Last night I was reading a biography of Walter Benjamin that described the excitement over Zionism in Berlin intellectual circles 90 years ago. Socialists and dreamers adopted Zionist ideas. In the U.S., too, many eastern European Jews who had lately escaped pogroms also signed on to Zionism, and they converted some privileged German Jews. I might have been a Zionist myself. For Zionism responded with hope to real world conditions: antisemitism in Europe, and European nationalism. Then the Holocaust showed Herzl to be prophetic, and almost all Jews became Zionists.
So Zionism can be seen as another redemptive belief taken up by Jews, in a history that includes communism, neoconservatism, Bundism, Trotskyism, Sabbatianism, assimilationism, neoliberalism. These ism’s are ideologies not philosophies. They are rooted
in history; and they are all undone as history moves forward. Communism ran up against manâs
laziness, bureaucracy, and capitalism. Neoconservatism has been utterly discredited by Iraq. Those ideas ran their course.
That’s why I wonder whether anti-Zionism is not the new Zionism. For it too is an ideology of hope that can be embraced by Jews, and that responds to today’s realities. As for Zionism, it feels backward, and it belongs to a different ideological age. It is nationalistic when western societies are becoming more pluralist. In a post-colonial age, its colonial roots are still evident, and it daily shows contempt for Arabs. And it puts a claim on Jewish citizens in other lands out of a belief in anti-semitism that simply makes no sense in the west today, especially in the U.S., where Jews are integrated into the power structure.
Anti-Zionists saw all these problems in Zionism 60 and 70 years ago, but they were ahead of their time. Now everyone knows that the dream hasn’t worked out so well, even if they’re afraid to say so. (When Richard Cohen murmured last year that Israel was "a mistake," he got clobbered.) As we said about communism, it’s not the glorious vision on paper that counts,
it’s how the thing plays out on the ground. Zionism has turned out to be
militaristic and–inasmuch as it fails to denounce Avigdor
Lieberman–racist. In a Middle East that is in sectarian flames, Zionism offers another sectarian belief. Lately even John Judis of the New Republic has complained of the demand by Jewish organizations that American Jews exhibit dual loyalty.
Enter anti-Zionism. It is an ideology with a
long Jewish pedigree that offers an idealistic vision of pluralism. It gives young Jews a place to stand that respects Palestinian and Arab rights.
It allows them to get past the neoconservative-led belief in a clash of civilizations–a belief that basically derogates all Muslim societies–and find common ground
with Arab intellectuals who are trying to reform their societies.
My encounters with Noah Schwartz, Antony Loewenstein, and David Zellnik have reminded me that idealism is alive and well among young Jews. They are not trying to force an outmoded vision on the world. They are responding to progressive chords in western thought and trying to use their political imagination to transform today’s reality. Their time is coming.
