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1 Zionism and the Ideology of the Jewish State 1 Zionism and the Ideology of the Jewish State The Jewish Diaspora and its Negation Zionism emerged in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century with the defined goal of terminating the “abnormal” political situation of the Jewish diaspora, that is, statelessness of the Jews, and of creating a mode of collective life based on a national state. Arising from the emergency situation posed by an increasingly rampant racist anti-Semitism in Europe, Jewish nationalism was funneled into a movement, with the “negation of the diaspora” forming the core of its ideology and the starting point of its politics. Thus, Shimon Peres (1923– 2016), a Zionist statesman and Israeli politician of many years who himself was born in an Eastern European shtetl and emigrated to Palestine as an adolescent, described the Jewish diaspora from the vantage point of an already achieved national statehood: […], a famous Jewish philosopher by the name of Yankelewitz said once that Jewish life in the diaspora was similar to a voyage in a subway – you travel underground, you don’t see the scenery, and nobody sees you in the train. It’s only now, in modern times, that Jewish life is being conducted as if it were a voyage in a bus; you can see from within the outside scenery, and you can see from the outside that people are sitting in the bus. A shtetl in many ways was the subway of Jewish life; it was totally disconnected from the outside world. Let’s have a good look at it – I mean, in a way, it was a dream and in a way it was a pleasure. It was a pleasure because it was disconnected from the rest of life. It wasn’t a normal place to live. And a dream because we weren’t living there mentally. Our hearts were in Israel. The shtetl was like a passing station.1 Two thousand years of Jewish diaspora as a historical transitional phase to the long awaited “normal” form of the national state? Apart from this Zionist one, there are various other Jewish interpretations of the diaspora. For instance, in his 1931 essay Diaspora, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow (1860–1941) points out that from the religious perspective, the diaspora is considered to be God’s pun- ishment: “The hope for a return to Zion and for the coming of the Messiah has always remained alive in the hearts of Orthodox Jews and has constituted one of the thirteen tenets of Jewish religion as formulated by Maimonides.” In response to the resignation that was setting in after more than two thousand years of futile waiting for the return to Zion, Jews “have found solace in the idea that the dias- pora was not God’s curse, but rather His blessing [of the Jewish people].” In this 1 Peres and Littell 1998: 3–4. DOI 10.1515/ 9783110498806-002, © 2017 Tamar Amar-Dahl, published by De Gruyter Olden- bourg. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. The Jewish Diaspora and its Negation 5 context, Dubnow quotes an explanation put forward by the medieval Torah com- mentator Rashi who argues that the diaspora is a blessing in consideration of the fact that a scattered people cannot be completely exterminated at the same time. At least under the religious aspect, a universally beneficent effect is ascribed to the Jews’ way of life as a “scattered people”: “God did not ‘scatter’ the Jews, but sowed them among the peoples like seeds from which the true world religion of monotheism would grow.”2 The diverging perspectives on life in the diaspora have all found their way into Jewish political movements. The modern Jewish reform movement or reli- gious liberalism accepts assimilation, i.e., the absorption into the majority popu- lation, as something to which there is no alternative, thus embracing life in exile as a kind of universal task. Then there were the so-called diaspora nationalists who held that neither the assimilation nor the categorical rejection of the dias- pora offered a solution. As they saw it, Jewish identity and national autonomy were being preserved just as well in the diaspora, namely by their own cultural institutions and organized communities on the one hand and assimilation to the new political and cultural environment on the other. By contrast, the Zionists deemed the diaspora a way of life that is dangerous for Jews and Jewish identity, since they saw assimilation and the consequential deracination as the inevitable result of the ever-present fierce anti-Semitism. By taking the political approach of radically rejecting the diaspora, Zionists brought to life “the messianic teach- ings in a modernized political form.”3 On this point, the Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (1958–) offers the observation that ‘negation of exile’ refers to the consciousness that deems the present Jewish settlement in, and sovereignty over, Palestine as the ‘return’ of the Jews to the land believed to be their home, and imagined, prior to its ‘redemption,’ as empty. The negation of exile appeared to be the ‘fulfillment’ of Jewish history and the realization of Jewish prayers and messi- anic expectations. According to this perspective, the cultural framework that the Zionists wished to actualize and uncover was the ‘authentic,’ original Jewish culture, as opposed to the exilic culture, described in blatant orientalist terms as stagnant, unproductive, and irrational.4 Further, Raz-Krakotzkin points out that Zionist-Israeli historians such as Yitzhak Baer (1888–1980), Chaim Hillel Ben-Sasson (1914–1977), Gershom Scholem (1897– 1982), Ben-Zion Dinur (1884–1973) – all of whom played a central role in the cre- 2 Dubnow 1931/2003: 176–177. 3 Ibid. 4 Raz-Krakotzkin 2005: 167. 6 1 Zionism and the Ideology of the Jewish State ation and shaping of a Zionist national history –, although they do expound the problems of the complex national and territorial definition of the Jewish collec- tive in the Zionist historical narrative, still maintain that not only did the general “negation of exile” not call into question Zionist historiography, but that it actu- ally firmly embedded it in Zionist culture as its very basis. In doing so, the Israeli present is interpreted as the “fulfillment of Jewish history”: Jewish exile culture is seen as the reflection of the “spirit of the nation” and the history of exile as an integral part of a specifically Jewish national and territorial master narrative. As is also noted by the American sociologist Rogers Brubaker (1956–), “nearly every nationalist historiography is of a teleological nature: History is read in terms of its outcome, it culminates in the nation state independence. This redemptive point of culmination can either be projected into the future – as a state that has to be fought for – or can be celebrated as something that has already become reality.”5 According to the Zionist-Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri (1933–), for example, the Zionist way of life represents a “progression.” To him, the Jewish national statehood has a moral-normative significance. Israel epitomizes the “public of the Jewish people” by taking over the role of the traditional reli- gious-communal diaspora centers that used to be responsible for the preserva- tion of “collective Judaism.” In the face of modernization and secularization pro- cesses, and hence the increasing assimilation of Jews into their respective society, the Jewish state is attributed a normative function, namely the preservation of the “collective existence of the Jewish people.” Avineri stresses that the state is not to be seen as a substitute for Jewish religion, since the latter already has a deeply collectively-existentialist meaning for the faithful. Rather, it represents an adequate response to the danger posed by the assimilation that is brought in the wake of the increasing secularization of Jewish life: “Only the Jewish state, and not religion, can serve as a common denominator […] for all the heterogeneous factors of Jewish existence.”6 This approach, in which the core of Jewish identity is shifted from religion towards nationalism, is naturally rejected by the Jewish orthodoxy. From the very beginning, the majority in the orthodox camp staunchly opposed Zionism and the idea that any “redemption of the Jews” can be brought about by the efforts of men. A radical religious anti-Zionist movement, the Neturei Karta, which cham- pions the dissolution of the State of Israel, dismisses Theodor Herzl’s idea of the termination of the diaspora as a violation of divine law. The Torah 5 Brubaker 2002: 218–219. 6 Avineri 1999: 251–252. The Jewish Diaspora and its Negation 7 forbids [the Jews] to leave the diaspora of their own accord and found a state before God brings final salvation to His people and to the entire world […]. 2,000 years ago, God sent the Jewish people into exile (diaspora), and it is also by God that they will be redeemed from it. Until then, they must be patient, faithful and loyal to their host peoples, wherever divine fate has cast them. This also extends to the Palestinians who live in the Holy Land of Palestine according to divine will. This is unambiguously recorded in written form in the Torah and by the prophets.7 Here, the categorical rejection of a Jewish state and of a cessation of the diaspora is derived from an orthodox interpretation of Jewish religion. In a stance that is in opposition to the religiously motivated anti-Zionist Judaism, the anti-religious movement of the Canaanites proposes a new concept of a Hebrew state. This movement, which was founded by Yonatan Ratosh (1908–1981) and was active in the founding period, first and foremost aspired to the integration of the new state into the culture of the Middle East, which would entail the total separation of the Jews living in Palestine from Jewish history and thus from the diaspora Jews.8 But also the less radical, not necessarily anti-Zionist religious Jews were occu- pied by the question as to what extent Israel as the Jewish state can really draw on Jewish tradition and religion, or in how far Israel can represent the Jewish people in the way envisioned by Avineri.
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