A PRIMER ON ZIONISM (by DAVID FINKEL)
[David Finkel is a member of the US socialist organization Solidarity (www.solidarity-us.org) and an editor of the magazine AGAINST THE CURRENT -- text of original article from NEW SOCIALIST magazine - Issue #49 (November/December 2004): http://newsocialist.org/newsite/index.php?id=75]
The fashionable claim by proponents of political Zionism is that âZionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.â The intended meaning of this is: If you oppose Zionism, you disrespect Jewish suffering and dignity, therefore youâre for âthe destruction of Israelâ and youâre an anti-Semite.
Every one of these claims is false, both in fact and in logic. To understand why, we have to deconstruct that claim piece by piece and clarify what Zionism was and is. Iâll use the term Zionism here to mean âpolitical Zionism,â which demanded the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. At the beginning there were other Zionists who proposed creating a Jewish homeland rather than a state. Honorable people like I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky have identified with this tradition, but it was political Zionism that ultimately mattered.
Whatâs true is that political Zionism arose in the late 19th and early 20th century, as a form of Jewish nationalism. (Although it has a pre-history as a movement among evangelical Christians to return the Jews to Palestine, before any Jews were much interested, weâll ignore that historical footnote here.) Thatâs the only part of the claim thatâs true. Zionism arose as a nationalist movement in late 19th century Europe, both in the context of other European nationalisms and as a response to the growth of racist anti- Semitism.
But Zionism was only one form of Jewish nationalism, and a highly peculiar one. It was in competition with the working class, socialist Jewish nationalism of the Bund, which sought to liberate the Jewish people where they lived, on the basis of their Yiddish culture and as part of the overall struggle for human freedom. There was the explicitly anti-territorial Jewish nationalism advocated by the great historian Simon Dubnow for example. And of course there were even more Jewish liberals, socialists and communists, conservatives and others who werenât nationalists at all.
Up to the Nazi genocide, most Jews and even most Jewish nationalists rejected Zionism. Even in the 1930s, in the shadow of fascism, the historian William Rubinstein has shown that support for Zionism among Jews worldwide cannot have been more than 15 percent. To understand why, you have to look at the peculiar character of Zionism as an ideology.
â Zionism was highly peculiar in proposing not to establish a nation-state where the people it claimed to liberate actually lived, but to transfer them wholesale to a different place â to Palestine, where the Jewish religious tradition began but where few Jews had lived for over 1500 years.
âZionism was highly peculiar in its contempt for the actual culture of the people it claimed to liberate, i.e. the Yiddish culture of Eastern European Jews. Its attitude toward non-European Jews of the Middle East and Africa was much worse, but in this respect it shared the racist assumptions of most European nationalism. It proposed to replace Yiddish language and culture with Hebrew, which Jews had not spoken except for prayer and scholastic study for many centuries.
âZionism was distinctive in the degree to which it relied on the sponsorship of colonial or imperial powers to carry out its project of national construction. The founding father of the Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, was very conscious of its role: âWe shall build there [in Palestine] a protecting enclave of Europe against Asia, civilization against Asiatic barbar-ism.ââAfter a flirtation with Turkey, following World War I the Zionist movement allied itself with Britain, which nurtured the Zionist colonial settlement in Palestine at the expense of the native Arab population.
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