Jews, Israelis, Zionists

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi at the Free (Reform) Synagogue of New York explained some twenty years ago that Zionism is inseparable from Judaism. “Good” Jews must be Zionists. Anti-Zionists are antisemites or self-hating Jews. However, unlike Catholicism, Judaism lacks a central authority, and other rabbis are free to disagree, as they often do. In fact, Rabbi Hirsch expressed his views in a book made up of two essays, one by Hirsch himself and one by an anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox rabbi who maintained that only the arrival of the Messiah could grant the land to Jews. The title of the book made this divergence clear: One People, Two Worlds: A Reform Rabbi and an Orthodox Rabbi Explore the Issues that Divide Them.

There is no doubt that today, the majority of Jews, religious and non-religious, proclaim some form of adherence to the Jewish state. However, as the Gaza crisis continues to dominate the papers, an increasing number of Jews, especially young American Jews, are having second thoughts, particularly since the present right-wing government in Israel clashes with the relatively progressive views of so many American Jews. Even a normally Israel-friendly newspaper such as the New York Times noted, with some alarm, that “a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.” (25 November 2023)

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch’s view on Zionism became the dominant political position among Jews only after the Second World War, when Jewish refugees who had survived the Nazi genocide, unable to migrate to the West (thousands of them were denied entry into the US), sought refuge in Palestine and established the Jewish state, forcing a large number of Palestinians to become, in their turn, refugees. The new state, proclaimed in 1948, called for a “return” of all Jews, while not allowing the Palestinians who had fled the conflict to return. The present Palestinian problem is a result of Western antisemitism, as was the birth of Zionism. Ironically, it was antisemitism that fueled the expansion of the Jewish population in the new state, first with Jews from the Middle East (where they had lived for centuries in greater safety than in Christian Europe) and then from the Soviet Union. Relatively few Jews migrated to Israel from Western countries, such as France, Italy, Great Britain, and the USA, where they prospered.

The first Zionists were not religious. They were secular Jews alarmed by the growth of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 19th century. Their Zionism was part of the ethnic nationalist ferment of 19th-century Europe, which grew out of aspects of Romanticism. Yet, since one uses all arguments to defend one’s position, they adopted the myth that Jews had been expelled from the Holy Land by the Romans (this has no historical foundation), as well as a Biblical reading, which asserted that God had given Palestine to the Jews (the promised land). In the modern age such claim would be met with ironic skepticism. Imagine a religious group arriving in Sicily or Crete claiming that their god had given them these islands and trying to settle there with force of arms.

You can go a long way towards folly with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other. According to the biblical account, God “gave” the Jews all land from the Euphrates to the River of Egypt. In Genesis (15:18-21), God told Abraham “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.”

Since the Euphrates flows from Turkey to the Persian Gulf (having joined the Tigris) and assuming that the “river of Egypt” is the Nile, then a claim could be made, on the basis of Genesis, that God’s promised the Jews not only present-day Israel and the occupied territories, but also Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, most of Turkey, and perhaps even Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and bits of Egypt.

All nationalisms need a mythology. The litany is fairly similar poised between lachrymose self-pitying victimhood and vainglorious accounts of heroic deeds. “We,” it says, have been around for centuries, or even more (1066 in Britain; 966 in Poland; since Romulus and Remus in Italy; since Plato and Aristotle in Greece; since the days of Abraham in Israel). The French claimed to be descendants from Clovis, King of the Francs; the German praised “their” tribal leader Arminius who defeated Roman legions.

Ukrainian nationalism stands on similarly shaky foundations. Some Ukrainian nationalist historians, such as the popular Yuriy Kanyhin, strongly endorsed by the first president of Ukraine (and former communist), Leonid Kravchuk, even claimed that Ukrainians are mentioned in the Bible and are descended from Noah.

Today, few take seriously such nationalist contentions, but they make an exception for Zionist claims, perhaps because the West felt guilty of past anti-Semitism and, above all, of the Nazi genocide.

Zionism represented one of the first and best-known Jewish political movement of the late 19th century, but not the only one. In the Tsarist Empire, the most important Jewish party was not Zionist, but the now semi-forgotten socialist Jewish Bund, created in Vilnius in 1897, the same year as Theodor Herzl held the First Zionist Congress in Switzerland, having just published his Der Judenstaat, advocating a Jewish homeland (not necessarily in Palestine). The Bund rejected Zionism, arguing that a Jewish state would bring about an insoluble conflict in Palestine and would not solve antisemitism. Herzl himself entertained the possibility that the Jews would settle in Uganda, then a British colony, but such a plan was abandoned. Both Zionists and Bundists sought solutions to the “Jewish Question.” The Bundists wanted a state where Jews could have equal rights while remaining Jewish; the Zionists wanted a state that would be entirely Jewish.

The original Zionists tended to be secular Jews. Today the movement is increasingly religious, as well as nationalist, a combination that is ever more common in the Middle East, notably in Turkey, in Iran, and in Lebanon. Palestinian nationalism, too, underwent a similar transition from the secular PLO of Yasser Arafat to the present Hamas. In 1948, the state of Israel was briefly supported by the USSR. Now right-wing populists support Zionism. In the past, some antisemites thought that the creation of a Jewish state would be a way of getting rid of their Jews. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India in the British government (1917-22) and one of two Jews in the British government, objected strongly to the Balfour Declaration, which he regarded as anti-Semitic, since it presupposed that Jews would have divided loyalties and would be regarded as foreigners “in every country but Palestine.”