L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim ( לשנה הבאה בירושלים), “Next year in Jerusalem”, these words have been uttered at the end of the Passover Seder, by Jews for almost 2000 years since exile. And yet today, many denounce Israel’s claim to existence, but a peer into the past reveals that the founding fathers of this nation were lawyers and not soldiers and that is how they created the state – born from a millenia old dream.
In a diaspora that spanned the four corners of the globe : from India, Ethiopia to Europe and those who didn’t depart from from the Middle East…..after millennia in a diaspora, the various Jewish communities spoke a variety of languages and had differing customs evolving over time but they never forgot their origin and more importantly where they came from. The phrase reflects their generation-long memory of home and a desire to return – which they ultimately did via legal means.
Theodore Herzl
Theodore Herzl is widely regarded as ‘The father of modern Zionism’. Born in Austria-Hungary, he initially had little interest in Jewish culture, but encountered anti-Semitism despite the fact that the family was ‘assimilated’. This climaxed when he covered the Dreyfus Affair (1895) for a French newspaper and motivated his desire to initiate the creation of an independent Jewish nation and when Modern Zionism as we know it emerged.
Herzl became president of the World Zionist Congress, a group focused on anti-Semitism.
When the British Uganda program was proposed, Herzl showed willingness to settle for a state anywhere, although his preferred destination was within the levant.
Herzl died in 1904, before witnessing the blossoming of the movement he had sown.
LAWYER
David Ben Gurion
Born in Poland in 1886, his family immigrated to Israel then under the Ottoman Empire. and found work on a collective farm a concept that is now known as the kibbutz. He studied law but did not complete the degree.
Ben Gurion later helped the immigration of thousands of Jews to the land and united an array of rag-tag Jewish militias into a fighting force to be reckoned with and they evolved into the forerunners of the modern Israeli army. Ben Gurion is the man who read the Israeli Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948. The Ben Gurion Airport is named after him.
While in London, Ben Gurion had a parlay with then leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Oliver Stanley at the Dorchester Hotel in 1947. They met in the lobby, and Sir Stanley advised him not to take off his coat since the hotel did not have heat. Afterwards, the Israeli leader surmised that if the most expensive hotel in Europe could not afford to keep warm after the war, then the British Empire’s collapse was imminent and by extension, they wouldn’t be able to hold onto Palestine for too long. His intuition payed off!
HAD LEGAL TRAINING
Menachem Begin
When World War II broke out, Begin was in jail: the Russian secret police had arrested him for being a Zionist. This paradoxically saved his life since he was deported to the East, so far away from the Nazis. After his release, he set off to the British mandate where he took over the militant organization founded by Jabotinsky, known as Irgun. He studied law and graduated from the University of Warsaw in Poland in 1935.
It was Begin’s strategy of taking up arms against the British and launching wave after wave of nationalist propaganda that helped Israeli independence take shape. On the advice of the Jewish IRA arms smuggler Robert Briscoe, Begin dismantled the Irgun . Briscoe was a figure in Ireland’s independence struggle and who worked with the legendary Michael Collins. Briscoe claimed that having a multitude of armed groups could lead to an internal civil war among the Jewish people.
Marvel comic book writer, Chris Claremont based the X-Men anti-hero, Magneto off Begin.
LAWYER
Ze’ev Jabotinsky
A wildcard in his era. He was eternally at loggerheads with leftists such as Weizmann and Ben-Gurion and was stubborn about having a right-wing Jewish state. Jabotinsky founded self-defense groups for Jews facing pogroms in Russia with the slogan “Better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it.” Jabotinky enrolled to study law at Sapienza University of Rome, but never completed his course.
Former Prime Minister Netanyahu’s father served as Jabotinsky’s personal secretary and every PM since 1970 has been a Likudnik, former Likudnik or in coalition with Likud. The more hawkish Likud replaced the left-wingers that dominated Israel’s early landscape after their failure to anticipate the 1973 war.
Jabotinky was an outcast from mainstream Zionist society and considered a radical by the mainstream. Still in the long term, his legacy remains.
HAD LEGAL TRAINING
Their legacy built upon the pen
Step by step they moved towards achieving nationhood via legal means:
Balfour Declaration 1917
San Remo Agreement 1920
League of Nations Resolution 1922
Partition of land by UN in 1947
So, we see that the founders of Israel today, were either qualified lawyers or those with legal training ; and proved that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword: even though they knew when to use the sword (or the gun especially in Jabotinsky’s case) when needed.
The founder’s acumen in using the multifaceted legal system of the era to revive a 2000 year dream is something generations had only y dreamed about. So, despite all claims that Israel has no legitimacy by international law, the founding fathers were people who used the legal framework to create a nation that has endured for over 75 years and thrived, continuing their legacy.