A PRIMER ON ZIONISM (by DAVID FINKEL)
<continued from first email>...
It is hardly surprising in view of all this that the large majority of the Jewish people rejected Zionism. Most Orthodox Jews opposed it on religious grounds, as a secularist usurpation of Godâs unique role in bringing about the Messianic era. Reform Judaism in late 19th century America and Germany opposed it as a diversion from Jewish modernization and political emancipation. Socialist Jews reviled it for attempting to divide Jewish workers from the proletarian struggle. Most ordinary Jews regarded it as a curiosity irrelevant to their lives.
Even as the Nazi menace arose in the 1930s, Jews generally did not see Zionism or emigration to Palestine as the solution to their problems. And the mainstream of political Zionism, in fact, was not concerned with saving Jews from Germany or Eastern Europe; David Ben-Gurion was concerned with bringing to Palestine young Jews or those with capital, not the large numbers whom he scorned as petty traders. Zionism indeed did not attempt â and to be honest, could not have succeeded even had it tried â to rescue millions of European Jews from the Nazi genocide.
The obvious question, then, is how such a historically late colonial movement could have succeeded after most Jews either opposed or were indifferent to it, and when Palestinian and other Arabs obviously did everything they could to stop it. There were basically three reasons:
â First, Zionist settlement in Palestine was highly advantageous to British imperialism in the inter-war period. The British colonial (so-called âMandateâ) administration afforded substantial economic advantages and military protection to the Yishuv (Jewish settlement community). The Zionist movement by the 1940s was also highly skilled in promoting itself as an ally in controlling the strategic Middle East to the rising imperialist power, the United States.
â Second, the Zionist movement in Palestine was very well organized and strategic in its planning, while the Palestinian population was poorly organized, very badly led and dominated by feudal landlords, often absentees who sold land to Zionist settlers without the peasantsâ knowledge. In addition, the Zionist project succeeded in the revival of the Hebrew language as a crucial factor in the identity of a new nation.
âThird, the debate in the Jewish world was never âwonâ by the Zionist argument. Rather, Nazi genocide and brutal Stalinist repression ended the argument, as most of European Jewry was wiped out and Jews in the Soviet bloc were cut off. The end of World War II saw several hundred thousand Jewish survivors in Displaced Persons camps, with no homes to return to and no place to go except Palestine (as western governments and the Zionist movement had no interest in opening other borders to the survivors).
This mass of desperate people furnished the critical mass that finally gave political Zionism the base for a Jewish State in Palestine. As the Zionist leadership rejected bi-nationalism in any form, it carried through the other option â the war of ethnic cleansing that Israel celebrates as the War of Independence and Palestinians commemorate as the Nakba â setting the stage for the half century of further conflict and tragedy that has followed. Nonetheless, the creation of a new Hebrew-speaking nation in Palestine/Israel was an accomplished fact â a tragic fact that would not have occurred had the Jews of Europe not been annihilated, but an undeniable fact anyway.
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
----- / o o \ ===OO=====OO=================================================http://pnews.org/ (links) http://pnews.org/PhpWiki/ (West Coast News Wiki) http://g0lem.net/PhpWiki/ (East Coast News Wiki) ==============================================================Sub/Unsub [pnews-l - rhetoric] :: http://pnews.org/signup.shtml ============================================================== ================= FIGHT THE RIGHT! =================
