With Israeli independence day approaching, Gil Troy reflects on the life of the chemist and Zionist activist Chaim Weizmann, who was one of the architects of the Balfour Declaration, a crucial leader of the Zionist movement during the Mandate period, and eventually Israel’s first president. Troy notes, among other things, the great Jewish statesman’s understanding of Zionism itself:

The Jewish people have “never based the Zionist movement on Jewish suffering,” [Weizmann] would insist. “The foundation of Zionism was, and continues to be to this day, the yearning of the Jewish people for its homeland, for a national center, and a national life”—for normalcy!

Weizmann’s Zionism put him on the right side of the great 20th-century debate pitting liberal nationalism against totalitarian Communism. One of sixteen children—eleven [of whom] survived into adulthood—he and eight other siblings went Zionist, moved to Palestine, and thrived. Chaim’s brother Shmuel, who embraced Communist universalism, was executed in 1939, in Josef Stalin’s purges. His sister Maria was imprisoned thanks to Stalin’s paranoid, anti-Semitic Doctor’s Plot.

Taking this family argument to the world stage, when studying in Geneva, Weizmann debated the merits of nationalism versus universalism with some exiled Russian Communists, including Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. . . . [Living in Britain], when his local member of Parliament, Lord Arthur Balfour, wondered why the Jews wouldn’t establish a national homeland in Uganda instead of Palestine, Weizmann asked: “Mr. Balfour, suppose I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?” Balfour replied: “But Dr. Weizmann, we have London.” Weizmann responded: “True, but we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.”

In the 1930s and 1940s, with Hitler’s rise to power and Britain’s ban on Jewish immigration to Palestine threatening any hope of a Jewish state, Weizmann found himself without a clear role to play, yet:

Weizmann sidelined was still an epoch-making statesman. He—and his extraordinary pediatrician wife Vera—were now living in the land of Israel, helping [to create] a state where one could be Chaim the scientist and the statesman, the humanist and the Jew, all at once. . . . Believing that science, technology, and education would serve as the new state’s national building blocks, Weizmann helped found the Technion, Hebrew University, and, in 1934, what is today the Weizmann Institute of Science, which recently ranked sixth in the Nature “index of innovation.”

With the IDF engaged in ground maneuvers in both northern and southern Gaza, and a plan about to go into effect next week that would separate more than 100,000 civilians from Hamas’s control, an end to the war may at last be in sight. Yet there seems to be no agreement within Israel, or without, about what should become of the territory. Efraim Inbar assesses the various proposals, from Donald Trump’s plan to remove the population entirely, to the Israeli far-right’s desire to settle the Strip with Jews, to the internationally supported proposal to place Gaza under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA)—and exposes the fatal flaws of each. He therefore tries to reframe the problem:

[M]any Arab states have failed to establish a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan all suffer from civil wars or armed militias that do not obey the central government.

Perhaps Israel needs to get used to the idea that in the absence of an entity willing to take Gaza under its wing, chaos will prevail there. This is less terrible than people may think. Chaos would allow Israel to establish buffer zones along the Gaza border without interference. Any entity controlling Gaza would oppose such measures and would resist necessary Israeli measures to reduce terrorism. Chaos may also encourage emigration.

Israel is doomed to live with bad neighbors for the foreseeable future. There is no way to ensure zero terrorism. Israel should avoid adopting a policy of containment and should constantly “mow the grass” to minimize the chances of a major threat emerging across the border. Periodic conflicts may be necessary. If the Jews want a state in their homeland, they need to internalize that Israel will have to live by the sword for many more years.