Ayelet Shaked Quotes
Zionism needn't continue, and won't continue, to bow its head to a system of individual rights interpreted in a universal way.
Shaked, Ayelet. Address to the Israel Bar Association. Haaretz, 29 Aug. 2017.
The irony is that the Zionist movement was very democratic long before most of the world had adopted democracy. They not only saw no conflict between a Jewish Homeland and democracy, but they maintained that Jewish tradition required democracy. After 60 years if constant attacks by its neighbors and having to defend the nation from invasion and extinction, the Israeli body politic actually became very conservative, while the Zionists were extremely left wing. Under the concept of Zionism there was a large population of Arabs as Israeli citizens. However, when some of those Arabs were openly against the nation in its struggle with the Palestinians and its other Muslim neighbors. Leiberman led the right wing effort in various efforts to expel the dissident Arab citizens and use very non democratic methods to cope with the right wing’s perception of the risk to the Jewish State.
The original Zionist conceptualization of Israel was as an agricultural state. Einstein thought this was unwise given Jewish accomplishment in science and trade. Blumenfield satisfied him that Israel would not be solely or even predominantly an agricultural nation, but it should be able to supply its own food needs,
Because of the classic historical anti-Semitism and discrimination, Jews were barred from land ownership and as a result few were farmers or had agricultural experience in their families. They were tradesmen, artisans, professionals in Europe. So amongst Jews and non Jews alike the notion of Jews settling the land of Palestine and farming it or trapping, the way the Boers had in South Africa or the French in Canada, was not a very credible image. The Zionists, realizing this potential weakness, placed strong emphasis on agriculture, developed the agricultural kibbutz concept and encouraged Jews to become farmers. The effort was so successful that almost all the leading early Zionist immigrants to Palestine became farmers. When independence came to Israel, the Jewish agriculture was more productive than most of that in Europe and almost on a par with small farms in the United States. The Israelis were known for “making the desert bloom.
He also expressed his pleasure with the British Balfour Declaration granting the Jews their own country in part of Palestine ({594001}). Wilson had earlier committed himself to support the Zionist claim for Palestine. See {585124}.
There was a strong movement among the early religious Christian Americans to go to the Holy Land to reclaim the Kingdom God promised in the Bible. American missionaries went to the Middle East. See {585147} for another early American politicians view.
At that time Jews in Palestine were in the minority. The issue of how to obtain the land was hotly debated amongst Jewish groups. Jabotinsky was at one extreme—colonize and take the land just as the Arabs had done to the Jews when there was a Jewish majority. His view did not however prevail. The policy was to buy the land from individual Arabs and Jewish land up to 1948 was obtained that way. In that year the UN partitioned Palestine and 11 Arab armies attacked the new state of Israel and asked the Arab civilians to leave the area so that the Army could cleanse it of Jews. Many did not, and they or their descendants are still on their land or have sold it. The Arabs who left, were suspected of being possible collaborators or terrorists, and they have never been paid for their land or allowed to return. Compensation is still in dispute. At the same time Jews driven out of Arab countries by law and the military have never been compensated or given any right of return either.
at the First World Zionist Congress, 1897
This is the first statement of a Jewish nation since Biblical Times.
The PLO and most of the Arab nations, took the position that the United Nations original partition of Palestine into a Jewish and a Palestinian nations -- UN General Assembly Resolution 181 – was “illegal”. That view has served as the basis for the Arab Israeli problems since. The basis of the illegality they claimed was the right of the Palestinians to self determination. However, it is a right which they deny to the Jews living in Palestine who also had a right to self determination. The UN solution was to partition the land into two nations so that the each had the right of self determination. However, the Arab leadership wanted only Arabs to have the right of self determination.
Ayelet Shaked is an Israeli politician, activist, and software engineer. She served as a member of the Knesset for The Jewish Home from 2013 to 2018, after which she became a member of the New Right. She currently represents the Yamina alliance. She was Minister of Justice from 2015 to 2019. Although until 2018 she was representing a religious party, Shaked identifies as a secular politician.
