A primer on ZIONISM

by DAVID FINKEL

“Zionism could well turn out to be a passing episode in Jewish history, a parenthesis that has been both brutal (for its victims) and tragic (for its protagonists). The second kingdom of Israel was shorter and less glorious than the first; why can’t the third be even more ephemeral and even less honorable?”
- Michael Warschawski (Israeli socialist and activist)

The fashionable claim by proponents of political Zionism is that “Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.” The intended meaning of this is: If you oppose Zionism, you disrespect Jewish suffering and dignity, therefore you’re for “the destruction of Israel” and you’re an anti-Semite.

Every one of these claims is false, both in fact and in logic. To understand why, we have to deconstruct that claim piece by piece and clarify what Zionism was and is. I’ll use the term Zionism here to mean “political Zionism,” which demanded the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. At the beginning there were other Zionists who proposed creating a Jewish homeland rather than a state. Honorable people like I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky have identified with this tradition, but it was political Zionism that ultimately mattered.

What’s true is that political Zionism arose in the late 19th and early 20th century, as a form of Jewish nationalism. (Although it has a pre-history as a movement among evangelical Christians to return the Jews to Palestine, before any Jews were much interested, we’ll ignore that historical footnote here.) That’s the only part of the claim that’s true. Zionism arose as a nationalist movement in late 19th century Europe, both in the context of other European nationalisms and as a response to the growth of racist anti- Semitism.

But Zionism was only one form of Jewish nationalism, and a highly peculiar one. It was in competition with the working class, socialist Jewish nationalism of the Bund, which sought to liberate the Jewish people where they lived, on the basis of their Yiddish culture and as part of the overall struggle for human freedom. There was the explicitly anti-territorial Jewish nationalism advocated by the great historian Simon Dubnow for example. And of course there were even more Jewish liberals, socialists and communists, conservatives and others who weren’t nationalists at all.

Up to the Nazi genocide, most Jews and even most Jewish nationalists rejected Zionism. Even in the 1930s, in the shadow of fascism, the historian William Rubinstein has shown that support for Zionism among Jews worldwide cannot have been more than 15 percent. To understand why, you have to look at the peculiar character of Zionism as an ideology.

• Zionism was highly peculiar in proposing not to establish a nation-state where the people it claimed to liberate actually lived, but to transfer them wholesale to a different place – to Palestine, where the Jewish religious tradition began but where few Jews had lived for over 1500 years.

•Zionism was highly peculiar in its contempt for the actual culture of the people it claimed to liberate, i.e. the Yiddish culture of Eastern European Jews. Its attitude toward non-European Jews of the Middle East and Africa was much worse, but in this respect it shared the racist assumptions of most European nationalism. It proposed to replace Yiddish language and culture with Hebrew, which Jews had not spoken except for prayer and scholastic study for many centuries.

•Zionism was distinctive in the degree to which it relied on the sponsorship of colonial or imperial powers to carry out its project of national construction. The founding father of the Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, was very conscious of its role: “We shall build there [in Palestine] a protecting enclave of Europe against Asia, civilization against Asiatic barbar-ism.”‑After a flirtation with Turkey, following World War I the Zionist movement allied itself with Britain, which nurtured the Zionist colonial settlement in Palestine at the expense of the native Arab population.

It is hardly surprising in view of all this that the large majority of the Jewish people rejected Zionism. Most Orthodox Jews opposed it on religious grounds, as a secularist usurpation of God’s unique role in bringing about the Messianic era. Reform Judaism in late 19th century America and Germany opposed it as a diversion from Jewish modernization and political emancipation. Socialist Jews reviled it for attempting to divide Jewish workers from the proletarian struggle. Most ordinary Jews regarded it as a curiosity irrelevant to their lives.

Even as the Nazi menace arose in the 1930s, Jews generally did not see Zionism or emigration to Palestine as the solution to their problems. And the mainstream of political Zionism, in fact, was not concerned with saving Jews from Germany or Eastern Europe; David Ben-Gurion was concerned with bringing to Palestine young Jews or those with capital, not the large numbers whom he scorned as petty traders. Zionism indeed did not attempt – and to be honest, could not have succeeded even had it tried – to rescue millions of European Jews from the Nazi genocide.

The obvious question, then, is how such a historically late colonial movement could have succeeded after most Jews either opposed or were indifferent to it, and when Palestinian and other Arabs obviously did everything they could to stop it. There were basically three reasons:

First, Zionist settlement in Palestine was highly advantageous to British imperialism in the inter-war period. The British colonial (so-called “Mandate”) administration afforded substantial economic advantages and military protection to the Yishuv (Jewish settlement community). The Zionist movement by the 1940s was also highly skilled in promoting itself as an ally in controlling the strategic Middle East to the rising imperialist power, the United States.

Second, the Zionist movement in Palestine was very well organized and strategic in its planning, while the Palestinian population was poorly organized, very badly led and dominated by feudal landlords, often absentees who sold land to Zionist settlers without the peasants’ knowledge. In addition, the Zionist project succeeded in the revival of the Hebrew language as a crucial factor in the identity of a new nation.

‑Third, the debate in the Jewish world was never “won” by the Zionist argument. Rather, Nazi genocide and brutal Stalinist repression ended the argument, as most of European Jewry was wiped out and Jews in the Soviet bloc were cut off. The end of World War II saw several hundred thousand Jewish survivors in Displaced Persons camps, with no homes to return to and no place to go except Palestine (as western governments and the Zionist movement had no interest in opening other borders to the survivors).

‑This mass of desperate people furnished the critical mass that finally gave political Zionism the base for a Jewish State in Palestine. As the Zionist leadership rejected bi-nationalism in any form, it carried through the other option – the war of ethnic cleansing that Israel celebrates as the War of Independence and Palestinians commemorate as the Nakba – setting the stage for the half century of further conflict and tragedy that has followed. Nonetheless, the creation of a new Hebrew-speaking nation in Palestine/Israel was an accomplished fact – a tragic fact that would not have occurred had the Jews of Europe not been annihilated, but an undeniable fact anyway. ★

David Finkel is a member of the US socialist organization Solidarity (www.solidarity-us.org) and an editor of the magazine AGAINST THE CURRENT.