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Zionist Anti-Semitism
By Les Levidow, publ. in RETURN (London), Dec. 1990
Zionism has always purported to be the prime or ultimate protector
of Jews from anti-Semitism. The proposed solution has been mass
emigration to what the Zionist's term Eretz Israel, ('the Land of
Israel'), a term which means possession of the region for the
Jews; this territorial notion corresponds to Biblical myths rather
than to any clear geographical boundaries. The emigration itself
has been termed aliyah ('ascent'). The term originally described
Jews' pilgrimage to Palestine as a duty of Orthodox Judaism.
Zionism appropriated the term for secular-settler purposes:
through Aliyah, Diaspora Jews, regarded as mere 'human dust'
elevate themselves to the status of human beings. As Israeli
citizens, the Jews claim their rightful place as 'nation among
(European) nations'.
Many critics have shown how advocacy of this solution has
undermined any struggle against anti-Semitism. Some critics have
even shown how Zionist leaders have collaborated with anti-Semitic
persecutors for the sake of that aliyah (as in Nazi Germany), or
for the sake of Israel's arms sales (as during the Argentinean
junta).
This essay takes the argument further, to the cultural field, by
arguing that the Zionist mission involved suppressing or denying
all Jewish identities other than the 'New Jew' who conquers
Palestine.
In practice, this has meant that:
* Zionist culture 'assimilated' European anti-Semitism from the
very start;
* the State of Israel eventually extended that discrimination to
Oriental Jews, seen as a Jewish-Arab (or 'Levantine') threat,
within a wider framework of Western colonial racism;
* the anti-Arab racism endemic to Zionism incorporates aspects of
European anti-Semitism; and
* Zionist paranoia towards Palestinians expresses internal
anxieties about the disintegration of Jewish identities which
Zionism itself has helped to destroy.
'Assimilating' anti-Semitism
As largely or potentially assimilated Jews, the early Zionists of
Western Europe came to doubt the possibility - or even
desirability - of their full assimilation, as they encountered
prejudice and barriers. They came to accept anti-Semitic racial
concepts of the Jews as inherently incapable of integrating into
the Western nations as full citizens. This fatalism was expressed
by doctor Leo Pinsker, with a suitable medical metaphor, when he
declared that 'Judeo-phobia is a disease; and, as a congenital
disease, it is incurable' (in Hertzberg, 1966).
Early Zionists also accepted - implicitly or explicitly -
prevalent stereotypes of backwards and/or subversive East European
Jews, whose migration to Western Europe (or the USA) they regarded
as a threat to their own hard-won social status. This perceived
threat acted as a motive for affluent Jews in Western Europe to
channel the migration of East European Jews elsewhere. Moreover,
many Zionists perceived their own interests as coinciding with the
domestic interests of Europe's imperial rulers. When Theodor Herzl
lobbied the Tsar's Minister of Interior, who had been responsible
for anti-Semitic pogroms, Herzl argued that Zionism would weaken
the revolutionary movement in Russia.
At the same time, Zionists justified themselves in terms of
uplifting the backward East European Jews. Moses Hess, describing
the economic structure of East European Jewry as 'parasitic',
described the future Jewish state as 'the basis on which European
Jewry will be able to climb out of the dustbins' (quoted in
Halevi, p.153). The alliance which Zionism sought with European
imperialism arose from the cultural chasm which they perceived
between Western and Eastern Jews.
Indeed, locating their solution in a Jewish state based on
European models, Zionist leaders regarded the Eastern European
Jews' culture as an obstacle. David Ben-Gurion referred
disparagingly to their 'Diaspora mentality' and 'Jewish
cosmopolitanism'. With the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the term
'cruel Zionism' described those who justified sacrificing the many
- especially East European Jews - for the sake of the few who
would establish a Jewish state. Chaim Weizmann (1937) promoted
such a mentality with his poetic flair:
The old ones will pass; they will bear their fate, or they will
not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world...
Thus, although Zionism arose in response to anti-Semitism, it did
so by assimilating crucial elements of anti-Semitism, while
appropriating the religious connotations of 'human dust' in racist
terms.
Zionism defined a secular Jewishness negatively, in terms of the
Jews' eternal persecution by anti-Semitism, seen as the world's
main evil, and eventually epitomised by the Arabs. Just as this
ideology saw anti-Semitism as a normal, expected reaction to the
presence of Jews out of place in the Diaspora, so it saw the
Jewish state as fulfilling the normal division of the world's
territorial spaces according to ethnically defined national
groups. [Emphasis - E.D.] Moreover, it incorporated anti-Semitic
myths of the Jews as defined by race or language, and turned these
into counter-myths defining the Jewish nation that needed to be
built (see Halevi, chapters 5-6).
Within this framework, racist distinctions among Jews were
extended into Palestine itself, where the Zionist movement sought
to replace immigrants' Yiddish culture with a literally fabricated
one. As Amos Oz [Israeli author] describes the state's
acculturation mission:
Even new lullabies and new 'ancient legends' which were
synthesised by eager writers...Folk song and dances that require
the officially trained guides who.... are teaching the folk how to
sing and dance properly! (translated in Bresheeth, p.130
Jewish Arab threat
Shortly after the state of Israel was created, the task of
Zionising European immigrants became overshadowed by the 'problem'
of the Oriental Jews. Nearly two million Israelis, who now
constitute a majority of the country's population, were culturally
Arabs in all but religion; indeed, they were Arab Jews in all but
name. The Zionist project necessarily fractured that reality into
two opposed identities - Arab versus Jew. It likewise identified
Jew with Zionist, in turn meaning the assimilated Ashkenazi
European type of Jew.
When the Israeli government realised in the early 1950s that few
Jews would emigrate from Western countries, it resorted to
inducing Oriental Jews to do so. It then used them to populate
dangerous settlements along cease-fire lines to consolidate
Israel's claims to the disputed territory, and it assigned them to
the low-paid, menial jobs otherwise done by Palestinians. By
engineering this physical and economic conflict between Oriental
Jews and Palestinians, Israel manufactured the former's anti-Arab
feeling, which Zionism officially attributed to the persecution
that most Oriental Jews had supposedly suffered in Arab countries.
Although the mass emigration of Oriental Jews served several
Zionist purposes, the Ashkenazi establishment saw it as a
potential cultural threat. Israeli publications have abounded with
racist language - animal metaphors, 'savages', 'superstitious',
'diseased', etc. - describing the Oriental Jews. Official Israeli
language bans the Yiddish term 'Schwartze' commonly used in
conversation to disparage Oriental Jews as 'blacks'. Yet the
official euphemism for them, Jewish 'people of African and Asian
origin', excludes South African Jews, who are instead categorised
along with Jewish 'people of European and American origin'
(Halevi, p.207). That anomaly reveals the racial, rather than
geographical, basis for the Zionist categorisation of Jews. Halevi
further notes the irony that Israel denounces its Jewish critics
as 'self-hating' yet attempts to integrate the Arab Jews through a
'system of ideological control and cultural domination wholly
built on the self-denial of Arab Judaism, and on a colonial-style
mass psychology' (p.220).
The Ashkenazi perception of internal threat has been insightfully
analysed by Ella Shohat (1988). She quotes Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion, whose 1964 book described the Oriental Jews as lacking
'the most elementary knowledge', 'without a trace of Jewish or
human education'. Similarly, Abba Eban warned that Israel must
infuse them 'with an Occidental spirit, rather than allow them to
drag us into an unnatural Orientalism'.
Shohat describes the Zionist project of turning the Oriental Jews
into true Ashkenazi Israelis: By distinguishing the 'evil East'
(the Moslem Arab) from the 'good' East (the Jewish Arab), Israel
has taken it upon itself to 'cleanse' the Orientals of their
Arab-ness and redeem them from the 'primal sin' of belonging to
the Orient. (pp.7-8). Despite official proclamations about Jews as
'one people', the Orientals' different culture "threatens the
European ideal-ego which phantasises Israel as a prolongation of
Europe 'in' the Middle East but not 'of' it. (p.23).
The grand project of assimilation has succeeded in constructing a
putatively eternal antagonism between Arab versus Jew,
particularly erasing the memory of the original Palestinian Jews.
Likewise it has generated a syndrome of self-hating Oriental Jews,
who can win acceptance only by disavowing their previous cultural
identity. For them, Shohat argues, "existence under Zionism has
meant a profound and visceral schizophrenia, mingling stubborn
self-pride with an imposed self-rejection, typical products of a
situation of colonial ambivalence...In fact, Arab-hatred, when it
occurs among Oriental Jews, is almost always a disguised form of
self-hatred." (p.25)
Thus their resentment against Palestinians expresses an
internalised Western racism. When some Orientals formed the Black
Panthers in 1970-1 and declared their solidarity with the PLO, the
Israeli government attacked the movement as an expression of
'neurosis' or 'maladjustment'. That is, precisely when Oriental
Jews attempted to overcome the psychopathology induced by Zionist
anti-Semitism, their attempt was labelled pathological and
suppressed.
Eventually their resentment became decisive in Israeli politics.
Having been treated as second-class citizens by the Histadrut
(Israel's second largest employer doubling as a 'labour
movement'), Oriental Jews directed their hatred against
'socialism' and the Labour Party in particular, to the point of
largely voting for Likud alignment in the 1977 election. Although
Oriental Jews apparently support harsher measures against the
Palestinians, the repressive vanguard among the army and settlers
has always had an Ashkenazi leadership. While colluding with the
latter, the Labour Party (and others) conveniently blame the
'backward' Oriental Jews as a major obstacle to peace.
As Shohat argues, this blaming "has the advantage of placing the
elite protesters in the narcissistic posture of perpetual seekers
after peace", who must bear the hostility of the government, the
right wing, the Oriental Jews and recalcitrant Palestinians. In
that way, even the most enlightened Ashkenazi Zionism can absolve
itself by blaming less civilised Semitic peoples for perpetuating
irrational conflicts. At the same time, Zionism conceals the
institutional racism which engendered that conflict.
Palestinians as persecutors
Zionism often portrays the Palestinians as agents of an
international Arab conspiracy dedicated to destroying Israel. This
mentality can be understood by analogy to other colonial episodes
in which the colonisers experienced the colonised as persecutors.
In the case of Zionism, Haim Bresheeth (1989) describes how the
social identity of the 'New Jew' was created in the image of the
European neo-colonialist model, except that Palestine's original
inhabitants (if acknowledged to exist at all) were to be expelled
rather than merely exploited.
Moreover, Zionist paranoia bears parallels to European
anti-Semitism, in two senses. Palestinians are almost racially
defined as anti-Jewish, as persecuted German Jews were labelled
'anti-German'. And their anticipated attacks on Jews help displace
subconscious guilt about Israeli pogroms committed against
Palestinians.
This displacement or projection of persecution can be seen in the
portrayal of Arabs in Hebrew-language children's literature, as
analysed by Fouzi al-Asmar (1986). In these stories Israelis face
a mortal threat from Arabs who vent a racial hatred for the Jews,
as a result of being incited by agitators sent by Arab
governments. Of course such fictional Arab characters make no
distinction between Jews and Israelis. Somehow the State of Israel
always escapes imminent annihilation because the irrational Arabs
lack effective organisation, and because Israeli supermen-soldiers
(or even children) heroically protect the country from the threat.
Despite such reassurance, the threat should be considered paranoid
by virtue of projecting aggression and potential guilt upon the
Arabs, as well as containing anxieties about the Israelis'
national identity.
El-Asmar observes a change in demonological terminology according
to the period being described. In these stories, pre-1948 Arabs
are portrayed as mainly nomadic Bedouins with no particular
attachment to Palestine; other Arabs, likewise primitive, diseased
and dirty, are often thieves and murderers. The Arab-Israeli
conflict arises only because Arabs refused to live in peace with
Jews; given their refusal and subsequent (unexplained) 'flight',
they lack grounds for claiming Palestine as a homeland.
After the 1948 war and the establishment of the state of Israel,
Arabs are portrayed as fedayin 'infiltrators' - in a period when
many of the million expelled Palestinians attempted to harvest
their crops or reclaim other abandoned property. After the 1967
war, Arabs are portrayed as 'saboteurs' - in a period when Israel
sabotaged Palestinian agriculture in the Occupied Territories
through an array of legal restrictions. After the 1973 war,
Palestinian characters became 'terrorists' operating world-wide.
In all cases, this children's literature portrays Arab attacks as
seeking only to raid, steal and kill. Apparently they are
motivated by jealousy against Jews who have brought 'human
standards' and modern prosperity to the Land of Israel. A 'good
Arab' character is portrayed as lamenting that "these Jews came to
a desert and they made out of it a paradise, and here we come and
convert that paradise into a desert" (p.70). This portrayal lends
legitimation to any Israeli measures taken against Palestinians.
Thus systematic Zionist expropriation and killing is concealed or
justified by attributing the real barbarity to its victims.
While the Israeli characters ultimately triumph in these
children's stories, the omnipotence fantasy becomes somewhat
dented by the 1973 war. In one story a child is taking cover from
a MIG bombing. He hears a terrible noise "as if I were a loyal
grain ground between huge millstones, as if the land is trembling
under me and I will soon fall into a deep and black pit" (p.119).
In that fantasy of being reduced to nothingness, the child
expresses a widespread 'victim complex', whereby Israelis imagine
themselves as facing a perpetual threat of annihilation, from
which they are saved by superior moral character and/or military
defence. The fantasy serves at least two crucial functions. It
displaces subconscious guilt about the persecution of
Palestinians; and it externalises the internal threat to Jewish
identity by the Zionist project itself. The displacement involves
a psychic continuum, in which anxiety over social identity is
experienced as a threat to one's physical existence - "falling
into a deep and black pit". The unavoidable anxiety arises in turn
from Israel's failed attempt to replace a religious Jewish
identity with a secular Jewish culture (as analysed by Akiva Orr
in The unJewish State).
Having constructed the 'New Jew' as the born-again goy,
Hebrew-speaking gentile, Zionist has further constructed the
Palestinian Arab on the stereotypical model of the European Jew.
Even a humanist, left-Zionist writer like Amos Oz (1983, pp.157,
164) found himself likening the office of Al-Fajr [a Palestinian
East-Jerusalem newspaper - E.D.] to that of an Eastern European
Yiddish newspaper. And in all seriousness he saw the paper as a
sinister front for an anti-Zionist, Islamic, Soviet Communist
conspiracy. Thus Arabs are despised not simply as the enemy
'other', but as a reminder of a hated and abandoned Jewish
identity, 'the suffering Jew'. Moreover, European anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories find their counterpart in Israeli fears of
Palestinians: the persecuted are experienced as the persecutors.
Projecting Zionist anti-Semitism
A Jewish Israeli academic, educationalist Dr. Adit Cohen
(Ha'aretz, 30.6.76) once warned about this racist portrayal of
Arabs as "it was in this way that the image of the Jew was
presented in anti-Semitic Christian literature" (quoted in
El-Asmar, p.125). Certainly an historical parallel can been drawn
between Zionist paranoia and its anti-Semitic antecedents. As
capitalist market relations destroy autonomous cultural
identities, "people begin not to know who they are" (Kovel,
p.238). As a psychic defence against this threat, modern racism
must go further than to project onto the victim; to protect the
self from annihilation, this racism tends towards physically
removing or destroying the victim.
Given that the Holocaust and then Israel served to destroy
'Diaspora' Jewish identities, in favour of the New Jew, the
Palestinians came to represent a psychic threat to the very
existence of Jews. "We were better off in the ghetto, where we
knew who we were" laments a semi-fictional character of novelist
Simon Louvish (1985, p.144). That wistful nostalgia, apparently
innocuous, provides a way into understanding the persistent
demonising of Palestinians as an external threat to Jewish
existence, whose Jewish cultural basis has been suppressed by
Zionist nationalism itself.
In conclusion, then, Zionism attempted to substitute a European
nationalism for the traditional religious basis of Jewish
identity, as well as for the diverse 'Diaspora' cultures which
European racism denigrated. While claiming to protect Jews from
anti-Semitism, Zionism actually undermined the basis for any
coherent Jewish identity, while attributing the threat entirely to
external enemies of the Jews. Thus, through a self-perpetuating
illogic, Zionism presents itself as the only saviour from a
malaise which it brought about and sustains.
References
* Bresheeth, H. (1989). Self and Other in Zionism. Palestine and Israel in
recent Hebrew literature, in Khamsin, 14/15. Palestine: Profile of an
Occupation, London, Zed Books, pp. 120-52
* El-Asmar, F. (1986). Through the Hebrew Looking-Glass: Arab Stereotypes
in Children's Literature, London, Zed Books
* Halevi, I. (1987): A History of the Jews, London, Zed Books
* Hertzberg, A. (1966). The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader.
New York, Atheneum; includes a reprint of Leo Pinsker, Auto-emancipation
* Kovel, J. (1983). Marx on the Jewish Question. Dialectical Anthropology
8: 31-46; reprinted in Joel Kovel, The Radical Spirit: Essays on
Psychoanalysis and Society, London, Free Association Books, 1988, pp.226-50
* Louvish, S. (1985) The Therapy of Avram Blok. London, Heinemann.
* Orr, A. (1983). The unJewish State: The Politics of Jewish Identity in
Israel. London, Ithaca Press
* Oz, A. (1983). The Dawn. In the Land of Israel. London, Fontana
* Shohat, E. (1988). Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the standpoint of
its Jewish victims. Social Text 19/20: 1-36; available from P.O. Box 1474,
Old Chelsea Station, New York, NY 10011.
* Weizmann, C. (1937) Dr. Weizmann's Political Address - 20th Zionist
Congress, New Judea, August, p.215
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