The contradictions of Zionism

This post is (yet another one) about Zionism...

...and therefore inevitably fraught.

Some of that comes from the fact that supporters of the Israeli government try to deflect all criticism of Israel and solidarity with the Palestinians by saying that it’s motivated - consciously or otherwise - by hatred of Jews. Some of them actually believe this, and sometimes they say it in bad faith because it’s effective.

And there are people who really are Jew-haters, who don’t care much about Palestinians or what Israel does to them, but use “Zionist” as a code-word for Jew. There’s more of this about than there used to be...you don’t have to go far in to many conspiracy theory websites before you find it...David Icke goes on about “Rothschild-Zionists”, Sandi Adams who spoke at the anti-lockdown rally in Stratford Park hosted material like this on her website.

And some people conclude from this that “it’s better not to talk about Zionism at all, because everyone means different things by it”. But we need to, because understanding the different meanings that are attached to it, and where these have come from, is a first step towards developing a decent politics that can address both Palestine and anti-semitism.

The central contradiction of Zionism

There is a distinction that is often made between the ‘nationalism of the oppressed’ and the ‘nationalism of the oppressor’. Zionism is both, and that makes talking about it more difficult. 

In Israel now Zionism underlies and provides the justification for the oppression of Palestinians, inside Israel ‘proper’ - the internationally recognised borders of Israel from 1967 - and in the territories that Israel has occupied since 1967. (For an in-depth illustration see the  website of B’tselem - an Israeli organisation that describes the situation as ‘a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea').

It’s considered an extreme left-wing view in Israel to say that Israel should be “a state for all its citizens”. Two years ago the Israeli parliament narrowly passed a law saying that Israel is ‘the nation-state of the Jewish people’...that is, it belongs to all the Jews of the world, whatever their citizenship status. And not to all of its citizens.

Now to most people around the world who believe in democracy this seems weird, but the debate in Israel is about whether it should be a law or not, not whether it’s right. Stuff like this is part of the intellectual and ideological and legal apparatus that enables oppression.

Nationalism of the oppressed: a response to antisemitism

To have productive conversations about Zionism, we need to go back further - and understand the ideology and movement as something that started out as a response to the predicament of the millions of East European Jews, particularly those in the Russian Empire. 

Antisemitism has a very long history in European civilisation - the blood libels (the often-repeated fiction that Jews murder Christian children for their blood), the massacres during the crusades, sinister Jews in art and literature. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 (and other countries in Western Europe at other times). The first immigration act in Britain, the 1905 Aliens Act, was introduced to keep out Jewish refugees from Russia.

The modern version of antisemitism was a mass political movement with its own parties and newspapers, and an explicit ideology that explained what was wrong with the world in terms of the involvement of evil Jews. 

Jewish life in Russia (Russian-governed Poland was the largest population of Jews in the world) was characterized by legal restrictions, state persecution, and organised street violence - the Black Hundreds was a popular Russian antisemitic organisation involved in organising pogroms (state-sponsored anti-Jewish riots that turned into massacres). 

In 1902-3 the Russian secret service forged a document, ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’, which claimed to be a secret plan for Jews to take over the world and it’s still in circulation today… this is the sort of stuff that Icke and Sandi Adams promote, and is promoted, via Qanon, in the US Republican Party..  

The catalyst for the founding of the political Zionist movement was the 1894 Dreyfus trial in France, which demonstrated to some that Jews would never be accepted as equal citizens by their non-Jewish counterparts.

From the foundation of the Zionist movement in 1897 the mainstream ‘Political Zionism’ sought to get backing from one or more major European powers to help them get a state. Political Zionism argued that the ‘Jewish Problem’ could be resolved by creating a state for the Jewish people and organising the mass migration of Jews to that state. This was referred to as the ‘Normalization of the Jewish People’. From early on the place chosen for that state was to be Palestine, seen as the site of the last time there had been an independent Jewish state. A key slogan was “A land without a people for a people without a land”, which ignored the fact that Palestine was inhabited.

Zionism wasn’t the only kind of Jewish nationalism- there were others like the Sejmists and Jewish Autonomists, and Territorialists; there was the Bund, a Jewish socialist movement that was big in Russia and Poland. In some ways Zionism was similar to the other movements of oppressed nationalities in Europe - the Polish, Czech, Finnish, etc. If history had unfolded differently Zionism might have turned into an interesting footnote in history, like some of the other European settlements in Palestine, or like Marcus Garvey’s  ‘Back to Africa’ movement in the US. And there were other responses to the oppression of Jews - the individual response of migrating to America or somewhere else, for example. Others placed their hopes in the international Communist movement, hoping that the overthrow of capitalism would also put an end to antisemitism.

Nationalism of the oppressor: a colonial movement in Palestine

“Practical Zionism” sought to encourage Jews to migrate to Palestine without waiting for a state, and to establish the nucleus of a new society there. 

This included the creation of communities - sometimes utopian communes with socialist or anarchist characteristics, as well as more conventional businesses, farms and towns. It wasn’t a big success - many more Jews migrated to America than to Palestine; between 1907 and 1914 the comparable figures were 20,000 vs. 1.5 million. 

But Practical Zionism had one important consequence; the Zionists discovered that Palestine was after all inhabited. There were a variety of responses. In general it wasn’t seen as a big problem, partly because they thought there were only a few hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs at most, and millions of Jews would be migrating to Palestine. Some Zionists convinced themselves that the Palestinian Arabs would be pleased once they understood how the creation of a Jewish state would benefit them. 

“Labour Zionists'' thought that it was necessary to create a segregated labour market, with protection for Jewish workers who would otherwise be undercut by low-waged Arab workers - otherwise they wouldn’t be able to persuade Jewish workers to immigrate. They organised unions that called for Jewish-owned businesses to boycott Arab workers, at the same as they tried to persuade those Arab workers to join special Arab-only unions to fight for higher wages. There was a wide spread of opinion, and some socialist-Zionists like the ‘Left Poale Tzion’ and Hashomer Hatzair took the socialism part seriously and tried to make common cause with the Arab workers in Palestine, with very limited success.

After WW1 the British Empire took Palestine away from the Turkish Empire, and the British began to sometimes tolerate and sometimes encourage Jewish immigration into Palestine. 

With the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe, and other countries closing their doors to Jewish refugees, the pressure to allow Jews into Palestine increased, and the Palestinian Arabs  - who knew that the Zionists were intending to turn their country into a Jewish state - became ever more hostile.
So from early on Zionism had two different aspects, and this is still important now. 

In Europe it was a movement of an oppressed minority, offering national pride and cultural identity. 
In Palestine it acted as a movement and an ideology of colonists, seeking to take over a territory and dominate the local inhabitants. It wasn’t interested in immediate self-government or independence for Palestine because it needed the British Empire to enforce the right of Jews to immigrate - an independent Arab-controlled Palestine would have stopped that. 

The impact of the Holocaust

The Holocaust changed the way that Jewish communities around the world responded to Zionism.

A majority of Europe’s Jews died in the Nazi genocide - two out of three, and many of those who survived were dispossessed, displaced and devastated by the loss of everything and everyone they had known. Before the Holocaust lots of Jews were anti-Zionist or at least not Zionist. Orthodoxy was opposed on the grounds that returning to Erez Yisrael before the coming of the Messiah was sacrilegious. Reform Jews, who were keen to present Jews as a denomination rather than a nationality, were also opposed - as were some successfully assimilated and prosperous Jews, the other kinds of Jewish nationalist, and most Jewish socialists. 

After the Holocaust, the Zionist view that the Jews would never be accepted in the countries in which they lived seemed to have been vindicated. Jews who had never been Zionists, and never became ideological Zionists, nevertheless found themselves supporting the nascent Israeli state in its ‘War of Independence’.  The creation of a state that - unlike the British administration in Palestine - would permit the mass immigration of the displaced Holocaust survivors seemed to have become a matter of urgency.

The brief honeymoon between Zionism one the one hand and the USSR and the international Communist movement on the other made this much easier. The state of Israel was fought for with Soviet and Czechoslovak weapons, Communists across Europe helped Jews breach the British blockade against emigration to Palestine, and Communist-sympathising young Jews volunteered to fight for the newly established state. Isaac Deutscher, the anti-Zionist biographer of Trotsky, regretted that he had opposed Zionism and not tried to persuade more European Jews to migrate to Palestine.

That was then, and Deutscher and his heirs avoided becoming belated converts to Zionism. Every so often the remnants of left Zionism appear to be making a last-ditch stand against what they would like to think of as the ‘betrayal’ of their ideals, but these become progressively intellectually less convincing, and less politically significant and the organisations loyal to these ideas diminish numerically. Some of the opposition to the occupation comes from people who characterise themselves as left or liberal Zionists, but this opposition seems to be forever compromised by ideological acrobatics to distinguish between the nasty things that go on in the Occupied Territories and the ‘democratic’ character of Israel proper.

For most Jews outside Israel, even those who aren’t ideologically or organisationally involved with Zionism, identification with Israel and with the word ‘Zionism’ is part of their personal identity. 
Most Jews in Britain identify as Zionists, even those who don’t like the Israeli government, oppose settlements and the occupation. People like me, who don’t consider themselves Zionists, are comparatively rare. We don’t know how rare, but we aren’t represented in the Jewish community, and when you start to get embroiled in the arguments between Jews about who represents what, and say things like “not all Jews are Zionists” you are opening up some complex stuff with a long history.

This identification is bound up with a memory of fear and precariousness. The extermination of most of Europe’s Jews happened in my parents’ lifetime, to their cousins. It might seem odd to POC that British Jews, who are mostly white and seem to be safe and privileged, don’t feel themselves to be so...but when I look at the people in rubber boats trying to make it across the Meditterranean or the English Channel, or the columns of refugees trying to cross borders in Southern and Central Europe, I think about my parents’ generation and those who tried and failed to cross borders or seas to escape to safety. 

I grew up Zionist. I went to a state-funded Jewish primary school that was run by a Zionist organisation. The Hebrew that I learned there was the Israeli kind - I didn’t even understand why older people pronounced Hebrew in a completely different way. The songs we sang were Israeli songs, in Hebrew. We celebrated Jewish holidays the way they did in Israel. There were maps of Israel and Israeli flags all over the school...I don’t think there was one British flag or map of Britain. Later on as a teenager I joined a Zionist youth movement, where we went camping, and got off with each other, and sung more Israeli songs and practiced living like a utopian community.

I don’t consider myself a Zionist now… I know too much about the role that Zionism plays in Israel and Palestine, and I don’t think it makes sense for Jews in this country to consider themselves as members of a “Jewish Nation”, even though I can’t think of myself as English either. But I don’t call myself an anti-Zionist either, because of all the stuff that I’ve just been talking about, and because I want to be able to have a conversation with other Jews who have an attachment to the word, and even to Israel, without falling at the first fence.