I struggle with the word “Zionism.” It seems to clearly describe the ideology – a set of beliefs, values, and assumptions following from a specific premise – that animates the policies of the State of Israel and its support in the Jewish Diaspora and among Euro-American Christian nationalists. I am not convinced that Zionism in the State of Israel, the Zionism of many Diaspora Jews, and the Zionism of Christian nationalists are the same thing, although there is considerable overlap. And it is clear to me that there is a kind of liberal Zionism that is embraced by some Euro-American Jews, which envisions the State of Israel as a kind of Cockaigne which has been perverted and led astray by radical Revisionist Zionism and the self-interest of Benjamin Netanyahu. And Zionism has a history.
Suffice it to say that Euro-American Liberal Zionism has little traction in the State of Israel and has been increasingly marginalized by hardline right-wingers in the mainstream Jewish community of the United States. It is a fading ideology as many erstwhile Liberal Zionists are now coming to terms with the contradiction between the idealized State of Israel of their imaginations and the one that exists in the real world and is prosecuting a brutal war in Gaza; they are finding that they can accept the oppressive, militaristic, quasi-democracy and are willing to abandon their liberal daydreams to do it.
What Zionism means has narrowed considerably in recent decades and the War on Gaza and the circling-of-the-wagons mentality (the colonialist metaphor is intentional) that has come along with it has narrowed its meaning even more. That is why “Zionist” is deployed more often than not in social media as a pejorative. Certainly, in the social media environment I inhabit, “Zionist” is an all-purpose, flat rejection of a political adversary, or of any unacceptable idea, political opinion, or proposal.
This is so much the case that avowed Zionists no longer use the term to describe themselves, preferring pro-Israel, and anti-Zionists call themselves pro-Palestinians. The ideology is still there; in its limited and narrowed form it continues to animate Israeli and Diaspora Jewish politics, but no one wants to talk about it, except as a scornful label.
I find this disappointing, since this narrowing shuts down any possibility of reconciliation; it creates an absolute binary that simply cannot be bridged. One can be a Zionist or anti-Israel (or antisemitic, as the Maximalists would have it), and nothing else. There is no way to speak with each other.
I guess that I should clarify that I am not a Zionist. By this, I mean that I do not believe that a Jewish State is necessary to secure the future of the Jewish people (Am Yisroel, the people of Israel), indeed I regard national states – and the “nation” – as an imagined and historically-contingent construct rooted in the European racialist tribalism of the 19th century. I do not regard the 19th century European-style nation as the natural, or inevitable, organizing category of humanity, so it follows that I do not regard a Jewish national state as natural or inevitable – or even desirable. I should add that I regard all similar nationalisms – American nationalism, Hindu nationalism, Christian nationalism, white nationalism, Serbian nationalism, French nationalism, Quebec nationalism, and even Palestinian nationalism – the same way. “Territories for all peoples, and all peoples in their own territories.”
In this thinking, the Heimat (the homeland) is reserved for the Volksgemeinschaft (the community of the people), but one can allow those who are not of the latter to settle in the former if they… If they what? Adopt the national language, embrace the national ancestors, heroes, and foundation myths of their own, abandon their own particularist beliefs, values, and practices, or at least keep them private? I am reminded of Judah Leib Gordon’s dictum for Jewish assimilation into the nation: “Be a Jew at home, and a man in the street.” Yet, this maxim denies the humanity of the other. To be a man, one cannot also be a Jew.
I know a good many Quebec nationalists, for example, who believe strongly in “le Quebec au Quebecois!” and that “nous autres” deserve a sovereign national state in a territory of their own while also embracing universalist liberal ideas that contradict nationalist particularism. Historically, nationalists in Quebec (and elsewhere) have tied themselves in knots trying to reconcile the particular with the universal, creating absurd chimeras like “civic nationalism” that seek to retain the territorial nation as a transhistorical category with all of its irrendentist and tribal implications, while trying to make it seem a little gentler.
Ultimately, the contradiction between the national and the universal is an aporia. They cannot be reconciled; there is no good nationalism today that can be leavened with liberal universalism… whatever we might hope or wish.
Yet, that does not mean that we cannot talk about it, or find possibilities in that impossible, irreconcilable aporetic space, and such possibilities have existed in the history of Zionism. It might be possible to conceive of “the nation” in ways that do not include an exclusive Volksgemeinschaft in its explicit Heimat bound by immutable borders. The word “nation,” had a long history before it was reduced to the rigid, invariable form of 19th century European nationalism.
Could it be possible to think of the nation, or any community, beyond territory? At one point in their history, Socialists imagined a world – their own Cockaigne – without borders, and where national belonging did not demand fidelity to a state. The founders of la Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière did not regard themselves as any less French even if their allegiance was to an international proletariat. That internationalism was tested and broken in the nationalist frenzy of 1914, but it had once been conceivable.
Even Zionists were once capable of thinking beyond territory and the state. The French anarchist journalist Bernard Lazare was initially drawn to Theodor Herzl’s Zionist movement, but quickly fell out when the latter made a nation-state its goal. Lazare envisioned something different: “the expression of collective liberty and the condition of individual liberty.” The Jewish nation, even as a Zionist goal, need not be “that chauvinistic, narrow, and absurd patriotism which leads peoples to set themselves against each other…” The nation he envisioned would “abolish the political-economic structure of our present nations,” and to recognize Am Yisroel as a “nation-among-nations,” all liberated from the structures of state and oppression.
Ahad Ha-Am (the founder of what has been called “cultural Zionism”) imagined a “Jewish national home” in Palestine as a “spiritual center” without Jewish occupation and domination. “In all those economic and political relations which depend first and foremost on the conditions of the immediate environment and are created by that environment and reflect its character,” he wrote, “these departments of life in the Diaspora will not be bound up with the life of the centre.” Am Yisroel did not have to control the land for it to be our home.
Some Zionists kept open the possibility of a non-territorial, or at least a non-exclusive national life even after Zionist became all-in for territorial domination. The philosopher Martin Buber, who emigrated to Palestine in 1938 as a refugee from Nazi Germany, regarded the project to create an exclusive Jewish national state as a “tragic mistake.” He had imagined a “land of two peoples” where Jewish settlers would work together as partners with their Palestinian Arab hosts.
“A bi-national socio-political entity, with its areas of settlement defined and limited as clearly as possible, and with in addition economic cooperation to the greatest possible extent; with complete equality of rights between the two partners, disregarding the changing numerical relationship between them; and with joint sovereignty founded upon these principles – such an entity would provide both peoples with all that they truly need.”
None of this exculpates Zionism “as-it-exists” today; those Zionisms are dead, and buried. The Zionisms that imagined a “nation among nations,” a “spiritual center” that was not a state, or a “land of two peoples” working together in partnership are lost to history – snuffed out by a Jewish nationalism of domination not too different from the Serbian nationalism that murdered the 8,000 at Srebrenica, or the white nationalism of the Fourteen Words.
Nor do I seek to recuperate Zionism from its current form. But the diversity of historical Zionisms and the imaginative ways that Zionists like Ahad Ha-am, Lazare, and Buber tried to think of Am Yisroel beyond territory makes me wonder. Is it perhaps possible to invite some of those Euro-American liberal Zionists to turn away from the mythic Cockaigne of their daydreams, to think differently, and to enter that impossible, irreconcilable aporetic space between particularism and universalism?
2 June 2024
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It is a difficult thing to admit to, and it probably won’t be popular but, after the holocaust of the tents, I really don’t care anymore about the 7 October attack. The continuing plight of the hostages is another matter, but in the flickering glow of the embers of Rafah, the injury done to the State of Israel is now merely the shadow of a distant memory. The deaths of 1,100 Israelis on that weekend in early fall will remain an open wound for their families and friends and, no doubt, for all the people who comprise the community of the State of Israel. They will be remembered, mourned, and candles will be lit for them every year as people say kaddish. That is how it should be. They were people who lived, had futures, were killed in a war, and left their mothers, fathers, partners, children, and friends behind. I will not gainsay their humanity or the tragedy – for it really is a tragedy – of their deaths.
But, after 36,000 deaths in Gaza, 80,000 wounded, millions displaced and starving, the tragic victims of 7 October seem a pittance of suffering. The charred bodies of Rafah, and the survivors agonizing in their burned limbs, overwhelms even the dead of the command our attention. The enormity of Gaza crowds everything else from my mind. Many of my friends and family insist that the “real story” is 7 October, the hundreds of young people murdered that evening at the Supernova Music Festival in Re’im, and all the others. That might have been the case on the morning of 8 October, or in the days that followed, but it is no longer. That story has been washed away in the blood and suffering of Gaza. It is now merely a footnote to the horror of the 36,000, the 80,000, and the millions.
And it is not I, or supporters of Palestinian rights and statehood, or the “radical left,” or imagined “antisemites” who have reduced the deaths of 1,100 Israelis to insignificance; it is the State of Israel, the IDF, Benjamin Netanyahu and his gang, and the Zionist mob and its keening bloodlust who have trivialized them. After the slaughter, the suffering and starvation, there can be no equivalence; 7 October is the past, Gaza and the holocaust of the tents is the present and, tragically, it is the future. It is the only story worth telling and worth remembering.
30 May 2024
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Please, please, please stop sharing that quote from the charlatan and academic poseur Dr Naomi Wolf. She really has no idea what she is talking about. If you are interested in reading a thorough and perceptive discussion about the meanings of the Covenant and the relationship of the descendants of the Patriarch Abraham to Eretz Zion, read Shaul Magid’s essay “Who Owns the Holy Land” in his book The Necessity of Exile. Magid is a brilliant and subtle thinker and commentator. I don’t always agree with him, but I am always impressed by the breadth of his knowledge and the keenness of his thought. Moreover, he is a real, honest-to-God scholar and not a dilletante.
As for chosen-ness… It can, and does, mean many things. I find most people’s hot takes on it not worth the paper they are printed on and, considering that they are not printed on paper at all, that should give you a sense of their worth.
30 May 2024
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I have had tents on my mind. I see the image of the tents of Rafah ablaze after IDF warplanes bombed the refugee camp at Tel al-Sultan every time I close my eyes. The State of Israel claims that the camp was a legitimate target in its campaign against Hamas. Two “senior Hamas officials” died in what the IDF described as a “precision” strike, and so did as many as 50 Palestinian civilians, and as many as two hundred more were gravely injured in the holocaust of the burning tents.
The tent has become a kind of metaphor for me in this horrible conflict, both as the flimsy shelter that offers no protection from evil, and as an instrument for confronting evil on colleges campuses and speaking truth to power. The massacre in Rafah, coming mere days after the International Court of Justice demanded a halt to the State of Israel’s offensive against the city in Gaza where millions of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge, can only be read as Benjamin Netanyahu’s act of defiance against justice and common decency. It was a deployment of naked power than knows no shame, but it is also a reminder for the committed young people sleeping in tents tonight, and every night, that nothing can shake their resolve in calling attention to the destruction of Gaza.
Tents have a special meaning for the Jewish people. It was in tents that our ancestors first came together as a community of pastoralists, a memory that we honor every fall in the festival of Sukkos. The Torah tells us that after the exodus from Egypt our ancestors built a mishkan, a tent to house the Ark of the Covenant, which could be pitched, struck, and moved as they wandered through the wilderness. For most of our subsequent history, until the construction of the Temple, this tent was the location of the Holy of Holies, what our ancestors believed was the dwelling place of God.
So, the Prophet Isaiah described the canopy of heaven as a tent, echoing the memory of our nomadic past, and obviously referencing the mishkan, under which God rules the world and dispenses justice. The kings and priests have failed and betrayed the people and God, under the tent of the heavens, has judged them and found them wanting. “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in. He brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.” (Isaiah 40:22-23)
Under this tent, the canopy of the universe above and around us, the perpetrators of the holocaust of the burning tents will be judged, if not by God, then by all of the attributes of justice, compassion, and morality that our ancestors believed he embodies. And they will be found guilty and reduced to nothing. That would be justice.
29 May 2024
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Gaza is Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in the same way that the US intervention in Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson’s war. He owns it, from the slaughter of 35,000 people to the displacement of millions, to the famine. The horror and misery are all his and, as we have heard in the overheated, bellicose rhetoric he continues to spit into the global mediastream, that is how he wants it. This is even more true, as Haaretz reports, of the vitriol he sputters in Hebrew at his followers in the State of Israel: he wants them to know that he, the Kohen Gadol of Zionism’s Third Temple and the heir of the Hasmonean priest-kings, is their anointed leader who led them against the Philistines.
It is all for politics, of course. Of the authoritarian strong men in the world, Netanyahu is the most insecure. He is deeply unpopular among Israeli voters, dependent on the support of minor parties in the State of Israel’s fractious, non-constitutional democracy, and a cloud of corruption and scandal follows him like a stray dog. That is why, apart from embroiling his country in an unwinnable, brutal war, Netanyahu’s signature policy initiative remains a judicial reform meant to undermine the State of Israel’s quasi-democracy.
Israelis, as blindly patriotic as the citizens of any other country, are loathe to “switch horses in midstream,” as Abraham Lincoln put it in 1864, when his government was in the process of putting down a slaveowners’ rebellion. Israelis might be more inclined to give their would-be priest-king the shove where they not at war, and in what most of them believe to be a national emergency. Most Israelis believe that the war is just and, after decades of campfire stories told by their country’s far-right, they are convinced that they face existential peril in Gaza. This is not the time, many believe, to be switching horses, and Netanyahu likes it that way.
Make no mistake: The priest-king’s rivals in government, and there are more than a few, are intriguing against him, carefully exploring gaps in his armor, and making plans for when they send him tumbling from the parapets of Jerusalem. Indeed, much of US President Joe Biden’s waffle-house policy with regard to the State of Israel is predicated on just these machinations. But as long as the war goes on – that is, as long as it does not succeed in the unrealizable goal of “eliminating Hamas” and achieving perfect security for the State of Israel – Netanyahu is politically safer and more secure than he would be in a state of peace.
And the cost? Netanyahu’s war comes at an extravagant cost. The death and suffering in Gaza are almost beyond imagining. One month into the war, I wondered if the State of Israel was seeking the biblically-mandated sevenfold vengeance for the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. “That would mean,” I mused, “that maybe the killing would stop when the dead numbered 9,800.” I could not have imagined the 35,000 in those early days, and now I cannot even conceive if there can even be an upper limit to the bloodshed in Netanyahu’s war – 50,000 dead? 100,000? Millions more starving? What can possibly be the limit of suffering in Gaza?
That suffering is the cost of Netanyahu’s war and it is clearly, along with the deaths of the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas, a price that he is more than willing, indeed, eager to pay.
There are other costs, of course, though admittedly lesser ones than the massacre of tens of thousands in Gaza and the continuing abomination of the State of Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian lands and the oppression of its people. These are costs that will be borne for generations by Israelis and, to a lesser extent, by the global Jewish community, and Netanyahu is just as willing to pay them. Indeed, he and his extremist collaborators in the Israeli government regard them as icing on the cake. These costs include the diplomatic isolation of the State of Israel and its inevitable rupture with the Diaspora Jewish community, and for Netanyahu that is just what the marketing world calls “value-add.”
Netanyahu’s Maximalist Zionist vision of the future of the State of Israel includes not only his personal political security, the Anschluss of the West Bank and the eternal brutal enslavement and domination of Gaza – with opportunities for seafront property developments, of course – but also the creation of a North Korea-style Zionist hermit kingdom. Isolation is part of Netanyahu’s plan. Warning the priest-king that, if the killing does not end, his country will be forever a pariah among the nations does nothing because both the killing and isolation are the point.
This is Netanyahu’s war, and it will go on because this is how the priest-king purifies the Third Temple. With blood.
27 May 2024
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