Warren Buffett would never make a major investment in a foreign company until he found ISCAR Metalworking, an Israeli company he purchased for over $6 billion. Buffett explained, “I have a very limited knowledge of foreign economies and foreign companies. I look at investments in this country first, and only if I can’t find anything here that I understand and like, would I even think about looking elsewhere. I don’t understand the currency risks, the political risks, or the business practices in a lot of places well enough to get comfortable.”
Buffett’s speech was delivered at his annual gathering in 1999. Just seven years later, Berkshire Hathaway would purchase ISCAR from Stef Wertheimer for $4b. in 2006, with the other $2b. coming in 2013. Buffett was reportedly impressed by Wertheimer’s ability to keep production at normal rates during the Second Lebanon War.
Wertheimer was much more than a business owner. Wertheimer was a philanthropist, politician, and peace activist. Most impressively, Wertheimer was a refugee from Nazi Germany. He had to flee his birthplace as a young man to escape German antisemitic persecution and immigrated to the Land of Israel.
Wertheimer is one of many remarkable examples of Jews who didn’t allow persecution and national trauma to define them and hold them back from moving forward and progressing. Wertheimer was a well-known example of Israeli refugees who pushed past their painful history and built successful lives despite their trauma.
Israel is well-known as a country that welcomes immigrants from around the world. What is less known is that the overwhelming majority of Israel’s immigrants were refugees from other countries, including Holocaust survivors. The Israeli refugees stretch from Jews evicted from Arab-Muslim countries to Jews who fled the Ethiopian desert and attacks on their communities.
Israelis could have spent decades wallowing in victimhood over the atrocities inflicted upon them by the many nations of the world. They never did. In a 1970 speech to the Zionist Organization of America, Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “We Jews have a choice: to live as victims of our past or to build a future where our children will know pride and freedom. Israel is that future.”
The Israeli attitude of taking their destiny into their own hands
The Israeli attitude towards the Holocaust was never, “Look what they did to us,” but rather, “Never again!” Israelis took their destiny into their own hands and built themselves a future. In a 1949 speech at the opening of the Weizmann Institute, president Chaim Weizmann said, “The Jewish people have suffered, but we do not build our future on sorrow. We build it on science, on labor, on the vision of a state that will be a light unto the nations.” Weizmann’s political opponent, prime minister Menachem Begin, himself a Holocaust survivor, expressed similar sentiments: “Our people have known too much pain, but we will not be defined by it. We will build a state of strength, of justice, and of hope for every Jew who dreams of a home.”
In contrast to the Israeli Zionist national movement that centered its narrative around looking forward and moving away from victimhood, the Palestinian national narrative is centered around victimhood.
In an address to the United Nations, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas focused his speech around the history of Palestinian trauma, “I ask you to consider the history of the question of Palestine and the relevant United Nations resolutions to realize the obvious truth: that a historic injustice has been inflicted upon a people and a homeland, a people that had lived peacefully in their land and made genuine intellectual, cultural, and humanitarian contributions to mankind. These people do not deserve to be deprived of their homeland, to die in exile or be swallowed by the sea, or to spend their lives fleeing from one refugee camp to another. Yet regrettably, their just cause remains at a standstill after the passage of all these years.”
Contrast Abbas’s words with the speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations that same year: “For a hundred generations, the Jewish people dreamed of returning to the Land of Israel. Even in our darkest hours, and we had so many, even in our darkest hours, we never gave up hope of rebuilding our eternal capital, Jerusalem. The establishment of Israel made realizing that dream possible.
“It has enabled us to live as a free people in our ancestral homeland. It’s enabled us to embrace Jews who’ve come from the four corners of the earth to find refuge from persecution. They came from war-torn Europe, from Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, from Ethiopia, and the Soviet Union, from a hundred other lands. And today, as a rising tide of antisemitism once again sweeps across Europe and elsewhere, many Jews come to Israel to join us in building the Jewish future.”
Palestinian advocacy centers itself on victimhood
An example of modern Palestinian advocacy centering itself on victimhood instead of progress is Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd’s new book, Perfect Victims, about the Palestinian experience. The book discusses the Palestinian condition today and its need for Palestinians to prove their humanity in the face of a settler colonial state that continues to inflict devastating violence on Palestinians.
Palestinian society can never move forward if it insists on embracing victimhood instead of progress. Dr. Eran Lerman, a member of the faculty at the Shalem Academic Center and a former deputy for foreign policy and international affairs at the National Security Council in the Prime Minister’s Office, summarized the Palestinian addiction to victimhood and its dangers: “The false Palestinian narrative of one-sided victimhood is a major hindrance to all efforts in the direction of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Global actors need to help the Palestinians move beyond wallowing in self-pity and rituals of bashing Israel, and towards difficult compromises with Israel.”
With God’s help, the Jewish people, Zionism, and the State of Israel have experienced resounding success. The Palestinian people have faced the opposite and suffer from a lack of national independence. One of the essential factors that has led to Jewish success and Palestinian suffering is the Jewish insistence on putting past trauma in its place and looking forward, and the Palestinian embracing of victimhood and refusal to put its past in its place.
The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world. He recently published his book Zionism Today.