Susan Roberts
At the last London protest – the 18th National march against the Genocide in Gaza – a solitary protester held up a home-made sign which read, ‘Imagine Being Stupid Enough to Actually believe A Genocide Doesn’t Affect You’, which I took not only as an exhortation to remember our common humanity, but also as a warning to us all if we don’t.
The next day an ad for Jordan Peterson’s latest podcast: ‘Foundations of the West’ popped up on my screen. The image, which wouldn’t shame a 90s boy-band – seemed to be presenting something of historic importance: Peterson and four of his chums, sitting on ancient steps, hands clasped in thoughtful repose. The accompanying caption described their worthy mission as ‘focusing on the necessity of a unifying vision for the future.’ And the trailer, which opens with a whirling Gladiator-style vista, shows the lads chatting whilst walking around old monuments. The only other member I recognised was Ben Shapiro. But it seems safe to assume, having heard the pro-Zionist views of both Peterson and Shapiro that my protester’s exhortation will not be working on them. And that when these self-appointed cultural representatives get down to the earnest task of sorting out the ‘vision that unites us’, the fact that we are watching an ongoing Genocide won’t be included. Which should give us all pause for thought, because if normal life is now a spectacle of undiluted horror, openly aided and abetted by our entire political class then the vision that is ‘uniting’ society is something humanity needs to slough off.
The late Edward Said was the acknowledged master commentator on issues pertaining to the relationship between cultural representation and politics. In works such as ‘Orientalism’ and ‘Culture and Imperialism’, Said exposed the links between different aspect of colonial power, the soft-cultural and the hard-military, and showed how the former so often enable and support the latter. Said showed that it is how we talk about ‘the other’, what images we create of them and how we represent them to ourselves in the novels, plays and films that fill our cultural repartee that determines how we see them, or don’t see them. Those shared cultural images also provide us with the necessary moral justification for utilising ‘the other’ to fulfil what we regard as our historic destiny.
According to Said, it is the underlying belief system, the idealistic architecture of values and purpose that an Imperial power relies on that is used to legitimise its exploitative practices, however cruel or inhumane. Whether expressed as ‘the White Man’s Burden’ for the British, ‘Mission Civilisatrice’ for the French, or America’s notion of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and ‘Exceptionalism’, all settler/colonial projects cloak themselves in some idealistic justificatory garb and Israel is no exception.
In ‘The Origins of Modern Zionism’, Shlomo Avineri, Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, lays out ‘the intellectual origins of the Jewish State’. According to Avineri, “Zionism was a post-emancipation phenomenon.” Meaning that it came into being not when antisemitism was rife, but when it ended. And the reason Zionism emerged later is because with liberalism came assimilation and inter-marriage which threatened the collective identity Jewish communities had built up over centuries. According to Zionist journalist, Ahad Ha’am, [Asher Ginzberg] the problem was modern culture itself, “[it] overturns the defences of Judaism from within so that Judaism can no longer remain isolated and live a life apart.” Obviously, for an individual, liberalism and assimilation were a good thing – between 1882 to 1914 over 3 million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the USA and Canada, with less than 1% going to Palestine. But assimilation was not good for the collective Jewish community which became hollowed out as a result. As Leon Simon, a leading British Zionist who helped draft the Balfour Declaration confirms, “Even in England, where antisemitism is practically unknown, there is none the less a Jewish problem, because the synagogues are empty…..and there is a great deal of drift into assimilation and intermarriage.” Orthodox Jews would continue to live in their collective religious communities with a self-imposed separation from the rest of liberal society, as they still do today. But for the non-orthodox community, liberalism presented a novel challenge and Zionism was the
novel solution.
With all the competing nationalisms emerging in Europe, together with the challenges of secular life, it is hardly surprising that some Jews looked to Zionism’s promise of a Jewish homeland as an answer. Nevertheless, there was a lot of Jewish opposition to Zionism and not just from the Orthodox community. Many Jewish intellectuals regarded any notion of Jewish nationalism as a betrayal of Judaic principles and voiced their opposition through books, pamphlets and lobbying. Lord Edwin Montagu – the only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s cabinet in 1917 was a particularly vociferous opponent not just of the Balfour Declaration, but of the Zionist movement more generally.
However, there was not just one form of Zionism. In the early days many Zionists who went to Palestine were not in search of an exclusively Jewish homeland and wanted to achieve a cooperative relationship with the native Palestinians. The best known ‘Bi-National’ Zionist is probably Martin Buber, author of ‘Land of Two Peoples’, who insisted that as ‘interlopers’ the obligation was on them to win the trust of the indigenous Palestinians and to help them to realise their aspiration for a nation state.
Buber was not alone in his belief that politics was the test of the spirit of Judaism. But some, like his friend Hans Kohn, author of ‘The Idea of Nationalism’, who would later become an academic in the US, were horrified by the violence and left. In 1929 Kohn wrote to Buber, who was then still living in Germany, “You are fortunate not to witness the details of the Palestinian and Zionist reality, for with Zionism as it is today, the objectives of Zionism cannot be affirmed. I fear we support something we are unable to comprehend. That something drives us from misconceived solidarity, ever deeper into the morass. Zionism will either be peaceful or it will be without me. Zionism is not Judaism.”
With hindsight, Buber’s early optimism looks naïve. But maybe he had not recognized what a strategic prize Palestine represented for the West as Balfour’s 1919 declaration of support for Zionism makes clear. “The Four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes of a far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” In any event, by 1961 Buber’s mood had become more sombre, “Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness of causeless hatred (for the Arabs). It is bound to bring complete ruin upon us.”
Zionism appears to have been an idea with more than one facet, in the early days at least. Perhaps it could have gone in a different direction, as Buber had hoped. But it didn’t and instead an exclusively Jewish state was established and most of the indigenous population were ethnically cleansed. The essential point though is that there never was anything inherently righteous about Zionism. It was a practical solution to a practical problem worked out by secular European intellectuals with the funding of Western capitalism. It was and still is simply a novel exclusionary form of nationalism. Only later did the idea became weaponised – by attempting to make the terms ‘Zionism’ and ‘Judaism’ coterminous – in order to block legitimate political critique. And, as with any idea, it is how it is represented that counts.
When Said wrote about Zionism, he obviously did so from the point of view of its victims, his people, who had been made to pay a concrete price for the abstract European idea that had been brought to their land. (It goes without saying that nothing like Zionism existed amongst Arab Jews; as Iraqi-born, Avi Shlaim recounts in his memoir – it was impossible for Arab Jews to feel at home in such a Eurocentric state where they tended to live on the margins of society). Said recognised the importance of understanding the intellectual ferment that gave birth to Zionism, but it was the way it was represented that gave it life. According to Said the reason Zionism succeeded as a military operation was because the political battle for Palestine had already been won “in the international world in which ideas, representations, rhetoric and images were at issue.”
Susan Roberts is a lecturer in moral philosophy and animal rights.
Source: CounterPunch
