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Adrian Stein
Zionism 2.0: Themes and Proposals for Reshaping World Civilization

Greater Israel—Getting Serious about Settlements and Colonization (Part 1 of 3)

Part 1 of 3

Zionism 2.0–Themes and Proposals is devoted to re-envisioning Zionism. The Zionist project, as has been reiterated in earlier blogs, did not end in 1948 with the establishment of the State of Israel but was merely initiated. Nineteen forty-eight (1948) represents the beginning of Zionism’s long future vocation not its terminal point. Zionism is something much larger. It is the start of a long uncharted historical and evolutionary process. The establishment of an internationally-recognized Jewish State, albeit a critical and necessary condition, was only the initial goal.

 Zionism is indeed monumental in its dimensions. It is something mythic, functioning and abiding on a civilizational scale, and partaking of what Mircea Eliade called “the myth of eternal return.” Zionism manifests the reemergence of the sacred and the transcendent in human history.  It contains many myths within myths and it carries within its wake many implicit dreams, in fact, dreams within dreams, vast intimations of possibility, deep historic intuitions, and gigantic swirling conceptions, plans and designs. This is all part of the Zionist project. 

The ambit and scope of Zionism is not something that is easily parsed, canvassed or understood. Some of the plans that I reference have been written down but others have been left unspoken. These underlying ideas are, however, in some kind of uncanny way, known and generationally renewed. Zionism partakes of a precognition or possibly a universal memory. It is as if the Zionist dream is retained and controlled by some kind of collective guiding consciousness creating an Omega Point, in Teilard de Chardin’s language, a force that is pulling us all toward a common goal and objective without us fully knowing how or why.  

The vision of Zionism 2.0, Zionism Potentia or Greater Israel as it may be called, rests, importantly on a deeper consideration and re-evaluation of what has typically characterized much of post-Herzlian Zionist thought. Hebraic civilization has given the world the great Abrahamic religions, its codes of morals and the daily rituals of belief and prayer that pattern the lives of a large part of humankind. Hebraic thought has further given the world a cosmogony that situates human history on a great ethical-cosmic continuum that begins with the genesis event of creation and concludes apocalyptically at the end of eschatological time. Judaic thought has given both history and time meaning, visceral and palpable meaning. The “metronome of human history” begins, as Thomas Cahill has apostrophized in his book, The Gift of the Jews, in the Sinai with Exodus. The Hebraic religious framework has been embedded in timeless human narratives that arose directly from the lived experience of the Hebrew people—narratives that have shaped every society and nation in the world. 

Moreover, Hebraic worship has patterned the most important rituals that we celebrate; the rituals of birth and death. I dare say there are no comparable civilizational achievements that can be pointed to. Greek and classical thought, not to be diminished at any level, pales in comparison. When considering that most of the vast corpus of Greek texts and scrolls that were once extant during the classical era, were either lost or abandoned. And further that the study of the disparate and scattered fragments of Grecian and Roman culture were largely confined to a handful of classicists in ivory towers who guarded and hoarded them. In contrast the Hebraic texts and the Greco-Aramaic testaments have never left daily worship and practice. This is the great legacy of Israel and the Jewish people.

The Jews chose not to lock up and hoard their precious national treasures but rather to devise some universal means by which to share the revelations and truths that they had been privy to. The Jewish people essentially transported something they witnessed in a remote and desolate place, something witnessed by an infinitesimally small fraction of humanity and then elected to convey what they had witnessed in a manner so it would permeate the consciousness and reality of every individual in the world. The means for this conveyance was the single most important invention in history, the invention of the Hebrew alphabet.

The Jewish forefathers, or perhaps a single unknown protean Magnus, a Jewish genius perhaps, did this, astonishingly by fashioning and attaching with unmatched parsimony, twenty-two (22) common and recognizable symbols to the phonemes of a primitive semitic language of an unknown neolithic people. The Hebraic alphabet is an unequaled invention. The alphabet, indeed, very much resembles the action of the universal molecular interlocutor-DNA- in jumpstarting world civilization just as DNA jump started biological and organic life. The Hebrew alphabet amounts, essentially, to an autocatalytic singularity. This self-catalyzing event ostensibly initiated itself, a seemingly paradoxical tautology that “allowed thought to run free,” to escape its stone age limitations and “to fly”. This is the beginning of the Hebraic civilizational era through which we are now currently living. 

Zionism 2.0 asserts unapologetically that the Hebraic people, perforce the Jewish people, constitute a civilization that warrants and grants the prerogatives and privileges that all great ancient civilizations deserve. The Jewish and Hebraic contributions to the world grant distinctive rights, warrants and privileges. Priority can be demanded and asserted.  Estranged and banished but never fully disconnected, from the biblical homeland after many great wars and vicissitudes, the Jewish people have migrated throughout the world, teaching, enriching, raising up and instructing all those around them. At no time, however, did the Jewish people forget their covenant with G-d nor their plans to return to their ancestral homeland. Only the necessary auspicious circumstances and material capacities delayed the ultimate Jewish return to Eretz Israel. 

 Jewish civilization is discernible, as the great historian, Ferdinand Braudel asserted in his magisterial historical work “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,” as a ‘Diasporic’ civilization, with Jewish societies and networks “floating on the surface of the great oceans of humanity” as distinct and coherent ‘cultural bubbles’ using Braudel’s metaphor of oil on water.

Braudel asserted that one can recognize that the Jews are the carriers of a great civilization by observing them in ‘totalis’, and seeing that wherever one finds Jews one finds them at the same time “teaching, educating, contributing, advancing, enriching and raising up all those around them.” Braudel proffers that one finds patterns of cooperation and wealth creation which are distinctive and discernible even if the specific actors are no longer visible or identifiable.  One cannot necessarily see the individual Jewish participants at many of the key historic junctures but one knows, as Braudel asserts, that they are there by the movement, social energy and the overall intellectual stimulus that they generate. 

The true dimensions of the Jewish people’s involvement and contribution to creating much of the world around us cannot be fully seen. The role of individual participants has been mostly effaced, in some cases maliciously and in other cases by benign neglect or by conscious effort to disguise and dissimulate their identity. The true story of the ‘Jews’, with a full inventory of Jewish discoveries and achievements has not been yet been written, not even sketched, as much as one might want to recognize the great scholarship of Salo Baron and his monumental 18 volume Social and Economic History of the Jews or Heinrich Graetz’s earlier synthesizing, and immensely influential (Lachrymose or tear provoking as Barron might have it) History of the Jews. Yet, such a universal Jewish history will be and must be written, even if it can only be done in a ‘prosopographical’ fashion, (face forward) as a kind of collective history; a type of historical recreation and scholarship pioneered by the great Manchester historian Lewis Namier, a close friend and supporter of Chaim Weizmann, it should be mentioned. Something akin to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s masterpiece of historic reconstruction, Montaillou, a book about the last pocket of surviving Cathars in the late 13th century France, will need to be written but on a larger scale and of proportionally greater complexity. 

The Jewish people do not need, as it has been previously asserted in these entries, to establish any special bonafides to return to their ancestral homelands or to justify holding these or any other contiguous domains. The Jewish deed and title to these lands are known to all. The economic and cultural efflorescence that will arise (and has arisen) from the reconstituted Jewish State will be such that the greatest beneficiaries of the evolving Zionist project will be those that live in the immediate proximity to Israel, its Arab neighbours and all of the many ancient and distinctive minorities of the Levant. Efforts to undermine, threaten and destroy modern Israel and its institutions is one of the greatest acts of vandalism and wanton destruction. These vandals and wreckers will not succeed and will, in fact, produce the opposite result for their instigation. No people on Earth have a stronger title to any land than the Jewish people have to Eretz Israel. Interference with the Zionist project interferes with humanity’s future and possibly its survival. There are many and various threats to humanity’s future and a limited amount of time within which to cross difficult societal and intellectual thresholds. Limited individual, societal and national energies cannot be dissipated on senseless war and in fighting futile acts of terrorism. 

The Zionist conception that we are ‘advancing,’ characterizes Zionism as a movement of immense and unmatched ambition, drive and energy. Zionism is an ideological program that seeks nothing less than to reshape the world—to alter the very trajectory and path of human civilization. Our objectives are first and foremost to build within Israel a society of material abundance, wealth and plenitude and to provide the material basis that will support the ingathering of millions Jewish people from around the world over the coming two generations (50 years). Only from internal strength, security and safety can Israel extend its focus and capacities outward.

 * This post is dedicated to Eden Nimri, an internationally competitive swimmer and soldier. Eden was the team commander of the Sky Riders Unit, one of only four women in a thirty individual company. She gave her life on October 7th, 2023 at the Kibbutz Nahal Oz while defending others. May her memory be a blessing and may she not be forgotten. <https://edennimri.co.il>

 Part 2 of 3 to follow.

About the Author
Adrian Stein is the Founder and CEO of Type 1 Enterprise Inc and its associated companies. He has contributed the core philosophical, conceptual and intellectual elements to the company's industrial schema and its related ecosystem. The company is developing a new type of economic institution which it has dubbed the "Universal Von Neumann Constructor and Tool Facility".Mr Stein has been energetically involved in myriad technological undertakings, projects and startups. During the 1990s he privately financed, staffed and organized his own research and scientific laboratory. Mr Stein has maintained a long standing consultancy in the area of emerging information technologies and was actively involved in scientific and medical publishing founding a number of firms.
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