A Basic History of Zionism and its Relation to Judaism
23/04/09April 23, 2009...10:55 am
The West tolerates Israel’s
continuous breaches of human rights–violations that it would not tolerate if
perpetrated by any other country. Few Western states and not many Jews dare
take a stand against Israel, particularly as many of the former still feel a
sense of unease and guilt about the holocaust which Zionist Jews inside and
outside Israel have exploited in what to me seems an almost obscene manner. In
the USA, the
Jewish Zionist lobby is still strong enough to keep successive governments on
board. Moreover, the USA regards Israel
as an important strategic ally in its fight against Middle Eastern “rogue”
states which have supplanted the Soviet Union as the great
satanic enemy of the free world.
Hanna Braun, London
First Published: September 2001: In order to understand the
circumstances that led to the birth of Zionism I shall sketch an outline of the
history of Judaism and the Jews.
Since biblical times Jewish communities lived in Arab lands,
in Persia, India,
East and North Africa and indeed in Palestine.
With the destruction of the Temple and the final fall of
their state in 70 AD many Jews were taken out of Judea and hence to Rome
and the Diaspora. Many poorer Judeans, however (such as subsistence farmers),
were able to stay in Palestine.
(Some of them had converted to Christianity and were one of the earliest
Christian groups.) Modern research suggests that when Islam arrived in the area
in 633 AD many of these Jews converted and that they form a considerable part
of today’s Palestinians. These various communities were on the whole well
integrated into their respective societies and did not experience the
persecutions that later became so prevalent in Europe.
In Palestine, for instance, Muslims repeatedly protected
their Jewish neighbours from marauding crusaders; in one instance at least,
Jews fought alongside Muslims to try and prevent crusaders from landing at Haifa’s
port, and Salah al-Dinl-din, after re-conquering Jerusalem
from the crusaders, invited the Jews back into the city.
The Jews in Spain
under Moorish rule flourished and experienced a renaissance mirroring that of
the great Islamic civilisation and culture at the time. As Christianity spread from
the north of Spain, Jews were again
protected by Muslim rulers until the fall of Granada
- the last Moorish kingdom to pass into Christian hands - when both Jews and
Muslims were expelled at the end of the 15th century (Jews in 1492 and Muslims
10 years later). Most of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula settled in North
Africa and the lands under Ottoman rule, including Palestine,
and continued their peaceful co-existence with Muslims in those countries. The
bulk of Portuguese “converted” Jews (these were forced conversions and such
Jews were called Marranos, i.e. pigs, by Jews who had fled or who preferred to
die for their faith) settled in Amsterdam,
presumably because they had long established trading connections in that city.
In 1655 they were invited to Britain
by Oliver Cromwell. Most of them were glad to resettle since at the time the Netherlands
had just freed itself from the Spanish yoke and the shadow of the dreaded
inquisition was still uncomfortably close.
The fate of Jewry in European countries was very different:
persecutions, killings and burnings were widespread and Jews were forced to
live in closed ghettos, particularly in the Russian Empire, where they were
confined to the “Pale of Jewish” (?) settlement, an area which consisted of the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Byelarus or White Russia. Anyone who wished to
move outside these borders needed special permission. However, by the mid-19th
century some of the more progressive Jewish communities had established
themselves in the big cities of St. Petersburg, Moscow
and Kiev.
In central and western Europe religious tolerance, followed
by the granting of full citizen rights and emancipation, came relatively early,
in the wake of general liberalization. However, Russian rulers remained opposed
to any liberalization, including religious tolerance and emancipation, and as
late as 1881 Tsar Alexander the third initiated a series of particularly
vicious pogroms to divert unrest amongst the population, at a time when Britain,
for instance, boasted of a Jewish prime minister.
Total segregation was not always imposed from outside,
however; frequently it was enforced from within by highly authoritarian rabbis
who exercised absolute power over their congregations, often including the
right to life and the imposition of the death penalty. Thus it was a major
decision for anyone to leave these congregations and to look for a broader
education (known as “enlightenment”). In eastern Europe enlightenment was a
relatively late phenomenon and it found expression initially in the mid-19th
century, in a revival of Hebrew language and literature and in the modern idea
of Jews seeing themselves as a people.
This distinction between a people and a religion was of
course disapproved of by the Orthodox Jews, who still today regard Hebrew as a
sacred language to be used solely for prayers and religious studies and the
Jewish people and religion as indivisible. The concept of the Jews as people
closely mirrored the relatively new European idea of a homogeneous nation state.
An exception to this was the socialist “Bund” organisation whose members
rejected nationalism and later Zionism.
Some of these early proto-Zionists, calling themselves
“Hovevei Zion” (Lovers of Zion), started the first settlements in Palestine
in the 1870’s, and a larger number of immigrants followed after the Russian
pogroms of 1881-82. These settlers distinguished themselves by their deliberate
segregation from the indigenous population and their contempt for local customs
and traditions. This naturally aroused suspicion and hostility in the locals.
This exclusivity was largely based on a sense of superiority common to
Europeans of the time, who believed they were the only advanced and truly
civilised society and in true colonial fashion looked down on “natives” or
ignored them altogether. However, beyond that there was also a particular sense
of superiority of Jews towards all non-Jews. This belief in innate Jewish
superiority had a long tradition in religious Jewish thinking, central to which
was the notion of the Jews as God’s chosen people. Moshe Ben Maimon
(Maimonides) had been an exponent of this theory and quite often thinkers with
a more humane outlook, e.g. Spinoza, were excommunicated. The accepted thinking
in the religious communities was that Jews must on no account mix with gentiles
for fear of being contaminated and corrupted by them. This notion was so deeply
ingrained that it quite possibly still affected, albeit subconsciously, those
Jews who had left the townships and had become educated and enlightened. Thus
the early settlers from eastern Europe transferred the “Stettl” (townlet)
mentality of segregation to Palestine,
with the added belief in the nobility of manual labour and in particular soil
cultivation. In this they had been influenced by Tolstoy and his writings.
The “father” of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl
(1860-1904), came from a totally different perspective. Dr. Herzl was a
Viennese, emancipated, secular journalist who was sent by his editor to Paris
in 1894 to cover the Dreyfus affair. Dreyfus had been a captain in the French
Army who was falsely accused and convicted of treason (although he was
acquitted and completely cleared some years later). The case brought to light
the strength of a strong streak of anti-Semitism prevalent in the upper
echelons of the French Army and in the French press, with profound
repercussions in emancipated Jewish circles. Herzl himself despaired of the
whole idea of emancipation and integration and felt that the only solution to
anti-Semitism lay in a Jewish Homeland. To that end he approached various
diplomats and notables, including the Ottoman Sultan, but mainly European
rulers, the great colonial powers of the time, and was rewarded for his efforts
by being offered Argentina or Uganda
by the British as possible Jewish Homelands.
Herzl would have been quite happy with either of these
countries, but when the first Zionist Congress was convened in Basle in 1897,
he came up against Eastern European Jewry, by far the greatest majority of participants,
who, although broadly emancipated and enlightened, would not accept any
homeland other than the land of Zion.
Not only had some of them already settled in Palestine,
there were strong remnants of the religious/sentimental notion of a pilgrimage
and possibly burial in the Holy Land. The last toast in
the Passover ceremony is “Next year in Jerusalem”; although this was a
religious rather than a national aspiration, it was common amongst the Orthodox
communities to purchase a handful of soil purporting to come from the Holy Land
to be placed under the deceased’s head. (Orthodox Jews at that time completely
rejected any Jewish political movement and did not attend the congress.)
Herzl was quick to realise that unless he accepted the “Land
of Zion”, i.e. Palestinian option,
he would have hardly any adherents. Thus the Zionist movement started with a
small section of Jewish society who saw the solution to anti-Semitism in a
return to its “roots” and in a renewal of a Jewish people in the land of their ancestors.
In his famous book “Der Judenstaat” (The State of the Jews) Herzl wrote that
the Jews and their state will constitute “a rampart of Europe against Asia, of
civilisation against barbarism,” and again regarding the local population, “We
shall endeavour to encourage the poverty-stricken population to cross the
border by securing work for it in the countries it passes through, while
denying it work in our own country. The process of expropriation and
displacement must be carried out prudently and discreetly–Let (the landowners)
sell us their land at exorbitant prices. We shall sell nothing back to them.”
Max Nordau, an early Zionist, visited Palestine
and was so horrified that the country was already populated that he burst out
in front of Herzl: “But we are committing a grave injustice!” Some years later,
in 1913, a prominent Zionist thinker and writer, Ahad Ha’am (one of the
people), wrote: “What are our brothers doing? They were slaves in the land of
their exile. Suddenly they found themselves faced with boundless freedom … and
they behave in a hostile and cruel manner towards the Arabs, trampling on their
rights without the least justification … even bragging about this behaviour.”
But the dismay of Nordau and others at the injustices to, and total lack of
recognition of, the indigenous population was silenced and indeed edited out of
Jewish history and other books, as was some of Herzl’s writing. The Zionist
slogan of “a land without people for a people without land” prevailed and
within a matter of a few years the immigrants became “sons of the land” (Bnei
Ha’aretz), whereas the inhabitants became the aliens and foreigners.
Following renewed efforts and lobbying after Herzl’s death,
the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which granted Zionists a Jewish Homeland in Palestine,
set the official seal of approval on their aspirations. Protests and
representations by local Arab leaders were brushed aside. Lord Balfour wrote in
1919: “In Palestine, we do not even
propose to consult the inhabitants of the country. (Zionism’s) immediate needs
and hopes for the future are much more important than the desires and
prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who presently inhabit Palestine.”
Settlements grew slowly for a long time, but the systematic
buying up of land, frequently from absentee landlords, which left tenant
farmers homeless, contributed to the first Palestinian uprising in 1921-22 and
other outbursts of hostilities. The worst was a massacre of some 65 Jews in
Hebron in 1929, after orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe had founded a “Yeshiva”
(a religious study centre) in the town and had aroused the suspicions and
hostility of the indigenous population, who prior to this had lived in peace
and harmony for hundreds of years with their non-European Jewish neighbours.
Another contributing factor to growing Arab hostility was the Zionists’ policy
of not employing Arabs or buying their produce.
For many years Zionism remained a minority movement of
mainly Eastern European Jews, excluding the whole religious establishment, most
central and western European Jews and, last but not least, all non-European
Jews who, unbeknown to Herzl and his co-founders, form the majority of us.
These communities were ignored by early Zionists, who had little interest in
their aspirations until the establishment of the state of Israel
after the “independence” war of 1948-9. After this the new state unleashed a
massive propaganda campaign to induce the Sephardi and Oriental Jews to
“ascend” to the land of their ancestors, mainly for demographic reasons–in 1948
only about one third of the population and about 6% of the land were Jews or in
Jewish hands–but also as cannon fodder. This also happened in the 1980’s with
the Jews of Ethiopia. However, upon arrival these non-European newcomers were
treated very much as inferior second-class citizens. This European dominance is
still prevalent in modern Israel
where, for example, the national anthem speaks about Jewish longing for the
East towards Zion, whereas for many of the non-European
communities Palestine lies to the
West. Sadly, this has led to some groups of Sephardi (non-European) or Oriental
Jews becoming extreme right-wing chauvinists, so as to “prove” their
credentials.
Immigration (”Aliyah”–ascent in Zionist parlance) took off
in seriously large numbers with the rise of Hitler, who initially declared
himself quite sympathetic to Zionism, as had other right-wing anti-Semites
before him. New Jewish settlements mushroomed, leading to a bitter and
prolonged Palestinian uprising from 1936 till 1939, when it was crushed by the
British mandatory powers. But it was not until the end of the 2nd World War and
the foundation of the state of Israel
in 1948 that Zionism started to win the hearts and minds of the majority of
Jewish society. Since that time we have witnessed an increasing and deliberate
confluence of Judaism and Zionism, to the extent that today it is widely
regarded as treason and self-hate for a Jew to criticise the state, let alone
Zionism.
In my view, this development was almost inevitable given the
preconception of an exclusive Jewish state. Could we realistically conceive of
a France purely
for the French? England
only for the English? (Unless, of course we belong to the National Front or
similar groups.) In a post-colonial world the notion is completely unacceptable
and ridiculous. How then, can Israel
and the majority of its citizens justify their claim and yet remain convinced
that theirs is a modern, democratic society? The last resort, when all logical
justifications fail, is that God has promised the land to his people, namely
us. (This rather begs the question of where this leaves a non-believing Jew.) I
have found over the years, and particularly in the last 30 or so years, that
the numbers of young people wearing the skullcap and generally observing at
least some of the religious laws has increased dramatically, and I believe this
is no coincidence.
The religious establishment has gone along with the general
flow and has, indeed, profited from it. Since the late 50’s there has also been
a notable and frightening change in the Orthodox community, which led to the
establishment in 1974 of the “Gush Emunim” (the block of the faithful),
initiated by Rabbi Tsvi Yehuda Kook the younger. This is the fundamentalist
movement which believes in accepting the state of Israel
and striving to make it entirely and exclusively Jewish. Prior to this time
Orthodox Jewry played no important role in politics except in pressuring
successive governments to introduce more Jewish religious regulations into state
law. The ultra-orthodox group “Neturei Karta” (the landless) has never
recognised the state of Israel,
and its members are exempt from army service.
Although Gush Emunim is small in numbers, it wields
disproportionate influence since successive Israeli governments covertly (and
sometimes almost overtly) have endorsed its aspirations. Gush Emunim’s
followers have been allocated to special army units so as to enable them to
observe Jewish religious laws and rituals in every detail (although even in the
regular army only Kosher food is served and the Sabbath is observed as far as
possible). These units have a reputation as dedicated, crack troops. What is
less well known but silently condoned is their refusal to give medical aid or
even drive wounded persons to the hospital on the Sabbath unless they are Jews.
In my view this is an extremely short-sighted and dangerous
road, leading in the end to a fundamentalist theocracy much like that of the
Taliban in Afghanistan.
The fundamentalists’ belief is that the Messianic age is already upon us and
that any obstacles to a total elimination of any non-Jews in the promised land,
i.e. the whole of what was Palestine including the Holy Mount, is God’s
punishment for sinful Jews, namely all those who are westernised and secular.
This fully exonerates, and indeed sanctifies, a man like Baruch Goldstein who
murdered 29 Palestinians praying in the Ibrahimi mosque, as well as the
assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Like the Hamas movement, which was initially
encouraged by Israel’s secret services, this is another genie which, having
been let out of the bottle, can no longer be controlled.
It seems a bitter irony that a movement that initially saw
itself as progressive, liberal and secular should find itself in an alliance
with, and held to ransom by, the most illiberal reactionary forces. In my view
this was inevitable from its inception although the founders, and most of us
(including even people like myself, growing up in Palestine
in the thirties), did not foresee this and certainly would not have wished it.
Nowadays the deliberate blurring of the distinction between
Zionism and Judaism, which includes a rewriting of ancient as well as modern
history, is exploited to stifle any criticism of Israel’s
policies and actions, however extreme and inhuman they may be. This,
incidentally, also plays directly into anti-Semitic prejudices by equating
Israeli arrogance, brutality and complete denial of basic human rights to
non-Jews with general Jewish characteristics.
Zionism has now assumed the all-embracing mantle of
righteousness. It claims to represent and to speak for all Jews and has adopted
the slogan of “my country right or wrong.” The West tolerates Israel’s
continuous breaches of human rights–violations that it would not tolerate if
perpetrated by any other country. Few Western states and not many Jews dare
take a stand against Israel, particularly as many of the former still feel a
sense of unease and guilt about the holocaust which Zionist Jews inside and
outside Israel have exploited in what to me seems an almost obscene manner. In
the USA, the
Jewish Zionist lobby is still strong enough to keep successive governments on
board. Moreover, the USA regards Israel
as an important strategic ally in its fight against Middle Eastern “rogue”
states which have supplanted the Soviet Union as the
great satanic enemy of the free world.
I fear that unless and until Israel
is judged by the same criteria as other modern states, this is unlikely to
change. It is the duty of all Jews with a sense of justice and a conscience to
speak out against the falsifications of history by the Zionist lobby, and the
dangerous misconceptions it has led the West to accept.
Hanna Braun, London,
September 2001
Hanna Braun is a retired lecturer, living in London.
She is a former Israeli, having emigrated to Palestine
as a child in 1937 to escape Nazi Germany — her grandmother later died in the
Terezin ghetto. She was in the Haganah in 1948 but left Israel
in 1958 for Britain,
after having become disillusioned with the Israeli government. She is a
signatory of The RETURN Statement Against the Israeli Law of Return - For the
Palestinian Right to Return .
Bibliography:
Israel
Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion
Israel Shahak,
Fundamental Judaism in Israel
Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews, Ancient and Modern
Michael Prior (ed.), Western Scholarship and the History of Palestine
http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/a-basic-history-of-zionism-and-its-relation-to-judaism/
