Today, April 18th, is the eve of Israel’s 70th Independence Day. Some are probably wondering how that may be possible, if Israel declared its independence on the evening of May the 14th. The answer is, that Israel celebrates the event as if it was a Jewish holiday, according to the moon calendar, which most often does not coincide with the Latin, sun-based calendar.
This is only one aspect in how Israel seeks to apply itself as a “Jewish State”. But I am going to speak about an even more essential ideological aspect that sits at the heart of Zionism. It is not the notion of the Jewish state as such, but the notion of the Jewish nation.
First, let’s jump back 100 years and look once again at the words of the British (and notably Jewish) Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu, in his critique of His Majesty’s Government’s intentions to endorse a ‘Jewish national home” in Palestine in 1917:
“I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion. It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation: of the same race, perhaps, traced back through the centuries – through centuries of the history of a peculiarly adaptable race”.
But Montagu’s logic did not win the day. Zionism did. And nowadays, many Jews around the world are relating to Israel’s Independence Day as if it was a religious holiday. Last Friday I had a conversation in Copenhagen with a man I hardly knew, we both merely knew we were Jewish:
“Will you be celebrating Yom Haatzmaut [Israeli Independence Day]?”, he asked.
“You betcha I won’t!” I answered.
The man responded with a predictable expression of bewilderment.
“I’d rather be commemorating the Nakba”, I said.
“Nakba? What’s that?” He wondered.
“It’s Arabic for ‘catastrophe'”, I explained, “when the vast majority of Palestinians was expelled”.
“Oh”, he said.
After a short pause, he went:
“But I love holidays like for example Pesach [Passover]”, he said.
“Alright, but that’s a religious holiday. Independence Day is not a religious holiday, unless you consider nationalism to be religious”, I said.
That was that conversation. Yesterday I was invited by another Jew to celebrate Israeli Independence Day – at the Copenhagen synagogue (as the very issue of Independence Day as a Jewish holiday was discussed):
“If you really are in any doubt about it being a Jewish holiday you can go to the Synagogue in Copenhagen tomorrow night as well as most other synagogues where there are special services and there are prayers on Thursday that you only say on Holidays (Hallel) and of course it is a day off and therefore a holiday in the Jewish state”, he wrote.
So you see, this notion of an extra-territorial, Jewish ‘nation’ has been subscribed to by very many Jews around the world – and makes the Israel case a mixture of religion and nationalism – but not nationalism in the sense that we normally attribute to the term.
The Jewish ‘nationalism’, as embodied by the State of Israel, literally means that there are no Israeli nationals, and that there cannot be. It may sound surreal (and should) to those who are not yet familiar with this bizarre concept – but even more bluntly put, Israelis don’t exist in the national sense – only as citizens. “Jewish” is defined as a “nationality” (alongside some 130 other recognized ‘nationalities’), and the purpose of this construct is simple: Since Israel defines itself as The Jewish State, and wishes to cement that concept fully as the Nation State of the Jewish People, the only ones who actually enjoy national rights, as opposed to merely citizenship rights, are the Jews. And yes when I say ‘the Jews’, I’m not accidentally generalizing – this is a generalization that Israel itself makes, an extra-territorial generalization, which entails that any Jew from anywhere can ‘return’, ‘ascend’ and receive automatic citizenship and a subsidy welcome package from the Jewish State. This even includes people who are not Jewish by Israeli orthodox law, merely by third generation paternal affiliation.
These are fantastic terms for Jews all over the world – I mean, why wouldn’t you want such an ‘insurance policy’?
It is this ‘insurance policy’ that makes it possible for Prime Minister Netanyahu to call on Jews to immigrate to Israel in the wake of terror, like he did in the wake of the Paris 2015 attacks:
“To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home”, he tweeted.
Some Jews were concerned about what such proclamations and ‘insurance policies’ can mean. The Director of the European Jewish Association, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, said at the time:
“Israel must cease this Pavlovian reaction every time Jews in Europe are attacked. Every such Israeli campaign severely weakens and damages the Jewish communities that have the right to live securely wherever they are.”
This is essentially the point that the mentioned Edwin Montagu was also making, back in 1917:
“When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants”.
How insightful. Montagu elucidates not only the Judeo-centric concern – but the Palestinian one. And with all the Jewish concerns, it is the Palestinians who have had to pay most dearly for this Jewish ‘insurance policy’. The “Jewish nation” has for them meant dispossession, and it is a continuing matter. Jews around the world insist on their “birthright” to Israel, while those who were actually born there and have ancestry from time immemorial, are dispossessed. And when some Jews protest this, they even get the finger (see above how ‘Birthright’ founder Michael Steinhart reacted to Jewish protesters calling for boycott of the free trip to Israel for young Jews). But giving the finger to Jews is the least of it. That finger has been given to Palestinians all the way through, that’s what it’s all about. The Jewish ‘nation’ idea is about them being dispossessed and stripped of any national affiliation with their homeland, for Jews to ‘return’.
That’s what Israel’s ‘independence’ is about. It means ‘we don’t need Palestinians’. Because we already have a ‘nation’ – the Jewish one.
This is the central myth that needs to be dismantled – that of the ‘Jewish nation’. It is the absolute core of Zionism. Everything that Israel does stems from this notion, of the “Jewish nation”.
For Judaism to actually survive this horror and become a mere religion or societal tradition within modern constructs of ‘nations’, the myth of the ‘Jewish nation’ must be deconstructed. The archaic concept of a religious-conditioned ‘nation’ must give way to the modern, enlightened version, wherein the term basically defines those who happen live in a given territory in a given time, providing them with justice, freedom and equality. Dispossessing the vast majority of those under the pretext that there’s a ‘nation’ waiting to take their place cannot be the solution.
Perfectly correct, as far as it goes. The notion of “the Jewish people” must be recognized as a form of racism, as many commentators have argued, such as Rabbi Elmer Berger, who upheld classical Reform anti-Zionism. The radical labor activist turned historiain Noel Ignatiev called Zionism Jewish race doctrine, which explains its affinity for and collaboration with racialist anti-Semitism from the late 19th c down to Nazism, and with Christian evangelicals and the alt-right today.
Classical Reform Judaism was one of the anti-Zionist traditions based on the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation. The Marxist internationalism in which Jewish people were prominent rejected Zionism as colonialism and imperialism. Isaac Deutscher and Maxime Rodinson upheld those standards after 1967. Israel Shahak, the great Israeli critic of Zionism and Orthodox Judaism, cited the “modern secular (non-)Jewish tradition” which he dated from Spinoza, the greatest of the 17th c rationalist philosophers.
Since 1967, the aggrandizement of “the Jewish people” has replaced liberalism as the Jewish social principle, in the state of Israel, in the organized Jewish communities abroad, and also on the left. The latter, from Noam Chomsky on down, have abandoned internationalism and secularism for the minimal critique of Israel’s “occupation” of the territories conquered in 1967, etc.
The concept of “the Jewish nation” must be ended not only Israel, but in the “Jewish politics” of the “diaspora”. On the left, Jewish intellectuals led by Chomsky and groups like Jewish Voice for Peace have ruthlessly enforced limits on Palestine politics for 50 years. The assassination of Alison Weir by all means except physical is only one example. Chomsky, JVP, et al continue adamantly to deny the decisive influence of the Israel Lobby.
Ofir seems to refer only to Israel. “The archaic concept of a religious-conditioned ‘nation’ must give way to the modern, enlightened version, wherein the term basically defines those who happen live in a given territory in a given time, providing them with justice, freedom and equality. Dispossessing the vast majority of those under the pretext that there’s a ‘nation’ waiting to take their place cannot be the solution.” Quite correct, and Boas Evron said as much in “Jewish State or Israeli Nation”, arguing for secular Israeli Hebrew nationality open to all.
Like most Israeli expatriate critics, Ofir is admirably unstinting in his analysis of conditions in Israel. He can not or refuses to understand “Jewish politics” outside Israel. He absurdly compared Israel’s banning JVP over its BDS position (reluctantly and tardily adopted), with Spinoza’s excommunication by his Amsterdam synagogue.
But the “Jewish nation” must be dismantled in the “diaspora” also. In the mainstream it commissions genocide and the clash of civilizations. On the left it denies the radicalization of US foreign policy by Zionism, from the establishment of Israel in the 1940s, to the anti-Iran/Russia/Syria/Hizbollah animus which threatens cataclysm today.
Left Zionism substitutes militant anti-anti-Semitism for an analysis of Jewish racism and its influence, ignores Zionism’s mortal danger to all of us, and precludes understanding and activism which would address it.
The vast majority of 2018’s Jews can trace their 1881 ancestors to one of two populations: Yiddish speaking Europe or Arabic speaking Jews of MENA (Middle East and North Africa). Closer to our day two events disturbed this neat formulation: Hitler’s event and the mass emigration of Arabic speaking Jews out of the various countries of MENA. Today most Jews live in North America or Israel (with a much smaller number living in Europe and Argentina).
But to return for a moment to 1881, most definitions of peoplehood or nationhood would not bridge the two 1881 communities.
Nonetheless, the religion itself, would not inspect the word “am” to see if it matches any textbook definitions. But nonetheless the religion refers to an “am Yisroel” and prays for an ingathering of the dispersed and states “All Israel are responsible each to the other.”
Most Jews in the Diaspora no longer share the Yiddish language and have not acquired Hebrew. Their attachment to Jewish practices: specifically Sabbath and kosher are tenuous to nonexistent. The stigma attached to intermarriage is eroded and eroding.
I once saw a video of Yeshayahu Leibowitz arguing with a young national religious Israeli female raising the question of whether a nation stops being a nation when it loses certain traits of commonality. (I think he was referring to language.) His question was delivered without an answer. He did not assert it as a statement, but proposed it as a question.
When atheist Jews assert the non-nationhood of the Jews, they are usually stating- we have nothing that connects us to other Jews. They assert the disappearance of the religious connection (as a result of their beliefs) and deny the existence of any other connection. They do not propose the rejection of the nationalist bond in order to return to some other bond, they are asserting: “Don’t think you have anything in common with other Jews. You don’t.”
The central myth of Zionism is that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. There may or may be a Jewish nation but it is nothing to do with the Palestinians. The Jewish nation schtick is only acceptable between consenting adults.
Great Photo of Michael Steinhardt flipping the bird at the BDSHOLE creeps! I echo his sentiments.
RE: “For Judaism to actually survive this horror and become a mere religion or societal tradition within modern constructs of ‘nations’, the myth of the ‘Jewish nation’ must be deconstructed.” ~ Ofir
SEE: Another Theocracy in the Heart of the Muslim World | by Uri Avnery | Antiwar.com | June 20, 2011
ENTIRE COMMENTARY – http://original.antiwar.com/avnery/2011/06/19/another-theocratic-state-in-the-heart-of-the-muslim-world/