In the US, coverage of the Israeli Palestinian conflict over the years has made it seem hopelessly complicated. This is a fallacy. The cause of the conflict—there is only one—is that Israel is stealing the Palestinians’ land. Likewise, there is really only one obstacle to its peaceful resolution. Israel does not want peace. Because peace would mean Israel would have to stop stealing Palestinian land and it has no intention of ever doing that until it has taken all of it. All the major agreements that Israel has signed with various Arab partners show this. Beginning with the Camp David Accords of 1978, Israel has ignored the provisions in every agreement that in any way recognized Palestinian rights. Since then most Palestinian leaders have recognized Israel’s right to exist on the land it took prior to 1967. And since then no Israeli government, whether Likud or Labor, has ever stopped the usurpation of Palestinian land. And the lines on the maps of 1978 have not changed.
But attitudes towards Israel around the world, and even in the United States, have changed. And this change is being noticed, as the coverage of Israel’s May assault on the Palestinians shows. Most of the news stories in May still began and ended the way they have since 1948. The stories began with a reckless Palestinian provocation and a measured Israeli response and they ended with the dim prospects for a “peaceful solution” due to both sides’ divisions and refusal to compromise. But many of the stories in May had something new in them besides that boilerplate. The worldwide protests were new and could not be ignored. Tens of thousands turned out in cities all over the world to protest Israel’s onslaught against Gaza and its violent suppression of Palestinian protests in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel proper. The size and scope of the protests compelled the press to take notice of something else that was new: the changing attitudes towards Israel around the world, especially among young people. And these changes in the US received special emphasis. This change has been underway for some time, but now for the mainstream press, it is news. Coverage of the changing attitudes, necessarily involved a change in the rhetoric of the coverage. Terms like ‘war crimes,’ ‘apartheid,’ ‘pariah’ have begun to occur more frequently in the mainstream press. All of these things signal that a revaluation of Zionism is underway. And this has far reaching implications for the future of Israel. The state of Israel was created in 1948 with Zionism as its ideological blueprint. If the idea of Zionism becomes discredited, what then?
The number of people for whom Zionism is still a respectable idea is diminishing. For those in Israel and abroad who still cling to it, its defense becomes a more difficult operation as the bodies of its victims pile up. The first line of their defense of Zionism and a Zionist state is the one-size-fits-all argument that criticisms of Israel and Zionism are anti-Semitic. This is preposterous not only because Israel’s present actions are indefensible, but it also overlooks the fact that long ago even more fundamental criticisms of Zionism were made by Jews themselves. When Zionism began to take shape, Jews argued not only about the tenets and goals of Zionism, but some took issue with the very idea of Zionism. Some thought it was folly.
Zionism began in the nineteenth century as a solution to what was called the ‘Jewish Question.’ The ‘Jewish Question’ was of course not really a question about Jews, but about European anti-Semitism. The solution of Zionism was that Jewish people should have a homeland of their own. That seems simple enough. But from the outset the implications of that simple idea and the details of how it was to be worked out were immediately a matter of dispute among Zionists and their non-Jewish allies. And the consequences of that unresolved dispute are with us today.
The first question that arose in the Jewish Question was what is a Jew? Was the word ‘Jew’ primarily an ethnic term or a religious term? This question still occurs in the current debate about what it means to say Israel is a Jewish state. Prominent early Zionists debated the question, but their debate was obviously inconclusive. For Theodor Herzl, who chaired the first World Zionist Congress in 1897, Jew was primarily an ethnic term. But for Rabbi Abraham Kook, who wrote several influential articles after the turn of the century and would later be the chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, the word was primarily a religious term. It is difficult to think of another word that names a group of people that is similarly ambiguous. When we say ‘Italian’ or ‘Muslim’ we have a fairly clear idea of what people we are talking about. Not so with the word ‘Jew.’ And this is still a matter of dispute among people living inside the present boundaries of Israel—which, I might add, are also a matter of dispute.
The second problem was that Zionism lacked one feature of other forms of nationalism. Other varieties of nationalism were expressions of peoples who were already concentrated in some region even if they did not govern it—the Serbs for example in the nineteenth century. But Zionism was a form of nationalism for a people without any land. Their homeland existed only in their imaginations. This could only amplify the problems already attendant with simpler versions of nationalism which at least had some land underfoot where its proponents could stand and start battling with their neighbors who were proponents of a different nationalism. So Zionists had a problem other nationalists did not have. Before they could fight over a piece of land, they had to find a piece of land to fight over. There were only two ways do this. They could buy a piece of land or they could steal it.
In the discussion of where to locate a Zionist state, Europe was never seriously considered. It was anti-Semitism in Europe that had created Zionism in the first place. And in any case, no European state was going to sell some of its land. That hadn’t happened since the Czar sold Alaska to the US.
The two locations most frequently put forth by early Zionist thinkers were Palestine and Argentina. The secularist Herzl’s preference was for Argentina where there was much more unpopulated land and where there was already a nascent colony of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. But Herzl recognized that Palestine had much more support for sentimental reasons. Palestine was a small but important part of the Ottoman Empire, but which then had a very small population of Jews. In fact, of all the places in Ottoman Empires with Jewish populations, Palestine ranked hear the bottom. Much larger Jewish populations existed in Algeria, Syria, Iraq and Istanbul itself. One estimate of the population of Jews in Jerusalem in 1867 put it at around 4000 to 5000 people. Contrast that with the Jewish population of Baghdad, then also part of the Ottoman Empire, which at that same time was estimated to be about 80,000 to 90,000 people—about one-third of the population of the city, that is.
Unfortunately for the Zionist cause, before World War I the Ottomans were generally hostile to Jewish emigration to Palestine though their public statements on the issue were muted. Their suspicions had no religious basis, but were due to the encroachments of Russia and Austria-Hungary on the Ottoman Empire. In 1882 the Ottoman Council of Ministers announced that Jews wishing to immigrate would not be permitted to settle in Palestine, but could settle in other provinces provided that they become Ottoman subjects. For Zionists that provision was out of the question. So various Zionist parties attempted an end-around to the policy through British and American channels. They pulled levers in European governments, they used subterfuges to purchase land in Palestine.
Despite Ottoman opposition to the establishment of any sort of independent state—whether Jewish or not—the Zionist movement continued to make some progress mostly because the Ottoman Empire had bigger problems. Jewish emigration to Palestine continued and the Zionist movement continued to gain adherents and backers. Among the latter were many wealthy and powerful Jews who assisted them in their project of gaining control of Palestine—though they themselves had no intention of relocating from Paris or London or Vienna to a small dusty province of the Ottoman Empire where they would take up farming.
Then World War I changed everything. As a result of it, Palestine became a British Mandate in the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire. Success now seemed closer—the British government had no qualms about giving away someone else’s land. But the problems intrinsic to Zionism from the outset remained. Those were first identified eighty years earlier by Karl Marx.
While Zionism did not yet have a name in Marx’s time, the general debate that would give birth to it was already in progress under the label of the “Jewish Question.” In 1843 Marx wrote an essay called “On the Jewish Question” that demolished the entire philosophical framework from which Zionism would arise—and not only Zionism but by implication all other nationalist projects.
In his essay Marx began by discussing views of his fellow Hegelian Bruno Bauer who had argued that the solution to the ‘Jewish Question’ was a secular state like the United States. Marx countered by noting—like Tocqueville and many other observers—the prominent role religion played in American society and therefore in its governance also. Marx argued that a secular state in fact does not oppose religion, but assumes its existence. Although “On the Jewish Question” was written before he elaborated his idea of class struggle, Marx in the essay says the fact that there was no established religion in the United States was irrelevant. People in the United States were not free because they were all subject to the rule of money and the marketplace. And someone who is not free cannot grant freedom to another.
Here Marx, I must add, anticipated and refuted well in advance not only what would become Zionism, but also the current notion of identity politics. The clear implication of Marx’s essay is that any political movement that aims only at the emancipation of a single group of people will ultimately fail—no matter what short term gains it may realize. From a Marx’s standpoint the only real form of human emancipation is the emancipation of all humans. The proposed emancipation of all cannot be achieved one group at a time. To think so is a species of bourgeois thinking in which a society is merely an aggregate of individuals, and various classes and institutions are mere abstractions with no substantial existence in their own right. For Marx the emancipation of Jews must be part of the emancipation of all people subjugated by governments that only served the interests of the wealthy.
Eighty years after Marx’s essay Zionism, despite its misconceptions, was gaining adherents in Europe and also land in Palestine. But in Palestine the problems inherent in Zionism from the beginning were on display in the growing antagonism between the Zionist colonists and the native Arab population. And it was then that events in Palestine led Sigmund Freud to lay out his thoughts about Zionism. To say they were negative is an understatement.
Discord in Palestine between Arabs and Zionist emigrants had been growing since the end of World War I. August of 1929 marked a turning point when the discord between the two sides became violent. The trigger to the violence came in mid-August when a group of Jews numbering in the hundreds marched to the Western Wall shouting “The Wall is Ours.” The next day a large number of Arab Muslims converged at the Wall and burned copies of the Torah. They then began attacking Jews throughout the city, and soon Arabs were also attacking Jews in nearby towns. It all culminated when hundreds of Arabs assaulted the Jewish community in Hebron. A massacre ensued in which 67 Jews and 9 Arabs were killed. In one week more than a hundred Jews were massacred by Arabs. Most of the victims were Zionist settlers but a few were native Jews. Their fate was ominous. They had lived in the region side by side with Muslims and Christians peaceably for more than a thousand years and now they found themselves caught up willy nilly in the Zionist project. Nineteen years later with the founding of the state of Israel the same thing would happen again, but now to native Jewish populations everywhere in the Arab World from Morocco to Iraq.
In early 1930, Keren HaYesod, a fundraising organization set up by the Zionist Congress, sent a letter to prominent Jews all over the world asking them to take a public stand in support of a Jewish state in Palestine. Chaim Koffler, the head of Keren HaYesod in Vienna, sent such a letter to Freud. That letter and Freud’s succinct reply would not be made public until 1990.
Freud’s reply can be found in a 2019 article written by Ro Oranim.[1]
Freud wrote to Oranim, “I cannot do as you wish. Whoever wants to influence the masses must give them something rousing and inflammatory and my sober judgment of Zionism does not permit this.” His sober judgment of Zionism followed: “I do not think that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state, nor that the Christian and Islamic worlds would ever be prepared to have their holy places under Jewish care. It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land. But I know that such a rational viewpoint would never have gained the enthusiasm of the masses and the financial support of the wealthy.”
Freud expressed sympathy for the painful events the Jewish emigres had recently experienced, but that was followed by what must have made even more painful reading for Koffler. Freud said, “the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.” Freud ended by saying, “Now judge for yourself whether I, with such a critical point of view, am the right person to come forward as the solace of a people deluded by unjustified hope.”
Koffler’s reaction was more or less, “Boy, did I get a wrong number—” His surprise at Freud’s reply indicates that he lacked even a rudimentary acquaintance with his ideas—especially those on religion. After he read Freud’s reply, he wrote—in Hebrew—in the upper corner of the letter, “Don’t show this to foreigners!” Freud’s reply, with Koffler’s note on it, would ultimately end up in the archives of the National Library of Israel, but, as I say, it would not be published until 1990.
The word “foreigners” in Koffler’s note was Ra Oranim’s translation of the Hebrew word zarim in his 2019 article. It struck me as odd. Given Koffler’s horror, one might have expected him to say, “Don’t show this to anybody!” Who might Koffler have meant by “foreigners”?
I showed Koffler’s Hebrew note to a Hebraist friend who told me that the Hebrew word Oranim translated as “foreigners” was zarim, the plural of the word zar. She wrote, “zar is a polysemantic word meaning ‘foreigner’ but also ‘stranger’ or simply ‘outsider.’” Furthermore she thought that a better translation of zarim was ‘outsiders.’ That is, people outside of Keren ha-Yesod. This is much more plausible than Koffler being concerned with what foreigners or non-Jews might think of Freud’s harsh reply. More likely, Koffler was concerned with what Zionist colleagues might think of him. He rightly feared that the letter would make him look ill-informed and naïve to the wider community of Zionists. For no one who had a general knowledge of Freud’s work and his views of religion would have even bothered to contact him.
The fundamental flaws in the Zionist project and the conflicts and problems that would necessarily follow were seen by Marx and Freud in its origins. Those are seen now by an increasing number of people all over the world.
On May 6 Palestinians in East Jerusalem demonstrated against the imminent expulsions of six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. The next day the IDF stormed the Al-Aqsa mosque compound. According to Israeli TV they were responding to a group of Palestinians throwing rocks at them. When the IDF stayed in the Haram al-Sharif and East Jerusalem, Hamas issued an ultimatum on May 10 to Israel to withdraw the IDF from those locations by 6 pm or there would be consequences. Israel of course ignored the ultimatum. Probably many in the government and military welcomed it. At 6 pm Hamas began launching missiles. As one might expect, Netanyahu’s provocations before May 10 were ignored in the mainstream media in the US. But everyone else in the world knew they were Netanyahu’s last desperate attempt to save his own political hide. The war, if it can be called that, was his bloodier version of January 6. It’s no surprise he and Trump hit it off. They’re both criminals and conmen whose only allegiance is to themselves. But the onslaught failed to meet its professed goal of disabling Hamas once and for all. As soon as the ceasefire was declared, Hamas began rebuilding. By any strategic measure Hamas won—the biggest Israeli daily Haaretz said as much. What is probably more dismaying to Israel is how it has unified all Palestinians inside and outside of Israel despite their political divisions. In a recent Counterpunch article Patrick Cockburn sees this new unity as a way for Palestinians to seize the initiative by making the recognition of their rights the foremost issue now and leaving the mirages of a ‘peace process’ and a ‘two-state solution’ to Western politicians.
The flimsy arguments put forward by Israel and its supporters to justify its assault on Gaza and its killings in the West Bank as “self-defense” and its futile attempts to violently suppress the demonstrations of Palestinians within Israel have not fooled anyone except its hopelessly deluded supporters in the US. On May 12 in Hebron an Israeli soldier shot a fourteen-year-old Palestinian boy in the eye while he was shopping for shoes. He was more than a half a mile from the nearest demonstration. The surgeons were unable to operate on the bullet in his brain and he died in the hospital. Six days later on May 18 in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Israeli police shot fourteen-year-old Jana Kiswani in the back with a sponge-tipped bullet while she was standing in front of her house with her father. When he tried to help her, they shot him in the leg. Then they fired a stun grenade at them. The bullet fractured the girl’s spine and damaged a kidney. Of the policeman who shot his daughter her father Muhammad said, “He wanted to commit murder.” Seventeen days later, again in Sheikh Jarrah, Israeli police arrested fourteen-year-old Nufouth Hammad—for face painting. She was painting the Palestinian flag on the faces of her friends and it is a crime to show the Palestinian flag in Jerusalem.
The Israeli assault on Palestinians in May has caused greater outrage than previous ones. A younger generation everywhere in the world is impatient with their geriatric leaders on what are all global issues: human rights, climate change, capitalism’s glaring inequities of wealth. So too they see the Palestinian cause as a part of the global struggle for human rights.
Neither Marx nor Freud would have been surprised by the misery created by the Zionist project. And now more and more people everywhere are coming around to their views that it was ill-conceived and doomed from the start. That it was the wrong answer to the wrong question.
Notes
1. The excerpts from Freud’s letter quoted here are found in “What Did Freud Really Think of Zionism?” Ro Aranim, in the blog The Librarians, August 9, 2019. https://blog.nli.org.il/en/freud_on_zionism/
The incidents of Muhammad Khalil Younis Freijat and Jana Kiswani are found in the article “Israel Attacks, Kills Children Amid Broad Crackdown” by Tamara Nassar in The Electronic Intifada, May 28, 2021.
Nufouth Hammad’s arrest is found in the article “Israeli Forces Detain Palestinian Girl in Sheikh Jarrah,” in The Palestine Chronicle, June 4, 2021.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israeli-forces-detain-palestinian-girl-in-sheikh-jarrah/ ↑
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