Who Is the Mother Country?

To the extraordinary equation of Zionism and imperialist colonialism (extraordinary not in the sense of being rare, since this is a widely broadcast assertion, but in its breathtaking ignorance of Jewish, or even Zionist, history), the question is: Who is the mother country?

Zionism was far broader and more variegated than the Herzlian variant, whose goal was a Jewish national state– the same goal that the nationalisms of other subject nationalities in the nineteenth century—Poles, other Slavs, Italians—sought for their groups and which– not the Dreyfus Affair and not “antisemitism” per se– was Herzl’s context and model. There were many forms and expressions of Zionism, just as there are differences about it now. But to confine the discussion for now to the Herzlian variant, the one focused on obtaining a national state for Jews, recognized by international law: it is basic knowledge Herzl used and attempted to use various imperial powers, chiefly, though not only England, to achieve his movement’s ends. Herzl, an assimilated Jewish journalist from Vienna and would-be leader of the dispersed, stateless Jews, sought nothing less than to wrest a corner of the Ottoman Empire for them.

The enormity of this idea, given the condition of the Jews and Herzl’s own non-status, was remarkable but Herzl was relentless and creative. He traveled around Europe and to the Middle East in the late nineteenth and first years of the twentieth century attempting to interest any leader who would listen in inventive and often contradictory schemes to bring about a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland, secured, he insisted, by international law. Dressed in tails and top hat to compensate for his utter lack of power, this self-invented leader of the Jews met the German Kaiser, the Turkish sultan, even the rabidly Jew-hating tsarist minister of the interior, as well as British officials and wealthy Jews (perhaps he could buy Palestine by offsetting some Ottoman debt?), in an increasingly desperate effort to bring some reality to his idea.

Did this make him, alternately, a German, an Ottoman, a tsarist sympathizer (!), an Englishman, a banker (all of the above)? He was a Zionist, who was master tactician. A politician.

Horrific pogroms in Russia in the early years of the twentieth century led Herzl to propose for a brief time a “Nachtasyl”—a “night refuge”—for Jews in Uganda; he also was willing to consider temporary way stations in other places (El Arish, on the Sinai peninsula, so much closer to Israel), since the dream of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel would clearly not materialize quickly enough to secure the lives of an immediately threatened population in eastern Europe. He was vehemently rebuffed, hounded to an early death, by the hysterical opposition of precisely these eastern European Jews, for whom the return to Zion was not about mere refugeeism (though refuge was certainly part of the dream), but about Zion, and national redemption.

Herzl was liberal in his politics and envisioned a liberal Jewish republic in the Jews’ ancestral home. He was certain of the superiority of constitutional systems and industrial progress to whatever other types of states and economies he was familiar with. His rather awful novel Altneuland (“Old-New Land”), a depiction of the Zionist utopia that was to arise, makes Haifa (which Herzl visited), a Vienna-on-the Mediterranean. The state is a liberal democracy in which xenophobes are ridden out of public life. There is no discrimination by race, religion, or, remarkable for a book published in 1902– gender. Genteel Arabs exist in this telling and so benefit by the Jewish enterprise, they are loyal to it. Indeed, the “restoration” of the Jews and the ethnic harmony in Old-New Land inspires its main protagonist (a thinly disguised Herzl), to dream of further improbable project: “restoration” for “Negroes.”

Is this patronizing? Sure. Does it betray “colonialist” attitudes, in its self-satisfied sense of superiority? Yes. Assimilated western European (and American) Jews articulated similarly patronizing, superior attitudes about eastern European and Middle Eastern Jews and the need to westernize them, too. Does this attitude envision a “colony” of Jews transplanted to Israel as “settlers,” with no prior ties to the place, to subjugate, exploit, and destroy a “native” population and export its natural resources in order to enrich and empower a Mother country?

What?

Realpolitik as well as conviction drove subsequent leaders of Herzl’s organization (he died in 1904), to ally themselves with Great Britain. The British were clearly the power in the Middle East; they also happened to have a liberal democracy with representative institutions, a formidable industrial economy, and a society in which Jews had come to experience a remarkable degree of economic integration and upward mobility. Of the imperial powers likely to be “players” in a post-World War I Middle East (in which the Turks were no longer players at all, having been on the losing end of wartime alliances), Zionist organization leaders such as Chaim Weizmann overwhelmingly preferred Britain (over France) and labored mightily during World War I to secure British backing of the Zionist enterprise. They succeeded, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a wartime move motivated by a confluence of religious belief by some of its British backers with wartime strategizing all its backers shared.

That alliance then, was both tactical and based on some shared values. The “payback” the British hoped to get from the Jews was America’s entrance into the war on the allied side (“the Jews” were supposed to be influential enough to deliver this so, yes, this was a pro-Jewish policy based on anti-Jewish racist stereotyping, which Zionist leaders took with two hands, a bird indeed, in hand vs however many in bushes). And yes, British imperialists hoped, a population in the Middle East loyal to the British. As anyone with even modest familiarity with the history of all this knows, similar promises were made to Arab nationalists and dynastic interests, including plans that contradicted the Balfour Declaration.

The sorry history of British policy, with its cynical duplicity to Arabs and Jews in Palestine during and after World War One is documented in many sources. Suffice it here to say that as British policy shifted increasingly to oppose Jewish immigration into the country, upon which, of course, the whole Zionist enterprise—that is, the return of a diaspora people to its ancestral land—hinged, Zionist policy became increasingly anti-British, to the point of open, violent revolt, including attacks on British soldiers and installations in the years after World War II. Zionists made common cause with British imperialism only so long as it served their purposes.

Arab nationalists in these years also played this game, with different opposing players. For some, alliances with Britain’s mortal enemies in World War II— fascist Italy but primarily, Hitler and the Nazis—were not merely tactical. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, leader of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee, did not just profess admiration for Nazi racism, seeking in his words, “an Arab state of a Fascist nature, including Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Trans-Jordan.” He also proclaimed his sympathy for its ultimately desired outcome: not just an end to Jewish settlement in Palestine but a “final resol[ution]” of the “Jewish question,” which “for us constitutes the greatest danger.” Only this “solution” would guarantee that the Jews, who “would dominate the world” if England were victorious, would not bring about the enslavement of the Arabs and of Muslims in Asia and Africa, as well. It was not Hitler who sought out the mufti for an alliance of obvious potential benefit to the Nazis—an Arab revolt against the British during wartime—but the mufti and his associates who aggressively sought out Hitler, including meeting with him in Germany.

When Hajj Amin al Husseini spoke to Britain’s Peel Commission in 1937 and was asked what would happen to Palestine’s Jews if Husseini got the Arab state he wished in all of mandatory Palestine, he first said that they would be allowed to live as Jews under Muslim rule had always lived, as second class citizens, with protected religious but no political rights, as dhimmi. When pressed about the size of then-Palestine’s Jewish population, al Husseini said that it would in no way be tolerated; it would have to be significantly reduced. His response was alarming to the British. During World War II, Al Husseini met Hitler in Berlin (November, 1941), and visited and cheered on Waffen SS troops at an SS recruitment center seeking Muslim recruits in Bosnia, in 1943.

Here is a link to an article with photos of Al Husseini’s cheering visit to SS troops: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-06-15/ty-article-magazine/revealed-photos-of-palestinian-mufti-visiting-nazi-germany/0000017f-ef6e-d0f7-a9ff-efefa25a0000?gift=67138a6a4195496b876d23d22c68d831

More information about all this is available, among other places, on the website of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Does the mufti’s ideological alliance with Hitler and Nazism—which he maintained even after the war– mean that all Palestinian nationalism is “fascist,” “Nazi”? Does Al Husseini tar all Palestinian nationalism? What about his many opponents in the movement? About which, among other sources, one might read Sari Nusseibeh’s memoir, Once Upon a Country.

I began by saying that “Zionism” was only in part, and not necessarily the most significant part, the movement and organization that Theodor Herzl created. It is crucial to distinguish between zionism (lower case) and Zionism (upper case), as well as to elucidate the connection between the two. This bears on another matter much discussed in this context, albeit usually with remarkable ignorance: anti-Zionism and “antisemitism” (itself a Jew-hating term invented by Jew-hating racists).

“Zion” is a term of biblical origin, referring to Jerusalem, sometimes to the land of Israel. Zionism (lower case), permeates, utterly pervades, not only the entire Hebrew Bible but all of post-biblical Jewish literature and culture, philosophy, liturgy, mysticism, poetry, family and synagogue ritual, popular religion—everything. Open up the Jewish prayer book from any century, from the earliest examples extant to today, and it is everywhere. A Jew could not eat bread without remembering Jerusalem, praying for its rebuilding, for the ingathering of the dispersed Jewish exiles, an end to Exile and subjugation to “the nations.”

It is this zionism upon which the Zionism of the nineteenth century was built, without which, it could not have taken root, even among the most secular of proponents. The Zionist movement was a revolt against diaspora Jewish history; much (most) of it was utterly secular. Some versions of Zionism were militantly so—fervently anti-religious. Some were modern Orthodox. Some were rigidly socialism and agrarian (kibbutzim); some middle class capitalist and urban; some fascist. The socialists were wedded to agricultural labor—to Jewish agricultural labor, refusing to even hire Arabs, much less exploit them, because these Zionists believed Jews had to work the land physically themselves in order to redeem themselves thereby from “internalized Exile,” the (to them) perverted economic and psychological pyramid which had Jews behind store fronts and books but not hoes and hammers.  Members of these groups were so hostile to each other they could barely cooperate in that upon which they all agreed: ingathering of the dispersed Jewish people to its ancestral land in which place alone could a fundamental remaking and invigoration of Jewish society be realized.

Theodor Herzl did not invent Zionism (let alone zionism). By the time he came on the scene, Zionist settlements were already established in what Jews called Eretz Yisrael. Zionism in its various manifestations began to be articulated in different places: in Germany (Moses Hess): in Austria-Hungary (Yehuda Alakalai, Zvi Hirsch Kalisher), around the middle of the nineteenth century, in response to the example of subject peoples of Europe—Italians, Poles, other Slavs—asserting national identities against imperial suppression (by Austrians, Russians)– giving sudden hope that Jews, too, could resurrect their national existence after nearly two millennia in exile. Many of the writers who began to articulate Zionist visions—in central, southern, and eastern Europe—did so with no awareness of others doing similarly. It was the pre-existence of a pervading zionism in traditional Jewish culture—and these Zionisms—that made it possible for Herzl to so quickly galvanize the response he did.

Because the Jews were predominantly a diaspora people, Zionism (and zionism), necessarily meant population movement, Jewish immigration back to the land of Israel. Where zionism and Zionism differ is the agency to bring this about. To zionism, it was (and to anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews, still is), God. To Zionists, it was and is—Zionists, using political expediencies as they present themselves.

Hence, the primacy of Jewish immigration to Palestine—in which there was continuous, unbroken Jewish settlement throughout history, greater in some eras (like the sixteenth century), smaller in others. Indeed, the Zionist immigration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries worked mightily to distinguish itself from the indigenous Jewish population—the “old yishuv”—because this overwhelmingly impoverished, pious population of scholars, mystics, and small craftspeople, women and men, depended on the donations of diaspora Jews for support; because it represented the “internal exile” of passivity, resignation, and dependence that the Zionist revolution came to uproot and replace. The notion, however, that Jews were not indigenous to this land, colonizing it as the Boers did to South Africa, is at best, the fruit of stunning ignorance. At worst, it is the expression of cynical malice, willful distortion, and incitement to anti-Jewish violence under the hypocritical banner of anti-colonialism.

The “Mother country,” to answer my own question, is the Jewish people.

Zionism is about establishing a home to come home to. That it is a home for Jews makes it no more racist an entity than is Pakistan, a home for Muslim Pakistanis, which would not open its gates to unrestricted immigration intended to alter the fundamental nature of the state any more or any differently, than does contemporary Israel. Jordan has a nationality law that granted citizenship to residents of West Bank areas annexed to that country after 1948 that explicitly excludes Jews. Check the ethnic prerogatives in immigration and citizenship requirements of India, Japan, Thailand, among other countries.

Zionism, to cite Bernard Lewis, is a form of pan-Judaism. That, in essence, is no different and no more “racist,” than pan-Arabism, though the potential for, and the actuality of, intolerance and chauvinism in such a stance certainly exists, in both cases. To cite examples of odious chauvinism and racism, which can certainly be had, the more so, to our disgrace, under the current Israeli government, and then equate all of Zionism with racism, is reductionist distortion at best, and at worst, racist incitement against Jews.

Jews can certainly be anti-Zionist; there certainly were such Jews before the creation of the state and a new cohort proclaiming such a position now also exists– when the state is an established fact and home to half the world’s Jews, a rather different set of facts than that of a century ago. Jews can and do criticize Israel, sometimes severely, and not be either anti-Zionist or self-hating. But to insist, a priori and for all time, that national self-realization for Jews in the nationalist expression accepted for every other people, including Palestinians, namely, in a nation-state, is racist when it comes to Jews, is itself racist. To suggest that the only good Jew is the de-politicized Jew, meek, subservient– the dhimmi (a protected religious minority of secondary status in Islamic regimes) of previous eras of Jewish-Muslim history, is not a position that would be advanced about any other group.

We can waste ourselves re-fighting the battles of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Or we can do what Palestinians and Israelis did at more productive moments in our relationship and recognize two nations, two peoples, two narratives, two histories, two tragedies, two desperate hopes. And work to recognize and accommodate both. And to accept, finally, that if there is to be a future for either people, there has to be a future for both. In situ.

Finally, to the vigilantes who spread mindless, vile slogans around campuses and elsewhere: yes, indeed, read some real books.