A lot of new people are coming to this blog– and to leftwing and Arabist sites–because of Gaza. These new readers are outraged by the slaughter and don't trust the conventional guides. This influx represents a great opportunity for my side to offer our teaching on the matter.
In that spirit, I want to give my quick, back-of-the-envelope description: What is Zionism?
Zionism is one of three or four great Jewish revelations about society that came out of 19th century Europe. Freudianism was another, so was Communism. They all arose from inspired minds, and changed the world. They all spoke to real conditions, and in Zionism's case answered a great Jewish reality: antisemitism.
Theodor Herzl, the visionary of Zionism, was the Tom Friedman of his time, a man-of-the-world journalist in Vienna, who was shocked by expressions of antisemitism at the Dreyfus trial in the 1890s in Paris (the voices in the crowds reportedly saying "Kill the Jews"), shocked that a rising professional like Dreyfus could be falsely accused. Herzl's answer was for the Jews to leave Europe and go to Palestine. His book The Jewish State (1896), the most important document in Zionism, talks about the dangers of wild animals in the new land but doesn't really mention the Arabs.
And that problem is built into the DNA of Zionism: arrogance toward the indigenous population.
That Herzl was dealing with a real and important problem is reflected in the fact that Zionism was taken up with passion by my ancestors, who were fleeing pogroms in Russia, and later of course, in the Holocaust. The annihilation of Europe's Jews had the effect of providing the world's imprimatur to Zionism, in the U.N. partition vote of 1947–a somewhat ahistorical vote, inasmuch as it came at the very time that the settler/colonial model was being abandoned by the west.
But the Jews were unsafe in the west. The Holocaust proved that. Ergo, the Jewish state.
The two great weaknesses in Zionism as a political model are intertwined: 1, it ignored the local population's interests, and 2, in order to pull off that contempt, this minority relied on the support of a western superpower. The Jewish lobbying of English leaders in 1917, when the British were dependent on Jews for scientific brilliance (Chaim Weizmann's acetone was the basis of certain ordnance) and finance (Jewish bankers had choked the Russian government because of the pogroms), resulted in the Balfour Declaration. And the lobbying of U.S. leaders for the last 40 years has resulted in the continued expansion of Zionists in historical Palestine. The "settlements." The occupation. The blank check on ethnic cleansing and slaughter.
And so the tragic irony of Zionism is that an ideology that arose because Jews were unsafe in the west has desiccated and hardened, 110 years on, into a policy of utter dependence on Jews who feel completely safe in the west in order to attempt to guarantee the security of an unsafe population of Jews in the alleged Jewish homeland.
That tragic irony is writ through all the events of the last few years in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, notably Iraq/the neocons and now the Gaza Slaughter/Obama's silence. The great and terrible reality that Zionism responded to, western antisemitism, is over. Richard Perle has a house in the south of France; four of six participants in this Sunday's "Meet the Press" foreign policy table are Jewish; I have a nice crib myself.
Zionism has completely outlived its usefulness and applicability. In historic Palestine, there is apartheid. The main thing that sustains that apartheid in the west is the same thing that enables the Gaza slaughter: The Holocaust has had the (understandable) effect of making Jews extremely ethnocentric.
The great challenge to Jewish minds, and American ones, is to imagine a different way of Jewish being in the Holy Land. Yes we can.
Guess that was a pretty big envelope!
