Our Justice

By Nadav Shragai
Ha'aretz, March 26, 2002

When the soldiers who had returned from Ramallah wept at 
the grave of their friend Gil Bedihi in Nataf, the sound of 
singing was suddenly heard amid the grief and the pain. 
In a trembling but confident voice, the bereaved mother,
Yael, sang on the fresh grave of her son. The song she 
sang was written by David Shimoni and sung after the Arab 
riots in Palestine in 1929. "And nevertheless, and in spite 
of everything, Eretz Yisrael. And as long as [the Jewish 
prayer of faith in God] 'Shema Yisrael' is heard in the 
world, and as long as the heart of Israel beats in the world,
'Shema Yisrael' 'Shema Yisrael,' you are Eretz Yisrael."

Afterward, Yael explained in words clearer and simpler than 
any heard recently in these parts, that "Eretz Yisrael is 
the land of the Jewish people, and that is the essence of 
Zionism." And she added that she wanted to impart some 
historical perspective to her son's friends, and mainly
to respond to the despair and to the thoughts many are 
having about the justice of our way. 

Israeli poet Nathan Alterman also referred once to our 
justice, when he described in one of his poems the dilemma 
of Satan, who is looking for various ways in which to 
undermine the stamina of the Yishuv [the pre-state Jewish 
community in Palestine], until he makes the following 
decision:
"I'll do only this: I'll blunt his brain / And he'll forget 
that justice is on his side." 

It may be hard for us to admit it, but during the past 20 
months of conflict, many good people in this country have 
lost the feeling that justice is on their side. Moreover, 
this basic element, justice, as a component of stamina and 
fortitude, this element which we cannot do without in a 
struggle such as ours, had been replaced by another basic 
element - security - as almost the only thing that the 
Israeli collective expects from the Palestinians. 

When faced with Palestinian "justice," from which they 
draw strength and courage, we repeatedly raise the very 
understandable demand for security, and when we don't 
attain it, we give up hope and we get confused and cause
confusion. For many of us, the serious undermining of 
personal security has also undermined our ability to make 
distinctions. An increasingly large segment of the public 
no longer differentiates between security as a natural
right and justice, here in the land of our forefathers. 
This justice, Zionism, the connection between the Jewish 
people and Zion, is the purpose of our existence here. 
The time has come to point out that this justice is not 
the same as the natural and understandable demand for 
security.

The sense of justice and of the right of the Jewish 
community in Israel cannot be based on the natural demand 
for security. People everywhere in the world are entitled 
to security, and not only in the Land of Israel. People who 
live in the Golan and in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are entitled 
to security. Jews who live within the 1967 borders, and 
those who live within the 1948 borders, are entitled to 
security. Jews who live in France, Argentina and the United 
States are entitled to security. The feeling that prevails 
today is "just let us arrive home safely." But if the only
basis for our claims vis-a-vis the Palestinians and the Arab 
states is our right to security, what right do we have to 
this country? Why here of all places? 
And what are we fighting for?

We must repeat what is self-understood, and has been forgotten - 
the root of the right is not security, but our Jewishness. 
That is the root. Israel is the state of the Jews, and were 
that not the case, it could have been established anywhere 
else in the world. In 1948, a small, weak community that 
numbered 600,000 Jews established a state here, not just 
because the Jews thought that it would provide them with a 
safe haven. At that point, the danger to the survival of 
the Jewish population in the Land of Israel was many times 
greater than today. The state was established despite the
risk, because it has a goal beyond security, because with 
its establishment, the identity of the Jewish people, which 
had returned to the Land of Israel and aspired to become 
part of it, was strengthened.

The war being waged for our home here is a war both for 
survival and for justice. If we weren't in the right, 
there would be no point to fighting and gritting our teeth. 
And security, which we certainly cannot do without, is the 
instrument by means of which we are fulfilling our destiny 
here, a destiny that the bereaved mother, Yael Bedihi from 
Nataf, described so well in her grief.