I am not an optimist by nature. That is perhaps an occupational hazard of being a Jew and a historian. It is difficult to see a bright future through a Jewish historian’s lens. The past, I often tell my students, is full of bad news since history is always the story of getting things wrong far more often than getting them right and, from a Jewish perspective, our history began with exile, continued to brutality at the hands of Rome, the ghettos, the Crusades, antisemitism and genocide.[i] So, I am not inclined anyway to look at the ongoing war in Gaza, which started three months (thirteen weeks and one day) ago, with optimism.
This is the eleventh entry in my Gaza Journal, and I could never have believed, when I began, that I would still be writing and publishing it, and I cannot now imagine a time when I will stop. Commenting on the War on Gaza, and the myths and nostrums of Zionism is a vocation that I took on willingly, and I do believe that I am doing some good by sharing my commentary, among so many other brilliant, thought-provoking perspectives that I read every day in social media. I had almost given up on social media, yet I have found that it has value as a platform for a latter-day “Republic of Letters,” a rhetorical space where I can feel part of an ongoing conversation of real value. I have the greatest gratitude to my friends and interlocutors who have helped me feel less crazy or, at least, less isolated.
Yet, looking through the lens of history, it is all bad news. Even with almost universal global demands for a ceasefire and for some kind of end to the occupation – with even the United States calling for a revitalization of the Palestinian authority over the State of Israel’s objections – the State of Israel grinds on.[ii] All that seems to clear to me is that, when this ends, it will end badly, and I do not know if the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies are aware of just how bad it will be.
***
I reflected the other day on the how the experience of humiliation at the hands of European antisemites inspired Sigmund Freud – and doubtless others – to resist Christian cultural hegemony and, indeed, the premises of Christian values. Seeing his father humiliated, he resolved never to back down, and to emulate heroes like Alexander the Great and Hannibal. I mused about how many young Palestinians, living under Israeli bombs and seeing their elders routinely abused and humiliated by Israeli soldiers and Border Police might have had similar experiences, and how many of them have resolved – and are resolving – to be anti-Israel heroes who will never back down.
Ted Levine, a social media friend, commented that “the symmetry of the situation, and the lack of recognition of that symmetry, just blow me away.” That is a common thought among those of us who know the history and reality of antisemitism and are committed to social justice, decency, and human rights. When we intone the motto “Never Again,” in memory of the Shoah, and in the fact of antisemitism, it means something. As Elie Wiesel himself said:
“Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.”
And the question that Ted, and so many others like him, is right to ask is how can our fellow Jews in the Diaspora and in the State of Israel tolerate again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting and bombing of starving, frightened, terrified children in Gaza? How can Jewish Zionists and Israelis not only condone but advocate for base, ugly, dark violence when we have repeated the prayer “Never Again” over and over for almost 80 years? How do they not acknowledge the fearful symmetry of the actions of the State of Israel in the Occupied Territories and, above all, at this moment in Gaza?
I believe that a good many Zionists and Israelis not only do, but they regard the symmetry as license. Although Zionism was not inspired or motivated by the horrors of the Shoah – after all, Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896 and the first Zionist Congress was held in 1897, almost a half-century before the revelations of the death camps – but its leaders and the State of Israel collectively have arrogated the extermination of European Jewry as their own foundation myth.
The irony is that Zionist leaders in 1930s Palestine cooperated with the Nazis to spirit the property and capital of wealthy German Jews out of Europe in the Haavara program, largely untroubled by the rise of National Socialism, which David Ben-Gurion hoped would be a “fertile force” for the Zionist project. After all, he did not consider the safety of Europe’s Jews to be a Zionist priority. Zionism’s mission, he made absolutely clear, was not to protect the world’s Jews from genocide, but to create a Zionist state in Palestine.
“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel,” he said, “I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”
And Revisionist Zionists, whose legacy lives on in the State of Israel’s Likud Party and the current Israeli regime, openly admired Fascism and National Socialism. Writing in the Revisionist Zionist newspaper Doar Hayom, Abba Ahimeir celebrated Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, noting that, apart from its antisemitism, National Socialism could be a model for the Zionist movement.
So the lesson that Israeli leaders and many contemporary Diaspora Zionists have taken from the Shoah and the long history of antisemitism might not be the one that people with consciences would hope. Writing in Haaretz, Michael Brizon noted that the motivations of the State of Israel and its Zionist surrogates are based on a “unique blend of a spirit of inferiority and spirit of superiority, a spirit of condescension and spirit of victimhood, a spirit of self-pity and spirit of meanness to others.”
In other words, as Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Benjamin Netanyahu himself have all said in their own ways: “We are the victims here; we are the only victims here; the Shoah has granted us unlimited resources of victimhood that we can call upon to enact whatever vengeance we wish against whomever we wish, using whatever means at our disposal.”
They acknowledge the symmetry, and they explicitly acknowledge it when Smotrich dreams of ethnic cleansing and the depopulation of Gaza, “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million,” presumably to make way for the settlers of Greater Israel, and no one in the Israeli government offers even a tacit rebuke. The leaders of the State of Israel and their Zionist allies know exactly what they are doing; they know that they are marching in lockstep with the tormentors of the Jewish people whom they have the outrageous gall to claim to represent. But that is the whole point.
“Humaneness is forbidden, we are Israeli,” Gideon Levy lamented in Haaretz last month. “When an earthquake happens anywhere on the globe, we’ll send aid and be proud of ourselves, but mass killing in Gaza is not our business. That’s the way Israel’s morality works.”
***
I remember the first time I ever tasted falafel. It was at the end of the annual March to Jerusalem in Montreal; it was sometime in the early-1970s, and I was seven or eight years old. The March was a walkathon organized by Combined Jewish Appeal, the main volunteer and fundraising organization for the Canadian Jewish community. Tens of thousands of us walked the 25 km, getting our “passports” stamped at checkpoints named after locations in the Holy Land as we raised money “for Israel.”
I have no clue what that money funded – social services and cultural projects, I imagine – but I do remember the falafel at the street festival outside the Snowdon YMHA. It was heavenly, I had never tasted something with just that balance of savory and spice, topped with fresh vegetables and tahini. The street cart was festooned with blue and white flags and signs that declared that falafel was one of the “authentic flavors of Israel.”
For years, I imagined beautiful, sun-kissed sabras in khaki shorts and bucket hats, munching on falafel and dipping their Israeli pita bread in Israeli hummus as they sat at sunset at a wadi after a long day of “making the desert bloom,” and singing “Hinei ma Tov.” That was the happy, heroic, exotic postcard picture of the State of Israel that I carried in my imagination for almost a decade.
Things began to change in 1982, when the IDF crossed the Litani River, invaded Lebanon, and stood by approvingly as their Christian militia allies butchered Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps. My rosy, infantile view of the State of Israel, formed at the March to Jerusalem, at Jewish summer camps where we sang “Ha Tikva” along with “O Canada” at sunset, in a Hebrew school always staffed by young Israeli teachers instructing us in our alef-bets and Zionism could not stand the cognitive dissonance.
That was about when I stopped being a Zionist. It had been easy to just go along with the flow of the post-1967 Israel fetishism that characterized so much of mainstream Jewish life in North America, and I was a kid who had grown up on “Jerusalem of Gold” and the heroics of Victory at Entebbe (in which Antony Hopkins played Yitzhak Rabin and Richard Dreyfuss played Yonatan Netanyahu – you can’t make this stuff up). But, confronted with Israeli naked, military aggression, that comforting narrative just crumbled.
I wrote a letter to the editor of the Montreal Gazette that concluded with the line “Israel is no longer the good guys,” or something like that, and I instantly became something of a Friedman family pariah.
It took longer for me to learn the truth about Falafel (and pita and hummus). I uncritically carried the idea that it was “authentically Israeli” until my first year of university. Thanks to the prevalence of Greek restaurants in Montreal and my father’s insistence that we stop at Arahova every time we went for bagels on Saint-Viateur Street (which was pretty often), I had already learned that neither “Israeli Salad” nor feta were, in fact, Israeli. So, I was already primed.
Yet, it was only when I started at Concordia University, occasionally grabbing lunch or dinner at Basha, a Lebanese restaurant on Sainte-Catherine Street, that I learned the truth about falafel. I remember going there with some of my colleagues at The Link, Concordia’s student newspaper, and musing out loud how odd I found it that a Lebanese restaurant served Israeli food. Ralph, Jennifer, and David stared at me with gaping jaws as if I had just said something like “I had no idea that the Pope was Catholic” and then, with much mirth, set about disabusing me of my absurd ignorance. I can only hope that they have forgotten this incident.
Yet, as I look back, whatever shame or embarrassment that I feel is not for looking silly in front of my friends, but for how I swallowed and uncritically accepted a narrative that not only elided Palestine and Palestinian culture – in this case, food culture – but erased it. There was nothing “authentically Israeli” in Falafel, Hummus, pita, and the rest, except in the egregious cultural appropriation of the culture of the people whom the State of Israel displaced, expelled, and is now killing in Gaza.
The Zionist project, certainly as Theodor Herzl outlined it in Der Judenstaat in 1897, was predicated on the narrative that it would settle empty lands, and the narrative which emerged through the following decades, in the Yishuv, and later, in the State of Israel, depended on the contention that the land had been left fallow by “incompetent” Palestinian Arabs, endowing the industrious Zionists with clear title to the land through usufruct.
Zionism rhetorically and ideologically erased the people they displaced and now, re-deploying the narrative of erasure, leaders like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and their millions of Greater Israel acolytes are slavering over the possibility of depopulating Gaza. There is nothing there, in their minds, except what is already Israeli. In a de-cultured space, where Israelis owe nothing to anyone but themselves, de-population seems, to them, to naturally follow.
And I recall how I bought into the narrative that anything from Israel, whether it was falafel or Jaffa oranges, was by definition, “authentically Israeli” – indeed, how so many of us did and still do. That makes us all complicit in a history of cultural erasure… And in what surely follows from it.
***
Sigmund Freud related one of the formative experiences of his life. His father had been walking on the sidewalk in their town in Moravia, when he was accosted by a Christian who shouted “Jew, get off the pavement!” The antisemite grabbed the elder Freud’s new fur hat and threw it into the rutted, muddy street. “‘And what did you do?’ I asked. ‘I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,’ was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct.” Freud related this story as an explanation for his ambivalence to “Christian civilization” and his great admiration for heroes like Alexander the Great and Hannibal who, unlike his humiliated father who seemed to participate in his own humiliation, never backed down.
And I am wondering about the generations of Palestinian youth who have seen their parents and their elders humiliated continually for decades, at checkpoints, border controls, and in daily life by Israeli soldiers and border police, often teenaged conscripts who exercise their authority in such a way as to intentionally humiliate Palestinians. I wonder about the generation of Palestinians who have grown up under Israeli bombs, artillery, and missiles, and have seen their homes, schools, hospitals – indeed, the entire infrastructure of their lives – reduced to rubble, and not just now, but repeatedly.
How can a brutal, imperialist state like the State of Israel really believe that it can secure “security” through ruthless violence when all it is probably doing is creating heroes among its enemies who will avenge their elders’ humiliation and never back down?
Is this what Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and all of their supporters really want?
***
One of the things that I find particularly telling about the hegemonic power of Maximalist Zionism in the Jewish world is how it has utterly delegitimized other Zionisms.[iii] I find the thought that Ahad Ha-am’s “cultural Zionism,” which regarded Eretz Yisroel as the cultural homeland of the Jewish people, though not our political-national homeland, and Bernard Lazare’s non-territorial Zionism, which held that the Jewish people comprised a nation, but a “nation among nations” that did not require control of a territory to thrive, have been utterly rejected by contemporary Zionism revealing.
Like the Taliban, who destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan because there could be, in their conception, no possible history in Afghanistan prior to Islam, the Maximalist Zionist who today dominate the State of Israel and the Diaspora Jewish community have intentionally erased any memory of possible Zionist alternatives. They do this to delegitimize potential opposition within the Zionist and Jewish communities, and to point to the stark gulf between themselves and Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists to justify their hard line. Contemporary Zionism’s slogan could be: “20 million Jews, one opinion.”
Yet, if we do educate ourselves about the other Zionisms, non-Zionisms and, as Shaul Magid proposed, counter-Zionisms of our history, we will find a range of possibilities and lenses through which we can understand our communal relationship to the State of Israel. Simon Rawidowicz imagined a Jewish world in which the State of Israel was not, and should not be, the center of Jewish life, any more than the (memory of the) Temple of Jerusalem should take precedence over the scholarship of Babylon – the Talmud and the roots of rabbinical Judaism.
When the State of Israel was created in 1948, Rawidowicz recalled the traditional hope we express at the Brit Milah, when we admit an infant boy into our community: “May he grow up to be a good Jew.” The State of Israel has failed to grow up to be a “good Jew.” We need to discuss the alternatives.
***
Non-Zionist thinkers like Richard Marienstras, and non-territorial Zionists like Bernard Lazare ask us to question whether the territorial state is the necessary (and inevitable) model for the survival of a people, even if we conceive of it as a “nation.” So, is contemporary Zionism a failure of imagination and a kind of ideological fetish, and how can we conceive of “the people” and “the nation” in non-territorial ways?
***
It probably won’t be a popular thing to say, but from the perspective of the Naqba, the disposession of Palestinian Arabs, the occupation, and the brutal oppression of the Palestinian people, the distinction between Revisionist Zionism and Labor Zionism is facile, to say the least. Historically, both the Haganah and the Irgun, both Mapai and Herut, both David Ben-Gurion and Menahem Begin, had the same goals with regard to Palestinian Arabs then and now: Their expulsion from the land claimed by Zionism and the State of Israel. This is not even slightly contradictory; no Zionists believed that Jews and Arabs could coexist – it was never in the plan. The Palestine Communist Party/Maki demurred, of course, but they also rejected Zionism until the mid-1960s.
The only difference between Labor Zionism (liberal Zionists’ imagined “good Zionism”) and Revisionist Zionism (liberal Zionists’ imagine “bad Zionism”) was that the former felt a pang of regret over what they regarded as necessity, and the latter felt great enthusiasm for what they regarded as absolutely desirable.
It is sad to see so many liberal Zionists deploy the myth of “good and bad Zionism” and take umbrage at the conflation of the Labor Zionists and the Revisionists. They must really believe it. They also must really believe that Labor Zionism (their imagine “good Zionism”), whose contemporary political embodiment earned about 3.7 percent of the vote in the 2022 Israeli election, is somehow still relevant. There is only one Zionism in the State of Israel, and it is the legacy of the Irgun, Lehi, Herut and the self-proclaimed “terrorists” of 1947.
The State of Israel that so many Diaspora liberal Zionists believe in ceased to exist many decades ago and, even then, it was not based on coexistence or humanity. And that really is sad to see.
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[i] There are brights spots, of course. When I teach US history, there is an inexpressible sense of joy at the abolition of slavery and the heroic successes of the Civil Rights Movement, but these are invariably overshadowed by the fact that racism and bigotry did not simply go away.
[ii] Admittedly, the American proposal, such as it is, is the weakest possible tea.
[iii] By Maximalist Zionism, I mean the quasi-official Israeli (and mainstream Diaspora) Zionist ideology that holds that, not only is the State of Israel a historical necessity or inevitability, but that Jewish life and identity are impossible outside of and without the State of Israel.
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