Death Cults and Life Forces
One of the more hateful protest signs I’ve seen in pictures of anti-Israel demonstrations in recent months was one that read “Zionism is a death cult”. This was offensive on a number of levels. Intellectually, it is a demonstration of ignorance. As I see Zionism—and I’ve read a Zionist source or two—it was, if anything, a “life cult”. It was an effort to breathe new life into a group that was widely seen—and by no means only by Zionists—as facing existential crisis from within and genocidal attacks from without. Much of Zionism, much of the time, cast itself, and understood itself, as one piece of a broader, general revival of oppressed national groups, and of humanity writ large.
But of course, a sign like this was not really engaged or interested in questions of what “Zionism”, or the smorgasbord of thinkers and ideas that constituted Zionism, actually had to say. It was offensive, in other words, not just intellectually, but mostly from a moral perspective. It is a sign based on hate. If there are questions as to the degree and areas of overlap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, this sign is one illustration of the increasingly broad terrain on which they become identical.
In a reality in which the enemy that Israel is fighting in Gaza is Hamas, an organization that recently elevated Yihyeh Sinwar its top leadership—yet but one more manifestation of its celebration of the mass murder, rape, mutilation and abuse that Sinwar masterminded on October 7th—the sign is offensive in its total lack of self-awareness or of any sense of irony. “Death cult”? In Gaza, Israel is fighting a movement that has long placed being a shahid, a martyr—a term used broadly to refer to those who die in suicide bombings and other terror attacks—as its highest ideal; a movement whose principal commitment is to the destruction of the Jewish state and to the killing of its citizens (as it demonstrated more clearly than even on October 7th); a movement that threw Fatah members out of windows when it came to power in 2016, and has continued to terrorize and murder its own Palestinian citizens since, including using them as shelter-less human shields before and after October 7th, while the leadership hides in underground tunnels. For those who see “death cults” as an enemy, the primary focus should be on Hamas.
To be sure, Zionism emerged with a strong sense of impending death—both personal-concrete and national-symbolic. Moreover, there were certainly elements of Zionism that incorporated celebration of heroic death as part of the national project. Perhaps the most famous example is the canonization of Joseph Trumpeldor’s assumed final words “It is good to die for our country”—an ethos that many generations of Israelis were raised with. But concern with death in Zionism was invariably part of what in a broader perspective was a major focus on life. Even celebrated heroic deaths such as Trumpeldor’s were understood in this way. When Meir Hazanowitz, a member of Ha-Shomer, was killed in 1913, one of his eulogies expressed the hope that “may this blood become the dew of life”. Similarly, as one early twentieth century short story about the establishment of a new settlement and the struggle against malaria put it, “In the field of death [the founders] had decided to create life. . . . And the war now raged between the people and death itself.” The story ends with the successful establishment of the settlement, where now ‘‘young trees waved erect in the wind . . . caressed and kissed by the sun’s warm rays. . . . The people had triumphed over death!’’
Death, in other words, may have been ever-present in some sense, but it was present as an enemy. Death featured in Zionist thought and in Israeli culture primarily as a threat that the Jewish people faced and that Zionism was meant to combat. The Zionist project was about bringing a nation that many feared was on its deathbed back to life; it was about enabling a vibrant and full life for a people it deemed to have been suffocated by both external and internal forces. It is not an accident, for example, that the Hebrew literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to be known as “sifrut ha-Tehiya”, the literature of revival, of rebirth. The national project as a whole was branded a project of “Tehiya” (a word whose root is, of course, the word Hayim, life). When Boris Schatz established the Bezalel Art School and Museum in Jerusalem in 1906, for example, he cast it as “the first sign” of a nation “coming to life”. A. D. Gordon might write of experiencing the combined desolation of his soul and of the land, but he made it clear that the goal was to reignite “the burning ember” that was still glowing beneath the physical and spiritual ruins. That ember, he wrote, “will return to life and become once again a raging flame. And you will live once again, and your people and your land will live”. When the holiday of Tu Bishvat was effectively reinvented in the Yishuv in the early 20th century, the new meanings with which it was infused expressed a similar notion, now translated into public ritual. The custom of children and youth planting seedlings, as one early JNF poster announced, was aimed at allowing them to become “blessing-bearing forests, which will spread their shade upon the land, to return it to life”. Individual, nation, and land would all return to life as the common symbolism had it. If it was a cult of any kind, in other words, Zionism was a life cult.
What can we learn from this about our present moment? Is there any connection between that protest sign, the Zionist project, and Israeli politics and culture today? Cultures and civilizations change. They can sometimes tumble with frightening speed from “civilization to barbarism”, as Nimrod Aloni recently put it in Haaretz, through an erosion, or as the case may be, through a deliberate undermining of the ethics of life that served as their beacon.
I write this post as we seem to be witnessing the first stage of a revenge attack from Hezbollah, perhaps leading to further escalation that might involve additional enthusiasts for the destruction of this renewed life that Zionism granted the Jewish people. The bodies of six hostages taken by Hamas were recently returned to Israel. The Netanyahu government seems at best reluctant to move forward with a deal that would bring hostages home alive and lead to a cease-fire in what began as one of the most justified wars one can imagine and has turned into an ongoing machinery of death—of Palestinians and Israelis—with, as far as anybody can tell, little or no strategic planning, and virtually no vision of any future arrangement for Gaza (and, for that matter, for Israel). The northern part of the country has been decimated, continually burning, as we experience—for the first time in Israeli history—the effective conquest of a significant portion of the country under the government of “Mr. Security”, with tens of thousands of evacuees still homeless and horizon-less.
And in the meantime: Hawara; Jit; justifications of lynchings, murder and pogroms by government ministers and members of the ruling coalition such as Limor Son Har Melech; death and destruction in Gaza; Sde Teiman and Beit Lid; Ben-Gvir’s promotion of a police officer who wounded demonstrators with a stun grenade; Ben-Gvir; Smotrich; Tzvi Sukkot; Channel 14; Netanyahu’s contemptuous and contemptible notion that the hostages are “only suffering”; the planned ceremony to mark the one-year anniversary of October 7 with no living audience, in which the families of hostages and members of the devastated kibbutzim are “background noise” to Miri Regev. It is difficult to know where to begin and where to end the list of the moral Sodom and Gomorrah that we have become; this list that turns the stomach even as it turns the wheels of our history, shaping it and ever reshaping who we are.
We have lost a sense of values and life, of the value of life—not only the lives of Palestinians, but even our own lives, the lives of our children, friends, spouses, and fellow citizens. As Ravit Hecht wrote the other day in Ha-Aretz, Netanyahu has turned us into people with “no tomorrow”. All that this government seems to offer is continuous war, a persistent erosion of social cohesion, of shared ethical values, of a vision of what Israel can be (or could have been?). There is a longstanding common expression in Israel that has often been used with regard to fallen soldiers. “In their death, they have commanded us life.” In a disturbing transformation, in the circles that tout what even Defense Minister Gallant has said is the illusory nonsense of “total victory”, this saying has now been transformed into “In their death, they have commanded us victory”. Life has been taken out of the equation. The notion that we fight wars when necessary, sacrifice life when we must, in the interest of enabling future life, has been swept aside for the sake of some elusive notion of victory, without any clear articulation of what that might look like, what life after war will be, what the life is that we are seeking to enable, or better yet, to cultivate. As members of Kibbutz Be’eri recently wrote in response to the plans for Miri Regev’s divisive ceremony, the government would do better “to focus on lives that can be saved rather than the lives that it abandoned to their fate”.
I think at times about the long span of some 3,000 years of Jewish history; a history in which the Zionist project constitutes a spectacular chapter, an infusion of new life and new vision into what many feared was a nation facing imminent demise. I think about the chapter of Jewish history that we have been writing over the past ten months (and even the past two years). It is a depressing, disheartening and dark one—one which will in itself add its own distasteful and, I fear, indelible color to that ongoing story. Aside from phantasmagorical visions of Jewish settlement in Gaza and even in Southern Lebanon; beyond hallucinatory projects aimed at preparing for the building of the Third Temple, there is little in the way of actual life that our current political, cultural, and moral regimes offer. If Zionism was a life cult, this is one aspect—a foundational one—in which Israel is today ruled by an anti-Zionism that has taken aim, like the enemies attacking it from without, at the humanistic core that animated much of Zionism much of the time.
The anti-Zionism expressed in the protest sign that cast Zionism as a death cult represented a hijacking of the meaning of the word. No less so, the appropriation of the word “Zionism” by the messianic cult that currently rules Israel, that has in fact been celebrating the deaths not only of Palestinians, but even those of Israelis; the ethic of revenge and the nihilistic aesthetic of war for its own sake that has taken over so much of our mental space and public culture—these too constitute a forced annexation of the word and a distortion of much that Zionism stood for. Israel today faces a coalition of anti-Zionism that brings together genocidal enemies from without and rulers determined to dismantle Zionism’s physical and moral achievements from within. Can we renew the life-cult that was called Zionism?