1. This week marks 47 years since the death of poet Nathan Alterman, and nearly 50 years since the 1967 Six-Day War. In the last three years of his life, Alterman, the most influential poet in all of modern Hebrew literature, set out to win his own battle, leading the charge without fear. Ten days after the great Six-Day War victory, he wrote in his column in Maariv: "This victory is not only a victory of restoring the nation's most ancient and noble holy sites, etched in out memory and heritage above all else, to the hands of the Jews. The achievement of this victory is that it essentially erased the differentiation between the State of Israel and the Land of Israel. This is the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple that the Land of Israel is in our hands. The state and the land are now one and the same. From now on, the only thing [Israel] needs to reconnect to its history is for the people of Israel to take everything we've achieved and weave that three-way thread so that it cannot be broken." Two months after the war, in August 1967, when the founding members of the Movement for Greater Israel first met, the poet defined the organization's chief goal: to win over the minds of the Israeli public and the world: "The idea is the Land of Israel being under the sovereignty of the Jewish people at this time. The idea is coming full circle on the deepest most fundamental of circles in the history of Israel and the Jewish experience. ... What we need now, what is still lacking in the people's minds, is the comprehensive nature of the thing ... how to communicate it to the Jewish people and pass it on to the world in a very concrete way, through speech and through printing texts in major newspapers and by meeting people and by recruiting influential Jewish writers around the world." The same holds true today. It seems that the deepest motif in Alterman's writing had to do with the historical perception of what had happened. "We are not free to decide -- not on the political level, not on the military level and not on the personal level -- how we behave. It is forced upon us! It is forced upon us the same way our individual biography is forced on us." In today's terms, we can say that it was one thing when all we could do was to long for these swathes of land -- the cradle of our national identity -- and something else entirely when this land became ours. Giving up these pieces of land would mean abandoning the enormous generations-long endeavor to return to Zion -- an endeavor that was designed from the start to be a return to the same historical Zion of Samaria, Judea and the Old City of Jerusalem, primarily. 2. Alterman did not ignore the Arabs living on the land. He spoke about the Arabs' full rights -- individual rights, not national rights that they could exercise in one of the many other Arab countries. He made no distinction between Israeli Arabs living within the Green Line and the Arabs living outside it. After all, why would their demand for national rights include only the Arabs of Judea and Samaria? "It is strange that they [Alterman's left-wing political opponents] don't demand this right for the Arabs of Wadi Ara [inside the Green Line] too. Why don't they recognize their right to rebel and ultimately achieve their official title-" he wondered. "Why did they [the opponents] agree to the [1947 U.N.] partition plan that included hundreds of thousands of Arabs? Did they [the Arabs] agree to live in a Jewish state-" These questions and more rest on the notion that the occupation doesn't automatically disappear when Israel's Arab residents are granted voting rights because no one ever asked them whether they wanted to be citizens of a Jewish state. That is why the talk of the "occupation" is not limited to Samaria, but applies also to Israel within the Green Line. If our right to the land -- meaning that we have a right to live as a people in our historical and only homeland -- outweighs the argument of "occupation" within Israel, it also outweighs the same argument in regard to historical Zion. Before we address the important question of the status of the Arabs in Judea and Samaria, and there are several possible solutions, we must acknowledge that our presence in all parts of the land is moral and just. Alterman viewed the Arabs of the Land of Israel as part of the Arab nation as a whole, and that is why he rejected the demand to give national status to that "one percent" of the Arab people. He rejected the idea of establishing another Arab state, when dozens of Arab states already exist. "The unique quality of this land, both as a political and historical entity, existed [throughout history] only in the minds of the Jewish people," he wrote. He believed that the Jewish view that the Arabs have as much right to the land as the Jews (with a side of self-flagellation) was extremely dangerous to the point of threatening the fate of the people and the fate of Zionism. Poet Haim Guri once said that Alterman told him, "If we concede that Judea and Samaria are not ours, we would have to rewrite the entire Bible." 3. In a conversation with politician Geula Cohen in October 1968, a young Amos Oz said he would rather save the life of one mother's son than be in possession of the Western Wall because "there are no holy places," and only human lives and freedoms were holy and worth fighting for. Alterman responded sharply to that remark, calling Oz's words "an empty and artificial game." "The reality is entirely different," Alterman wrote. "The reality is one of war where ... young people have to die not for life and liberty as an abstract, hollow term but rather for the lives and freedoms of human beings and of an ancient people that has known trials and tribulations, whose lives and liberties contain everything that makes up life and liberty, those things without which the words are an empty slogan. They contain the earth and the sky, the walls and the roofs, the words and the silences, the memories of the past and the present and future. And also the 'places,' yes, the 'holy' places, and all the other ones, as well." In his book "Nathan Haya Omer" (Nathan used to say -- lyrical memoirs about Alterman), Poet Yaacov Orland recalls an episode in 1968, when he and Alterman sat with writer Haim Hazaz at a famous cafe, and Alterman convinced Hazaz to sign the first petition drawn by the Movement for Greater Israel. "It was only for our sins that we were exiled and distanced. But now - that we have been coerced / we handed back and returned, are we fated to keep silent and miss our chance? / What if this will be the only chance in our history? And perhaps it is forbidden for us not to want? / If only to try, just for a short while. So that future generations / will not say 'you didn't even try.'" Hazaz was very skeptical and resisted at first. "This people is not interested in bringing redemption," he explained. "They want to wait for it. / They don't want it to arrive. They prefer for the messiah to take his time. They are happy that way." Ultimately, he did sign the petition, but added a caveat: "We must always see the light, but let us never ignore the darkness." Nathan the wise, as Alterman was affectionately called by his friends, replied "We have never missed the darkness, but we have missed the light many times."
