Two Views: Is Zionism “Good for the Jews”?
| WRMEA Archives 2006-2010 - 2010 March |
Two Views, Pages 40-41
Is Zionism “Good for the Jews”?
Israel Must Unpick Its Ethnic Myth
By Tony Judt
WHAT EXACTLY is “Zionism”? Its core claim was always that Jews represent a common and single people; that their millennia-long dispersion and suffering has done nothing to diminish their distinctive, collective attributes; and that the only way they can live freely as Jews—in the same way that, say, Swedes live freely as Swedes—is to dwell in a Jewish state.
Thus religion ceased in Zionist eyes to be the primary measure of Jewish identity. In the course of the late-19th century, as more and more young Jews were legally or culturally emancipated from the world of the ghetto or the shtetl, Zionism began to look to an influential minority like the only alternative to persecution, assimilation or cultural dilution. Paradoxically then, as religious separatism and practice began to retreat, a secular version of it was actively promoted.
I can certainly confirm, from personal experience, that anti-religious sentiment—often of an intensity that I found discomforting—was widespread in left-leaning Israeli circles of the 1960s. Religion, I was informed, was for the haredim and the “crazies” of Jerusalem’s Mea Sharim quarter. “We” are modern and rational and “Western,” it was explained to me by my Zionist teachers. But what they did not say was that the Israel they wished me to join was therefore grounded, and could only be grounded, in an ethnically rigid view of Jews and Jewishness.
The story went like this. Jews, until the destruction of the Second Temple (in the first century), had been farmers in what is now Israel/Palestine. They had then been forced yet again into exile by the Romans and wandered the earth: homeless, rootless and outcast. Now at last “they” were “returning” and would once again farm the soil of their ancestors.
It is this narrative that the historian Shlomo Sand seeks to deconstruct in his controversial book The Invention of the Jewish People [available from the AET Book Club]. His contribution, critics assert, is at best redundant. For the last century, specialists have been perfectly familiar with the sources he cites and the arguments he makes. From a purely scholarly perspective, I have no quarrel with this. Even I, dependent for the most part on second-hand information about the earlier millennia of Jewish history, can see that Professor Sand—for example in his emphasis upon the conversions and ethnic mixing that characterize the Jews in earlier times—is telling us nothing we do not already know.
The question is, who are “we”? Certainly in the U.S., the overwhelming majority of Jews (and perhaps non-Jews) have absolutely no acquaintance with the story Professor Sand tells. They will never have heard of most of his protagonists, but they are all too approvingly familiar with the caricatured version of Jewish history that he is seeking to discredit. If Professor Sand’s popularizing work does nothing more than provoke reflection and further reading among such a constituency, it will have been worthwhile.
But there is more to it than that. While there were other justifications for the state of Israel, and still are—it was not by chance that David Ben-Gurion sought, planned and choreographed the trial of Adolf Eichmann—it is clear that Professor Sand has undermined the conventional case for a Jewish state. Once we agree, in short, that Israel’s uniquely “Jewish” quality is an imagined or elective affinity, how are we to proceed?
Professor Sand is himself an Israeli and the idea that his country has no “raison d’etre” would be abhorrent to him. Rightly so. States exist or they do not. Egypt or Slovakia are not justified in international law by virtue of some theory of deep “Egyptianness” or “Slovakness.” Such states are recognized as international actors, with rights and status, simply by virtue of their existence and their capacity to maintain and protect themselves.
So Israel’s survival does not rest on the credibility of the story it tells about its ethnic origins. If we accept this, we can begin to understand that the country’s insistence upon its exclusive claim upon Jewish identity is a significant handicap. In the first place, such an insistence reduces all non-Jewish Israeli citizens and residents to second-class status. This would be true even if the distinction were purely formal. But of course it is not: being a Muslim or a Christian—or even a Jew who does not meet the increasingly rigid specification for “Jewishness” in today’s Israel—carries a price.
Implicit in Professor Sand’s book is the conclusion that Israel would do better to identify itself and learn to think of itself as Israel. The perverse insistence upon identifying a universal Jewishness with one small piece of territory is dysfunctional in many ways. It is the single most important factor accounting for the failure to solve the Israel-Palestine imbroglio. It is bad for Israel and, I would suggest, bad for Jews elsewhere who are identified with its actions.
So what is to be done? Professor Sand certainly does not tell us—and in his defense we should acknowledge that the problem may be intractable. I suspect that he favors a one-state solution: if only because it is the logical upshot of his arguments. I, too, would favor such an outcome—if I were not so sure that both sides would oppose it vigorously and with force. A two-state solution might still be the best compromise, even though it would leave Israel intact in its ethno-delusions. But it is hard to be optimistic about the prospects for such a resolution, in the light of the developments of the past two years.
My own inclination, then, would be to focus elsewhere. If the Jews of Europe and North America took their distance from Israel (as many have begun to do), the assertion that Israel was “their” state would take on an absurd air. Over time, even Washington might come to see the futility of attaching American foreign policy to the delusions of one small Middle Eastern state. This, I believe, is the best thing that could possibly happen to Israel itself. It would be obliged to acknowledge its limits. It would have to make other friends, preferably among its neighbors.
We could thus hope, in time, to establish a natural distinction between people who happen to be Jews but are citizens of other countries; and people who are Israeli citizens and happen to be Jews. This could prove very helpful. There are many precedents: the Greek, Armenian, Ukrainian and Irish diasporas have all played an unhealthy role in perpetuating ethnic exclusivism and nationalist prejudice in the countries of their forebears. The civil war in Northern Ireland came to an end in part because an American president instructed the Irish emigrant community in the U.S. to stop sending arms and cash to the Provisional IRA. If American Jews stopped associating their fate with Israel and used their charitable checks for better purposes, something similar might happen in the Middle East.
Tony Judt is University Professor at New York University and director of the Remarque Institute. This op-ed first appeared in the Financial Times, Dec. 7, 2009.
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and a Better Future
By John V. Whitbeck
In a commentary published recently in the Arab News, Saudi Arabia’s leading English-language newspaper, the British journalist Neil Berry focuses on a reality which is rarely mentioned in polite society: that Zionism is, and has always been, an anti-Semite’s dream come true, offering the hope that one’s own country’s Jews can be induced to leave and move elsewhere.
Berry writes: “The imperious British statesman, A.J. Balfour, who gave his name to the declaration, was an earnest supporter of the 1905 Alien Act, which was specifically designed to stem the inflow into Britain of Jews who were fleeing from persecution in czarist Russia. A century ago, immigrant Jews were seen by many, much as Muslims are now, as subversive intruders menacing the British way of life....Zionism and anti-Semitism became inextricably bound up with one another.”
Citing a better-known cause for the enduring shame of Western states, Berry continues: “In the aftermath of the liquidation by the Nazis of some 6 million Jews during World War II, the United States, Australia and Canada, brushing aside Arab pleas to treat displaced Jews as a challenge for the whole world, refused to relax their immigration restrictions, thereby ensuring that the great majority of them poured into Palestine, even though many would have preferred to settle elsewhere....It was with shrewd foresight that Herzl predicted that anti-Semitism would become Zionism’s greatest ally.”
Western governments which, today, are not anti-Semitic should, rather than feeding justice, human decency and international law into a shredder through blind subservience to a racial-supremicist, settler-colonial experiment (and thereby earning themselves the hatred of much of mankind), be opening their doors wide to any and all Israeli Jews who might be tempted to build a new and better life for themselves and their children, with less injustice and less insecurity, by returning to their countries of origin or emigrating to other countries of their choice, offering them immediate residency rights, generous resettlement assistance and a rapid road to citizenship (if they do not already have it).
Such “Laws of Return” would be profoundly philo-Semitic, pro-Jewish and, yes, anti-Zionist. They would reflect a moral, ethical and self-interested recognition that Zionism, like certain other prominent 20th century “isms” which once captured the imaginations of millions, was a tragically bad idea—not simply for those innocents caught and trampled in its path but also for those who embraced it—which is unsustainable, does not deserve to be sustained, and has already caused (and, if perpetuated, will continue to cause) profound problems for the Western world and the Western world’s relations with the rest of the world.
Western states like to call for “confidence-building measures” from Israelis, Palestinians and other Arabs without offering any themselves. A multinational initiative to atone for the West’s past sins against Jews by welcoming them to resettle in Western states would constitute a hugely constructive confidence-building measure which would be almost universally praised and should, logically, be opposed only by people who are either anti-Semites or Zionists—or both.
In the land which, until 1948, was called Palestine, democracy and equal rights, coupled with freedom of choice (with attractive choices for resettlement being generously provided) for those who would prefer not to live in such a state, would offer a far greater hope for eventual peace in the Middle East than continued cynical recycling of a partition-based “peace process” which is now widely recognized to be both a fraud and a farce and which, even if “successful,” would simply legitimize, reward and perpetuate ethnic cleansing, racism and apartheid—scarcely a recipe for lasting peace, let alone for any measure of justice.
Old assumptions, including the irreversible “success” of the Zionist experiment, should now be questioned. Even heretical ideas, including the peaceful rollback of the Zionist experiment and its replacement by democracy through voluntary personal choice rather than violence, should now be considered.
If Western politicians cared more about the welfare and happiness of individual Jewish human beings than they do about the money and ability to hurt them of a few wealthy and powerful Zionists, most of whom live comfortably and safely far from the Middle East, democracy, equal rights and freedom of choice—all principles to which Western states profess devotion—might actually come to the “Holy Land.”
Politicians being what they are, civil society will have to take the lead in delegitimizing Zionism and pointing the way toward a better future for all concerned—and, like it or not, everyone on this planet is concerned.
John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer who has advised the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations with Israel, is author of The World According to Whitbeck (available from the AET Book Club).
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