Two nations, two peoples, two desperate hopes

To the Editors:

Who Is the Mother Country?
To the extraordinary equation of Zionism and imperialist colonialism (extraordinary not in the sense of being rare, since this is now a widely broadcast assertion, but in its breathtaking ignorance of Jewish, or even Zionist, history), the question is: who is the mother country?
That the Zionist movement — for now, narrowly defined as the organization created by Theodor Herzl (Zionism was far broader and more variegated than this, more on which, below) — used and attempted to use various imperial powers, chiefly, though not only, England, to achieve its ends, is of course, basic knowledge. Herzl, an assimilated Jewish journalist from Vienna and would-be leader of the dispersed, stateless Jews, sought nothing less than to wrest a corner of the Ottoman Empire for them. The enormity of this idea, given the condition of the Jews and Herzl’s own non-status, was remarkable, but Herzl was relentless and creative. He travelled around Europe and to the Middle East in the late nineteenth and first years of the twentieth century attempting to interest any leader who would listen to inventive, and often contradictory, schemes to bring about a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland, secured, he insisted, by international law. Dressed in tails and top hat to compensate for his utter lack of power, this self-invented leader of the Jews met the German Kaiser, the Turkish sultan, even the rabidly Jew-hating tsarist minister of the interior, as well as British officals and wealthy Jews (perhaps he could buy Palestine by offsetting some Ottoman debt?), in an increasingly desperate effort to bring some reality to his idea. Did this make him, alternately, a German, an Ottoman, a tsarist sympathizer (!), an Englishman, a banker (all of the above)? He was a Zionist, who was master tactician. A politican.
Horrific pogroms in the early years of the twentieth century led Herzl to propose for a brief time a “Nachtasyl” — a “night refuge”— for Jews in Uganda; he also was willing to consider temporary way stations in other places (El Arish, on the Sinai peninsula — closer to Israel), since the dream of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel would clearly not materialize quickly enough to secure the lives of an immediately threatened population in Eastern Europe. He was vehemently rebuffed, hounded to an early death, by the hysterical opposition of precisely these eastern European Jews, for whom the return to Zion was not about mere refugeeism (though refuge was certainly part of the dream), but about Zion and national redemption.
Herzl happened to be liberal in his politics and envisioned a liberal Jewish republic in the Jews’ ancestral home. He was certain of the superiority of constitutional systems and industrial progress to whatever other types of states and economies he was familiar with. His rather awful novel Altneuland("Old-New Land"), a depiction of the Zionist utopia that was to arise, makes Haifa (which Herzl had visited), a Vienna-on-the Mediterranean. The state is a liberal democracy in which xenophobes are ridden out of public life. There is no discrimination by race, religion or, remarkable for a book published in 1902 — gender. Genteel Arabs exist in this telling, and so benefit by the Jewish enterprise, they are loyal to it. Indeed, the “restoration” of the Jews and the ethnic harmony in Old-New Land inspires its main protagonist (a thinly disguised Herzl), to dream of further improbable project: “restoration” for “Negroes.”
Is this patronizing? Sure. Does it betray “colonialist” attitudes, in its self-satisfied sense of superiority? Yes. Western European (and American) Jews articulated similarly patronizing, superior attitudes about Eastern European and Middle Eastern Jews and the need to westernize them, too. Does this attitude envision a “colony” of Jews transplanted to Israel as “settlers,” with no prior ties to the place, to subjugate, exploit, and destroy a “native” population and export its natural resources in order to enrich and empower a Mother country?
What?
Realpolitik as well as conviction drove subsequent leaders of Herzl’s organization (he died in 1904), to ally themselves with Great Britain. The British were clearly the power in the Middle East; they also happened to have a liberal democracy with representative institutions, a formidable industrial economy, and a society in which Jews had come to know a remarkable degree of integration. Of the imperial powers likely to be “players” in a post-World War I Middle East (in which the Turks were no longer players at all, having been on the losing end of wartime alliances), Zionist organization leaders such as Chaim Weizmann overwhelmingly preferred Britain (over France) and labored mightily during World War I to secure British backing of the Zionist enterprise (they succeeded, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917). That alliance then, was both tactical and based on some shared values. The “payback” the British hoped to get from the Jews was America’s entrance into the war on the allied side (“the Jews” were supposed to be influential enough to deliver this). And yes, a population in the Middle East loyal to the British.
The sorry history of British policy, with its cynical duplicity to Arabs and Jews in Palestine during and after World War One is well known and available in many sources. Suffice it here to say that as British policy shifted increasingly to oppose Jewish immigration into the country, upon which, of course, the whole Zionist enterprise — that is, the return of a diaspora people to its ancestral land — was based, Zionist policy became increasingly anti-British, to the point of open, violent revolt, including terror attacks on British soldiers and installations in the years after World War II. The Zionists made common cause with British imperialism only so long as it served their purposes.
Arab nationalists in these years also played this game, with different opposing players, the British being identified with Jewish interests. For some, alliances with Britain’s mortal enemy in World War II — the fascist regime of Mussolini, but primarily, Hitler and the Nazis — were not merely tactical. Hajj Amin al-Husayni, mufti of Jerusalem, leader of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee, did not just profess admiration for Nazi racism, seeking in his words, “an Arab state of a Fascist nature, including Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Trans-Jordan.” (Lewis, 1986:151). He also proclaimed his sympathy for its ultimately desired outcome: not just an end to Jewish settlement in Palestine (though he certainly wished that), but a “final resol[ution]” of the “Jewish question,” which “for us constitutes the greatest danger.” Only this “solution” would guarantee that the Jews, who “would dominate the world” if England were victorious, would not bring about the enslavement of the Arabs, and of Muslims in Asia and Africa, as well [ibid., 155]. It is noteworthy that it was not Hitler who sought out the mufti for an alliance of obvious potential benefit to the Nazis — an Arab revolt against the British during wartime — but the mufti and his associates who aggressively sought out Hitler, including meeting with him in Germany.
Does the mufti’s tactical, and more importantly, ideological alliance with Hitler and Nazism (which he maintained even after the war), mean that Arab — and Palestinian — nationalism are “fascist,” “Nazi”? Who would assert such an outrageous and ludicrous idea, flattening the complex and variegated phenomena of these nationalisms to one odious connection, denying that Arab — and Palestinian — nationalisms are first and foremost, liberation movements, movements of national self-realization?
I began by saying that "Zionism" was only in part, and not necessarily the most significant part, the movement and organization that Theodor Herzl created. It is crucial to distinguish between zionism and Zionism, as well as elucidate the connection between the two. This bears on another matter much discussed in this context, albeit usually with remarkable ignorance: anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism.
“Zion” is a term of biblical origin, referring to Jerusalem, sometimes to the land of Israel. Zionism (lower case), permeates, utterly pervades, not only the Hebrew Bible but all of post-biblical Jewish literature and culture, philosophy, liturgy, mysticism, poetry, ritual, popular religion— everything. Open up the Jewish prayer book from any century you wish, from the earliest examples extant to today, and it is everywhere. A Jew could not eat bread without remembering Jerusalem, praying for its rebuilding and for the ingathering of the dispersed Jewish exiles.
It is this zionism upon which the Zionism of the nineteenth century was built. That later movement was a revolt against diaspora Jewish history; much (most) of it was utterly secular. Some versions of Zionism were militantly so. Some were rigidly Marxist; some socialist; some capitalist; some fascist. Some were wedded to agricultural labor— to Jewish agricultural labor, refusing to even hire Arabs, much less exploit them, because these Zionists believed Jews had to work the land physically and redeem themselves thereby from "internalized exile." Some versions were urban. Some were modern Orthodox. Members of these groups were so hostile to each other they could barely cooperate in that upon which they all agreed: ingathering of the dispersed Jewish people to its ancestral land in which place alone could a fundamental remaking of Jewish society be realized.
Theodor Herzl did not invent Zionism (let alone zionism). By the time he came on the scene, there were Zionist settlements already in place. Zionism in its various manifestations began to be articulated in different places, in Germany (Moses Hess), in Austria-Hungary ((Yehuda Alakalai, Zvi Hirsch Kalisher), around the middle of the nineteenth century, in response to the example of subject peoples of Europe — Italians, Poles, other Slavs — asserting national identities against imperial suppression (by Austrians, Russians) — giving sudden hope that Jews, too, could resurrect their national existence after nearly two millennia in exile. Many of the writers who began to articulate Zionist visions — in central, southern, and eastern Europe — did so with no awareness of others doing similarly. It was the pre-existence of Zionism — and these Zionisms — that made it possible for Herzl to so quickly galvanize the response he did.
Because the Jews were (and still largely are) predominantly a diaspora people, Zionism (and zionism), necessarily mean population movement, immigration back to the land of Israel. Where zionism and Zionism differ is the agency to bring this about. To zionism, it was (and to anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews, still is), God. To Zionists, it is Zionists, using political expediencies as they present themselves.
Hence, the primacy of Jewish immigration to Palestine in which there was continuous Jewish settlement throughout history, greater in some eras (like the sixteenth century), smaller in others. Indeed, the Zionist immigration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries worked mightily to distinguish itself from the indigenous Jewish population— the "old yishuv"— because this overwhelmingly impoverished, pious population of scholars, mystics and small craftspeople, dependent on the donations of diaspora Jews for support, smacked too much of the "internal exile" the Zionist revolution came to uproot. The notion, however, that Jews were not indigenous to this land, colonizing it like the Boers did to South Africa, is at best, the fruit of stunning ignorance. At worst, it is the expression of cynical malice and willful distortion.
The "Mother country," to answer my own question, is the Jewish people. Zionism is about establishing a home to come home to. That it is a home for Jews makes it no more racist an entity than is Pakistan, a home for Muslim Pakistanis, which would not open its gates to unrestricted immigration intended to alter the fundamental nature of the state any more, or any differently, than does contemporary Israel. Jordan has a nationality law that granted citizenship to residents of West Bank areas annexed to that country after 1948 that explicitly excludes Jews— is this any wonder? (Lewis, 1986:207) Zionism, to cite Brenard Lewis, is a form of pan-Judaism. That, in essence, is no different, and no more "racist," than pan-Arabism, though the potential for, and sometimes the actuality of, intolerance and chauvinism in such a stance certainly exists in both cases. To cite examples of odious chauvinism, even racism, which can certainly be had, and then equate all of Zionism with racism, is reductionist at best.
Jews can certainly be anti-Zionist. Jews can and do criticize Israel, sometimes severely, and not be either anti-Zionist or self-hating. But to insist, a priori and for all time, that national self-realization for Jews in the nationalist expression accepted for every other people, including Palestinians, namely, in a nation-state, is racist when it comes to Jews, is itself racist. To suggest that the only good Jew is the de-politicized Jew, meek, subservient, the dhimmi (protected minority of secondary status), of previous eras of Jewish-Muslim history, is not a position that would be advanced about any other group I know of.
We can waste ourselves re-fighting the battles of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Or we can do what Palestinians and Israelis did at Oslo and recognize two nations, two peoples, two narratives, two histories, two tragedies, two desperate hopes. And work to recognize, honor, and accommodate both. And to accept, finally, that if there is to be a future for either people, there has to be a future for both.
Finally, to the vigilantes who spray mindless slogans around campus: yes, indeed, read some real books.

—Shulamit Magnus
Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History