Daphne Netanyahu, " Celebrating Herzl"

[David Shasha]

Celebrating Herzl

By: Daphne Netanyahu

 

In order to properly understand the divide between traditional Judaism and Zionism it is very helpful to carefully examine the ideas of Theodor Herzl.

 

This article deploys a very specific language in which to frame what it calls “The Jewish Problem.”

 

This formulation is not a Jewish one, but a product of European Christian Anti-Semitism.  Jews never saw themselves as a “problem” but in looking at their condition in light of this benighted Christian racism they were trapped in the debilitating grip of persecution and violence.  This tension led to despair and an adoption of the persecuting mentality of our oppressors.

 

Zionism speaks not to the Torah values of the Jewish people, but to the depredations of the Christians.  In the same way that Karl Marx saw the many flaws of the Capitalist system but was unable to replace that economic system with a more efficient and just one, so too Zionism accurately diagnosed the terminal condition of the Jews in Christian Europe but was unable to accurately connect the diagnosis with the traditional identity of Judaism.

 

In point of fact, the language that Herzlian Zionism developed out of the detritus of European Christian Anti-Semitism was one that was eerily similar to the ethnocentric racist nationalism of the socio-political system that had engendered Anti-Semitism to begin with.

 

Sephardi Zionists like Rabbi Yehuda Alcalay who sought refuge and redemption in a renewed Jewish homeland did not share this Eurocentric and Hegelian view of politics.  They asserted a renewed Jewish presence in Palestine founded on the idea that Jews were native to the region and not alien colonists.  Their view was tinged with a mystical faith and a constant belief in the truth of God’s revelation in the Torah.

 

The Sephardi Zionists failed in two ways: Their Levantine nativism was rejected by the European Zionists who quickly dominated the movement and its political discourse.  In addition, due to this hegemonic dominance of the Ashkenazim, Sephardim were locked out of the existential transformations that Zionism engendered and found themselves and their Arabized culture unwelcome in the new order which took a very dim view of the “natives.”

 

The title of Herzl’s novel Altneuland – Old-New Land – tells all we need to know about this transformational process and its ideological underpinnings: A new myth was created that looked wistfully to ancient Israel and resolutely ignored the Diaspora culture that brought what we now know as Rabbinic Judaism into its present form.  

 

A dual process took place: The ancient past was valorized as the “authentic” Jewish identity while the evolutionary system formulated in the Talmudic-Rabbinic tradition was jettisoned.  Zionist discourse thus formulated a PILPUL that sought to value certain set of facts and ideas at the expense of other facts and ideas that it harshly suppressed.

 

The practical implications of the new ideas and their centrality in contemporary Jewish life have not been examined in a way that allows us to see the way the process has completely transformed traditional Judaism and crippled its integrity.

 

The “new” land of Israel was to be a romanticized reproduction of the ancient Commonwealth. 

 

In this “new” land the realities of history and their current implications were to be rejected as irrelevant to the “Jewish Problem.”  Adopting a form of Hegelian ethnic nationalism, Zionism remained resolutely blind to the realities of the present, preferring instead to institute a form of Jewish essentialism that would effectively control all Jewish representation. 

 

“A land without a people for a people without a land,” as the cliché went:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_land_without_a_people_for_a_people_without_a_land

 

It is interesting to see how the origin of this deeply ignorant and offensive phrase is to be found in Christian circles.  Zionism connected itself to Europe and fed off of the detritus of Anti-Semitism.  Rather than seeking to confront Anti-Semitism, Zionism sought to run away from it in a way that allowed it to morph and become something else, roping in Zionism in the process.

 

Herzl’s obsessive fixation with Anti-Semitism came at the high cost of rejecting the traditional resources of Torah Judaism as a means to articulate and embody Jewish identity.  The language of Anti-Semitism and victimization continues to permeate Zionist-Israeli discourse.

 

The Zionist Jew remains alien to both the region that Israel finds itself located in, as well as to the values of the Torah which have now been left to a group of increasingly fanatical and violent fundamentalists who are themselves tied to the new Zionist values in ways that have yet to be properly examined.

 

I have discussed these matters in my article “The ‘Three Weeks,’ the Gaza Disengagement, and Religious Zionism”:

http://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha/browse_thread/thread/579671207ee12690#

The radical messianism of the Settlers and their ilk has been produced by a clash between the “new” values of Zionism and the traditional quietism of Jewish scholasticism.  The violence and anomie of the Zionist vision is rooted in the Christian European Imperialist tradition which ironically produced Anti-Semitism in the first place.

 

Institutional racism and colonial oppression is built into the Zionist system which has sought to create an Arab Other that would contrast to the Western-European Jew who carries the banner of the West along the lines of a Crusade.  The existence of Arabized Jews is therefore a problem for Zionism.  A process of De-Arabization and cultural rejectionism towards Sephardim has been part of Israeli culture since 1948.

 

Herzl sought to resolve the “Jewish Problem” by using the means that created the “Jewish Problem” in the first place.  His analysis of the problem of Europe’s Anti-Semitism was prescient; one need only look at Hitler and Stalin to see how accurate it was.  But Herzl’s solution was to turn the Jewish people into a European Christian state that would be run along the same Imperial and racial lines of those states that had so abused the Jews over the course of many centuries.

 

Reading the following article we should note the complete and utter absence of the word “Torah.”  It was the Torah that formed the Jewish people and not any other factor.  The Land was a product of Jewish fidelity to the Torah and not the other way around.  The Zionist rejection of the Torah as the basis for Jewish existence has served to transform Jewish self-understanding.  Rather than elevating God and the Covenant to pride of place in Jewish life, Zionism extols the power of the gun and of the human being to make their way in the Darwinian thicket that is the Modern world.

 

It is not that Jews should walk like lambs to the slaughter, it is that Jews must come to understand their history and how the values of the Torah, rather than those of Enlightenment philosophy, have made us who we are.  We can and should attack the depredations of Anti-Semitism, but we must never forget who we are and where we come from.  It is not at all helpful for Jews to take on the ways of those who oppressed us.  The transition from victim to victimizer has become endemic to our contemporary Jewish experience as we see the Torah drifting away from us; awash in the paradoxical twinning of obscurantist irrelevance and fanatical violence.

 

DS

 

Last week marked the 153nd anniversary of Theodor Herzl’s birthday on May 2, 1860. As a small child, upon first seeing the picture of Herzl, I was saddened, realizing I would never meet the man who was gazing at me.

I became a big fan of Herzl, my admiration at first based on feeling rather than knowledge.

With time, though, I started reading what he wrote: The Jewish State, Old-New Land, his stories and letters, and my admiration for him grew.

Whenever I would ask myself which three people that I’ve never met I would most like to, Herzl was always among them. His importance to our life cannot be overstated, for our entire being and identity as Jews and Israelis, as citizens of the Jewish state and of the modern world, are built upon Herzl’s Zionism. Today, his creation is the reference point by which the Jewish people of all colors identify themselves. This includes also opponents of Zionism – such as those haredi Jews who vocally support Ahmadinejad, or anti-Zionists secular Jews, who carry out anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian activity.

Herzl took about finding a solution to the Jewish Problem, acutely analyzing both its positive and negative aspects.

The negative one, modern anti-Semitism, he saw as being a new and different outgrowth of the anti-Semitism practiced in earlier periods of history. Herzl believed that the source of this new anti-Semitism was rooted in the Emancipation, i.e., the granting of equal rights to the Jews. Once allowed to enter society’s various strata that had been previously closed to them, fierce competition to the Jews from the local population arose. Emancipation also created, in those instances where integration was deemed by the Jews to have failed, bitter frustration, leading to fomentation by Jews of social unrest, which brought upon even more hatred. Herzl foresaw that as Jews tried to gain further inroads into non-Jewish society, anti-Semitism would grow and eventually manifest itself in horrendous ways.

Herzl was certainly right about this.

The positive side to Herzl’s analysis of the Jewish Problem was its solution – Political Zionism. It would cause a revival of the life forces in the Jewish nation which lay dormant for centuries.

In Herzl’s words, “Zionism is our return to Judaism, which must occur before we can return to the Land of the Jews.”

In other words, Zionism would return to the Jewish awareness its national existence, which until then took a far second to its religious existence. He was right about this too, knowing that the will to nationhood was still very much in existence, even if dormant.

The end goal of Herzl’s Political Zionism was of course the creation of a Jewish state. Herzl did not claim to be the originator of this idea. In fact, he said that it was “an age-old idea – as old as our people.”

But his methods to bring it to fruition were new: The implementation of full sovereignty (i.e., control of all national institutions), the formation of an army of citizens to protect the state, and the bringing about of international guarantees to the state’s formation and survival.

Herzl was right about this basic pathway as well. While trying to implement it, he succeeded in the eight short years allotted him until his death in achieving something that has no parallel in human history.

Above all, Herzl understood the importance of the human spirit. He knew that just as it had the power to defeat us, it equally had the power to revive us as a nation. He was well aware of our Jewish sense of inferiority, born of exilic existence, but believed in our ability to rise above it and establish an independent state. He understood our fear of exercising our right to statehood, yet called upon us to gather the courage necessary for the creation of such a state. And just as Herzl recognized the lack of desire among many to return to a life of independence, he also knew that such desire was there and was the driving force for achieving nationhood.

Despite all his “prophetic” ability, Herzl was wrong in thinking that with the creation of a Jewish state, the negative manifestations of the Jewish Problem would disappear.

He thought anti-Semitism would weaken, possibly disappear, following the Jewish state’s establishment, because the nations of the world would recognize the benefits they would have by it – both allowing the Jewish genius to fully flourish under an independent state and thus benefiting also the entire world, and causing a lessening of European destabilization, which to a large measure was brought about by Jewish frustration born of anti- Semitism. This lessening of anti-Semitism did not happen, and in fact today we are witness to a dangerous world-wide rise of it.

As to the solution, it is hard to imagine that Herzl would have believed that after the establishment of the Jewish state, the desire for national existence would not encompass all Jews.

Yet there are many among us who are actively trying to weaken this desire, to instill in us a feeling of guilt for our very existence as a nation, and who want to share our country with those who also wish to “solve” the Jewish Problem – by the destruction of the Jewish state.

It could be, though, that Herzl’s mistakes were not really his, but ours. For not only did we not truly follow the path Herzl laid out for us, we also added to it much that was extraneous and harmful: Socialism, universalism and such like, which Herzl was opposed to and which have caused us so much harm and delays along the way. They were no doubt a deviation from Herzl’s revolutionary core Zionism, and so perhaps for the continuing survival of the Jewish state, a permanent Zionist “revolutionary” state of mind is needed, one that constantly renews the Jewish national idea and confronts those who try to weaken and silence it.

The writer is the editor of the weekly online magazine Maraah-magazine.co.il.

Translated by Hannah Hochner

 

From The Jerusalem Post, May 6, 2013