Share

Tweet

Share

Share

Email

Comments

Victor Rosenthal – How Zionism Keeps us in the Game & Our European Enemy

How Zionism Keeps us in the Game

Anshel Pfeffer, a very smart guy and one of the few writers that regularly appears in Ha’aretz who is worth reading does not believe in Zionism. He doesn’t oppose it, he just thinks talking about it is a kind of category mistake:

You cannot be either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist, just as you cannot be a veteran of Iwo Jima unless you were born at least 90 years ago and fought in that battle. Zionism isn’t an ideology. It’s a program, or an ideological plan, to establish a state for Jews in the biblical homeland. And that program was fulfilled on May 14, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence at the old Tel Aviv Museum. That’s it. Done.

…believing that on the whole, founding the State of Israel was the right thing to do, doesn’t make you a Zionist any more than thinking that Oliver Cromwell was right to overthrow King Charles, makes you a Roundhead. It simply doesn’t matter what you think about long-ago events you didn’t take part in. Israel is a reality and it’s not going anywhere.

As a consequence, he thinks that the World Zionist Congress is a waste of time and money, as are almost all other Zionist organizations, including those like the Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund that are closely entwined with the government of Israel.

He’s right about those organizations, but he’s wrong about Zionism. There absolutely is such a thing as Zionist ideology, a set of basic principles that Zionists believe. And here they are:

1. There is an am Yehudi, a Jewish people (I discuss the concept of a people here). You might think this is obvious, but Mahmoud Abbas denies it, and so do the “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion” crowd, which includes much of the American Reform Movement.
2. The survival of the Jewish people requires the Jewish state, a state that is more than just a state with a Jewish majority. The precise meaning of “more” differs according to the faction of the Zionist movement to which one belongs, but the Nation-State Law that was passed by the Knesset in 2018 is an example of a secular attempt to explicate that.
3. Only in the Jewish state can a person fully realize his Jewish identity. You can still be a Zionist if you don’t believe that all Jews ought to live in the Jewish state, but Zionism includes the idea that diaspora life is sub-optimal even when it is not actively dangerous.

Pfeffer points out that there were religious and secular, socialist and revisionist Zionisms, and this was true before 1948, and it’s still true today. But all of them affirm the principles above. The existence of factions doesn’t negate the truth behind an ideology. After all, these are Jews we are talking about.

One needn’t be a Jew to be a Zionist. Agree with the principles above and you are a Zionist, regardless of your own religion or peoplehood.

Pfeffer’s criticisms of “Zionist” organizations are on target: diaspora Jewry no longer needs to subsidize the thriving state of Israel, nor does it need to support bloated bureaucracies that carry out functions that could more transparently and simply be handled by the government, like vetting new immigrants under the Law of Return or planting trees in Israel’s forests. These organizations are vestiges of the pre-state struggle to maintain and grow the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. We should get rid of them.

But he conflates the bureaucratic excrescences of a long-accomplished program to create a state with the ideology that gave rise to the program – and which is the reason for the continued existence of that state. That ideology and that state are under continued attack today. “Israel isn’t going anywhere,” he says, but there are many who would like to see it changed beyond recognition, in particular by denying the part of proposition 2) above which says that the Jewish state must be more than just a state with a Jewish majority.

Attacks on Zionism center on the inescapable fact that no matter how careful Israel is in ensuring the civil rights of all its citizens – which Israel does relatively well, given the circumstances – that insistence on “more than just a Jewish majority” represents a degree of ethnic privilege. There is a Law of Return for Jews and not for Arabs, and it is an essential part of a Jewish state, as are the symbols of the state, its official language, its holidays, and so forth.

It’s not only Israel’s enemies who oppose Zionism. There are patriotic Israelis who love their country, pay their taxes, and have fought in Israel’s wars, who believe that Israel ought to be nothing more than a state of all of its citizens, Jew and non-Jew alike. That is an anti-Zionist position.

Zionism is a form of ethnic nationalism, and in today’s intellectual climate, forged by the European wars of the 20^th century, nationalism is considered incompatible with liberal democracy. However, Israel is a special case, because the Jewish people are a special case. The Jews are unique in history for maintaining their identity both in their homeland and in exile from it for several millennia. The Jewish people are the paradigm case that defines our conception of a “people,” and antisemitism is the paradigm case for understanding ethnic hatred.

Zionism didn’t appear from anywhere. It was the considered answer from Herzl and others to such phenomena as the failure of European liberalism to extend emancipation to Jews and to end the scourge of Jew-hatred. The truth of Zionism was emphatically demonstrated by the Holocaust, in which Jews were murdered by the millions by members of what was, in some ways, the most highly developed culture on the planet.

The Jewish people’s historical narrative, expressed in the Torah – which can be appreciated by any educated Jew, even those who do not pray three times a day or even ever set foot in a synagogue – is a story about the relationship between Hashem, the Jewish people, and the land of Israel. This is who we are, the people who were given this land to be their home as long as they behaved themselves. You don’t have to be observant in the traditional sense to be moved by the basic idea. It is the glue that holds us together as a people.

The conversion of the Jewish state to a pure liberal democracy would be a tragedy for the Jewish people even if it didn’t lead to Israel’s transition away from a Jewish majority state. It would rip us away from our narrative and – I believe – begin the final disappearance of the Jewish people from the world stage.

 

Our European Enemy

Our state is tiny, in size and population. The Nations didn’t want it to exist at all, and when they couldn’t stop it they did their best to keep it small. There aren’t so many Jews in the world, anyway; millennia of oppression and murder have kept our numbers down, and today there are millions who are “Jewish by extraction” but are assimilated enough to other cultures to be lost forever to the Jewish people.

In all the world there are fewer than 15 million Jews, in Israel fewer than 7 million. But there are forces arrayed against us that are unique in their scope and viciousness. Throughout the world, even in countries where there are few Jews or none at all, people have opinions about us. According to a worldwide survey done by the ADL, some 26% of the world’s 7.5 billion people “harbor antisemitic attitudes.” That is incredible when you think about it.

There are 35 million Kurds in the world, another people seeking (but so far not getting) self-determination. Certainly, they have issues with their Turkish and other neighbors, but I venture to guess that it is highly unlikely that anywhere near as many people have even heard of the Kurds, much less “harbor anti-Kurdish attitudes.”

What’s true for Jews goes triple for their state. I won’t repeat the depressing statistics about the number of UN resolutions condemning Israel that pass every year, and the fact that it is consistently attacked there for crimes that it did not commit while countries that do engage in murder, aggression, and oppression are never mentioned. I won’t go into detail about the extreme and irrational anti-Israel expression (misoziony*) found in almost one hundred percent of the world’s academic and artistic realms.

Really, Israel and Jews are sui generis in the “objects of hatred” department (and if you think it is our fault, you are part of the problem).

This hatred is not just theoretical. From time to time, our immediate neighbors, cousins if you will start wars whose intent is to kill or disperse the Jews who are occupying the Land of Israel. As a result, Israel has been forced to spend a large portion of her GDP on defense, which has led to her possession of very advanced military technology, which – along with her slightly better degree of organization – led to the defeat of our enemies in a conventional war. That, in turn, led them to adopt strategies of asymmetric warfare and terrorism, which we have managed to counter, although less successfully.

These aren’t our only enemies. In the middle of the twentieth century, one of the most highly developed scientific, literary, and musical cultures in the Western world descended into genocidal madness and ignited a war which resulted in 60 million dead and much of Europe laid waste, primarily – there were other reasons, but I’ll stick with “primarily” – to annihilate us. Largish groups in almost every country of Eastern and Western Europe worked together with the Nazis to help collect, ship, and exterminate those of us who fell into their hands.

After the war there was a general revulsion in what was left of the countries that had participated in the biggest pogrom in history, as well as an understanding on the part of the Jewish remnant that our state had to be established regardless of the cost, which prevailed against the resistance – imagine, after all that! – the resistance from Britain and the Arabs.

But the antisemitism of Europe didn’t go away, although it was pushed under cover by the embarrassment of its involvement in the pogrom of pogroms. There was no embarrassment about expressing it in the form of misoziony, the wild hatred of the state that we managed to establish despite Britain’s best efforts to prevent it. And while there is still enough revulsion left to prevent them from repeating their attempt to liquidate our people, it hasn’t stopped them from paying to create the conditions for others to do it for them.

So we have European powers, particularly Germany (of all nations) and the hyper-civilized Scandinavian countries, the ones who abhor physical violence and have made the expression of racist sentiments illegal, spending millions of Euros of their citizens’ taxes on enterprises designed to weaken the Jewish state and set the stage for its destruction by Arabs or Iranians who aren’t squeamish about direct action with guns and bombs to accomplish the goal desired – but never said out loud in public – in Brussels, Berlin, and Stockholm.

European money keeps numerous international and Israeli organizations afloat, usually ostensibly in defense of human rights, but practically focusing on the rights and national aspirations of one particular group, the Palestinian Arabs. If you ask an honest Palestinian, he will tell you that he aspires, above all else, to violently kick the Jews out of all of the Land of Israel, in which he believes they have no right to live (except as a dhimmi minority), and certainly no right to have a sovereign state.

The Europeans, realizing that this aspiration smells uncomfortably like the 1940s, insisted that what they want is only to divide Israel along the 1949 armistice line and set up a Palestinian Arab state in the eastern part. Then this state will live happily alongside Israel, with its 9-mile wide waist, and the “Middle Eastern Conflict” will be over. This is called the “two-state solution,” but of course won’t solve anything except the difficulties the Arabs have today in hitting Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Airport from their territory with the cheapest and simplest of mortars.

Israelis learned by experience that Arab control of areas near Jewish populations makes them a target of terrorism and rocket attacks, and refuse to vote for the stupid or psychologically disturbed politicians who advocate this. Thus, since the Second Intifada (2000-3) and the Hamas takeover of Gaza (2007), Israeli voters have rejected the parties of the Left, whose support has fallen to the point that they flirt with the cutoff percentage in elections.

Europe wants to change that. For example – and this is just one of the countless similar examples – the European Union has granted more than half a million dollars (500,000 Euros) to an Israeli NGO whose objective is to change the attitude of Russian-speaking Israelis, who have always leaned politically right – for obvious reasons – and who have opposed the creation of a Palestinian state. The EU says that the grant is intended to

…promote conditions for a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and potential shifts in public opinion among the Russian-speaking community by building confidence and trust in the two-state solution among a population that has traditionally rejected and been omitted from the process, as well as to deconstruct a negative view of the Palestinian narrative.

It should be obvious that the political attitudes of Russian-speaking Israelis are nobody’s business but Israel’s. But this item provides a window into the overall program of the EU and individual European countries, which work on numerous levels to bring about the partition of the Land of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state.

This and other manipulative programs, including financial support for international and Israeli NGOs that propagandize, support BDS, and engage in lawfare against Israel, complement the EU’s investment in building infrastructure for Palestinians in Area C, the part of Judea and Samaria that according to the Oslo accords is under Israeli civil control. These building projects, done without permits or permission, are intended to create facts on the ground that will make it more difficult for Israel to retain control of these areas in any future deal. At the same time, international pressure on Israel to not build in the territories, even inside existing settlements that will certainly end up as part of Israel, has been effective. Despite news reports that “1000 new homes have been approved” and so forth, very few buildings have actually been constructed. And illegal Palestinian settlements have not been removed.

Make no mistake – the Palestinian leadership has no interest in a state in the territories except as a stepping stone to the replacement of Israel by an Arab state, and the death or dispersal of about half of the Jewish people. They say it themselves over and over.

Are officials in the EU and individual countries that support this project so stupid or blind and deaf as to fail to understand that? Do they not know that the funds that they provide to the Palestinian Authority are used to pay terrorists? Do they not see that UNRWA, of which they are now the prime funder, educates Palestinian children to hate?

I don’t believe it.

_______________________
* Misoziony (pronounced mis-OZ-yoni) is the extreme and irrational hatred of the Jewish state. It is antisemitism raised up one level of abstraction, although almost all misozionists are antisemites as well.