-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
"A Vote for 'ABBB' (Any Body But Biden) is a Vote for Trump and Republo-Fascism" (S. Jonas, March, 2024)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As my regular readers know (and some of my occasional readers will know it too), I have been writing on Israel, the Israeli Right, and the awful plight of the non-Israeli Palestinians (and yes, there are Palestinians who are full Israeli citizens, even including judges) on a regular basis for the past year or so. (See the listing of those columns just below.) In fact, I have been writing on the Israeli Right (which I now call the Israeli Nationalists) on and off at least since 2006. In this column, I am going to review some of the arguments made/positions taken, in the columns referenced just below.
OpEdNews Op Eds 4/28/2023: "The Current Israeli Constitutional Crisis --- What it is Really About: Palestinian Expulsionism." URL: Click Here
OpEdNews Op Eds 10/12/2023: "On the Gaza Crisis, 2023 (1): Primarily on the Historical Background of Zionism." URL: Click Here
OpEdNews Op Eds 10/20/2023: "On the Gaza Crisis, 2023(2): Who Benefits?" URL: Click Here
OpEdNews Op Eds 10/27/2023: "Israel: Fighting Six Wars, Plus One: A Civil War." URL: Click Here
OpEdNews Op Eds 11/10/2023: "The SJ 'Killer Fence,' Israel's detector fence, the GAZA attack, Mike Johnson, and 'The Devil's Triangle.' " URL: Click Here
OpEdNews Op Eds 1/18/2024: "Response to a Commentary by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center on the Gaza Conflict." URL: Click Here
OpEdNews Op Eds 1/25/2024: "Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and Anti-Zionism." URL: Click Here
OpEdNews Op Eds 2/1/2024: "Why the Current Israeli Government Will Not Negotiate." URL: Click Here
OpEdNews Op Eds 3/15/2024: "Israeli Nationalism: Creating the New International Anti-Semitism; Conflating Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism." URL: Click Here
And so, on to brief reviews of a selection of the issues covered in greater detail in the columns above.
1. The Origins of the Policies of the Current Israeli Government, which I now refer to as Israeli Nationalist, go back about a Century.
In my view the current Israeli government should have a name that more truly describes it and its objectives than "Right-Wing Coalition," "Likud Coalition," or even "Anti-Palestinian Rights Coalition." And for that I have chosen "Israeli Nationalism." It reflects an ideology and policies that go back for about a century, to the time of its historical founder, one Ze'ev Jabotinsky, a post-World War I emigree to what in the early 1920's became the (British) Palestinian Mandate.
He was an early promoter of the "It's all ours" ideology. As I said in a column published last year:
"In the Woody Allen movie Sleeper, when his character awakens from a (very) deep sleep (very) long after the end of a catastrophic world war which he obviously survived, he is asked about what started the war. He replies, 'well, there was a man named Albert Shanker.' (Only older readers, especially from the New York City area, will know who he was. But he was a bad guy, except among his most devoted followers.) For Israel and Expulsionism going back in history, there was a man named Ze'ev Jabotinsky. He was a right-wing Zionist who in the 1920's laid down the dictum that that long-range solution for what would become Israel was to establish an exclusively Jewish state within what has been held for millennia by certain Jews to be the boundaries of 'The Land of Israel' 'granted to the Jews' 'by God.' Questions of logic, history, and legality do not figure into this particular configuration for a modern State of Israel.
"For Jabotinsky the solution to the problem of the Arab peoples living in the Mandate there was a simple one: expulsion. In the 1930s, the social democrat David Ben Gurion, the future first Prime Minister of Israel, referred to Jabotinsky as the 'Jewish Hitler.' There is a direct line from Jabotinsky down to the present Israeli leadership. Netanyahu's father was a secretary to Jabotinsky. Ariel Sharon's parents were close associates of his, and the first right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin (who led the pre-1948 Jewish anti-British terrorist organization Irgun) was strongly influenced by him."
2. Although many current users of the word "Zionism" don't recognize this fact , the word has had multiple meanings over time. Before the late 19th century in Central Europe, it had a sort of romantic form, "Next Year in Jerusalem," without a particular plan for just how that goal was to be achieved. Then came the first meaning with a political/economic basis, which lead to the first significant modern emigration to a province of the Ottoman Empire. It is very important to recognize that the late-19th/early-20th century Zionism of Theodor Herzl developed as a direct outcome of a new, political, use of the doctrine of the anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a doctrine founded on prejudice against Jews as a people, actually first came into existence before the Common Era. It is what I refer to as "The Default Hate."
Significantly, in the late 19th century, it was for the first time being politicized, by several Austrian and German politicians. It started to take hold in the general population of Central Europe, with (ironically) an expulsionist (of the Jews) element to it. In response, Herzl and his colleagues essentially said: "You don't want us? Well, while some of us will go to America, others of us will just go to Palestine, which was, a long time ago, known as 'Judea.' "
In the Between-the-Wars period, particularly as anti-Semitism became central to the policies of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, an increasing number of Jews, especially in central Europe, wanted to leave. But, as the "Evian Conference" of 1938 proved conclusively, there were virtually no countries in the World who take any of them. One might say that a "Zionism of Desperation" overtook European Jewry at that time. And some numbers of Jews did make it to the Palestine Mandate between the Wars. Then, after World War II, when again few countries showed any inclination to take in any significant number of the survivors of the Holocaust, it happened again. Those who did indeed had no place else to go, who could get to Palestine and then (early) Israel, went there.
The subsequent history of Israel is well-known. It has been unfortunately marked by three significant wars with surrounding Arab countries: in 1948 just after Partition (which included the horrific "Nakba"), the "Six Day War" in 1967, and the "Yom Kippur War" of 1973. These wars were all caused at least in part by the status of certain Palestinians who lived in what has come to be known, in a term developed by the Right-wing Israelis whom I describe as "Expulsionists," as the "Occupied Territories." The Partition into two independent states envisioned in the original UN Resolution which created the State of Israel, has never happened.
Most importantly, although there have been Israeli governments that attempted, to a great or lesser extent, to come to some kind of reasonable settlement for the Palestinians living in those parts of Greater Israel (see "Oslo"), for the past 25 years, the Israeli Right (what, again, I am now calling the Israeli Nationalists), with various coalitions in the Knesset over time, have made sure that nothing that could possibly have come of "Oslo" has ever happened. And in my view, the "Gaza" horror is all about, from the Israeli side, making sure that nothing ever does.
This policy is "Zionist," all right, in the sense that "Zionism" is taken to mean "It's All Ours and Everyone Else Must Leave, As Soon as Possible." This, for example, is what is going on in the West Bank with increasing Israeli Nationalist fury (for which, by the way, the Gaza Horror is providing a convenient news/information cover). But, and this is a big BUT, historically, as briefly illustrated above, this is not only one kind Zionism. To review, there have been:
1. The fanciful Zionism of Russian Jews trapped behind the Pale of Settlement and certain other European Jews;
2. The political Zionism of late 19th century Europe responding the first development of political anti-Semitism.
3. The Zionism
of the between-the-Wars period, which had both its Palestinian-expulsionist
(Jabotinskyite) wing, and its (majority)
"we-are-going-to-have-to-work-something-out" wing, which was a major factor
that led eventually to the UN resolution which formally established Partition-for-Palestine.
It was accepted by the then majority
Labour wing of the new Israeli government (created under the auspices of the Jewish Agency) led by David Ben-Gurion. But it was rejected by the minority wing of
the Jewish
Agency, the ancestors (in some cases literally) of the current Expulsionist Israeli
government.
4. To repeat, the Expulsionist Zionism of the current Israeli government does NOT exclusively define "Zionism" as it has existed over time.
Why am I drawing these distinctions between the various historical forms of Zionism? Because in my view there are too many critics of the Israeli Nationalist government which describe it as "Zionist" without drawing any distinctions between the various forms of "Zionism" that have existed historically, and in the minds of some of us Jews who support the existence of the State of Israel but hardly under any form of its current Expulsionist government, we refer to one or more of those forms of Zionism.
To define our position of what Israel should be, we begin by referring to a clause of the Israeli Declaration of Independence:
"The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
3. In summary, representing "Zionism" in its best sense, and recognizing that modern Zionism would never have existed if it had not been for: a) the development of political anti-Semitism in the late 19th century; and b) the between-the-wars-and-immediate-post-World-War-II refusal of virtually all nations in the World to take in any significant number of European Jews. Further, there were, and still are, a significant number of Israelis who would like to make a fair settlement with the Palestinians in the (sic) Occupied Territories. Thus, the modern use of the term "Zionism" in criticizing the policies of the current Israeli Nationalist government, without making it clear that it is being used to describe the policies of Israeli Nationalism only, is counter-productive.
4. Finally, on the matter of what I call the "New International Anti-Semitism," just as the long-held notion that there is some kind of "International Jewish Conspiracy," based on some version of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," is finally beginning to fade (although it is still being circulated in certain quarters), the actions of the Israeli Nationalist government are providing a basis for its rebirth. Congratulations, Bibi Netanyahu!
At the same time, in the U.S. a modern version of that imaginary conspiracy is coincidentally being developed by Donald Trump and the Republo-fascists (click here), who frequently (Trump in particular) use the words "George Soros" (who is of course a well-known and long-time Jewish philanthropist) in campaign speeches. As Seth Cohen has said in Forbes: "Behind the spectacle of paranoid outrage, there is a troubling and undeniable truth about the constant attacks on George Soros: Anti-Semitism." Yes indeed, the name "George Soros" has become for the Trumpist-right the symbol for "Jew." It is indeed the successor to the name "Rothschild," which, when I was much younger, was very commonly used as that symbol by anti-Semites around the globe. And then what happens is that in certain quarters, "anti-Zionism" becomes code for their true anti-Semitism. Yes indeed, anti-Semitism is The Default Hate.
In conclusion, the history of the State of Israel is obviously a highly complicated one. So is the group of social/political movements called "Zionism" which, in certain cases, have little in common with each other, either in terms of their history or their politics. Indeed, among its Jewish population Israel itself is hardly a unified country, and never has been. The Israeli Nationalists' majority in the Knesset is in the range of only 8.
And so, I think that progressive critics of Israeli policy in re both Gaza and the West Bank, with whom I certainly agree on the substance (except that I for one clearly label it "Expulsionist"), when they use the term "Zionism" should make it very clear just which branch of Zionism they are talking about. They should also make it very clear that they know that the current Israeli Nationalist government rules by the slimmest of majorities, that in Israel there is a strong minority opposition to them and their policies, and that were it to get back into Government it would pursue a radically different policy. Otherwise, the critics' critique-from-abroad cannot be regarded as useful for resolving the current crisis.
(Article changed on May 03, 2024 at 12:19 PM EDT)
