Musings on Zionism and It’s Discontents

 

Zionism, of course, as many scholars and intellectuals have noted, is the product of late 18th century, 19th century, and 20th century mostly European nationalism. Unlike constitutional nationalism, which defines national identity relative to political culture, “democracy”, for example, as in the United States and Canada, though there are wrinkles in Canadian nationalism which add complexity to notions of being Canadian, Zionism has increasingly become a form of ethnic nationalism, identity defined on the basis of certain cultural characteristics such as ethnicity or religion and the overlap between these, and soil, something one can particularly see in the right wing populist conception of Israeli Zionism and the decline of Kibbutz nationalism since the 1970s.

What a lot of people don’t want you to know and what a lot of people don’t know is that criticisms of European settler state Zionism, which are distinct from anti-Semitism or better anti-Judaicism, have been around almost as long as Zionism, religious and secular, has been around. Many Hasidic Jews of the 19th century, the era that saw the rise of political Zionism, and after, for example, saw political Zionism as a form of messianism, a form of false messianism wrought by the minds of men rather than by the will of god. They thus often saw political Zionism as heresy, as having another god before god, political Zionism.

A number of Jewish intellectuals have, over the years, been critics of Zionism. Across the twentieth century Zalman Baruch Rabinkow, who was influenced by Hasidim, Eric Fromm, who was a student of Rabinkow and who was also influenced by Hasidism, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Albert Einstein, David Riesman, Tony Judt, Norman Finkelstein, and the Jewish Voice for Peace have criticised Zionism on both empirical and ethical grounds. Their criticism ranged from the normative, theological, or doctrinal—Zionism was a false form Judaism, that political, priestly, and theocratic Zionism undermined the humanistic and universal aspects of humanistic or prophetic Zionism--to the descriptive or empirical, pointing out the inhumane and unequal treatment of Palestinians and Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews in Israel given Zionism’s domination by European Jews, Israeli imperialism and colonialism (all of Judea and Samaria, the Zionist version of from the river to the sea), and the tendency of Israel to prefer force to negotiation, negotiation being incompatible with varieties of Zionist expansionism, to note a few of these criticisms. Needless to say, the Israeli use of force over negotiation since 1948 has not brought peace to the region just more anger and alienation.

None of these criticism of Zionism are “anti-Semitic” though interested parties like the Israeli government and its adjuncts around the world would have you believe that they are. Some of those who claim that any criticisms of Israel are anti-Semitic, a strategy that parallels those used by nationalists, some other religous/ethnic groups, and those in power that any criticism, including empirical and theological criticism, of the US, Mormonism, and Islam, may believe their own subjective discourse or rhetoric. Others, however, demagogues, are using such claims cynically and for power purposes to marginalise,  demonise, intimidate, and silence those who offer rational, reasonable, and empirical analyses of the state of Israel, including Jews who make such criticisms of Zionist Israel. That such rhetoric seems to be working particularly with some university presidents with their retail notion of higher education and its moronic speech codes—you can’t outlaw speech any more than you can outlaw cannabis or alcohol in the long run--points up how many have bought into this rhetoric, a rhetoric that is nearly if not clearly fascist. And ain’t that, just as is the ties between Israel and Christian anti-Semites for whom the only good Jew is a converted or apocalypticised Jew, a paradox and in the final analysis pathetic! The use of force to demonise and criminalise speech will not work anymore than the use of force by Israel in the long run and will only breed more anger and alienation and perhaps even real more anti-Judaicism.

One can compellingly argue that this intellectual divide between polemicist and apologists for Israeli Zionism reflects a divide that goes back to ancient Israel and Judea between priestly Judaism, theocratic Judaism, and prophetic Judaism, the Judaism of the prophets who often criticised priestly Zionism for its breaking of the covenant with god, for its treatment of the poor, of outsiders, and for its emphasis on ritual without spirituality, for example. Fromm, for instance, saw himself as a proponent of prophetic Judaism—the “camp” I would place myself in--and regarded his empirical and spiritual and ideological critiques of Zionism as grounded in prophetic Judaism and empirical facts.

All across the modern and postmodern core world Jews continue to be divided between those who fall in the priestly and theocratic camp and who claim that any criticism of Israel and Zionist nationalism is anti-Judaicism, and those, who like the American Jews who marched for civil and human rights in places like Selma, Alabama, Jews like Abraham Joshua Heschel, for whom humanistic Judaism, prophetic Judaism, the Judaism which sympathises and even empathises with those who have been abused by the powerful, point out, just like the nevi’im did before them, that political and religious Zionism, is not living up to the covenant with god or to its own claims to be a humanistic beacon to the world. And so it goes...