Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine

Tamar Amar-Dahl, Olga Thierbach-McLean

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110495645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

After half a century of occupation and tremendous costs of the conflict, Israel is still struggling with the idea of a Palestinian state in what is often perceived as the Biblical Eretz Israel. Mapping Zionism, enemy images, peace and war policies, as well as democracy within the Jewish State, the present study offers original insights into Israel's role in this conflict. By analyzing Israeli history, politics and security-oriented political culture as it has been evolving from 1948 on, this book reveals the ideological and political structures of a Zionist-oriented state and society. In doing so, it uncovers the abyss between the Zionist vision of Eretz Israel on the one hand and the aspiration to achieve normalization, peace and security on the other. In view of this conflict-laden bi-national reality, the Palestinian question is identified as the Achilles' heel of Jewish statehood in the Land of Israel. Thus, Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine provides a fresh, innovative, critical and yet accessible perspective on one of the most controversial issues in contemporary history.

1Zionism and the Ideology of the Jewish State

The Jewish Diaspora and its Negation

Zionism emerged in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century with the defined goal of terminating the “abnormal” political situation of the Jewish diaspora, that is, statelessness of the Jews, and of creating a mode of collective life based on a national state. Arising from the emergency situation posed by an increasingly rampant racist anti-Semitism in Europe, Jewish nationalism was funneled into a movement, with the “negation of the diaspora” forming the core of its ideology and the starting point of its politics. Thus, Shimon Peres (1923–2016), a Zionist statesman and Israeli politician of many years who himself was born in an Eastern European shtetl and emigrated to Palestine as an adolescent, described the Jewish diaspora from the vantage point of an already achieved national statehood:

[…], a famous Jewish philosopher by the name of Yankelewitz said once that Jewish life in the diaspora was similar to a voyage in a subway – you travel underground, you don’t see the scenery, and nobody sees you in the train. It’s only now, in modern times, that Jewish life is being conducted as if it were a voyage in a bus; you can see from within the outside scenery, and you can see from the outside that people are sitting in the bus. A shtetl in many ways was the subway of Jewish life; it was totally disconnected from the outside world. Let’s have a good look at it – I mean, in a way, it was a dream and in a way it was a pleasure. It was a pleasure because it was disconnected from the rest of life. It wasn’t a normal place to live. And a dream because we weren’t living there mentally. Our hearts were in Israel. The shtetl was like a passing station.1

Two thousand years of Jewish diaspora as a historical transitional phase to the long awaited “normal” form of the national state? Apart from this Zionist one, there are various other Jewish interpretations of the diaspora. For instance, in his 1931 essay Diaspora, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow (1860–1941) points out that from the religious perspective, the diaspora is considered to be God’s punishment: “The hope for a return to Zion and for the coming of the Messiah has always remained alive in the hearts of Orthodox Jews and has constituted one of the thirteen tenets of Jewish religion as formulated by Maimonides.” In response to the resignation that was setting in after more than two thousand years of futile waiting for the return to Zion, Jews “have found solace in the idea that the diaspora was not God’s curse, but rather His blessing [of the Jewish people].” In this context, Dubnow quotes an explanation put forward by the medieval Torah commentator Rashi who argues that the diaspora is a blessing in consideration of the fact that a scattered people cannot be completely exterminated at the same time. At least under the religious aspect, a universally beneficent effect is ascribed to the Jews’ way of life as a “scattered people”: “God did not ‘scatter’ the Jews, but sowed them among the peoples like seeds from which the true world religion of monotheism would grow.”2

The diverging perspectives on life in the diaspora have all found their way into Jewish political movements. The modern Jewish reform movement or religious liberalism accepts assimilation, i.e., the absorption into the majority population, as something to which there is no alternative, thus embracing life in exile as a kind of universal task. Then there were the so-called diaspora nationalists who held that neither the assimilation nor the categorical rejection of the diaspora offered a solution. As they saw it, Jewish identity and national autonomy were being preserved just as well in the diaspora, namely by their own cultural institutions and organized communities on the one hand and assimilation to the new political and cultural environment on the other. By contrast, the Zionists deemed the diaspora a way of life that is dangerous for Jews and Jewish identity, since they saw assimilation and the consequential deracination as the inevitable result of the ever-present fierce anti-Semitism. By taking the political approach of radically rejecting the diaspora, Zionists brought to life “the messianic teachings in a modernized political form.”3 On this point, the Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (1958–) offers the observation that

‘negation of exile’ refers to the consciousness that deems the present Jewish settlement in, and sovereignty over, Palestine as the ‘return’ of the Jews to the land believed to be their home, and imagined, prior to its ‘redemption,’ as empty. The negation of exile appeared to be the ‘fulfillment’ of Jewish history and the realization of Jewish prayers and messianic expectations. According to this perspective, the cultural framework that the Zionists wished to actualize and uncover was the ‘authentic,’ original Jewish culture, as opposed to the exilic culture, described in blatant orientalist terms as stagnant, unproductive, and irrational.4

Further, Raz-Krakotzkin points out that Zionist-Israeli historians such as Yitzhak Baer (1888–1980), Chaim Hillel Ben-Sasson (1914–1977), Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), Ben-Zion Dinur (1884–1973) – all of whom played a central role in the creation and shaping of a Zionist national history –, although they do expound the problems of the complex national and territorial definition of the Jewish collective in the Zionist historical narrative, still maintain that not only did the general “negation of exile” not call into question Zionist historiography, but that it actually firmly embedded it in Zionist culture as its very basis. In doing so, the Israeli present is interpreted as the “fulfillment of Jewish history”: Jewish exile culture is seen as the reflection of the “spirit of the nation” and the history of exile as an integral part of a specifically Jewish national and territorial master narrative.

As is also noted by the American sociologist Rogers Brubaker (1956–), “nearly every nationalist historiography is of a teleological nature: History is read in terms of its outcome, it culminates in the nation state independence. This redemptive point of culmination can either be projected into the future – as a state that has to be fought for – or can be celebrated as something that has already become reality.”5

According to the Zionist-Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri (1933–), for example, the Zionist way of life represents a “progression.” To him, the Jewish national statehood has a moral-normative significance. Israel epitomizes the “public of the Jewish people” by taking over the role of the traditional religious-communal diaspora centers that used to be responsible for the preservation of “collective Judaism.” In the face of modernization and secularization processes, and hence the increasing assimilation of Jews into their respective society, the Jewish state is attributed a normative function, namely the preservation of the “collective existence of the Jewish people.” Avineri stresses that the state is not to be seen as a substitute for Jewish religion, since the latter already has a deeply collectively-existentialist meaning for the faithful. Rather, it represents an adequate response to the danger posed by the assimilation that is brought in the wake of the increasing secularization of Jewish life: “Only the Jewish state, and not religion, can serve as a common denominator […] for all the heterogeneous factors of Jewish existence.”6

This approach, in which the core of Jewish identity is shifted from religion towards nationalism, is naturally rejected by the Jewish orthodoxy. From the very beginning, the majority in the orthodox camp staunchly opposed Zionism and the idea that any “redemption of the Jews” can be brought about by the efforts of men. A radical religious anti-Zionist movement, the Neturei Karta, which champions the dissolution of the State of Israel, dismisses Theodor Herzl’s idea of the termination of the diaspora as a violation of divine law. The Torah

forbids [the Jews] to leave the diaspora of their own accord and found a state before God brings final salvation to His people and to the entire world […]. 2,000 years ago, God sent the Jewish people into exile (diaspora), and it is also by God that they will be redeemed from it. Until then, they must be patient, faithful and loyal to their host peoples, wherever divine fate has cast them. This also extends to the Palestinians who live in the Holy Land of Palestine according to divine will. This is unambiguously recorded in written form in the Torah and by the prophets.7

Here, the categorical rejection of a Jewish state and of a cessation of the diaspora is derived from an orthodox interpretation of Jewish religion. In a stance that is in opposition to the religiously motivated anti-Zionist Judaism, the anti-religious movement of the Canaanites proposes a new concept of a Hebrew state. This movement, which was founded by Yonatan Ratosh (1908–1981) and was active in the founding period, first and foremost aspired to the integration of the new state into the culture of the Middle East, which would entail the total separation of the Jews living in Palestine from Jewish history and thus from the diaspora Jews.8

But also the less radical, not necessarily anti-Zionist religious Jews were occupied by the question as to what extent Israel as the Jewish state can really draw on Jewish tradition and religion, or in how far Israel can represent the Jewish people in the way envisioned by Avineri. The orthodox Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994), a resolute advocate of the separation of state and religion, aims his criticism not so much at the existence of the Jewish state but rather at the usurpation of the Jewish people and the instrumentalization of Jewish religion and tradition for Zionist purposes. As Leibowitz wrote in 1954:

The State of Israel does not dare disclose the true nature of its spirit, which is a rebellion against the religious tradition of the Jewish nation. It cannot afford to be sincere because the atheistic state at present does not know any other origin or any other source other than the historic Jewish nation on which it could draw. The only way for the state to justify its existence and create an ideological fundament is by falling back on Jewish history and tradition. For this reason, this secular state is constantly forced to use symbols and terms of traditional Judaism – in education as well as in propaganda, internally and externally – although the meaning and content of these symbols and terms is of a religious nature. […] The effects on public morality are fatal: By utilizing wordings, names and symbols depleted of their religious meaning, all values are destroyed and hypocrisy, cynicism and nihilism are promoted.9

There is a current in Jewish thought, however, which is positioned between secular Zionism and religious a-Zionism or anti-Zionism in which the two momentums – the religious and the national one – are not only considered not contradictory, but even jointly form the bedrock for the movement’s agitation. That is religious Zionism, which shares the same basic idea with secular Zionism: namely the negation of the diaspora and the assumption that the creation of a Jewish national state is the only sustainable way of Jewish life. In contrast to the Orthodox Jews, the early religious Zionists did not construe secular Zionism and its goal of settling the Holy Land to be blasphemous in any way. Rather, they effectively reconciled Jewish religion and national statehood by bringing questions of culture and education center stage in their movement while shifting the more controversial messianic dimension of Jewish Orthodoxy into the background.

Initially, the establishment of a religious state in keeping with the Jewish Halacha law did not constitute a stated goal of religious Zionism. Only later, influenced in the 1920s by the Jewish mystic Abraham Isaac Kook HaCohen (1865–1935), did religious Zionism take on messianic features. These became manifest after the Six-Day War of 1967, and formed the ideological basis for the national-religious settlement movement Gush Emunim (Hebrew for “block of the faithful”) that was founded in 1974. It considered the creation of a secular Jewish state an indispensable step on the way to “messianic redemption.” Especially following the events of 1967, Gush Emunim and its advocates in the Knesset knew how to effectively rope in the state apparatus for their goal of promoting Jewish settlement in the Holy Land.10 It has to be stressed here, however, that when it comes to the ideology of the “Judaization of the land of the forefathers,” there is barely any difference between religious and secular Zionism. This may explain the settlement policies adopted over the years by the various Zionist-oriented Israeli governments. The implementation of the Zionist project in Eretz Israel is the work of Zionist Israel, with Jewish nationalism asserting itself in the course of the second half of the twentieth century as the central Jewish line of thought.

On Nationalism

Emerging as a reaction to anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews in Europe, Zionism was ultimately inspired by European nationalism. Nationalism – and hence conceptions of nation, nationality and sense of national identity – has occupied thinkers of Romanticism since the middle of the nineteenth century. From the early 1980s on, the so-called “premoderns” dominated scientific understanding of nations and nationalism. They perceived nations as quasi-natural units which have been developing since the Middle Ages, so that the first nations were able to “blossom and fully unfold in an organic growth process.”11

The second assumption relates to the right of a nation to its own state. It is from this premise that the right of self-determination of peoples, as evoked by Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) and Vladimir I. Lenin (1870–1924), was derived after the First World War. Thirdly, it was assumed that each nation has its own system of ideas and values which justifies the respective nation’s existence and which can be referred to as national consciousness, patriotism or national sentiment. And fourthly, this understanding of the nation infers the existence of a predefined political and linguistic “national foundation” that provides an ideational “superstructure” in the form of nationalism.12

More recent studies on nationalism distance themselves from these fundamental assumptions. Instead, they draw on the constructivist idea according to which historical phenomena can be interpreted as constructs of the human mind.13 Max Weber (1864–1920) was the first scholar to understand nationalism as a historic-ideological phenomenon with a clearly definable beginning as well as a possible end. Weber radically contested the basic attitudes towards nationalism and nations that were prevailing in his own time. In doing so, he opened up the possibilities of new, modern research on nationalism that is based on the understanding of a nation as a utopian concept or “imagined order.”14

In the words of the sociologist Ernest Gellner (1925–1995): “It is n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Zionism and the Ideology of the Jewish State
• 2 Zionist Israel and its Enemies
• 3 Israeli Democracy and the Zionist Project
• 4 Israel’s War Policy in the Service of Zionist Israel
• 5 Jewish Statehood and Regional Peace
• Bibliography
• Internet sources
• Index of Persons
• Endnotes