The Jewish Power Blog: Colonial Reflections (2)

In 1493, Pope Alexander VI promulgated the “doctrine of discovery,” which proclaimed the divine right of European states to rule over, exploit, and convert the peoples they “discovered” in the heretofore “unknown” (to them) lands of America, Africa, and Asia. This doctrine was, incredibly, affirmed by the US Supreme Court in 1823, which determined that “the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” And the rest is history – sad, bitter, horrendous, cruel, history. While Britain and France still hold a few distant territories, the great majority of European colonies had achieved independence by 1980. But even though colonialism has ended, the sun never sets on the ongoing suffering it set in motion.

When Theodor Herzl came on the stage at the end of the nineteenth century, the suffering of the masses of Russian Jews under the cruel, collapsing Russian empire was perceived, world-wide, as an emergency. Meanwhile the Enlightenment dream of emancipation into a “neutral society” of equal citizens of differing faiths was shattered by the rise of states based on national identity – leaving the Jews as outsiders, as Herzl famously discovered at the Dreyfus trial.

There was already (1884) a movement, “Chovevei Tzion,” seeking to solve the “Jewish problem” not by mass migration or state building, but by small communities settling in the poor, sparsely-populated, Ottoman-ruled Land of Israel, “to build and to be built,” to re-establish their ancient roots and revitalize their culture, without displacing or dominating anyone.  A leader of this movement, Ahad Ha’am, came to be Herzl’s nemesis.

Herzl believed that the Russian Jewish masses couldn’t wait for cultural revitalization, and that emancipation or territorial autonomy in the diaspora were doomed to fail. The Jews urgently needed a refuge.  He shuttled between heads of state and philanthropists, in the effort to lobby the Ottoman empire (or any other empire) to grant the Jews permission to immigrate and set up an autonomous polity. As far as he could see, the colonial game was the only game in town. And a decade after his death, when the Zionists lobbied the British government to grant a “national home” in Palestine, they were playing the same game. One could say that the Balfour Declaration is a further application of the Doctrine of Discovery – it takes for granted the moral right of His Majesty to apportion the middle east.

But do Zionism’s exploitation of colonialism – and colonialism’s exploitation of Zionism (the Balfour Declaration was not an act of altruism, but served British interests) – make Zionism inherently illegitimate? The World Zionist Organization had no navy and often no money; it saw its mission as facilitating the creation of a polity in the ancestral Jewish homeland where Jews would be safe. Were the mosquito-bitten bands of Jewish settlers trying to eke out a living from agriculture really the equivalent of the conquistadors?

As mentioned above, Zionism was not one unified ideology, but rather embraced, often uncomfortably, a range of different strategies and even of different ultimate visions. And a key point of conflict among these was (and is) what to do about the reality that the Land of Israel – or Palestine – had not been lying empty since 70 CE.  Even though there was no Palestinian polity, there were Palestinians living there.

Throughout the first four decades of the century, Zionist discourse about this challenge was lively and rich, including proposals for a binational state, a confederation, partition, eternal conflict…  Meanwhile, territorialism – seeking a Jewish autonomous territory outside of Palestine – generated dozens of proposals, from Siberia to Madagascar; these avoided the “Palestinian question,” but no place was terra nullius (nobody’s land, available for the taking); the underlying assumption was that some colonial power would grant the Jews a place.

However, as the truth about the Holocaust became known, the discussion narrowed significantly. Principled debates about nationalism, historical rights, and self-determination gave way to desperation. Jews had literally no place to run to from heretofore unimaginable persecution. Moreover, the apparent moral collapse of enlightened civilization confirmed a direction in Zionism that saw attaining power – rebelling against Jewish powerlessness – as the only hope for Jewish survival. No longer would we rely on God’s mercy, or the gentiles’ justice; rather, we would do whatever we had to in order to save ourselves, in order to create a sovereign nation-state of the Jewish people.

Under these circumstances, it seems questionable to label the European (and middle eastern!) Jewish refugees “colonists,” sent by a mother empire to claim indigenes’ lands and resources by divine right. However, questioning that label does not make all their decisions, policies, and actions, ipso facto morally unblemished. And even if Zionism is not colonialism, but “merely” nationalism – which is also seen by many as morally problematic – then we have entered a different debate: if Jewish nationalism is unacceptable, then so is Palestinian – and French and Hungarian etc.

Personally, I guess I define myself as a utopian, but even I have my limits. John and Yoko’s vision feels to me not only beyond reality, but beyond desirable:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

A world in which all identities have been erased, leaving just one generic humanity, might be peaceful(?), but seems like it would not be very satisfying to live in. In any case, it seems we will have to make do, at least until this messianic vision is realized, with national and religious identities. The best that we can hope for is to apply basic rules of morality to the relationships among these groups. And of course, the most basic of these rules is not to do to others what you would not have others do to you.

The debate over the accusation of colonialism, it seems to me, is a sterile debate.  What does matter is for us Zionists to take responsibility for our actions, and to advocate and fight for a version of the Jewish nation-state that is free of religious or apocalyptic exceptionalism, and that sees itself as bound by the same moral scruples as we would want any other nation to respect. Only then can we claim our right to demand the same of others…