In this essay, I’m going to argue that the continuing opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza should be centrally grounded in a determined opposition to the whole Zionist project. No sympathies for any variant of Zionism or any political formation that does not reject Zionism should be allowed to dilute support for the complete replacement of the existing regime with a society based on the full and complete equality of all of Palestine’s people, including those who have not been able to return, without reference to any religious beliefs or ancestry. I look forward to reading responses.
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This is a battle, not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism.
–Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, December 24, 2023
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The truth in what Netanyahu said can be deciphered by simply reversing his words. It is the people of Gaza who represent the preservation of civilization and the Israeli state that brings barbarism to Gaza.
For the last 75 years, Zionists have resorted to denials, lies and false justifications to explain why Israel did one or another terrible thing: why did the Israelis force more than 700,000 Palestinians to flee from their homes in 1948 and then refuse to allow them or their children and their children’s children to return home; why did the Israelis obliterate any evidence of the people who had lived there and their culture (including the Arabic names of villages); why did they follow their victory in the 1967 war with another round of expulsions of Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights; why did they initiate a several decades long process of severely restricting virtually all aspects of Palestinian daily life and displacing Palestinians to establish Jewish settlements in the West Bank, now totaling more than 700,000 people; why have they accelerated those policies and displacements since October 7th. The answers to these questions go to the very heart of the Zionist project.
As does Israel’s current invasion of Gaza. Its systematic destruction of all aspects of the civilization of Gaza—its people (including children), its teachers and writers, its homes, its educational and cultural institutions, its health care facilities, its transportation and communication systems. In other words, Israel has been destroying the place and the lives of its inhabitants. Why?
Of course, the events of October 7th have something to do with it. But a total assault on Gaza was not the only possible response. As unlikely as it might have been, an international tribunal could have been convened to systematically review all aspects of what happened and determine if criminal charges against specific individuals for crimes against civilians were warranted.
But a total assault was what contemporary Zionism demanded. Why? In the immediate situation, it had a lot to do with the need to unify the Israeli population after a year of very divisive cleavages between secular Jews and messianic religious Jews over various governmental proposals that favored the interests of the religious ones, especially the settlers in the West Bank.
It also had a lot to do with the need of that same Israeli government to deflect any serious attention from its apparent intelligence and military failings on the 7th, whether intentional or not. And more than that, it had a lot to do with the government’s need to deflect attention from its military’s likely culpability for a large number of the October 7th casualties.
In spite of the seriousness of the split over the government proposals, which resulted in the emigration of hundreds of thousands of secular Israelis to countries where they held dual passports and often led to talk of a possible civil war, the great majority of both secular and religious Israeli Jews share a conviction that Palestinians do not matter and, if they stood in the way, the Zionist state had the right, even the obligation, to clear them out—as it is proceeding to do in Gaza.[i]
Israel does what it does because Zionists believe that they have an absolute right to do whatever they want to do. In a quite famous 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall”, Ze’ev Jabotinsky explained his views:
We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say “non” and withdraw from Zionism.
Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.
That is our Arab policy; not what it should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate? Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible.
And we are all of us, without any exception, demanding day after day that this outside Power, should carry out this task vigorously and with determination.
……….
…. if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answer: It is not true: either Zionism is moral and just, or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question that we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually we have settled that question, and in the affirmative.
We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not.
There is no other morality.[ii]
The Zionists’ article of faith is that there is nothing that should stop them, no matter what they do; they do not have to think about what they do.
Zionism does what it does because it can. Its technical/military strength allows it to do so but, more importantly, the support it receives from the US and European nations provides it with an enormous degree of military and political protection. One quick word from the President of the US would bring Israel to a full stop. It’s only happened once—during the Suez War in 1956.[iii]
The foundation stone of contemporary Zionism is what can be considered a “mythologizing” of the Holocaust that takes those horrifying and sickening events out of history. That mythologizing is intended to preclude serious understandings of the events that occurred under the Nazis in favor of what might be called the official propaganda of Zionism (as embodied in the curriculum of Israeli schools). It is also designed to avoid any comparisons of other catastrophic assaults on a population, including those perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians, with what the Nazis and their allies did. A ghetto is a ghetto when it’s in Warsaw but it’s not a ghetto when it’s in Gaza. [iv]
We need to remember that the Zionists in Israel did precious little to stop the Holocaust as it was happening and they did little to save the European Jews who were being hauled off to the concentration camps and gas chambers. Tom Segev in his book titled The Seventh Million, concludes that of the three million European Jews who survived the Holocaust, “only a few” were saved by the Zionists in what was called the yishuv. The Zionists’ detachment from the effort to rescue Jews from the Nazis drove a deep wedge between them and world Jewry. [v] Interestingly, the only exception to the pattern of Zionist indifference was the activity of the faction founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. [vi]
Furthermore, the mythologizing is part and parcel of a comprehensive Zionist strategy to forestall virtually any serious criticism of what Israel has done and is doing. As necessary, that strategy involves numerous lies and false accusations, initiated at the highest levels of the Israeli government and promoted globally by a large network of organizations that closely monitors and intervenes in different social sectors, such as the media and higher education. That operation is, not secretly, known as hasbara.
One of the most recent examples of Zionist effectiveness in this regard occurred when Shinbet, Israel’s internal security service, alleged that twelve or thirteen employees of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Administration) had taken part in the October 7th attack on southern Israel—an allegation made public just one day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ordered the imposition of interim measures intended to prevent genocide by Israel in Gaza.[vii] Those Shinbet accusations may well prove to be fabricated and fraudulent as, for example, have so many of the allegations of horrendous acts committed by Hamas fighters on October 7th. [viii]
Nonetheless, in spite of the lack of evidence, the dominoes began to fall. Fourteen donor countries suspended their funding for UNRWA and the viability of the agency’s services in Gaza remains in serious jeopardy.[ix] The effectiveness of the Zionist apparatus could not have been clearer than in the juxtaposition of the swift dismissal of the Court’s findings, in spite of documented deaths, injuries and destructions of homes and essential institutions, by most Western nations, compared to the swift suspension of UNRWA funding, based on virtually no evidence, by those same nations.[x]
One of the things that distinguishes those who conduct and support the war against Gaza is the remarkable consistency with which they use language. For them, words are weapons of mass seduction, designed to insure, through more or less endless repetition, that only one version of reality prevails—that of the heroic democratic state fighting an existential battle against forces of evil determined to exterminate Jews. Furthermore, antisemitism is ancient and never-ending and can be/must be found underneath almost everything and anything.
In that worldview, when college students shout “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they really mean death to the Jews. But maybe there is more going on in the Zionists’ minds than they would like everyone to understand. Nadia Abu El-Haj has written: “Perhaps such interpretations are revealing in ways those voicing them cannot quite hear—or admit. Perhaps those words echo a Zionist political unconscious, terrifying when presumed to be mirrored by ‘the other side’. After all, when spoken on behalf of the Israeli state, ‘from the river to the sea’ is an eliminationist call.” She cites examples from recent statements of Israeli politicians, policy papers from governmental ministries as well as historical evidence from the Nakba of 1948 and the less well-known Naksa of 1967 to support that argument.[xi]
At the same time, the Zionists, more or less as always, remain perfectly willing to make alliances with the leaders of the Great Powers like Lord Arthur Balfour of Great Britain who, among other things, didn’t want Jews from Eastern Europe to migrate to his country. The Zionists praised Balfour for his 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild that Great Britain would look favorably on the establishment of a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine. Earlier that same year, Balfour refused to contact the Russian government regarding its terrible treatment of Jews in its Empire. He explained:
It was also to be remembered that the persecutors had a case of their own. They were afraid of the Jews, who are an exceedingly clever people….. [W]herever one went in Eastern Europe, one found that, by some way or other, the Jew got on, and when to this was added the fact that he belonged to a distinct race, and that he professed a religion which to the people about him was an object of inherited hatred and that, moreover, he was …. numbered in millions, one could perhaps understand the desire to keep him down. [xii]
So long as those individuals were prepared to support the Zionist project, the Zionists did not trouble themselves with other things they said and did. As I’ll suggest below, antisemitism has never been that much of a real problem for Zionists.
Zionism
To really understand what Israel does and why it does it requires an historical understanding of Zionism, a rather complicated matter. I’ll try to do justice to it with a limited series of propositions.
- Zionism is a modern political movement, initiated at the end of the 19th century. It is not the reincarnation of any ancient yearning for the Land.
- Zionism is not Judaism. Many of its founders had not been believers in any serious way:
… neither Herzl nor the other figures studied here were truly “integrationists” before they became Zionists, for the most part because they had no clear, conscious, or sustained ideological position on the so-called Jewish problem.
…. figures such as Theodore Herzl and Max Nordau and the young Vladimir Jabotinsky acted as if their Jewishness had no bearing on their lives, their careers, their world views, their Kultur. They neither disavowed their Judaism nor proclaimed it publicly believing (or pretending to believe) that it was essentially irrelevant to their lives. [xiii]
- Those three founders of modern Zionism recognized the impossibility of avoiding being Jewish in late 19th century Europe when faced with unexpected instances of antisemitism, such as the Dreyfus Affair in France. But their understanding of the “problem” was not what it was supposed to be. In 1896, Herzl explained what he thought about antisemitism in a letter to the London Jewish Chronicle: Antisemitism was “a highly complex movement. I consider it from a Jewish standpoint, yet without fear or hatred. I believe that I can see what elements there are of vulgar sport, of common trade, of jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance, and also of legitimate self-defense.” For those who challenged Herzl, the Zionists seemed to be “not only accepting the claims of antisemites about the impossibility of Jewish life in Europe and their criticisms of Jewish society and behavior in European society, but feeding and advancing those claims as well” (emphases added).[xiv]
- For at least fifty years, there was a powerful Jewish opposition to Zionism of any kind. The most visible incarnation of that opposition was the Bund, the General Jewish Workers’ Union. There was also a deep lack of interest in Zionism among most Jews. When Eastern European Jews thought of emigrating, they thought of the United States.
- For those same fifty or so years, Zionism was a movement that included varied currents, including those who embraced the views expressed in Herzl’s Das Alte Neuland novel that were quite utopian regarding the egalitarian organization of life in the new Palestinian society, and others that were not committed to the establishment of a Jewish “state”.[xv] Those currents lost out in the consolidation of a new hardened Zionism in the Jewish state after 1948.
- The initial Zionist goals did not necessarily include the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine. Indeed, other places (such as Uganda in eastern Africa) were given serious consideration. What the early Zionists mostly wanted was to find a place where they could “create a Europe in another place, a new Europe, instead of the Europe that didn’t want them.”[xvi]
There was, of course, the claim of a connection to Palestine by way of the Old Testament but it turned out that the Bible was not an especially good history book and that the dispersion of Jewish believers across Europe, the Near East and northern Africa had mostly resulted in the development of many different Jewish communities that had more in common with the others with whom they lived—even when they were harassed or persecuted.
Only in Eastern Europe did the concentration of Yiddish-speaking Jews result in what could be considered a people and a possible nation. That possibility was obliterated by the Nazis. Nonetheless, the memories of that society and culture may well have a lot to do with the genuine and widespread conviction among Jews in places like the United States that individuals who have never believed in the tenets of the Jewish faith nonetheless have some real connection with others of similar ancestries and that those connections are grounded in common commitments to human justice.[xvii]
- At the beginning of the 20th Century, there was a small Jewish population, primarily very religious and strongly opposed, for theological reasons, to the establishment of any Jewish state in Palestine. Nonetheless, their presence provided some rationale for plans to establish a Jewish home on that territory. But the emphasis on the ancient Jewish connection to the Land of Israel as part of the Zionist argument was mostly developed later on.
- When the first serious Zionist efforts to promote Jewish emigration to Palestine from Europe were initiated in the early 20th Century, the architect of the colonization [as it was known] modelled what he did on the Prussian colonization of Poland. That architect was Arthur Ruppin, perhaps best considered a brilliant individual without too many moral constraints, who crafted virtually every aspect of the plans for Jewish migration and settlement. He developed a framework for evaluating the “suitability” of immigrants for the purpose of building the land of Israel. Inevitably, some were deemed lacking. His policies sent a good number of immigrants who did not measure up to his expectations back to Europe, in all likelihood, to face death in the Nazi camps.
He also had friendly consultations with Nazi race scientists and negotiated the infamous Transfer Agreement with the Germans, which allowed for the migration of German Jews to Palestine upon the payment of substantial amounts of money to the Nazi state. This was in direct opposition to efforts by Jews elsewhere to enforce a boycott of any dealings with Germany. [xviii]
- Historically, Zionism has not been very concerned with defeating antisemitism; in part, because its proponents argued that antisemitism can’t be defeated; in part, because it wanted, when it suited its goals, to make common cause with antisemites; and, in part, because its overriding goal was to make Palestine a majority Jewish country and to encourage as many Jews as possible to move there. Put simply, more real or supposed antisemitism was good for Zionism.[xix]
- Jews are not a people; they are either believers in a common faith (in any number of variants) or the non-observant descendants of believers in that faith, as well as those who subscribe to tenets of human behavior that are grounded in Jewish teachings or traditions.[xx] There is nothing that unites them in the claim for a territory–anywhere. Having said that, those who came to be Israelis, by one means or another, live within a defined space and possess cultures with their own distinctive elements. It has become an Israeli nation, not a Jewish one. But, as mentioned above, its bonds of national unity might not extend much beyond a desire for the elimination of the Palestinians.
- The ultimate origins of that “nation” are in the Zionist settler projects of the first half of the 20th Century but the real launching of the nation dates from the all but completely haphazard migration of “Jews” to Palestine since the end of World War II. The great driver of the immediate post-war wave of migration was the desperation of European Jews who had been driven from their homes by the Nazis or their collaborators and found themselves in the infamous “displaced persons” camps and had nowhere else to go. In spite of the wartime catastrophe, if Jews returned to Poland, for example, they risked further persecution, if not death. The Zionists appeared ready for the occasion and they sent recruiters into the camps—although they were often enough recruiting for particular Zionist factions.
- The United States—the place where the overwhelming majority of Jewish refugees wanted to go–did a great deal to force migration to Israel by refusing to admit Jewish refugees. A worldwide campaign was launched to allow the Jews into Palestine. But there was a civil war of sorts among the Zionists. Zionist terrorist groups initiated attacks against British targets in Palestine while other Zionists provided intelligence information about those groups to the British. By 1947, England was done with it and handed off its Mandate to the UN—which subsequentially pronounced a Partition Plan which gave more territory to the Jews than they had and less to the Palestinians. That led to war between the Israelis and the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors. Israel won the war and proceeded to expel more than 700,000 Palestinians not only from the land granted to it by the Partition plan but still more. Israel declared its independence in 1948.
- In the post-independence period, there was a consolidation of what might be considered a “new Zionism.” Israel became the state of all the Jews. There was an explicit demand of Jews in other countries to support Israel in every matter. But it was a bit schizophrenic! Typically, there was no expectation that the Diaspora Jews, especially from those countries where Jews had secured basic democratic rights and protections, would come in anything like mass numbers. Instead, their role was to remain where they were and ensure that their governments remained firmly in the Zionist camp and that the Zionist project had all the resources it wanted. There was, however, an interest in encouraging the children of those Jews across the globe to join the IDF. That, in turn, gave rise to one of the most sophisticated indoctrination projects in recent history—Birthright.[xxi]
A Few Concluding Thoughts
This has not been an easy article to write and I am not sure that I have gotten everything right. Here are a few last thoughts:
What’s Wrong with Zionism?
Zionism is premised on the elimination of Palestinians. Nothing else can justify that.
The Jewish state, by definition, is not able to meet the minimal criteria of equality in a democracy. This claim is supported even by those who support the Jewish state.[xxii] A Jewish state is not a democratic state.
Zionism, in spite of its claims to the contrary, does not provide safety for Jews. Indeed, by any measure, Jews are more vulnerable in Israel than they are anywhere else.
Zionists tend to ignore the effects that their constant accusations of antisemitism anywhere and everywhere have on weakening the possibilities of an absolutely necessary strong opposition to real anti-Semitism today.
The War Against Gaza
For an armed forces and intelligence apparatus whose failings, according to official accounts, on the 7th of October were more or less unbelievable, their ability to switch in short order to a massive invasion of Gaza is somewhat remarkable.[xxiii] Indeed, it seems all but certain that Israel planned better for this war of annihilation than it did to prevent the Hamas assault that precipitated it. By way of example, when the invasion began, an elite unit of the IDF was ready to initiate its use of AI to guide bombs and missiles to increase the likelihood, for all practical purposes, that every strike achieved maximum damage among civilians.[xxiv]
The initial phases of the Israeli invasion were accompanied by exhortations from the national leaders, and not just those considered to be on the far-right:
- On October 9th, the Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that he had ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza City and that there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel”.
- On the following day, Gallant told Israeli troops on the Gaza border: “I have released all restraints . . . You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza. This is what we are fighting against . . . Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything.”
- On October 12th, Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, said: “We are at war. We are at war. We are defending our homes. We are protecting our homes. That’s the truth. And when a nation protects its home, it fights. And we will fight until we’ll break their backbone.”
- On October 13th, the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz wrote on Twitter: “We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”
Soon enough, though, the voices of the far-right West Bank settlers were added to the poisonous mix. Here’s a video of the well-known settler spokeswoman, Daniella Weiss:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGbkUjNp9vM
They were then joined by videos of rapturous IDF members singing along to exterminationist lyrics of songs performed by popular artists. More recently, a conference of more than a thousand in Jerusalem planned for and celebrated the Jewish resettlement of Gaza. This video includes scenes of the singing soldiers:
Where Goes Gaza, There Goes the World
The fate of Gaza might well be the fate of the world.
Andreas Malm, a revolutionary Swedish climate activist, has recently suggested that the Israeli war on Gaza, along with the disastrous flooding in northern Libya that occurred in the middle of September, are stand-ins of sorts for the impending global climate catastrophe.[xxv] The sociologists, William Robinson and Hoai-An Nguyen, have written about Gaza, “This is more than old-fashioned settler colonialism; it is the face of a global capitalist system that can only reproduce through bloodshed, dehumanization, torture, and extermination.”[xxvi]
If the barbarism is completed—if the majority of the people of Gaza are forced to leave as the result of deaths and injuries, the destruction of much of Gaza and the continuing threat represented by ongoing Israeli attacks—we will be much, much closer to a global catastrophe. We will have proven ourselves incapable of doing what needs to be done.
Conversely, if Israel can be defeated by a combination of resistance (from armed and unarmed forces) on the ground in Gaza and enduring, militant solidarity everywhere else, it could open the door to a very different future. The rejuvenation of internationalism around Gaza could serve as the predecessor to a recovery of a revolutionary solidarity, embodying a new shared humanity across the world and the beginnings of a genuine opportunity to save the planet.
The defeat of Israel requires the defeat of Zionism. That defeat requires many more defectors from the Zionist project. That defection would be treason to Zionism. Therefore, I suggest that treason should be forcefully and consistently promoted for all supporters of Zionism—those in Israel and elsewhere; those of the various branches of Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform as well as those of no faith); Christian Zionists; liberals and conservatives and, perhaps especially those who call themselves progressives.