Jews, Zionism and the European Right of Blood
by David Kessel
The Middle Eastern conflict has been viewed from many angles in the media, and there have been numerous viewpoints as to who had caused it, why it has happened and who is at fault. It is kind of hard not to be partial or not to take sides in the debates surrounding it as the temptation to do so is very high. "Oh, those Arabs, they are such fanatics!" "Oh, those Israelis, they are baby killers!" "Oh, they are both wrong". "They are brothers, why can't they just try and get along somehow?"
I keep seeing all these commentators with respectable faces, experts, in their sixties, who are supposed to know about such things better than we do, but they never seem to give you the complete picture. There are just too many factors involved many of which even they do not know of- religion, tradition, the nationality question, and, most of all, lots of emotions pouring out every which way. The Arab-Israeli conflict seems simple to some and complicated to others, but even the most knowledgeable pundits of international politics cannot give you the whole truth. Some things simply seem to be missing from all of their explanations.
If you ask most people in the West about the Arab-Israeli conflict, they will probably tell you a very simple story- there was the Holocaust and then the establishment of the State of Israel as a kind of shelter for Holocaust victims. The Nazis persecuted the Jews; killed six million of them, and then the survivors went back to their ancient homeland and established an independent state there. Arabs would not accept these Jews and have been fighting them ever since. On the Arab side they usually talk about European imperialism, Western colonialism and how the Jews come to Palestine to take Arab land. They will also tell you about how they are killing Muslims who never did anything bad to the Jews. The Jews became Nazis themselves, and are racists, and are killers of Arab children. They took the place of other Western colonial powers in the Middle East in further oppressing the Arabs. They see Jewish immigrants as Europeans of Jewish belief that should be living in Europe and not in the Middle East. The see Jewishness as a religious thing only- same as Christianity or Islam.
Outside of mentioning the Nazis, or occasionally, Germans, almost no one ever mentions East or Central Europeans and how they treated the Jews as one of the main factors to cause the Jews to leave the countries of their birth, and go to a faraway desert land to build a new country there. Moreover, almost no one ever talks about a very important European nationality law called "Jus Sanguinis" which loosely translated from Latin means "The Right of the Blood" and which was one of the main causes of mass Jewish exodus from Europe in the 20th century. In this short paper I attempt to show how Russia and Poland and other Central and East European countries applied the Jus Sanguinis law to the Jews and put them in a situation where the only possible way out , short of emigration to the New World, was the creation of Zionism and subsequent exodus of hundreds of thousands of East European Jews to Palestine.
Central/East Europeans and Arabs see "Jewishness" in two different ways
|
