*The term Zionism can mean many different things. Like the term socialism,
for example. Francois Hollande is a socialist. So was Joe Stalin. Any
resemblance?*
WHEN I was young, there was a joke making the rounds in Germany: "A Zionist
is a Jew who asks a second Jew for money in order to settle a third Jew in
Palestine." My father was such a Zionist. That was before the Nazis came to
power, or course. I suspect that this definition applies nowadays to many
American Zionists.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, did not really want to
go to Zion, a hill in Jerusalem. He did not like Palestine at all. In the
first draft of the Zionist Bible, Der Judenstaat, he proposed Patagonia as
the preferred site of the Jewish state, because of its mild climate. Also,
because it was sparsely populated after a genocidal campaign by Argentina.
When the movement turned towards Zion, Zionism still meant many different
things to different people. Some wanted the country to become merely a
spiritual center of the Jews. Others wanted it to become a socialist
Utopia. Others wanted it to become a nationalist bastion based on military
force.
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The renewal of the Hebrew language, which has become such an integral part
of our lives, was not a part of the Zionist project at all. Herzl, whose
initial ambition was to become a great German writer, thought that we would
speak German. Others would have preferred Yiddish. The fanatical desire to
rejuvenate Hebrew came from below.
Even the desire to found a Jewish State was not unanimous. Some ardent
Zionists, like Martin Buber, dreamed of a bi-national state, half Arab,
half Jewish. "Practical" Zionists wanted to fulfill the Zionist dream by
patient settlement in the country, "Revisionist" Zionists wanted to achieve
at once an international "charter."
Religious Zionists want a state based on and dominated by the Jewish
religion. National-religious Zionists believe that God has sent the Jews
into "exile" because of their sins, and wanted to compel God by their deeds
to send the Messiah now. Atheist Zionists declare the Jews are a nation,
not a religion, and want nothing to do with the Jewish faith.
And so on.
SO WHAT does Zionism mean nowadays? The word is bandied about in Israel
without much thought. Almost every party wants to be seen as Zionist and
brands its adversaries as anti-Zionist -- a deadly accusation in Israeli
politics. Only small minorities at the edges decline the honor. Communists
on one side, ultra-Orthodox on another. (These believe that it is a great
sin to go back to the Land of Israel in large numbers without God's express
permission.)
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For many Israelis, Zionism means nothing more than Israeli patriotism. If
you want Israel to exist as a "Jewish state" (whatever that means) you are
a Zionist. Also, you have to believe that Israel is a part of the
world-wide "Jewish people" and its leader, a kind of command-center. In
up-to-date terminology: "the Nation-State of the Jewish people."
In a deeper sense, Zionism may mean the profound belief that all the
world's Jews will eventually come to Israel, either by their own free will
or driven here by anti-Semitism. The inevitable victory of anti-Semitism in
each and every country is taken for granted. Therefore any real or imagined
anti-Semitic wave -- like the present one in France -- is greeted with
secret satisfaction ("We told you so").
WHERE DO I stand?
A few years before the foundation of the State of Israel, a group of young
people in this country, mostly artists and writers, declared that they were
not Jews, but Hebrews. They were nicknamed "the Canaanites."
Their gospel was that the Hebrew-speaking young people in this country were
not a part of the world-wide Jewish community, but a separate new Hebrew
nation. They wanted nothing to do with the Jews. Some of their
announcements sounded positively anti-Semitic. They conceived the Hebrew
nation as a continuation -- after a brief interval of a few thousand years
-- of the original pre-Biblical Canaanite people. Hence the nickname.
Four years later I founded another group, nicknamed the "Struggle-Group."
We also proclaimed that we were a new Hebrew nation. But contrary to the
Canaanites we acknowledged that this new nation was a part of the Jewish
people, much as the Australians, for example, are a part of Anglo-Saxon
culture.
We also contradicted the Canaanites on one other crucial element of
doctrine. The Canaanites denied the existence of an Arab nation or nations.
We not only recognized Arab nationalism, but declared that the Arab nation
was the natural ally of the Hebrew nation in the creation of a new Semitic
Region.
Soon after, Israel was founded. Forty years ago, in a libel case, I was
asked by the judge to define my attitude towards Zionism.
In response I invented the term "post-Zionism." The Zionist movement, I
testified, is a historic movement with incredible achievements -- a totally
new society, an ancient-new language, a new culture, a new economy, new
social models like the kibbutz and the moshav. But Zionism also performed
grievous wrongs, especially to the Arab Palestinian people.
However, I said, this is history. With the creation of the State of Israel,
Zionism has fulfilled its role. Israeli patriotism must replace it. Like
scaffolding that is dismantled once the new building is finished, Zionism
has outlived its usefulness and should be discarded.
This is my belief today, too.
THE WHOLE question has come up again now because of the decision of the new
combined election list of the Labor Party and Tzipi Livni's group to call
itself officially "the Zionist Camp."
On the pragmatic level, this is a clever move. The Rightist parties almost
always accuse the Left of being unpatriotic, even traitorous, a fifth
column. In our case, the Left is being accused of being anti-Zionist. So it
makes sense for a new combined list to call itself Zionist. Not "a" Zionist
party, but "the" Zionist party.
(By the same logic, a very moderate French party once called itself the
"Radical Party," the word "democratic" has appeared in the official names
of several communist countries and the German fascists called themselves
"National-Socialists.") Being sure of their hard-core adherents, they hope
the misnomer will attract votes on the fringes.
One negative practical aspect of the name of the Labor list is that it
automatically excludes the Arab citizens. For Arabs everywhere, Zionism is
the synonym of evil. Zionism took away their country, Zionism expelled the
Arab Palestinians and carried out the Naqba, Zionism today discriminates
against the Arab citizens of Israel in all spheres of life.
However, very few Arab citizens voted in the recent past for the Labor
Party anyhow, and these don't care either way about Zionism as a name. All
Arab political forces in the country, including the Communist Hadash party
which has a number of Jewish members, united this week in a common Arab
list, and are expected to harvest almost all the Arab votes.
(This, by the way, is one of the ironies of Israeli politics. The "Israel
Our Home" party of Avigdor Lieberman, which some consider fascist, wanted
to evict the Arabs from the Knesset. Noting that none of the three Arab
lists achieved 3.25% of the votes, they enacted a law that raised the
threshold for entering the Knesset to this level. As a result, all the Arab
parties, which detest each other, united in a common list that may reach
10% and more.
Apart from the Orthodox, this will be the only self-styled anti-Zionist
party. Everybody else, from the far-right national-religious Jewish Home
party to the far-left Meretz, declare themselves staunch Zionists.
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So it's quite a coup that Herzog and Livni ran away with the coveted label.
On Thursday, October 22, 2015 at 11:16:57 AM UTC-5, plainolamerican wrote:
>
> Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early age as
> one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of what
> gentile Europeans called the "Jewish Question". What galled anti-Zionist
> Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the "solution" to the
> Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always advocated, namely the
> expulsion of Jews from Europe.
>
> It was the Protestant Reformation with its revival of the Hebrew Bible
> that would link the modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews of
> Palestine, a link that the philologists of the 18th century would solidify
> through their discovery of the family of "Semitic" languages, including
> Hebrew and Arabic. Whereas Millenarian Protestants insisted that
> contemporary Jews, as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, must leave Europe
> to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ, philological
> discoveries led to the labelling of contemporary Jews as "Semites". The
> leap that the biological sciences of race and heredity would make in the
> 19th century of considering contemporary European Jews racial descendants
> of the ancient Hebrews would, as a result, not be a giant one.
>
> Basing themselves on the connections made by anti-Jewish Protestant
> Millenarians, secular European figures saw the political potential of
> "restoring" Jews to Palestine abounded in the 19th century. Less interested
> in expediting the second coming of Christ as were the Millenarians, these
> secular politicians, from Napoleon Bonaparte to British foreign secretary
> Lord Palmerston (1785-1865) to Ernest Laharanne, the private secretary of
> Napoleon III in the 1860s, sought to expel the Jews of Europe to Palestine
> in order to set them up as agents of European imperialism in Asia. Their
> call would be espoused by many "anti-Semites", a new label chosen by
> European anti-Jewish racists after its invention in 1879 by a minor
> Viennese journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who issued a political
> programme titled *The Victory of Judaism over Germanism*. Marr was
> careful to decouple anti-Semitism from the history of Christian hatred of
> Jews on the basis of religion, emphasising, in line with Semitic philology
> and racial theories of the 19th century, that the distinction to be made
> between Jews and Aryans was strictly racial.
>
>
> *Assimilating Jews into European culture*
>
> Scientific anti-Semitism insisted that the Jews were different from
> Christian Europeans. Indeed that the Jews were not European at all and that
> their very presence in Europe is what causes anti-Semitism. The reason why
> Jews caused so many problems for European Christians had to do with their
> alleged rootlessness, that they lacked a country, and hence country-based
> loyalty. In the Romantic age of European nationalisms, anti-Semites argued
> that Jews did not fit in the new national configurations, and disrupted
> national and racial purity essential to most European nationalisms. This is
> why if the Jews remained in Europe, the anti-Semites argued, they could
> only cause hostility among Christian Europeans. The only solution was for
> the Jews to exit from Europe and have their own country. Needless to say,
> religious and secular Jews opposed this horrific anti-Semitic line of
> thinking. Orthodox and Reform Jews, Socialist and Communist Jews,
> cosmopolitan and Yiddishkeit cultural Jews, all agreed that this was a
> dangerous ideology of hostility that sought the expulsion of Jews from
> their European homelands.
> <http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/gazacrisis/>Spotlight
> <http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/gazacrisis/>
> Gaza Crisis
>
> The Jewish Haskalah
> <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Haskalah.html>, or
> Enlightenment, which emerged also in the 19th century, sought to assimilate
> Jews into European secular gentile culture and have them shed their Jewish
> culture. It was the Haskalah that sought to break the hegemony of Orthodox
> Jewish rabbis on the "Ostjuden" of the East European shtetl and to shed
> what it perceived as a "medieval" Jewish culture in favour of the modern
> secular culture of European Christians. Reform Judaism, as a Christian- and
> Protestant-like variant of Judaism, would emerge from the bosom of the
> Haskalah. This assimilationist programme, however, sought to integrate Jews
> in European modernity, not to expel them outside Europe's geography.
>
> When Zionism started a decade and a half after Marr's anti-Semitic
> programme was published, it would espouse all these anti-Jewish ideas,
> including scientific anti-Semitism as valid. For Zionism, Jews were
> "Semites", who were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. In his foundational
> pamphlet *Der Judenstaat*, Herzl explained that it was Jews, not their
> Christian enemies, who "cause" anti-Semitism and that "where it does not
> exist, [anti-Semitism] is carried by Jews in the course of their
> migrations", indeed that "the unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds
> of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into
> America";that Jews were a "nation" that should leave Europe to restore
> their "nationhood" in Palestine or Argentina; that Jews must emulate
> European Christians culturally and abandon their living languages and
> traditions in favour of modern European languages or a restored ancient
> national language. Herzl preferred that all Jews adopt German, while the
> East European Zionists wanted Hebrew. Zionists after Herzl even agreed and
> affirmed that Jews were separate racially from Aryans. As forYiddish
> <http://www.jewfaq.org/yiddish.htm>, the living language of most European
> Jews, all Zionists agreed that it should be abandoned.
>
> The majority of Jews continued to resist Zionism and understood its
> precepts as those of anti-Semitism and as a continuation of the Haskalah
> quest to shed Jewish culture and assimilate Jews into European secular
> gentile culture, except that Zionism sought the latter not inside Europe
> but at a geographical remove following the expulsion of Jews from Europe.
> The Bund
> <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0004_0_03730.html>,
>
> or the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which
> was founded in Vilna in early October 1897, a few weeks after the convening
> of the first Zionist Congress in Basel
> <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/First_Cong_&_Basel_Program.html>
> in
> late August 1897, would become Zionism's fiercest enemy. The Bund joined
> the existing anti-Zionist Jewish coalition of Orthodox and Reform rabbis
> who had combined forces a few months earlier to prevent Herzl from
> convening the first Zionist Congress in Munich, which forced him to move it
> to Basel. Jewish anti-Zionism across Europe and in the United States had
> the support of the majority of Jews who continued to view Zionism as an
> anti-Jewish movement well into the 1940s.
>
>
> *Anti-Semitic chain of pro-Zionist enthusiasts*
>
> Realising that its plan for the future of European Jews was in line with
> those of anti-Semites, Herzl strategised early on an alliance with the
> latter. He declared in *Der Judenstaat *that
> <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1896herzl.asp>:
>
> "The Governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly
> interested in assisting us to obtain [the] sovereignty we want."
>
> He added that "not only poor Jews" would contribute to an immigration fund
> for European Jews, "but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them".
> Herzl unapologetically confided in his *Diaries* that:
>
> "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the
> anti-Semitic countries our allies."
>
> Thus when Herzl began to meet in 1903 with infamous anti-Semites like the
> Russian minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, who oversaw
> anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, it was an alliance that he sought by design.
> That it would be the anti-Semitic Lord Balfour, who as Prime Minister of
> Britain in 1905 oversaw his government's Aliens Act, which prevented East
> European Jews fleeing Russian pogroms from entering Britain in order, as he
> put it, to save the country from the "undoubted evils" of "an immigration
> which was largely Jewish", was hardy coincidental. Balfour's infamous
> Declaration of 1917
> <http://jewishquarterly.org/2008/03/the-balfour-declaration-origins-and-consequences/>
> to
> create in Palestine a "national home" for the "Jewish people", was
> designed, among other things, to curb Jewish support for the Russian
> Revolution and to stem the tide of further unwanted Jewish immigrants into
> Britain.
>
> The Nazis would not be an exception in this anti-Semitic chain of
> pro-Zionist enthusiasts. Indeed, the Zionists would strike a deal with the
> Nazis very early in their history. It was in 1933 that the infamous
> Transfer (*Ha'avara
> <http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203231.pdf>*)
> Agreement was signed between the Zionists and the Nazi government to
> facilitate the transfer of German Jews and their property to Palestine and
> which broke the international Jewish boycott
> <http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/201331884943284526.html> of
> Nazi Germany started by American Jews. It was in this spirit that Nazi
> envoys were dispatched to Palestine to report on the successes of Jewish
> colonisation of the country. Adolf Eichmann returned from his 1937 trip to
> Palestine full of fantastic stories about the achievements of the
> racially-separatist Ashkenazi Kibbutz, one of which he visited on Mount
> Carmel as a guest of the Zionists.
>
> Despite the overwhelming opposition of most German Jews, it was the
> Zionist Federation of Germany that was the only Jewish group that supported
> the Nuremberg Laws of 1935
> <http://www.thenagain.info/webchron/WestEurope/NuremLaws.html>, as they
> agreed with the Nazis that Jews and Aryans were separate and separable
> races. This was not a tactical support but one based on ideological
> similitude. The Nazis' Final Solution initially meant the expulsion of
> Germany's Jews to Madagascar. It is this shared goal of expelling Jews from
> Europe as a separate unassimilable race that created the affinity between
> Nazis and Zionists all along.
>
> While the majority of Jews continued to resist the anti-Semitic basis of
> Zionism and its alliances with anti-Semites, the Nazi genocide not only
> killed 90 percent of European Jews, but in the process also killed the
> majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism who died precisely because they
> refused to heed the Zionist call of abandoning their countries and homes.
>
> The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic
> countries our allies.
>
> Theodor Herzl , Diaries
>
> After the War, the horror at the Jewish holocaust did not stop European
> countries from supporting the anti-Semitic programme of Zionism. On the
> contrary, these countries shared with the Nazis a predilection for Zionism.
> They only opposed Nazism's genocidal programme. European countries, along
> with the United States, refused to take in hundreds of thousands of Jewish
> survivors of the holocaust. In fact, these countries voted against a UN
> resolution introduced by the Arab states in 1947 calling on them to take in
> the Jewish survivors, yet these same countries would be the ones who would
> support the United Nations Partition Plan of November 1947 to create a
> Jewish State in Palestine to which these unwanted Jewish refugees could be
> expelled.
>
>
> *The pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis*
>
> The United States and European countries, including Germany, would
> continue the pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis. Post-War West German
> governments that presented themselves as opening a new page in their
> relationship with Jews in reality did no such thing. Since the
> establishment of the country after WWII, every West German government (and
> every German government since unification in1990) has continued the
> pro-Zionist Nazi policies unabated. There was never a break with Nazi
> pro-Zionism. The only break was with the genocidal and racial hatred of
> Jews that Nazism consecrated, but not with the desire to see Jews set up in
> a country in Asia, away from Europe. Indeed, the Germans would explain that
> much of the money they were sending to Israel was to help offset the costs
> of resettling European Jewish refugees in the country.
>
> After World War II, a new consensus emerged in the United States and
> Europe that Jews had to be integrated posthumously into white Europeanness,
> and that the horror of the Jewish holocaust was essentially a horror at the
> murder of white Europeans. Since the 1960s, Hollywood films about the
> holocaust began to depict Jewish victims of Nazism as white
> Christian-looking, middle class, educated and talented people not unlike
> contemporary European and American Christians who should and would identify
> with them. Presumably if the films were to depict the poor religious Jews
> of Eastern Europe (and most East European Jews who were killed by the Nazis
> were poor and many were religious), contemporary white Christians would not
> find commonality with them. Hence, the post-holocaust European Christian
> horror at the genocide of European Jews was not based on the horror of
> slaughtering people in the millions who were *different from European
> Christians*, but rather a horror at the murder of millions of people who
> were the *same as European Christians.* This explains why in a country
> like the United States, which had nothing to do with the slaughter of
> European Jews, there exists upwards of 40 holocaust memorials and a major
> museum for the murdered Jews of Europe, but not one for the holocaust of
> Native Americans or African Americans for which the US is responsible.
>
> Aimé Césaire understood this process very well. In his famous speech on
> colonialism, he affirmed
> <http://www.rlwclarke.net/theory/SourcesPrimary/CesaireDiscourseonColonialism.pdf>
> that
> the retrospective view of European Christians about Nazism is that
>
> it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that
> sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before
> [Europeans] were its victims, they were its accomplices; and they tolerated
> that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut
> their eyes to it, legitimised it, because, until then, it had been applied
> only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that
> they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of
> Western, Christian civilisation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps,
> and trickles from every crack.
>
> That for Césaire the Nazi wars and holocaust were European colonialism
> turned inwards is true enough. But since the rehabilitation of Nazism's
> victims as white people, Europe and its American accomplice would continue
> their Nazi policy of visiting horrors on non-white people around the world,
> on Korea, on Vietnam and Indochina, on Algeria, on Indonesia, on Central
> and South America, on Central and Southern Africa, on Palestine, on Iran,
> and on Iraq and Afghanistan.
>
> The rehabilitation of European Jews after WWII was a crucial part of US
> Cold War propaganda. As American social scientists and ideologues developed
> the theory of "totalitarianism", which posited Soviet Communism and Nazism
> as essentially the same type of regime, European Jews, as victims of one
> totalitarian regime, became part of the atrocity exhibition that American
> and West European propaganda claimed was like the atrocities that the
> Soviet regime was allegedly committing in the pre- and post-War periods.
> That Israel would jump on the bandwagon by accusing the Soviets of
> anti-Semitism for their refusal to allow Soviet Jewish citizens to
> self-expel and leave to Israel was part of the propaganda.
> ...
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