WRMEA, January/February, 2015, pp. 48-49

Israel and Judaism

Lamenting the Decline of “Liberal Zionism” Is Futile—Since It Never Really Existed

By Allan C. Brownfeld

In Israel now, almost no one speaks of a “two-state” solution any more.

Land that would constitute a Palestinian state is being settled by Israel. Palestinian officials say that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has refused to outline the borders of a Palestinian state or the size of areas Israel proposes to keep, or to commit publicly to land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for any adjustment to the 1967 boundary.

Israel seems to feel that Washington has given it a blank check to continue its occupation policies and therefore need no longer even pretend to support a two-state solution. Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political communication at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzlya, Israel, said of Netanyahu: “The truth is that he is not really nervous about America or the world anymore because until now, nobody has done anything.”

At the same time, racism and religious extremism are growing in Israel. In their best-selling book The King’s Torah, Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur state that, “The prohibition ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder’ applies only to a Jew who kills a Jew.” Non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature,” they write, and attacks on them “curb their evil inclinations,” while the babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.”

According to Prof. Emanuel Gutmann of Hebrew University, “Overall, Israeli society has turned to the right. Israeli society in general is less tolerant, less interested in compromise, and more accepting of force than it was in the past.”

New Yorker editor David Remnick writes in the magazine’s Nov. 17 issue that “Israeli politicians often speak of the country’s singularity as ‘the sole democracy in the Middle East,’ ‘the villa in the jungle.’ They engage far less often with the challenges to democratic practice in Israel: the resurgence of hate speech; attacks by settlers on Palestinians and their property in the West Bank; the Knesset’s attempt to rein in left-wing human rights organizations; and, most of all, the unequal status of Israeli Palestinians and the utter lack of civil rights for the Palestinians in the West Bank. A recent poll revealed that a third of Israelis think that Arab citizens of Israel—the nearly two million Arabs living in Israel proper, not the West Bank—should not have the right to vote....More explicitly jingoistic and racist elements now operate closer to the center of Israeli political life. Some well-known figures in the religious world speak openly in an anti-democratic rhetoric of Jewish supremacy.”

These trends have caused many to lament what Antony Lerman, a former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and author of The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist, called “The End of Liberal Zionism” in an article in the Aug. 24 New York Times. “Liberal Zionists are at a crossroads,” he states. “The original tradition of combining Zionism and liberalism—which meant ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, supporting a Palestinian state as well as a Jewish state with a permanent Jewish majority, and standing behind Israel when it was threatened—was well intentioned. But everything liberal Zionism stands for is now in doubt.”

In his book The Crisis of Zionism (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More), author Peter Beinart refers to himself as a “liberal Zionist,” and expresses concern about what he sees as Israel’s retreat from its traditional “liberal” values. According to Beinart, “When Israel’s founders wrote the country’s Declaration of Independence, which calls for a Jewish state that ‘ensures complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex’ they understood that Zionism and democracy was not only compatible, the two were inseparable.”

Those who believe that Israel is now in the process of abandoning its founding philosophy of “liberal Zionism” are engaged in a futile enterprise, for that “liberal” Zionism never existed—it is simply a convenient myth. They have not confronted a contrary thesis—one supported by history—that Zionism was flawed from the beginning, not only by ignoring the existing indigenous Palestinian population, but by rejecting the dominant spiritual history and essence of Judaism.

To understand the injustice which Zionism has inflicted upon the Palestinians, it is essential to consider the indifference of the early Zionists as well as of the British government, which issued the Balfour Declaration, to transfer ownership of a piece of land it had gained through war.

As the French Jewish historian Maxime Rodinson notes in his book Israel: A Colonial-Settler State, “Wanting to create a purely Jewish or predominantly Jewish state in Arab Palestine in the 20th century could not help but lead to a colonial-type situation and the development of a racist state of mind, and in the final analysis, to a military confrontation.”

Such colonization seemed “perfectly natural” given the atmosphere of the time, Rodinson writes: “[Theodor] Herzl’s plan unquestionably fit into the great movement of European expansion of the 19th and 20th centuries, the great European imperialist groundswell.”

The immediate issue for the Zionists in the late 19th century was what they called “the Arab problem” in Palestine, an indigenous population 92 percent Arab. The early Zionists, declares Israeli historian Benny Morris in Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, saw that the establishment of a Jewish state would require the removal of these Palestinian Arabs. The idea of removal, he notes, “goes back to the fathers of modern Zionism...one of the main currents of Zionist ideology from the movement’s inception.” Herzl accepted the removal (“transfer”) of the Palestinians, though he emphasized the need for diplomatic caution in the face of Ottoman, British and larger Arab vested interests.

According to Morris, the Zionist settlers referred to Palestinians as “mules” and behaved “like lords and masters, some apparently resorting to the whip at the slightest provocation...a major source of Arab animosity.”

The only “liberal” Zionism to be found in these early years was that of a handful of “cultural Zionists,” who sought to establish a Jewish cultural center in Palestine, not a sovereign and exclusively Jewish state. The most important of these was the Russian Jewish writer and philosopher Ahad Ha’am. In 1891, the Lovers of Zion sent Ahad Ha’am from Russia to observe conditions in Palestine. He wrote that the Jewish settlers arriving in Palestine from Europe “behaved toward the [Palestinian] Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without reason and even brag about it.”

The early Zionists used the slogan, “A land without people, for a people without land.” But Ha’am wrote: “From abroad we are accustomed to believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate, an uncultivated desert, and that anyone wishing to buy land there can come and buy all he wants. But, in truth, it is not so. In the entire land, it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled...If the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place.”

There were always a few who questioned the prevailing view of Jewish-Arab relations. At a meeting in Basel, Switzerland during the 7th Zionist Congress in 1905—decades before the European Holocaust—Yitzhak Epstein, a teacher who had migrated to Palestine, raised what he called the “hidden question.” He declared: “Among the difficult problems associated with the idea of the renewal of the life of our people in its land, there is one question that outweighs all the others, namely the question of our attitude to the Arabs. We have overlooked a rather ‘marginal’ fact—that in our beloved land lives an entire people that has been dwelling there for many centuries and has never considered leaving it.”

“Palestine Belongs to Others”

At the same time, another early Zionist, Hillel Zeitlin, who wrote in Hebrew and Yiddish, charged that Zionists “forget, mistakenly or maliciously, that Palestine belongs to others, and it is totally settled.”

These few dissident voices constitute the essence of the alleged “liberal Zionism” which existed as the expropriation of the land proceeded. As Moshe Sharett, a future Israeli prime minister, acknowledged, “We have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it...the land must be ours alone.”

Another example of what one might call “liberal Zionism” manifested itself in 1925, when several prominent intellectuals, most of them émigrés from Central Europe who were teaching at Hebrew University, formed Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace), which backed a binational state of Arabs and Jews. The group’s members looked to Ha’am, rather than Herzl, as their mentor. They rejected the attempt to impose a Jewish state on Palestine’s Arabs as politically impossible without the use of force, and they saw doing this as contrary to the ethical principles of Judaism. The group’s chairman, the sociologist Arthur Ruppin, described their objective as “to settle the Jews, as a second people, in a country already inhabited by another people, and accomplish this peacefully.” This group enjoyed the support of Albert Einstein, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, the first president of Hebrew University. It was small, attracted few members—and soon faded away.

Those who look at Israel’s current policies, such as continued construction and settlement of the occupied territories, are wrong to blame the country’s right wing. Labor and Likud Israeli governments alike have advanced the occupation. Both right- and left-wing Israelis, apparently, are comfortable with the status quo. Those who lament what they think is the decline—or end—of “liberal Zionism” must seriously consider the possibility that Zionism, from the start, not only turned its back on the Jewish universal spiritual tradition but, by ignoring the rights of the indigenous population of Palestine, on Western principles of democracy and self-determination as well. “Liberal Zionism” is not dead or dying. The truth is that it never existed at all, except in the minds of those who could not confront what was happening at the hands of an enterprise they eagerly embraced from afar, ignoring its harsh reality.

That reality has now become clear to all, hence the current shock and dismay. Yet, the organized American Jewish community, and the U.S. government, both of which continue to aid and abet these developments, continue to turn away from what is happening. They will not be able to continue to do so very much longer.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.