We Have Found Our Home; Now We Must Seek Peace

In 1871 my great-grandfather, Rabbi Aryeh Leib Frumkin, left his home in Kelme, Lithuania, and set out on a fateful journey. He was one of the first generation of religious Zionists. His destination was Jerusalem. He carried with him one treasured possession, a Torah scroll, which to him represented the biblical covenant between the Jewish people and their land. There, he believed, Jews would find peace.

Four years later, George Eliot published Daniel Deronda. It, too, was about a journey to Jerusalem. Deronda is an assimilated Jew in whom the vision of the return to Zion re-awakes. He recovers his Jewish identity and travels to Israel to revive the “organic centre” of his people. For Eliot, the idea of a Jewish homecoming was one of the great romantic possibilities. “The world will gain as Israel gains,” she wrote. “There will be a land set for halting-place of enmities.” The reality proved darker than the dream. In 1881, pogroms broke out in more than a hundred towns in Russia. My great-grandfather toured Europe, arguing for Jewish immigration to Israel as a matter of life-saving urgency.

In 1884 he bought land in Petach Tikva (The Gateway of Hope), built the first house there, and began turning a malarial swamp into an agricultural settlement. As it grew, however, so did the hostility of the surrounding Arab population. Ten years later, after an attack on the village, he came to London. Neither Europe nor the Middle East was yet ready for “a halting-place of enmities”.

On April 29th we will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel. No event more starkly epitomises the tragedies and triumphs of Jewish life in the 20th century. In 1948, world Jewry was still devastated by the Holocaust. Since the rise of Hitler, Jews had sought a place of refuge and found the doors of the world closed. They needed a home, in the sense defined by the poet Robert Frost as the place where “when you have to go there, they have to take you in”. The State of Israel was the child of the nightmare of anti-Semitism and the dream of the return of a people to its ancestral home.

Israel was born in war. The day the State was proclaimed, it was attacked on all its borders. It has faced war and terrorism ever since. Yet it remains the fulfilment of a prophetic dream.

Because of Israel, Hebrew, the language of the Bible, has become again a living tongue. A once desolate landscape has become a place of forests and farms. The State of Israel has rescued Jews from every country where they faced persecution. After centuries of dispersion, the Jewish people has returned to the land to which Abraham and Sarah first travelled four thousand years ago. It has emerged from the shadow of death to new life. If we search, as the prophets did, for the presence of God in human history, surely it is here. And it will be to God that on Israel's Jubilee we will give thanks. But the search for peace remains. Jews did not return home to make others homeless. Nor did they escape millennia of suffering to inflict suffering on others. Isaiah's words 25 centuries ago still define Israel's challenge and its hope: “I will make peace your governor and righteousness your ruler. No longer will violence be heard in your land.”