Aleksandar Donski, The Descendants of Alexander the Great of Macedon, ed. Michael Seraphinoff, trans. Marijan Galevski and Michael Seraphinoff (Shtip: Macedonian Literary Association, 2004); “Why the Macedonians Are Not Slavs,” www.historyofmacedonia.org/ConciseMacedonia/MacedoniansNotSlavs.html.

21. Victor Roudometof, “Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Balkans: Greece and the Macedonian Question,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 14:2 (1996), pp. 253-301.

23. Lyle Campbell, “Review of The Saami Languages: An Introduction,” Language 75:3 (September 1999), p. 645.

24. “The Honningsvag Declaration,” issued by the 18th Sami Conference, Honningsvag, Norway on October 7-9, 2004, refers to the Sami as “an indigenous people and as one nation.” See the website of the Sami Council at www.saamicouncil.net/files/20041215142715.doc, and the following Sami advocacy websites: http://boreale.konto.itv.se/seatnam.htm; www.sametinget.se/sametinget/view.cfm?oid=2000&sat=no; and http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/HistoryCulture/Sami/samisf.html.

25. Diana Muir, “Exhibition Notes: ‘Frost: Life and Cuture of the Sami Reindeer People of Norway,’” The New Criterion 24:8 (April 2006), p. 46.

26.Antonio Torroni et al., “MtDNA Analysis Reveals a Major Late Paleolithic Population Expansion from Southwestern to Northeastern Europe,” American Journal of Human Genetics 62:5 (1998), pp. 1137-1152; K. Tambets et al., “The Western and Eastern Roots of the Saami: The Story of Genetic ‘Outliers’ Told by Mitochondrial DNA and Y Chromosomes,” American Journal of Human Genetics 74 (2004), pp. 661-682; Muir, “Exhibition Notes”; www.sametinget.se/sametinget/view.cfm?oid=1429.

27. Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634-1099, trans. Ethel Broido (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1992).

28. Rajah G. Mattar, “Arab Christians Are Arabs,” Baltimore Chronicle, August 30, 2005, and posted on the website of passia, the Palestine Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, at www.passia.org/meetings/rsunit/Articles/E-August-2005.htm.

29. Al Quds University Homepage, “Jerusalem, the Old City: An Introduction,” at www.alquds.edu/gen_info/index.php?page=jerusalem_history.

30. Joseph Massad, quoted in Andrew Whitehead, “History on the Line, ‘No Common Ground’: Joseph Massad and Benny Morris Discuss the Middle East,” History Workshop Journal 53:1 (2002), pp. 214-215.

31. Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (London: Pan, 1976); D.M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars (New York: Schocken, 1967); Mazin Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli Palestinian Struggle (London: Pluto, 2004), p. 28.

33. Michael F. Hammer et al., “Jewish and Middle Eastern Non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-Chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97:12 (June 2000), pp. 6769-6774; Almut Nebel et al., “High-Resolution Y Chromosome Haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs Reveal Geographic Substructure and Substantial Overlap with Haplotypes of Jews,” Human Genetics 107:6 (November 2000), pp. 630-641.

34. Antonio Arnaiz-Villena et al., “The Origin of Palestinians and Their Genetic Relatedness with Other Mediterranean Populations,” Human Immunology 62:9 (September 2001), pp. 889-900. The paper was later withdrawn from the scientific literature by the editor of the journal in which it was published—an unusual step, justified by its rather extraordinary historical claims, for example, “[T]he Palestinians are nowadays thought to come from the Egyptian garrisons that were abandoned to their own fate on the Canaan land by 1200 years b.c.e.…” and “[T]he origin of the long-lasting Jewish-Palestinian hostility is the fight for land in ancient times” are just two examples. Erica Klarreich, “Genetics Paper Erased from Journal over Political Content,” Nature 414 (November 2001), p. 382.

35. Whitehead, “History on the Line,” p. 215; Ali, “To Be Intimidated Is to Be an Accomplice.”

37. Neil Risch, Alberto Piazza, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “Correspondence: Dropped Genetics Paper Lacked Scientific Merit,” Nature 415 (January 2002), p. 115. Although the letter was focused on the controversy surrounding the withdrawal of the paper on Palestinian-Jewish similarities, the critique applies equally well to the Macedonian analyses; both papers were based on the same data set and used the same techniques.

38. Bamshad et al., “Deconstructing the Relationship Between Genetics and Race.”

39. Risch, Piazza, and Cavalli-Sforza, “Dropped Genetics Paper Lacked Scientific Merit.”

40. Alexander Petlichkovski et al., “High-Resolution Typing of hla-drb1 Locus in the Macedonian Population,” Tissue Antigens 64:4 (October 2004), pp. 486-491.

41. Zoe Rosser et al., “Y-Chromosomal Diversity in Europe Is Clinal and Influenced Primarily by Geography Rather than by Language,” American Journal of Human Genetics 67:6 (December 2000), pp. 1526-1543; Tatiana Zerjal et al., “Geographical, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences on Genetic Diversity: Y-Chromosomal Distribution in Northern European Populations,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 18:6 (June 2001), pp. 1077-1087; Mirja Raitio et al., “Y-Chromosomal SNPs in Finno-Ugric-Speaking Populations Analyzed by Minisequencing on Microarrays,” Genome Research 11:3 (March 2001), pp. 471-482.

42. Lyle Campbell, “On the Linguistic Prehistory of Finno-Ugric,” in Raymond Kickey and Stanisaw Puppel, eds., Language History and Linguistic Modeling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on His 60th Birthday (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 829-861.

43. Torroni et al, “MtDNA Analysis Reveals a Major Late Paleolithic Population Expansion from Southwestern to Northeastern Europe.” Expansion of Neolithic technology carried by an Indo-European population into Europe is dated to around 6000 b.c.e. See Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes, ch. 5.

44. The most plausible interpretation of these data is that the ancestors of today’s Sami were predominantly the males of the later Finno-Ugric migration, who mated mostly with the women descended from the glacial refugee population. However, recent research on Sami genetics has found evidence of maternal mitochondrial DNA from the Finno-Ugric line as well, probably derived from a migration roughly 2,700 years ago. These data help to date the Finno-Ugric migration (and agree with independent linguistic data), and underscore the complexity of the genetics of even as isolated a population as the Sami, which, like almost all groups, reflects a mixture of lineage in both paternal and maternal lines. See Max Ingman and Ulf Gyllensten, “A Recent Genetic Link Between Sami and the Volga-Ural Region of Russia.” European Journal of Human Genetics, advance online publication, September 20, 2006.

45. Controversy continues to surround the origins of the Sami, underscoring the virtue of caution in making claims about their genetic heritage. See Tambets et al., “The Western and Eastern Roots of the Saami”; H. Ikegaya et al., “Genetic Diversity of JC Virus in the Saami and the Finns: Implications for Their Population History,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 128:1 (September 2005), pp. 185-193.

46. Arnaiz-Villena et al., “The Origin of Palestinians.” Studies of Palestinians’ genetics have suggested non-random differences, for example, between highland and other groups. See Nebel et al., “High-Resolution Y Chromosome Haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs.”

47. Nebel, et al., “High-Resolution Y Chromosome Haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs.”

48. Almut Nebel et al., “The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East,” American Journal of Human Genetics 69:5 (November 2001), p. 1095; Hammer et al., “Jewish and Middle Eastern Non-Jewish Populations.”

49. Ali, “To Be Intimidated Is to Be an Accomplice”; Saliba, “Rebutting a ‘Misguided Political Project.’”

50. Note that such comparisons require a priori assumptions about which groups in fact descended from the ancient inhabitants of the land. Demonstrating that Macedonians have a high degree of genetic relatedness to Cretans, as Arnaiz-Villena et al. claimed, is of little value in establishing historical primacy unless one begins with the belief that the Cretans themselves are not descendants of later interlopers. Assumptions about comparison groups in population genetics studies must be scrutinized as carefully as the data themselves. Arnaiz-Villena et al., “The Origin of Palestinians and Their Genetic Relatedness with Other Mediterranean Populations.”

51. Martin Richards et al., “Extensive Female-Mediated Gene Flow from Sub-Saharan Africa into Near Eastern Arab Populations,” American Journal of Human Genetics 72:4 (April 2003), pp. 1058-1064.

52. Ellen Levy-Coffman, “A Mosaic of People: The Jewish Story and a Reassessment of the DNA Evidence,” Journal of Genetic Genealogy 1:1 (Spring 2005), pp. 12-33.

59. Nations confer automatic membership on the offspring of members, a practice that may appear to support the notion that nations are biologically based communities, until it is examined more closely. The Jewish nation, for example, defines every child born of a Jewish mother as Jewish. The mother, however, may be Jewish either because she was born to a Jewish mother or because she converted to Judaism. And anyone born Jewish can cease to be Jewish by the act of conversion. Thus, even in this instance, cultural identity trumps lineage.

60. Tamar Meisels, Territorial Rights (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2005), ch. 5.

62. Gans, “Historical Rights,” p. 66; see also Chaim Gans’ essay in the current issue, pp. 80-111

Do the Jews have a historical right to the land of Israel? To many Israe-lis, the answer to this question is obvious. A divine promise is often invoked by many religious or traditionally oriented Jews in Israel in order to justify the movement advocating settlement in Greater Israel. Many more Israelis, who were raised according to the Zionist ethos, would tend to answer the above question affirmatively. However, this response emanates from early ideological conditioning rather than from a worldview which is the product of systematic reasoning.

Indeed, when viewed through the lens of universalistic moral discourse, rather than through that of religious or nationalistic dogma, the picture that emerges is far more complex. Several contemporary liberal thinkers have argued that, from a universalistic point of view, it is possible to justify certain versions of nationalist ideology of the ethno-cultural type, such as Zionism. According to the ideology of cultural nationalism, members of groups sharing a common history and culture have a fundamental and morally significant interest in adhering to their culture and sustaining it across generations. This interest warrants political protection by means of self-determination and self-rule.1

Many nationalist movements around the world have adopted positions of this kind. Yet what separates Zionism from all other nationalist ideologies of the ethno-cultural type-including even those historically championed by Jews, such as the Bund movement2-is its insistence on the idea that the Jewish people’s aspiration to adhere to its own culture and establish self-rule can be fulfilled only in the land of Israel, and not in any country in the diaspora, or on any territory without a direct link to Jewish history. As the leaders of the Zionist movement have reiterated time and again, Jewish self-determination is wholly dependent on the Jews’ realization of their “historical rights” to their homeland.

In the following pages, I will examine the nature of the Jews’ historical rights over the land of Israel and its role within the Zionist discourse. As I will try to demonstrate here, the Zionist movement’s employment of the historical rights argument in order to establish the land of Israel as the preferred location-or perhaps even the only possible site-for the fulfillment of Jewish national aspirations was, in fact, justified, especially in view of the various threats faced by the Jewish people in the first half of the twentieth century. Invoking this argument was justified particularly if it is understood to stem not from the primacy of the Jews in the land of Israel (henceforth, “the first occupancy claim”), but rather from the primacy of the land of Israel in Jewish history (“the formative territory claim”).

However, historical rights in themselves are not enough to justify the Jewish demand for territorial sovereignty over the land of Israel or even parts of it. Rather, historical rights may be considered in order to determine the specific geographical location in which Jewish self-determination may come to be realized. This fundamental distinction-between invoking the historical rights argument in order to justify demands for territorial sovereignty, and employing the historical rights argument in order to determine the specific geographical site for the realization of a nation’s right to self-determination-was not lost on several of Zionism’s most prominent leaders, such as Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and even Ze’ev Jabotinsky. In their statements, as well as in the declarations issued by prominent national institutions such as the Zionist Congress and the Jewish Agency, one can detect varying degrees of awareness of the complex nature of the historical rights argument and its limitations.

Unfortunately, when one examines the fierce political debate held within Israel on the issue of its borders after the Six Day War, the participants in this debate do not seem to exhibit any awareness of the complexity of the concept of historical rights. This applies even to those who purport to represent the legacy of the great Zionist leaders mentioned above. The conclusions of the analysis presented below are worth considering as long as the concept of historical rights remains on the public agenda.

It is important to distinguish between the determination of the geograph-ical site of the right to national self-determination on the one hand, and, on the other hand, justifying the right itself, its institutional form, and its territorial scope. Unlike historical rights, which are acquired by virtue of specific events in which the specific claimant to such rights was involved, the right to self-determination could be said to be ahistorical. The groups that have it are entitled to it by virtue of belonging to a general category (namely, being a nation) and not by virtue of any particular events in their history.3 If historical rights alone constitute the justification for the right to territorial sovereignty, then they necessarily serve also to provide the answers to questions concerning the appropriate geographical site, territorial scope, and institutional form of the right to national self-determination. For if historical rights give rise to territorial sovereignty, they necessarily presuppose a statist realization of self-determination within the whole area with respect to which the historical rights are claimed. On the other hand, justifying the ahistorical right to national self-determination, for example, by means of the argument that it enables individuals to live their lives within the framework of their culture does not predetermine what the appropriate institutional framework of such self-determination should be (for instance, personal autonomy in various areas, territorial autonomy, or sovereignty in the framework of a nation state), what its territorial scope ought to be (assuming that it concerns territorial self-determination), or where the appropriate geographical site for the realization of this self-determination should be. Historical rights could constitute a solution to this third problem concerning the site of the territory designated for self-determination, without necessarily determining its institutional character and the scope of the territories in which self-determination is realized.4

The difference between using the historical-rights argument as the basis for determining the site of the right to self-determination, and invoking the same argument as the basis for asserting political sovereignty and engaging in territorial expansion is of great normative significance. Put simply, the latter is morally questionable. The historical-rights argument cannot justify the right to territorial sovereignty, and it also cannot serve as a basis for determining its scope. Given the scarcity of resources and space in the world, basing sovereignty rights and their territorial scope on historical rights could endanger the livelihood and autonomy of many peoples. Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated this point clearly in The Social Contract: “How can one man or a whole people take possession of vast territories, thereby excluding the rest of the world from their enjoyment, save by an act of criminal usurpation, since, as the result of such an act, the rest of humanity is deprived of the amenities for dwelling and subsistence which nature has provided for their common enjoyment?”5

Rousseau’s critique pertains to people physically present in the territories over which they seek to establish territorial sovereignty. It is all the more applicable to nations which attempt to renew their physical presence in territories where they lived many generations ago. If such nations invoke historical rights to claim territorial sovereignty, then accepting this claim would not only make it impossible for these territories to be used later to satisfy the basic and/or important needs of other people who might need these territories. It would also increase the risk of uprooting people already living there, and it would necessarily lead to their subordination to foreign rule.

In contrast, if a nation’s historical rights are not perceived as grounds for demanding territorial sovereignty, but rather only as a consideration for determining the location where its right to self-determination should be realized, then the fears expressed above lose a considerable measure of their weight. This is particularly true if considerations of substantive justice serve to determine whether nations are entitled to sovereignty or other territorial rights. Based on criteria pertaining to substantive justice, territories could be allocated to nations according to the size of their respective populations, the nature of their culture, the specific needs created by the culture, the degree to which any given nation is committed to members of the nation and how this nation treats those who are not members, or according to a combination of the above criteria as well as additional considerations. Historical rights could serve as a consideration for determining the specific geographical location where self-determination is to be exercised. If the territories of the world are divided between the nations in the world on the basis of these considerations, and if the role of historical rights is interpreted not as a basis for the right to sovereignty in and of itself but rather as grounds for determining the location where self-determination is to be realized, then these rights do not endanger the livelihood and autonomy of many people. People would only have to pay the price of being excluded from specific areas-the areas granted to other nations for the exercise of their own right to self-determination. These areas would not be any larger than those from which they would in any case be excluded, if the territorial rights accompanying self-determination were justly distributed among national groups.

Historical rights should be resorted to for purposes of determining the location of nations’ self-determination not only because there are no reasons for not doing so, but also because there are reasons supporting this. In cases of nations that have not lost their physical ties with the territories to which they could claim historical rights, this applies to historical rights under their two conceptions, namely, first occupancy and formative territories. If the nation that was the first occupant in a given territory still occupies the territory, then first occupancy should be the basis for determining the site for realizing that nation’s right to self-determination. Resorting to other grounds for determining this site would entail the re-location of entire peoples, which would be costly and would involve extreme discomfort to them. Furthermore, there do not appear to be any good reasons for exacting such high costs and causing such inconvenience. Under the formative territories conception, historical rights should not serve as grounds for determining the location of nations’ right to self-determination only for these pragmatic reasons. Put simply, for people that ascribe great significance to their national affiliation, it may be very important not to be torn away from their national group’s formative territories. Being away from their formative territories may arouse feelings of alienation and longing. In view of the importance of formative territories to people’s national identity, it can definitely be argued that the link between these territories and the right to national self-determination is an essential one. In contrast to first occupancy, formative territories not only are suitable grounds for determining the location of the right to self-determination but seem to be essential for the realization of this right.6

The pragmatic considerations due to which it is desirable to determine the location of self-determination in the specific territory where the particular nation was the first occupant or with which it has a formative link lose their validity once the physical connection has been severed. If a nation eventually ceases to occupy a particular territory, then it cannot be claimed that realizing its right to self-determination would prevent this particular nation and other nations from having to wander from place to place. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. Any such territorial restitution is likely to result in forcing people to wander from place to place.

However, the non-pragmatic considerations for which historical rights under the formative territories conception could serve as grounds for determining the site for the realization of self-determination do not necessarily lose their force if the physical link between the nation and the territory has been severed. The interest that the committed members of such a nation have in not being separated from their formative territories is valid both while they are occupying the territories and when they cease living there. This is certainly the case when, despite physical separation from their formative territories, members of the group have retained an emotional attachment to the place that still constitutes a part of their identity. In that sense, the physical severance of the group’s members from their formative territories does not really differ from the physical separation of people from their relatives. These connections usually continue to be a part of their identity and as such provide reasons for determining the site of self-determination in the formative territories even when the physical connection no longer exists.

However, the fact that the non-pragmatic reasons retain their validity for determining the location of self-determination does not make them conclusive reasons for actually doing so. There are two kinds of considerations that might militate against them. The first kind of considerations pertains to the demographic situation in these territories and the needs of those living there and those wishing to return to these territories. Consider the case of an Indian tribe, the descendants of which seek to return to Manhattan in order to reside there within the framework of their culture. However, due to the large non-Indian population currently living in Manhattan, if members of the tribe were allowed to fulfill their wishes, this would result in the imposition of unreasonably high costs on the other residents of Manhattan. For example, the population density of Manhattan would certainly make it impossible to allow members of the Indian tribe to live there within the framework of their culture, if this also means providing them with hunting grounds. In other words, when a territory is densely populated, this seems to give rise to considerations which must override the force of the formative tie as grounds for determining the site for the realization of the nation’s right to self-determination. However, with regard to areas that are less crowded than New York City and/or in cultures that do not require hunting grounds in order to realize their cultural identity, it seems that the return of ethno-cultural groups to such areas is something that such groups should be entitled to if they have a formative tie with those areas.7 Indeed, the claims of ethno-cultural groups to return to areas with which they have a formative connection in order to realize certain forms of self-determination was recently recognized in the rulings of both Australian and Canadian courts.8

That said, it must be noted that the return of native groups in Australia and Canada, in contrast to the Jewish return to the land of Israel, was conducted within the political framework of a state that has legislative and judicial institutions as well as law-enforcement agencies. These institutions can draft the principles that define the relationships among all the people or groups under their jurisdiction. These institutions can settle disputes which might arise and enforce these principles and any judicial decisions. The Jewish return to Palestine, however, took place in an international context in which such legislative, judicial, and law-enforcement institutions were and to a great extent still are in their embryonic stages.9 A second category of considerations could therefore militate against considering the formative connection as a conclusive consideration in determining the location for the realization of the self-determination of nations that are no longer physically present in their historical homeland. It should be remembered that the principle according to which formative ties should be considered in determining where a nation should realize its right to self-determination settles this specific question only pertaining to the justice of self-determination. There is a whole range of additional issues related to the justice of this right, such as the global distribution of political power and territorial resources among nations. However, in order for justice to be achieved in these matters, there is a need for most nations in the world to coordinate their actions by adhering to a comprehensive system of principles that would provide sufficiently specific answers to the above questions. One isolated action according to one principle only that should belong to a comprehensive and institutionalized system could well be compared to playing one isolated chord or drumbeat without the rest of the symphony to which it belongs. However, in the case of justice, as opposed to the analogy of music, the danger of playing one of the chords or drumbeats in isolation is not just that of creating a cacophony. Applying one isolated principle of justice to only one party may mean that this party alone might be forced to pay a price which ought to have been shared by all those subject to the aforementioned system of principles. This isolated action may also confer advantages to parties who may not be the only ones entitled to that advantage.10

Moreover, if the burdens and advantages of distributive justice are not divided between all those who are supposed to be subject thereto (in our case, the nations of the world), and only one of them pays the price (perhaps rightfully so, but others should also have to pay the price), and only one of them reaps the benefits (again, perhaps rightfully so, but others should also reap the benefits), then this will no doubt lead to instability and bloodshed.11

In other words, even if the formative tie which a particular nation has with a given territory should ideally be a reason to make that territory the site for the realization of this nation’s self-determination, provided the geo-demographic conditions of that territory allow this, then, in our non-ideal world, both considerations of justice (the equal distribution of burdens and benefits to all subjects) and of morality (prevention of bloodshed) compel the suspension of any action according to this ideal.12

This last argument may indeed be a compelling one and under normal circumstances should convince members of nations wishing to return to their historical homeland to refrain from doing so. However, in the absence of real alternatives for realizing their self-determination, or at least in the absence of real alternatives for leading a reasonable life as individuals, it would not be unreasonable for members of a national group to nevertheless resort to the historical rights argument. It could be argued that they then have a remedial justification for seeking to protect their physical integrity and retain their dignity by means of realizing their right to self-determination in their historical homeland.13

I have so far defined the conditions and circumstances under which the historical-rights argument may be justly used for determining the site for realizing a nation’s right to self-determination. I am of the opinion that this argument provides a moral justification for the return of the Jews to their historical homeland, even though it is not sufficient in itself to serve as a basis for the Jewish demand for territorial sovereignty over the land of Israel. As I will show below, this was probably clear to several prominent leaders of the Zionist movement.

It should be noted that Zionism is not the only political movement to have made use of the historical-rights argument. Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck invoked it in order to justify the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1870. Similarly, Tomas Masaryk used it in order to justify the inclusion of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia after World War I, and Slobodan Milosevic recently cited historical rights in order to justify the expulsion of the Albanians from Kosovo. In all of these instances and countless others, leaders of national groups resorted to historical rights in order to make territorial claims. Yet there are two significant differences between how one could interpret the early Zionists’ reliance on the historical rights argument, and how one could interpret the use of this argument in the other cases just mentioned.

Firstly, whereas Zionism could be regarded as having invoked the historical rights argument primarily in order to stress the primacy of the land of Israel in the history of the Jews (the “formative territories” argument), those who used it in most other cases referred mainly to the primacy of the nations they represented in the history of the territories they were claiming (the “first occupancy” argument).14 Indeed, when Bismarck sought to annex Alsace-Lorraine to the German Reich after the Franco-Prussian War, he cited the fact that these territories had been under German rule in the sixteenth century. Tomas Masaryk’s demand to include the Sudetenland in the Czechoslovakian Republic after World War I, despite the fact that the Sudetenland was populated mainly by Germans, was backed by a similar claim, namely, that the Sudetenland had been part of the Bohemian kingdom at the end of the Middle Ages. Conceivably, this interpretation of the historical rights argument as a first occupancy argument is also implied in the arguments used by the indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and New Zealand, all of whom demand that territories usurped by European latecomers be returned to them.15 Similar demands seem to be at play in the dispute between the Tamil and the Sinhalese populations in Sri Lanka as well as in many other cases.

In contrast, when the Zionist movement referred to historical rights it focused more on the predominance of the land of Israel in Jewish history and its significance for Jewish identity than on the fact that Jews had lived in the land of Israel long before the Arabs arrived there. One of the most noteworthy expressions of this sentiment can be found in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. It states that the land of Israel “was the birthplace of the Jewish people,” and that it was there that “their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped,” where “they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance.” “Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment,” the declaration goes on to say, “Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland.”16 Indeed, these formulations stress the predominance of the land of Israel in Jewish identity, while they contain no reference to the primacy of the Jews in the history of the land of Israel.

Secondly, and more importantly, while other nations that were already living in their historical homeland resorted to the historical rights argument in order to justify demands for territorial expansion, Zionism can be interpreted as invoking the historical rights argument in order designate the land of Israel as the most suitable place for the realization of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. Like the other Jewish movements at the end of the nineteenth century, which could be regarded as manifestations of ethno-cultural nationalism, the Zionist movement conceived of the right to self-determination as ahistorical and universal. Indeed, the dispute between Zionism and the other Jewish nationalist movements turned primarily on the issue of the geographical location for Jewish self-determination. The Bund and other autonomists held the view that the Jews should realize their self-determination in a non-territorial manner in the places where they currently resided-namely, in Eastern and Central Europe. Another view was that of the Territorialists, who seceded from the Zionist movement, contending that Jewish self-determination should be realized territorially in one of the territories currently suggested to them (such as Uganda). The third view was that of the “Zion’s Zionists,” also called “Palestinians” at the time. By invoking the historical-rights argument, they claimed that Jewish self-determination was possible only in the land of Israel, or what was then called “Palestine.”

Now, in light of the situation in Russia and Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, and at least in view of what we now know to have happened in the first half of the twentieth century, the chances that the Jews could have realized their right to self-determination there as desired by the Bund, or even to continue living there as individuals, were, to say the least, bleak.17 The Territorialists’ thinking was also flawed. Their plan, which called for the placement of Jewish self-determination in Uganda, was affected by the same flaws as the Zionist one, but without the attending advantages: The East African country on which they had set their sights was already home to other ethno-cultural groups, and the goal of settling among them was fraught with the danger of violent clashes. However, unlike the Jewish link with the land of Israel, the Jews had no formative or historical link whatsoever with East Africa.

However, none of the arguments mentioned earlier against nations returning to their formative territories-namely, that acting on principles of ideal justice in a non-ideal world could bring about unjust results, and that bloodshed should be prevented-is sufficient for denying the justice of the Zionist aspiration to realize Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel. As noted above, persecution of the Jews was rampant at the time and the threat of death or loss of human dignity was imminent. Even though bloodshed was clearly expected to be caused by their return to their historical homeland, the Jews had not yet encountered it face to face. It was only human to still entertain the hope that they might be able to protect themselves and retain their dignity in the land of Israel.

Stemming from the need to rescue themselves from persecution, the Jews therefore could resort to remedial justification in order to realize their primary right to self-determination, and to determine its site in their historical homeland. This rationale is very similar to what is referred to as the “necessity” defense in criminal law. This defense serves to justify acts which in normal circumstances are considered legally and morally unjustified, or at least excuses those committing these acts from liability for having committed them. The defense in question is similar to that granted to a mortally wounded person who has no way of saving his life other than by breaking into a pharmacy to steal the medicines that would save his life.18 As to the query “Why in our pharmacy?” that some Arabs might come up with, the response would be either, “Because it is the only one carrying the appropriate medicine,” or “Because the medicine carried here is better than the medicines found in other pharmacies” (that is, places such as Uganda, Eastern Europe, and Argentina, as it were). The medicine is a unique one, or is at least better than the others. That is, an attempt to realize self-determination in the formative territory is the only attempt which has a chance of succeeding, or at least has better chances of success than attempts to realize self-determination in other territories. The pharmacy analogy illustrates what should have been emphasized from the very beginning, namely, that the reasons militating against the realization of Jewish self-determination in Palestine-stemming from injustice and the danger of bloodshed-were overridden not by the Jewish right to self-determination in and of itself and the ordinary reasons supporting this right (i.e., people’s interest in living within the framework of their cultures and determining their destiny within this culture), but rather by the urgent need that the Jews had, both as individuals and as a people, to protect their dignity and their physical safety.

The return of the Jews to the land of Israel was, therefore, justified, although not merely because of the historical rights argument. As demonstrated above, historical rights cannot in and of themselves serve as the basis for territorial sovereignty, but only as the basis for determining where a nation’s right to self-determination should be realized. In this regard, it may further be noted that statehood and political sovereignty is but one of the various forms the right to self-determination may take; there are other, more modest forms for institutionalizing this right. In addition, it must also be stressed that invoking the historical right as grounds for determining the location for the realization of the right to self-determination does not mean that the scope of this self-determination must extend over the whole area with which the nation in question has historical ties.

Clearly, this position was not held by all of Zionism’s early leaders. Three main approaches seem to have been endorsed by various Zionist leaders. According to one approach, the historical right of the Jews to the land of Israel justified political sovereignty over Greater Israel, namely, all of the land of Israel. Adherents of a second approach, who were aware of the limitations of the historical rights argument, sought to downplay Jewish nationalist aspirations by not demanding control of the entire territory. A third group of Zionist leaders aspired to establish a sovereign Jewish state within as much of the land of Israel as possible, but nonetheless seemed to suspect that the historical-rights claim would not be sufficient grounds on which to justify this course of action.

The first approach, according to which the Greater Israel ideology could be justified by means of the historical rights argument, was held by the radical factions within religious Zionism and Revisionism. Religious Zionists, who regarded the modern return of the Jews to Zion as a sign of the messiah’s impending arrival, viewed the historical right as deriving from the divine promise to Abraham in “the covenant between the pieces.” According to this position, the Bible confers a stamp of approval on Jewish sovereignty over all of Canaan, “from the Egyptian river until the great river… Euphrates.”19 Thus not only did the divine promise justify the Jewish return to the land of Israel, but it also determined the territorial scope to which the exiled nation should now return. The same applies to the radical Revisionists’ interpretation of the historical-rights argument. This faction’s ideologues, Joshua Heschel Yeivin and Uri Tzvi Greenberg, and the members of the Lehi group (an underground militia in pre-state Israel) were of the opinion that the Jewish right to sovereignty in the land of Israel required no moral justification-or, at least, no justification of a universal nature. The “Eighteen Principles of National Renewal” drafted for the Lehi by its founder, Abraham Stern, best expresses this ideology: “The Jewish people conquered the land of Israel by the sword. There it became a nation, and there alone it shall restore itself. For this reason the people of Israel are the sole rightful owners of the land of Israel. This right is absolute: It has not yet lapsed and cannot ever lapse.”20 In other words, if having conquered a territory “by the sword” justifies sovereignty, and if, during various periods in history, the land of Israel was conquered in its entirety by the Jews, then the Jews are indeed the rightful owners of the entire land of Israel.

The only problem with the arguments of both the messianic faction within religious Zionism and that of the radical Revisionists is that they do not make the slightest attempt to provide moral or universally valid arguments.21 The movement seems content with persuading those who already subscribe to its own tenets.22 Rabbi Meir Berlin, who was the honorary president of the World Mizrahi Movement, admitted as much in his speech to the Twentieth Zionist Congress in 1937, at which agreement was reached on the general outline of partition. “Nor are we claiming our right for reasons of moral rectitude,” he pronounced. “The basis of Zionism is that the land is ours, and does not belong to the Arabs.”23

At the other end of the spectrum were those who did not demand Jewish sovereignty over Greater Israel. Among this group were Ahad Ha’am, Chaim Weizmann, the socialist Zionist movement of Hashomer Hatza’ir, the members of Brit Shalom, and also the Jewish Agency. The argument in the quotation below appears in a memo presented by the Jewish Agency to the Palestine Royal Commission in 1936 (and later submitted to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in 1946):

It is asserted that it might similarly be pleaded that the Italians had a claim to a national home in Great Britain because that country had once formed part of the Roman Empire. The conclusive reply to that sophistic argument is that the Italians were never settled in England and that they have, and always have had, a home of their own in Italy, whilst the Jews are not merely the ancient rulers but also the former settlers of Palestine and never had and to this day do not possess any other national home. It is because of that homelessness and because “they have never forgotten” that the Jews have a claim to the restoration of their national life in Palestine.24

The report’s admission that the Italians cannot claim sovereignty over Britain necessarily implies recognition that the historical right cannot be the basis for the right to sovereignty in and of itself. However, the quoted passage seems to imply that in cases of nations lacking a national home, the historical right can be a consideration in determining the geographical site for the realization of their self-determination. According to the passage, by virtue of the fact that they are a homeless nation, the Jews are entitled to renew their home in Palestine. It does not say that their state of homelessness entitles them to renew their sovereignty over all of Palestine. Similar wording, from which it may be understood that historical rights can serve as a basis for the establishment of a homeland in the land of Israel but not sovereignty over all of it, can be, as expected, found in the writings of Ahad Ha’am,25 and appears repeatedly in other important Zionist documents. For instance, in the Basel Program at the First Zionist Congress, Zionism was defined as “striv[ing] to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine.”26 The Balfour Declaration which Weizmann managed to obtain from the British government27 speaks of the constitution of a national home in the land of Israel.28 It is worth noting that these statements not only seem to recognize the fact that historical rights do not provide a basis for sovereignty over all of the land of Israel, but also imply that, quite possibly, these rights do not constitute a basis for sovereignty at all. Rather, they only establish the geographical site for self-determination, which may take several institutional forms.29

Chaim Weizmann, for example, was well aware of the moral limitations of the historical-rights argument. For a long time, he supported the establishment of a binational state in the land of Israel, and in his testimony to the Peel Commission, he maintained that even if the Jews were to become the majority in Palestine, there would be no need to turn it into a Jewish national state.30 This was also the position of the members of Brit Shalom and Hashomer Hatza’ir. The latter, for instance, were of the opinion that the Jews ought to return to all parts of the land of Israel, but believed that their national self-determination need not be realized by means of Jewish sovereignty over all of the land of Israel; binational cooperation with the Arabs would suffice.31 Yet the positions of such groups as Brit Shalom and Hashomer Hatzair with regard to the question of historical rights will hardly come as a surprise to those familiar with their ideologies. Really surprising are the positions and arguments expressed by David Ben-Gurion and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the leaders of the two main Zionist parties.

It is well known that Ben-Gurion was prepared to accept a territorial compromise for pragmatic reasons. Nonetheless, on many occasions he expressed the opinion that, in principle, the Jews had the historical right to sovereignty over all parts of the land of Israel.32 Even so, certain turns of phrase employed by the Zionist leader reveal that he was indeed aware of the fact that the historical rights argument alone was not an adequate basis on which to rest claims for the right to Jewish sovereignty over Greater Israel. According to Ben-Gurion:

[This right] stems from the unbreakable bond between the Hebrew people and its historic homeland; from the right of the Jewish nation to independence and national renewal in equal measure to that of the world’s other nations; from the status of the Jews in the diaspora as a wandering minority at the mercy of strangers; from the need to find a home for millions of Jewish immigrants; from the under-populated condition of the land of Israel; from the possibilities for settlement and the opportunity to make bountiful the earth of the land of Israel and its endless natural treasures, now lying fallow; from the Jewish settlement enterprise in the land over the last several generations….33

Among other things, these words contain all the components of the argument I presented earlier for the Jewish return to the land of Israel, namely, the universal ahistorical right of all nations to self-determination, the particular historical right of the Jews in the land of Israel predicated upon the centrality of this land in Jewish identity and history; the fact that, at the time, the land of Israel was not densely populated to a degree that would have prevented Jewish immigration and settlement; and the Jews’ special need for self-rule since they had been at the mercy of other peoples in the diaspora. Ben-Gurion does not say that any one reason of the several he cited would suffice, in and of itself, to secure Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, or if some or all of them would be necessary toward this end. It is therefore impossible to conclude from his statement whether or not he was of the opinion that historical rights alone were enough to justify Jewish sovereignty over the entire land of Israel. However, the fact that Ben-Gurion raised all of the above points, and did not find it satisfactory simply to mention the historical rights argument, seems to indicate that he was sensitive to this argument’s limitations, even if he was not explicit on this matter.

Surprisingly, it was Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism, who was explicit on this point. He openly argued that the demand for territorial sovereignty cannot be justified merely by resorting to historical rights. According to him, “The first question is, ‘Do you need land?’ If you don’t need it, if you are sufficiently provided for, it is then impossible to be backed by historical rights.”34 In order to justify the Jews’ return to the land of Israel and their aspiration to establish a sovereign homeland there, Jabotinsky linked the historical right, predicated on the particularistic ties of a given nation to a given territory, with the ahistorical and universal right of every nation to national self-determination. The fact that he interpreted self-determination as a right founded on universal distributive justice, and one that ought to be enjoyed by all nations, is clearly expressed by his assertion that, “Self-determination means revision-revision such as the division of the Earth between the nations, so that those nations with too much land would give over parts of them to those nations which do not have enough, or are completely landless in order for every nation to be given the opportunity for self-determination.”35

Moreover, Jabotinsky added the urgent need to save the Jews from persecution. As he testified before the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission, “it is quite understandable that the Arabs of Palestine would also prefer to be the Arab State No. 4, No. 5, or No. 6… but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation.”36

In this context, it is worth highlighting that in explaining his demand to establish a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River to the Peel Commission, Jabotinsky did not invoke the historical rights argument, but instead resorted to pragmatic calculations, such as how much territory would be required for the millions of Jews in need of rescue to settle in the land of Israel. This number was based on some ideal of the desirable population density per kilometer given the prevailing circumstances in the land of Israel at the time.37

In contrast to the position normally attributed to him, these and other statements by Jabotinsky indicate that his Greater Israel vision did not derive solely from the historical-rights argument. Rather, it was grounded in a more complex argument presupposing the distinctions which I made in the first parts of this essay, namely, the distinction between justifying the Jewish right to sovereignty (by resorting to the right to national self-determination), justifying the site where this self-determination ought to be realized (by resorting to the historical rights argument), justifying the territorial scope of this self-determination (by taking into account the number of Jews it must contain combined with some ideal of the desirable population density), and justifying the Jewish return to the land of Israel despite the fact that the territory in question was already inhabited by another national group (by resorting to the remedial justification of necessity in rescuing the persecuted Jews). Thus, while there is no doubt that Jabotinsky believed that the Jews’ right to self-determination applied to both banks of the Jordan, he also undoubtedly understood that it was out of the question to base this type of demand on historical-rights alone. However, this does not apply to many of his followers and political heirs who were entranced by the allure of blatantly amoral or religious readings of the historical-rights argument.38

The statements made by Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion are instructive: They demonstrate that recognizing the limits of the historical-rights argument does not necessarily contradict the desire to establish a Jewish homeland in Greater Israel. Nonetheless, on its own, the historical-rights argument is not enough to provide a moral basis for this aspiration. Justifying sovereignty and territorial expansion requires additional arguments, some of which depart from the conceptual framework of national self-determination and the historical-rights argument.

Unfortunately, since the Six Day War, the concept of historical rights has become a tool of certain political factions that seek to rationalize the expansion of Jewish sovereignty to Judea and Samaria and, until recently, to Gaza as well. This use of historical rights assumes that these rights can justify territorial sovereignty. Fortunately, however, fifty-eight years after the founding of the State of Israel, the predicament of the Jews is very different from what it was like in 1948. As citizens of a Jewish state, the Jews have realized their right to self-determination and can now provide refuge to other Jews in other parts of the world, should they be in need of it.

Consequently, it must be recognized that employing the historical rights argument as a main defense for the continued occupation of Judea and Samaria and the Jewish settlement movement therein is not essentially different from Bismarck’s employment of this argument when he annexed Alsace-Lorraine, or from the propaganda campaign pursued by Milosevic when he refused to grant autonomy to the Albanians in Kosovo and attempted to expel them. In each of these cases, historical rights are presented as a sufficient basis for territorial claims. However, if the arguments presented in the three first parts of this essay are sound, historical rights do not constitute sufficient grounds for territorial claims.

Historical rights are not sufficient grounds for sovereignty, at least from the viewpoint of those who attempt to view it as a kind of universalistic moral argument. In this respect, there is a clear difference between the members of Gush Emunim, the extra-parliamentary movement of the Greater Israel ideology, and successive Israeli governments that backed this movement politically. Followers of Gush Emunim, affiliated with the messianic faction of religious Zionism, have never attempted to provide moral justification for the historical-rights claim. However, the governments headed by both the Labor party and (primarily) the Likud party, both of which are secular Zionist parties, are ideologically affiliated with Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, respectively. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that they have tried time and again to portray their reliance on historical right as a claim firmly grounded in morality and universal justice.

One might have expected those who profess to speak in the name of Ben-Gurion’s and Jabotinsky’s legacy to adhere to standards similar to those of their predecessors, namely, to understand the limits and limitations of the rights which they refer to constantly, and to act accordingly.38 It goes without saying that this is not the case, and the result is no less than tragic, both morally and politically.

Chaim Gans is a professor of law at Tel Aviv University. His two most recent books are The Limits of Nationalism (Cambridge, 2003) and From Richard Wagner to the Palestinian Right of Return: A Philosophical Analysis of Israeli Public Affairs (Am Oved, 2006) [Hebrew].

This article is based on sections of a book analyzing the justice of Zionism from a philosophical perspective, which the author is currently in the process of completing. He wishes to thank his colleagues at Tel Aviv University’s Law Faculty for their constructive analytic comments, as well as the historians Yosef Gorny, Yaakov Shavit, and Gideon Shimoni for their historiographic and bibliographic comments.

1. For a defense of this normative interpretation of ethno-cultural nationalism, as well as for a discussion of the appropriate normative interpretation of nationalist ideologies belonging to the civic type, see Chaim Gans, The Limits of Nationalism (New York: Cambridge, 2003), ch. 1.

2. Besides the Bund movement, the Volkspartei, influenced by the ideas of Shimon Dubnow should also be mentioned in this context. Whereas Zionism attracted Jews from both Eastern and Western Europe, the Bund and the Volkspartei existed exclusively in Eastern Europe.

3. Compare to the analogous distinction between special and general rights. See H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” in Jeremy Waldron, ed., Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford, 1984), p. 84.

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: Prometheus, 1988), book 1, ch. 9, p. 28.

6. In support of this view, one could perhaps mention the fact it is subscribed to by authors as remote from one another as Ross Poole, an Australian philosopher who recently wrote about the Aborigines’ rights, and Yehezkel Kaufmann, a Jewish historian who wrote during the 1940s about the predicament of the Jewish people. Ross Poole, Nation and Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 127; Yechezkel Kaufmann, Exile and Foreign Land, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1954), pp. 211-212 [Hebrew].

7. The Zionist movement was profoundly aware of this consideration. This is expressed in Israel Zangwill’s notorious description of Palestine as a land without a nation which should therefore be given to a nation without a land. Israel Zangvill, “The Return to Palestine,” New Liberal Review 2 (December 1901), p. 627. However, those who did not invoke this misleading description stressed the fact that the land of Israel was not densely populated as one argument in favor of a Jewish return. When justifying the Jewish right to the land of Israel, Ben-Gurion stated that it arose from “the depopulated state of the land of Israel.” Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University, 1995), p. 385.

8. Mabo v. Queensland (no. 2) (1992) 175 CLR1; Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997) 153 DLR (4th) 193 (SCC). On the claim that the return in these cases was based not only on the primacy of the groups in the territories but also on their formative connection with these territories, see John Borrows,“‘Landed’ Citizenship: Narratives of Aboriginal Political Participation,” in Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, eds., Citizenship in Diverse Societies (Oxford: Oxford, 2000), pp. 326-342; James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1993), pp. 153-154; Poole, Nation and Identity, p. 131; Richard H. Bartlett, “Native Title in Australia: Denial, Recognition, and Dispossession,” in Paul Haveman, ed., Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand (Auckland: Oxford, 1999), pp. 417-418.

9. There are obviously numerous additional differences between the return of native groups to their native lands and the return of the Jews to the land of Israel. The most conspicuous of these is that the majority groups ruling the New World uprooted the people returning to their lands hundreds of years ago, so that the ruling majority could be said to be liable for wrongs inflicted on indigenous groups. Many people would argue that if this kind of liability obtains between the Jews and the Arabs, then the onus of rectification is on the Jews due to the expulsion of the Palestinians and the refugee problem. There are those who would also make the opposite claim-that the Arabs are the last of a chain of conquerors of the land of Israel-and as such their obligation toward the Jewish people is identical to that of the ruling nations in Australia and North America toward the native nations. I will refrain from addressing this theoretical conundrum here. One additional important difference between the Jewish return to the land of Israel and the return of the native Americans and Australians in the wake of the judgments in the Delgamuukw and Mabo cases, is that the concessions made by the majority groups in order to repatriate the native groups did not involve massive violations of property rights and the destruction of the majority native group. However, these differences between the cases, and perhaps other differences, too, do not affect the present argument.

10. This distinction resembles the distinction made by John Rawls between ideal and non-ideal theories of justice. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard, 1971). An ideal theory establishes the principles that society should aspire to (locally or internationally) and endorse, under the assumption of full compliance with these principles. On the use of this distinction in the context of international law and justice, see Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination (New York: Oxford, 2004). As mentioned above, the view that high population density in a given territory precludes invoking formative ties as a consideration for determining the site of self-determination is valid, even within an ideal theory of distributive justice. On the other hand, the argument that the absence of institutions for applying these principles precludes invoking the formative ties as a consideration for determining the site of self-determination is valid only in the context of a non-ideal theory of distributive justice.

11. On this point, it is perhaps worth mentioning the distinction between practical and political Zionism, and to explore the differences between the Zionist enterprise in the land of Israel before the Balfour Declaration and British Mandate, and the activities after this point. From the outset, political Zionism sought political and legal support from the superpowers (Herzl from Turkey, Weizmann and Jabotinsky from Great Britain) and also international support (from the League of Nations and the United Nations) for the realization of its self-determination in the land of Israel; practical Zionism sought to establish demographic facts on the ground without this official backing. For the purpose of the present argument against the realization of the historical right, political Zionism had a clear moral advantage over practical Zionism. (Although, of course, it is entirely unclear if the leaders of the political approach were specifically motivated by moral considerations. It is more likely that they acted the way they acted for pragmatic reasons.) This advantage became even more significant in relation to Jewish settlement after the Balfour Declaration and, more importantly, with the onset of the British Mandate, which was backed by the League of Nations after World War I. This is so because it was reasonable to hope that if the British would fulfill the role assigned to them in the Mandate charter (namely, to promote the self-determination of the Jews in the land of Israel), it would be possible to minimize the expected risk of violence. But the claim that political Zionism had a moral advantage since the institution of the British Mandate proved to be true only to a limited extent. Firstly, there were those (mainly Jabotinsky and the Revisionists) who believed that the British Mandate failed to fulfill its role. Also, the British role as an international trustee involved many complex moral issues. And besides, the efficacy of international bodies and those who act to adjudicate and enforce disputes between national groups on their behalf cannot compare to the effectiveness of a country’s own internal legal system, which serves to adjudicate between individuals or organizations and enforces these decisions.

12. To illustrate this point, consider those who believe that Saudi Arabia should not have exclusive possession of its oil riches, and that it should divide them up with countries suffering from abject poverty, such as Somalia. A person subscribing to this position need not necessarily think that this principled position entails the conclusion that Somalia has the right to invade Saudi Arabia and appropriate its portion of the oil wealth in question. He might contend that Saudi Arabia should not be the only one to have to share its oil with other countries. Kuwait should also do this, and then, for instance, Chad, too, should benefit from this and not only Somalia. He might even contend that the re-allocation of resources should not be limited to wealth deriving from natural resources possessed by nations, but should also include wealth derived from human talents and investments. Furthermore, these questions of allocation should be regulated by a public system of principles agreeable to most or all its subjects and enforced by judicial and executive authorities capable of applying them in a coordinated manner to all, or at least to the majority of those to whom they apply. Consequently, any isolated and unilateral action against one of the parties subject to these principles would be at least partially unjust and might lead to bloodshed, even if the justice of the principle itself is undisputed.

13. A remedial justification or right is a justification or right that people have by virtue of harm caused to fundamental interests they have and/or harm caused to interests they have which are protected by primary rights. A remedial right is conferred in order to halt or remedy such harm. A primary right is a right that people have by virtue of interests they have in their everyday lives (as opposed to interests they have in emergency situations) and which justify the imposition of duties on others in order to protect these interests. Primary rights are granted in order to protect or promote these interests not only in cases in which they are being harmed. For example, our right not to be attacked is a primary right. Rights or justifications that we have to perform certain acts in order to rescue ourselves from attacks or rights to compensation for harm caused by attacks are remedial rights or justifications.

14. A similar distinction can be found in Reuven Gafni, Our Legal-Historical Right to Eretz Yisrael (Jerusalem: Tora Ve’avoda Library, 1943) [Hebrew], and in Joseph Heller, The Zionist Idea (New York: Schocken, 1949). Regarding these essays, see Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, pp. 355-357.

15. Although the indigenous populations in North America and Australia also seem to maintain the second interpretation of the historical rights argument.

16. “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel,” Official Gazette: No. 1; Tel Aviv, 5 Iyar 5708, May 19, 1948, p. 1. Less elegant versions of similar ideas appear in the opening statements of the proposals presented by the Zionists at the February 1919 Paris Peace Conference. See Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, pp. 352-353.

17. This component of the justification of the Zionist aspiration to re-settle the Jews in the Land of Israel has been a prominent part of traditional Zionist arguments, including those by early leaders such as Pinsker and Herzl, and later leaders such as Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, and Weizmann.

18. It could be argued that the case of a mortally wounded person breaking into a pharmacy to procure life-saving medicine is not really analogous to the Jews’ return to the land of Israel. The pharmacy case is a clear-cut case of preventing a greater and irreversible evil (the death of the person in need of the medication) by committing a lesser and temporary evil (the damage to the shop, and perhaps also to public order). On the other hand, even if the Jewish return to the land of Israel might perhaps have prevented a very great evil, it was nonetheless obvious from the outset that its consequences would not merely result in a minor and temporary injustice. In this respect, the case of the Jewish return to the land of Israel is not as clear a case as the pharmacy case of preferring the lesser evil, a preference which grounds the defense of necessity as a justification for action which otherwise would have been considered criminal. Some people will therefore hold the view that the necessity in question justifies not the act of the Jewish return to the land of Israel in and of itself but rather excusing the Jews from responsibility for this act. I do not share the latter view, but the scope of this essay does not allow me to elaborate on this point. Regarding the distinction between necessity that fully justifies a criminal action, and one that excuses from culpability without justifying the action, and for a generally illuminating and captivating discussion of the necessity defense in which examples that shed light on the question of the justification of the Jewish return to the land of Israel are cited, see George P. Fletcher, Rethinking Criminal Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), pp. 774-835.

20. See Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, p. 370. See also Arye Naor, Greater Israel: Theology and Policy (Haifa: Haifa University, 2001), p. 87 [Hebrew].

21. In fact, the arguments presented by the Lehi and the members of the “Israel Kingdom” faction were not only amoral but purposefully anti-moral. Those circles not only admitted their use of amoral arguments but took pride in doing so, while treating with contempt those who attempted to invoke moral arguments in order to justify the absolute right over the land of Israel.

22. For a similar position, namely, that the religious argument cannot have universal force but is valid only for believers, see Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, pp. 343-344; and Margaret Moore, “The Territorial Dimension of Self-Determination,” in Margaret Moore, ed., National Self-Determination and Secession (New York: Oxford, 1998), pp. 145-147.

23. The radical Revisionists made a similar point. See Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, p. 339.

24. The Historical Connection of the Jewish People with Palestine, revised edition of the memorandum submitted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine to the Palestine Royal Commission in November 1936 (Jerusalem: Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1936); Shimoni, Zionist Ideology, p. 354.

25. In “Three Stairs,” he states: “[B]ut there is one national right…. That we will also constitute ‘the majority’ in one country under the sun, one land in which our historical right is undisputed.” Emphasis mine. From Writings of Ahad Ha’am (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1947), p. 153 [Hebrew].

27. The Balfour Declaration stated that the British government supported Zionist plans for a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. It was given to the Zionist movement on November 2, 1917 in the form of a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, then a prominent figure in the Jewish community in Britain.

28. As is ordinarily the case in the drafting of political documents, it was similarly the case in both the Basel Program and the Balfour Declaration that these documents were the end product of a process of balancing and compromising between divergent considerations and pressures. Max Bodenheimer was one of the authors of the Basel Program at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. In objecting to the Peel Commission’s Partition Plan in 1937, he explained that political Zionism was striving for a state in the entire country. The Basel Program’s reference to a secure haven for the Jews in the land of Israel and its omission of the idea of a state in the entire country was motivated by the understanding that Zionism could not press for its ultimate goals at such an early stage, and that it was preferable to wait until there was a Jewish majority in the entire county. See Shmuel Dothan, The Partition of Eretz Yisrael in the Mandatory Period (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1983), p. 97. See also Ben Halpern, The Idea of the Jewish State (Cambridge: Harvard, 1969), p. 30, on the considerations that motivated Herzl to propose the version of the Basel Program that was adopted by the Congress. One of the drafts that preceded the final version of the Balfour Declaration referred not to the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, but rather to the “reconstitution” of Palestine “as a national home for the Jewish people.” It was only pressure exerted by a British Foreign Office official which ultimately caused the Foreign Office to change the above version of the Balfour Declaration to the wording of the final and official version, see Dvorah Barzilay-Yegar, A National Home for the Jewish People: The Concept in British Politics and Policymaking, 1917-1923 (Jerusalem: Zionist Library, 2003), p. 30 [Hebrew]. In view of the above, there will no doubt be those who will question whether the wording of important official Zionist documents and public positions to which some leading Zionist thinkers subscribed provides sufficient evidence to substantiate my claim that the moral interpretation of Zionism should regard its extensive use of the idea of historical rights as rights in the land of Israel rather than as rights over all of the land of Israel. Their argument would be that the documents and the public positions in question do not really reflect the “authentic” position of Zionism.

To deal with this objection, a distinction must be drawn between two sorts of cases: Cases in which the transition from very ambitious goals to more modest ones is a result of acknowledging the constraints imposed by reality and morality on one’s ambitious goals, and cases in which this transition is the product of calculated tactics. Surely the waiving of ambitious goals and endorsement of more modest goals, when motivated by one’s acknowledgment of pragmatic and moral constraints does not necessarily indicate that the ambitious goals are the “authentic” ones. The fact is that many of us once entertained the thought of becoming millionaires or prime ministers but nevertheless gave it up in our acknowledgment of the constraints imposed on these ambitions by reality and by our personalities. This does not mean that these ambitions are our authentic ambitions, even though it would not be false to say that we might have actually fantasized about such possibilities. However, if we surrender ambitious goals for tactical reasons and express less grandiose goals instead, then it is indeed correct to argue that our first goals are the authentic ones, because the waiver relates only to the immediacy with which the goal is to be achieved or to giving it public expression. It does not mean that we have given up the goal itself.

It is not always possible to know whether a person’s surrender of a particular goal is real or tactical. Sometimes the person who has given up this goal is himself unable to accurately identify his real motivations for doing so. For reasons which are beyond the scope of this article, this is especially the case when political leaders abandon the goals previously defined for their groups. At any rate, even if a surrender of ambitious goals is merely a pretense motivated by tactical considerations, two points ought to be remembered: Firstly, relinquishing ambitious goals in favor of tactical goals may, though not necessarily so, express acknowledgment of the justice of the latter. My observation here is somewhat similar to one often made about hypocrites, namely, that their hypocrisy attests to their acknowledgment of the propriety of the standards which they only pretend to follow. Otherwise they would have no reason for feigning compliance with these particular standards. In other words, even if one could assume it is true that references by Zionist leaders and official documents to a historical right to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine rather than a Jewish state encompassing Palestine in its entirety were tactically rather than strategically motivated, nonetheless, the very adoption of such a tactic might have been a result of acknowledging the fact that morally these are the appropriate terms. (It is important to note here that this essay relates mostly to the moral question of what Zionism ought to have aspired to then, and what it ought to aspire to now based on the historical rights argument. It does not attempt to deal with what Zionism aimed for in actual practice. My above quotes from the arguments of Zionist leaders are intended to substantiate claims concerning their explicit or implicit positions on the morally possible goals of Zionism, not their positions on its goals independent of morality.) Secondly, even assuming that some of the authors of the Basel Program and the Balfour Declaration did engage in political conniving, and not in the acknowledgment of the moral and pragmatic constraints applying to Zionist goals, the factual questions concerning these people’s good faith, or even the assessment of their moral standing, should not be confused with the actual contents of the Basel Program and the Balfour Declaration, respectively.

29. Regarding the fact that Zionist ambitions with respect to the institutional form of Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel were modest, see Halpern, Idea of the Jewish State. Halpern examines this aspect of Zionist history from the Basel Program of the First Zionist Congress in 1897, to the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations’ Charter of the British Mandate, until the negotiations with the United Nations mission regarding the implementation of the Partition Plan of the General Assembly of November 29, 1947. Halpern contends that this modesty is one of the hallmarks of the Zionist movement, which distinguishes it from other national movements. However, it is not entirely correct to view modesty in this respect as a phenomenon unique to Zionism. (See my discussion in Gans, Limits of Nationalism, pp. 23-26). The modesty of Zionist aspirations regarding the institutional form of Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel is emphasized in many other history books. (See, for example, Joseph Gorny, Policy and Imagination: Federal Plans in Zionist Political Thought 1917-1948 (Jerusalem: Zionist Library, 1993) [Hebrew], which deals with the plans for something less than a state in the thinking of Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Weizmann and others. See also Itzhak Galnoor, Territorial Partition, Decision Crossroads in The Zionist Movement (Jerusalem: Ben-Gurion University, 1994) [Hebrew]. However, it is important to note here a significant group of historians, known as New Historians, who claim that the real goals of Zionism were much more ambitious than those expressed in the official decisions of Zionist institutions and by some Zionist leaders. They claim that the apparent modesty of many of the official decisions and statements made by Zionist leaders should be attributed to mere tactical considerations. See Benny Morris, “The New Historiography: Israel Meets Its Past,” Tikkun 3 (1988), pp. 19-24; Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan (New York: Columbia, 1988); Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-51 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988).

32. See the excerpt from a letter he wrote to his son, Amos, in 1937, after serving as one of the leading sponsors of the Twentieth Zionist Congress’ decision to accept the recommendation of the Peel Commission. David Ben-Gurion, Letters to Paula, trans. Aubrey Hodes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1968), p. 154. In supporting the Partition Plan, Ben-Gurion hinted at the possibility of expanding the state’s borders once established. For sources, see Naor, Greater Israel, p. 109, n. 29, referring to the minutes of the Congress (pp. 95-110 of the minutes); Shabtai Teveth, David’s Passion: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1976), p. 216 [Hebrew]; Galnoor, Territorial Partition, pp. 218-219.

33. David Ben-Gurion, Our Neighbors and Us (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1931), p. 188 [Hebrew].

34. Moshe Bela, ed., The World of Jabotinsky: A Selection of His Works and the Essentials of His Teachings (Tel Aviv: Dfusim, 1972), p. 221 [Hebrew]. The original source is a letter in English to Leonard Stein on March 9, 1922, Central Zionist Archives, file c-199.

35. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Writings, vol. 11 (Jerusalem: Sefarim, 1953), pp. 163-164 [Hebrew].

36. Vladimir Jabotinsky, Evidence Submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission: House of Lords, London, February 11, 1937 by M.V. Jabotinsky, on Behalf of the New Zionist Organization (London: New Zionist Press, 1937), p. 13. This and the above quote explicitly indicate that Jabotinsky’s argument for the right of Jewish return to the land of Israel was one of global distributive justice (between nations) in conjunction with the necessity argument. Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that I am not a historian, and certainly not an expert on Jabotinsky’s or Ben-Gurion’s writings, and I have not studied everything they ever wrote or published. The excerpts I have cited here appear in the secondary sources mentioned in these endnotes. I believe that these specific quotes suffice for the purpose of substantiating my arguments that pertain to these leaders.

37. According to Jabotinsky, this density should resemble Poland’s or Czechoslovakia’s, and not Belgium’s or Holland’s. Galnoor, Territorial Partition, pp. 170-171. For a substantiation of the claim that Jabotinsky’s argument for establishing a state on both banks of the Jordan (before the Peel Commission and on other occasions) was at its core pragmatic and was due to the need to save Jews in the 1930s, see also Naor, Greater Israel, ch. 2, pp. 76, 81. Naor, however, is of the opinion that Jabotinsky used this argument in his testimony before the Peel Commission only because it was presented to an outside party. This opinion is incompatible with the fact (which Naor himself refers to on p. 76 of his book) that Jabotinsky also used this argument in order to justify his Greater Israel ideology in the ideological platform of the Revisionist Zionists in 1928. Naor claims that Jabotinsky also had “fundamentalist” reasons for his maximalist ideology, but the excerpt which he cites to prove this (p. 82) is of an entirely practical nature. Benjamin Akzin attested to the fact that the Revisionist objection to the Peel Commission’s Partition Plan was based on considerations related to whether or not a Jewish state was capable of accommodating the millions of Jews in need of rescue during the 1930s. See Benjamin Akzin, “The Revisionist Zionism Position Toward the Partition Plan,” in Meir Avizohar and Isaiah Friedman, eds., Studies in the Palestine Partition Plans 1937-1947 (Sede Boker: Ben-Gurion Research Center, 1984), pp. 162-163 [Hebrew].

38. On this point, note the way Menachem Begin related to the ideology of Greater Israel on both banks of the Jordan. On the one hand, when he led the Herut party during the early days of the state, he based this ideology on arguments similar to those employed by the messianic religious Zionists, that is, mainly on the Bible and on “the covenant between the pieces.” See Naor, Greater Israel, pp. 95-96. On the other hand, he later revealed a willingness to reevaluate these ideas since the instrumentalist justifications which served Jabotinsky during the late 1930s-those associated with rescuing the Jews of Europe-had lost their force. In 1982, Begin tried to reassure King Hussein of the sincerity of his government’s intentions, since “[w]e, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, have no strength left, and therefore have no desire” to realize the historic right in Transjordan. See Naor, Greater Israel, pp. 91-92.

In the debate between left- and right-wing factions in Israel concerning Israel’s borders since the Six Day War, Greater Israel advocates often level the following accusation of (moral and logical) inconsistency against those willing to accept a territorial compromise within the pre-1967 borders: According to the Greater Israel activists, anyone who believes that the Jews deserve to settle in Tel Aviv or in Negba must also believe that they deserve to live in Hebron or Kedumim and vice versa. In other words, anyone who holds the view that it is unjust for Jews to settle in Hebron or Kedumim does not really believe in the justice of Zionism. It is possible to respond to this accusation of inconsistency even without the benefit of the distinctions made in this essay. For example, one could argue that even if the Jews do have the historical right to sovereignty in Hebron and Kedumim, this right may be compromised, for pragmatic and moral reasons. Willingness to compromise does not necessarily indicate inconsistency. And yet, the distinctions suggested in this essay provide an even stronger answer. For if one interprets historical rights as they should be interpreted-which in my opinion, is the interpretation implied by the sentiments expressed by the main leaders of Zionism in its formative years-that is to say, as an appropriate basis for determining the site of Jewish self-determination, but not for sovereignty and territorial expansion, there is no inconsistency at all in the willingness to realize this self-determination in only part of the land (and not on all of it). The truth is that the opposite is the case. If the historic right is only a consideration for determining the site of a nation’s right to self-determination in areas of its historic homeland, and if it cannot serve as an appropriate basis for territorial sovereignty over all the homeland territory, then the attempt to realize the right to self-determination over all areas of the homeland by virtue of the historic right alone is inconsistent. The real inconsistency is inherent in the notion that if living in Tel Aviv is justified, then settling in Hebron must also be justified. (For a more extensive discussion of the question of the logical and moral consistency of the Greater Israel ideology vs. the pre-1967 ideology, see Chaim Gans, From Richard Wagner to the Palestinian Right of Return: A Philosophical Analysis of Israeli Public Affairs (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2006), ch. 8, part 7 [Hebrew].

"To the victor go the spoils. Israel is not the last owner of that land.

If Turkey wants what was lost in the ottoman empire wars, then this would trigger all lost lands due to agressive wars a whole new "war". The Ottomans stole it from the Christians. So the Brits, (Christians) won it back, and divided the ME up as they saw fit. If Arabs want to whine, then lets put the whole ME back under Brittish rule- screw them. If that's not good enough, then lets go back in time to when Jesus walked the earth. That puts it under control of the Roman empire.

I guess we are going to have to.

From the roman empire time on, it was always a battle between Christans and Muslims of one sort or another. That "other" where the ottomans- who were definately not Arabs for amny centuries.
"Jews"(as in the Jewish relion, there is no "last tribe" anymore) never held that land since the Roman empire conquered it, until the state of Isreal was re-created in 1948.
That's who Holds it today by international agreement through the UN (when the UN wasn't corrupt with Jew haters like it is now). They have every right to defend it.

--If that's not good enough, then lets go back in time to when Jesus walked the earth. That puts it under control of the Roman empire.

"I am sorry, but the -ROMAN EMPEROR- cannot come to the phone right now. Please leave a message or try on the -ROMAN EMPEROR-'s cell phone, area code XXXVIIDMCD XXXIVIVDCMXXIVXXIIIVCDMXIX, thank you...*beep*beep*beep..."
"I am sorry, but the voice mailbox for -ROMAN EMPEROR- is full. Please try again..."

Genetically based claims to sovereignty are the newest tactics employed in old struggles over national sovereignty and borders

You're to be commended for formatting all of this, but the upshot of the article is that all Americans of European descent should abandon North America and leave it to the indigenous people.

However, this response emanates from early ideological conditioning rather than from a worldview which is the product of systematic reasoning.

Satan is the Author of your "World View"

God is the Creator of All mankind and Our DNA..He said "go into the Land and take possesion of it"

Only a Godless Intelectual like the Author of these crappy Articles would call the belief that God Gave the Land to Israel, "ideological conditioning"

and Satan's world view "Systematic Reasoning"

when the exact opposite is the Truth. To accept the "World View" is the wide road to Hell.

and calling Biblical truth.."ideological conditioning"
betrays the Authors lack of Knowlege.

God Gave the land to Israel, they dont need the accepted DNA to convince anyone in the World. they have an IRON-Clad unbreakable Title to the land that superceeds any
idiotic "conditioned Reasoning" proposed By some intelectual.

If any race in this world has a right to a piece of land..Israel has an exclusive Right to Palestine.

all others are tresspassers.

and The Authors conclusions are irrelevant.

The Bible says "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom" this makes the Authors less than Morons.

The word "Fear" Here means Awesome respect. not fear like the idiot intelectuals lie about scripture to the World

and second it says Wisdom, not Knowlege..which is less desireable.

So anyone, with a drop of Wisdom is by far a smarter person than one with a Mountain of Knowlege.

The Bible says that the Godless intelectuals are "Blind"
to this truth.

Because Knowlege is their "GOD"

Read it and Weep.

Your right.

This article and "DNA" crap is just that- crap.
The origional seed has been spread far and wide, as every single tribe has been exiled and spread far and wide.

The Lord is quite clear on who he considers "his people" now.
When his day arives, many will discover that much too late.

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