When Israeli soldiers shoot, maim and kill unarmed Palestinian protestors living under Israeli siege in Gaza – where has Zionism taken us?
When a nation descended from refugees turns it back on African asylum seekers because they will dilute the Jewish purity of the State – what moral integrity does Zionism have?
When the President of the Board of Deputies in Britain describes a left-wing religious Jewish group as “a source of virulent antisemitism” because they openly criticise Israel – what madness has Zionism created?
As Israel turns 70 later this month, Zionism, the political ideology that propelled the Jewish State into existence, is showing all of its failings and exposing the destructive force it’s always been for Palestinians and, indeed, for Jews.
For everyone’s sake, it’s high time we ditched it.
The ‘Jewish Question’
Zionism at the end of the 19th century set out to provide a distinctly Jewish response to what was described as ‘The Jewish Question’. How could Jews break free from centuries of oppression and discrimination? Where could Jews find safety and security and lead a normal life in a place that could be called ‘home’?
Zionism’s answer to ‘the Jewish Question’ was the revival of Jewish nationalism with the aim of ‘returning to’ and ‘recreating’ our ancient biblical kingdom. It was influenced as much by European ‘blood and soil’ nationalism as it was by socialism and the collective memory of ‘Eretz Yisrael’ carried with us through sacred texts and daily liturgy.
But whether nationalist, socialist or religious, Zionism has failed to address the Jewish Question. The State of Israel has neither normalised nor made safe the Jewish people.
If successive Israeli leaders are to believed, Israel is permanently under genocidal threat.
Right now we have the nuclear ambitions of Tehran; the would-be Palestinian murderers about to tear down the Gaza fence; and the campaigners in Europe and North America using boycotts, divestment and sanctions to throw the Jews into the sea. So what happened to the ‘safe haven’ in times of trouble? In 2018 Israel must be the least safe place for a Jew to live.
As for antisemitism, Zionism was meant to address this by taking Jews out of the continent of Europe which had given birth to it. But according to Israel’s advocates, antisemitism has not gone away but mutated into anti-Zionism. Not only does this call into question the point of Zionism in the first place, it’s also a convenient framing that makes opposition to Zionism look like hateful extremism.
Rather than address the causes of antisemitism, Zionism has confused and complicated matters, making it more difficult to agree what antisemitism is and how best to combat it.
Defending Israel, defending Zionism and castigating its critics takes up a disproportionate amount of the diaspora community leadership’s time. But it’s worse than that. The pro-active position on Israel and Zionism that’s been adopted by Jewish leaders around the world creates distorted and strained relationships between the Jewish community and other faiths groups.
New Jewish Questions
Since the late 1980s, the Zionist narrative of ‘Jewish Return’ as part of a righteous and moral endeavour of Jewish national self-determination has been challenged by Jewish Israeli historians gaining access to Israel’s own government archives.
There has been a growing understanding that the indigenous Arab population of Palestine paid a high price for the triumph of Jewish nationalism. The historical record shows that Zionism was never just an innocent endeavour which Arab hostility and irrational Jew hatred attempted to thwart.
Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel created a brand new set questions about Jewish security and Jewish identity just as urgent and just as fundamental as those of the 19th century.
What happens when the Jewish people become colonisers?
What happens when we create a State that constitutionally discriminates against its own non-Jewish citizens?
What happens when we become occupiers?
What happens when we besiege and annex another people’s land?
By holding dear to Zionism, Jewish communities around the world are trapped in a state of collective denial about the past and the present. Not only do we refuse to accept what’s taken place, we’ve made ourselves incapable of seeing it.
Zionism and Judaism
We pray for Israel and its armed forces in our synagogues; our communal leaders advocate on its behalf, chastise its critics, stay silent on its misdemeanours; and Israeli Independence Day itself has been made a minor Jewish festival celebrated not according to the secular Gregorian calendar but by the Hebrew lunar calendar.
But if Zionism is Judaism and Judaism is Zionism what’s left of the ethical Jewish tradition? Because now the Nakba is Judaism. The Occupation is Judaism. The siege of Gaza is Judaism. The question becomes not only what is Zionism but what is Judaism? Is Judaism no more than the defence of a colonial project of dispossession? And if our Rabbis find such a statement abhorrent, why don’t they speak out against the atrocities being committed and then excused in the name of our faith.
Liberal Zionism
Liberal Zionists insist that the ideology of Zionism is still fundamentally sound and can be redeemed from its current difficulties through a two-state solution. Such a position now looks not only naive but a deliberate attempt to obscure the truth.
Liberal Zionists still treasure the Israeli Declaration of Independence signed on 14th May 1948 with its promise of equality for all Israel’s citizens. But in truth that was a deceit from the beginning. There is no true democracy on either side of the ‘Green line’. Try asking Palestinian Israelis if, after 70 years, they think the Israeli Government treats them as equal citizens or a demographic threat to the Jewish State?
Dividing not unifying
For a younger generation of Jews living outside of Israel, the Jewish State is no longer an idea that creates communal unity or a satisfying secular or religious Jewish identity.
Younger Jews have learnt too much about the forced displacement and on-going discrimination against an indigenous people to accept that Zionism was, and still is, an innocent project of Jewish liberation.
They have questioned the myths and narratives accepted by their parents and grandparents, while their own understanding of what it should mean to ‘be Jewish’ in the 21st century feels offended by what they see happening in a country that claims to exist and act in their interests.
In America you see the growing inter generational divide at work with the rise of Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. In Britain the latest twist in the ‘Get Corbyn’ saga has given a healthy profile to a young group of religious and leftist Jews called Jewdas disenchanted by a Jewish establishment which is attempting to police who is a ‘good Jew’ and who is a ‘bad Jew’ based on criteria set by Zionism.
How to mark Israel at 70?
As Israel turns 70 there’s nothing to celebrate but there are many lives to mourn.
The dead and wounded Palestinians shot by Israeli army snipers on the Gaza border over the last two weeks is what makes Zionism a crime rather than just a political failure for the Jewish people.
The latest atrocity, is just that, the latest atrocity in a long line of Israeli atrocities, which Zionism attempts to legitimise and justify. The news reporting rarely reminds the public why there are so many Palestinians crammed into the Gaza Strip, how they got there or where their grandparents came from. But without that knowledge you cannot understand this year’s Great March of Return 70 years on.
If you are Palestinian the idea of another people celebrating the moment of your national catastrophe is profoundly immoral. The growing number of Jews who have understood that Zionism has been a ‘wrong turning’ in Jewish history will not be celebrating either. Instead we’ll stand with Palestinians to mark the 70th anniversary of their Nakba on 15th May.
Only one thing is certain, Israel needs to stop being an ideology and start being a nation. A nation of all of its citizens, all with equal national, civil and religious rights.
After 70 years, only partial justice and restoration is possible for the Palestinian people. Whatever constitutional arrangements are arrived at, equality should be the guiding principle at work.
As for Zionism let’s ditch it and move on. It’s time to place it in a glass cabinet and put it in a museum in a room marked ‘Dead Ends & False Messiahs’.
This post first appeared on the Patheos site.
Yes, but not only that we ditch Zionism, that we return to the not so long ago when concern for social justice and equality defined us. Task number one on this new agenda, our helping Palestinians attain justice, whereupon it’s onward towards the long sought just and peaceful world of our dreams.
Thank you Robert Cohen. Forceful argumentative essays like “Jews must ditch Zionism, now” are why I love reading MW.
“Liberal Zionists insist that the ideology of Zionism is still fundamentally sound and can be redeemed from its current difficulties through a two-state solution. Such a position now looks not only naive but a deliberate attempt to obscure the truth.”
I agree wholeheartedly with the thrust of your argument, Robert, and appreciate that you have taken the time to craft a brief, cogent, logically-sound argument against “liberal Zionism” (however readers may choose to define that term).
I love the way you employ salient historical facts throughout this essay to support your argument. My only quibbling reservation concerns language which might cause offense to the faint-hearted, statements like, “Is Judaism no more than the defense of a colonial project of dispossession?” — not that causing offense isn’t necessary, at times, to wake some people from their (seemingly) unconscious stupor(s).
I would only suggest that Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and many others represent, for some, a Zionist tradition (or counter-tradition, if you prefer) which was more interested in establishing in Palestine a “Jewish cultural center [which] reject[s] the crude slogans of Balkanized nationalism and [refuses] a vision of Palestine based on ‘ethnic homogeneity and national sovereignty,’” to borrow the language of Ronald Beiner in THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HANNAH ARENDT (2000), p. 58.
There is no doubt in my mind that the Herzlian tradition of ethnonational (or ethno-national) sovereignty has prevailed over all other Zionist traditions. But for some students and scholars, Zionism (as a term) may (possibly) be salvageable through the recognition of universal human rights, the right of self-determination and the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.
Some of Hannah Arendt’s arguments seem, to me, particularly prescient. For example, when she writes, “the only alternative to Balkanization [in the M.E.] is a regional federation” because nationalists’ “insistence on absolute sovereignty in such small countries as Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, TransJordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt can lead only to [transforming the whole region] into a battlefield for the conflicting interests of the great powers to the detriment of all authentic nationalist interests” (pp. 58-59).
From the many books I have read on the creation of zionism the roads always lead back to the British. Created for imperialist strategic/geopolitical reasons the zionist Jews are merely pawns in that game.
ROBERT COHEN- “What makes it so difficult for Jews to ditch Zionism is that it’s undergone a highly successful ‘merger’ with Judaism. Zionism long ago stopped being merely a political project. It’s now understood as the natural heir to three thousand years of Jewish religion, history and culture.”
Bless you for that! One can only hope that those who illogically continue to see a stark separation between Zionism and Judaism will acknowledge that as Zionism has continued to Judaize itself, so too has Judaism become Zionized. My one quibble is that Zionism was never merely a political project. The early Zionists indicated that Zionism was an affirmation of Jewish peoplehood, Jews as separate from the non-Jewish society. The very concept of “blood and soil” is, in fact, a secular mythological concept where a sense of common peoplehood is created from a highly romanticized “history,” religious symbolism frequently employed even when not literally believed. Israel Shahak conceived of Zionism as a return to Classical Judaism in secular form. Jacob Neusner sees American Judaism as now centered on the Holocaust, with the state of Israel representing symbolic redemption. In his words, “American Judaism must be deemed a wholly Zionist Judaism.” (p8, “Stranger at Home: The Holocaust, Zionism, and American Judaism,” Jacob Neusner).
Ditching Zionism sounds lovely to me but will sound very unlovely to many others.
I believe that some threads of Jewish belief and teaching hold that moral rules binding on Jews are of a universal character — Jews should not murder anyone, for example — and that other threads of Jewish belief and teaching hold that moral rules binding on Jews are non-universal — perhaps to the extent that no duties are owed to non-Jews, who are sometimes described as animals or insects.
If this is so, then the moral distance between various Jews is as extreme (on this important point) as between anyone else, and one wonders why members of the first group would be supporting members of the second group — which seems to comprise Zionist Israeli-Jews and some Zionists who are not Israeli-Jews.
This seems to me to be an agreeable argument (to some Jews) for ditching Zionism and support for Israel.