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The Article on Zionism the Editors of the the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Threw out (Without Notifying the Author)

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The Article on Zionism the Editors of the the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Threw out (Without Notifying the Author) The Article on Zionism the Editors of the The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism threw out (without notifying the author) On 4 February 2013 I received an email from Saër Maty Bâ, inviting me to contribute an article of 3,000 to 4,000 words on Zionism to the forthcoming Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, which I readily accepted. Due to a confluence of difficult personal circumstances, I subsequently fell fowl of the initial deadline. Having been informed that mine was ‘a crucial essay’ and sent emphatic reminder emails on 24 November and 16 December 2013 and twice on 3 January 2014, I finally submitted my article on 6 January. ‘I must thank you so much for this contribution on Zionism,’ Immanuel Ness responded on the same day, ‘I just read it and consider it an excellent account!’ That was the last I heard from the editors. Once in a while I checked online whether the publication of the encyclopedia was moving closer. When it became clear that it really would be coming out this autumn I thought I’d better contact the editors, given that I’d been led to believe there would be proofs to correct. When I contacted Ness on 4 September, he responded the following day to inform me that ‘the project direction focused on Third World issues’ and my essay ‘was sadly not included’. Apparently embarrassed, he not only offered to pay me a fee out of his own pocket but also pointed out that his mother, due to whose death he claimed to have been somewhat distracted from the project, was an Auschwitz survivor. Now, the editors are, of course, entirely within their rights to reject my submission if they feel they have cause to do so. Surely, though, one would ordinarily expect them to contact me, explain their misgivings, and request changes first. Instead, the editors could not even be bothered to inform me of the fact that they had thrown out my article. Evidently, the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism has now come out. I am in no position to acquire such an expensive resource and it will be a while until I can access it in a library. Consequently, I can make inferences based only on the index which Palgrave has made available online. It would seem that there is indeed no entry for Zionism in the encyclopedia. The index entries for Zionism indicate that it is treated in the context of lengthy discussions of Palestine and the Negev Bedouin. Other entries place it on the same pages as references to U.S. imperialism, apartheid, Black September, racism, displacement, dispossession, accumulation by dispossession, grabs, and musical intifada. These, to be sure, were not the core concerns I discussed in my article. This does not yet explain, though, why the concerns I raised should not also be discussed in the encyclopedia, let alone, why the editors chose simply to throw out my contribution without any further discussion, indeed without even informing me of the fact that they had done so. One can only hope that this is not characteristic of the editors’ respect for academic integrity more generally. Zionism Zionism was one of the forms of Jewish nationalism that emerged in Europe, alongside its various non-Jewish counterparts, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. How best to assess its meaning and significance after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 is a moot point. On the one hand, the World Zionist Organization, originally established at its first congress in 1897 in Basle with Theodor Herzl at its helm, continues to exist. According to its website, it remains ‘committed to promoting the Zionist idea and the Zionist enterprise as vital and positive elements of contemporary Jewish life’, and it collaborates closely with the Israeli government, especially in matters of immigration (‘aliyah’, lit. to go up). On the other hand, the term Zionist is generally used, especially by critics, as a blanket term denoting a broad range of issues from Israeli national identity, constitutional arrangements, and security interests to cultural activity or indeed anything to come out of or likely to benefit Israel, in other words, in many instances where the term Israeli would arguably be appropriate. Writing just prior to the Oslo process, the Israeli philosopher, intellectual historian, and committed Zionist, Nathan Rotenstreich (1914–1993), stated that ‘there is no Zionist ideology today’. He suggested that ‘the existence of the State of Israel can explain the disappearance of the Zionist ideology insofar as any realization of a broad social-political goal may make the guiding ideology obsolete’ (Rotenstreich 2007 115). His contention drew on the assumption that the function of Zionism was ultimately to establish ‘a common Jewish reality’ between Jews in Israel and the diaspora. Zionism was not so much about the State of Israel itself but primarily about the relationship between Israeli and diaspora Jews. ‘Independence,’ Rotenstreich wrote, ‘becomes coterminous with the Jewish common reality’ (Rotenstreich 2007 121). The establishment of the State of Israel had created a ‘Jewish collective existence in the public realm’ (Rotenstreich 2007 82) yet the same obviously did not hold true of Jews in the diaspora. It remained the task of Zionism to create ‘a plausible continuity between the life of individuals and the life of the collectivity’ (Rotenstreich 2007 97) under these new circumstances. Yet Zionism ‘did not address itself to this issue’ after 2 1948, Rotenstreich criticized. Instead, its ‘ideological approach founded in self- examination’ had been ‘replaced by a continuous attempt to safeguard support for the State of Israel’, i.e., identification with Israel ‘as exemplifying the unity of the Jewish people and making it symbolically manifest’ had displaced the quest for an actual common reality (Rotenstreich 2007 122). It is not without irony (though hardly surprising) that more than a century ago Zionism’s harshest critics initially came from within the Jewish community itself, not least because it took some time before non-Jews became aware of Zionism as an issue worthy of serious consideration. To more traditional and more acculturated Jews alike Zionism seemed a perverse proposition. The return to Palestine had traditionally been expected as part of the messianic age and was thus considered a matter of divine providence. To bring about this return by human initiative was a blatant violation of the tradition and some fundamentalist Jews consequently denounce the existence of the State of Israel to this day, sometimes in the company of very strange bed fellows (such as the Iranian regime). Many more acculturated Jews, on the other hand, had begun to consider their increasing integration into society as an indication of progress in general that signified the coming of the messianic age, albeit in a metaphorical rather than literal sense, and thus abandoned the idea of a return to Palestine which in any case had the potential to nurture non-Jewish concerns about split Jewish loyalties. Non-Jewish Socialists within and beyond the Second International were not far behind and soon discovered Zionism as the example for an anachronistic fixation on nationalist concerns. In so doing they almost inevitably took issue with the mote in the Zionists’ eyes while showing precious little concern for the beam in their own and their compatriots’ eyes. A century on, anti-Zionism has become a rallying cry with the rare ability to unite anti-imperialists of various stripes across the political spectrum in the West, and effectively a state doctrine in much of the Arab world that cuts across various other stark and often violently antagonistic differences. This article focuses on the ideological diversity of Zionism as a historical phenomenon and the question of how Zionism can best be understood in relation to colonialism and imperialism. 3 ZIONISM AND JEWISH NATIONALISM In an era in which national belonging and the authenticity of national identity were widely prized as arguably the foremost features constituting individuals’ identities, Jewish nationalism was predicated on the notion that Jews would become like all other groups, not by submerging into the nationalities among whom they lived, but by constituting themselves as a distinct nationality on an equal footing with these other nationalities. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant form of Jewish nationalism was that of autonomism (also referred to as diaspora nationalism), inspired not least by concepts developed by Austro Marxists in grappling with nationality issues within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The classic formulation of this programme is generally associated with the Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow (1860–1941). ‘Jewish nationality,’ Dubnow argued in 1901, cannot strive for territorial or political isolation, but only for social and cultural autonomy … old Jewry sacrificed its civic rights for its national rights, and new Jewry its national rights for its political or civic rights. The period of autonomy now approaching does not tend to either of these two extremes of the previous epochs (Dubnow 1901 418–419). The Bund, the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln, un Rusland (The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), established in 1897 and for at least a decade by far and away the largest Jewish political movement in Eastern Europe (and indeed the largest Socialist party in the Russian Empire), officially enshrined autonomism in its programme in 1905 and diaspora nationalism remained influential until the destruction of East European Jewry during the Shoah Zionism and Territorialism, by contrast, argued that Jewry needed a territory of its own within which to develop its national life. The Territorialists, who seceded from the Zionist movement and were organized after 1905 by Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) in the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO), suggested that any suitable territory (e.g.
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