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ZIONISM: THE END OF AN ILLUSION  
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Richard E. Rubenstein
July 19, 2024
CounterPunch
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_ Zionism as currently defined connotes Jewish supremacy in Israel,
Israeli supremacy in Palestine, and American supremacy in the region.
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, Photograph Source: Hossam el-Hamalawy – CC BY 2.0

 

One of the oddest arguments made by self-declared friends of Israel is
that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism.  That assertion is
comprehensible if the person making it believes that God Himself gave
the Jews property rights from the river to the sea – but  Theodore
Herzl and the founders of modern Zionism embraced no such belief.  On
the contrary, that movement’s largely secularized leadership defined
Zionism from the outset as a form of ethnic nationalism – a claim to
the same “right of self-determination” as that asserted, say, by
the Irish or the Serbs.  The argument, therefore, is that it is
antisemitic to deny the Jews (considered as an ethnic community, not a
confessional group) the same alleged right enjoyed by the Irish and
the Serbs.  Forgetting for the moment that only a handful of
world’s 3,000 or so ethnic peoples enjoy the  right to control a
nation-state, the question remains: what does Zionism have to do with
Judaism?

The answer is to be found in history rather than in sacred texts. The
rise of mass-based antisemitism in Europe culminating in the
unimaginable catastrophe of the Holocaust convinced many Jews that the
alternative to yielding to genocidaires was to fight them, and the
best way to fight them was to command the resources of their own
nation-state.  Israel was conceived of not only as a means of
deterring or escaping would-be Hitlers, but also of ensuring that Jews
would “never again” go helplessly to their deaths or be forced to
beg more secure nations to admit them.  If the United States and
other wealthy nations had welcomed Jewish refugees and survivors in
the 1940s instead of slamming shut their doors, a good deal of the
pressure to create a Jewish state might have been dissipated.  The
fact that they did not – not even in the shadow of the gas chambers
– convinced many that they needed to play the nationalist game if
they wished to ensure their survival.

This reasoning, however, generated another question . . . and created
a dilemma.  In the dog-eat-dog world of competing nation-states,
nations do not survive and thrive unless they are either isolated and
unthreatening or warlike and strong.  Given the geopolitical
importance of the oil-rich Middle East, the rapid growth of
Palestinian and Arab nationalism, and America’s imperial ambitions,
it was clear even before 1948 that Israel would neither be isolated
nor considered harmless.  Violent conflicts between Jewish settlers
and Palestinians had been endemic since the late 1920s, and not one
Arab state accepted the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan.  Given the
intensity of this opposition, how could a state offering Jewish
residents and would-be immigrants preferential treatment become
sufficiently warlike and strong to survive?

The answer was suggested by the formation of a Jewish Legion in World
War I and a Jewish Brigade in World War II that fought in Palestine
and Syria as units of the British army.  When the U.S. replaced
Britain as the region’s dominant power, Israel became an American
ally and its armed forces de facto extensions of U.S. military
power.  From 1948 onward no other client state received anything
close to the military and civil aid donated by the leader of the
“Free World” to Israel.  Ironically – and tragically – the
state created to establish Jewish independence and security was thus
from the outset a neocolonial dependency and imperial outpost of the
United States.

This was not a recipe either for internal peace or international
security.  Since 1945, targeted by rebellious subject peoples and
competing great powers, the U.S. has fought five major wars and
participated in scores of bloody proxy struggles.  According to the
Brown University Cost of War project, American wars since the al Qaeda
attacks of 2001 have killed 4.5 million people, most of them
civilians.  In the same period, the State of Israel has fought six
interstate wars and three wars in Gaza.  It is customary in the West
to attribute this persistent insecurity and violence to the malice and
fanaticism of Israel’s Palestinian subjects and Muslim neighbors –
a partisan “explanation” that ignores the Jewish state’s
neocolonial origins, its expulsion and oppression of Palestinians, and
its faithful service to American and European patrons.  Whatever the
sources of Israeli insecurity, however, the result over time has been
to strengthen the position of “hard” vis a vis “soft”
Zionists.

ZIONISM: “HARD” AND “SOFT”

Since the late nineteenth century, when modern Zionism took form, the
attempts to combine Judaism with ethnic nationalism have tended to
generate three schools of thought.  We can call these Hard Zionism,
Soft Zionism, and anti-Zionism.

The Hard Zionist school is currently represented by the Netanyahu
regime in Israel – a right-wing ruling coalition that includes the
leading Jewish religious parties, parties representing Israeli
settlers in the West Bank, and advocates of annexation of all the
Occupied Territories. The perspective that shapes their political
views assumes the existence of serious, long-term, irreconcilable
conflicts of interests and values between Jews and non-Jews.  It also
accepts the ineluctable persistence of a neo-Darwinian global
environment in which only the most violent groups and nations
survive.  Since the time of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, founder of
this school, the implication has been that Jewish survival requires
the existence of a state controlled by Jews and capable of dominating
both internal and external enemies militarily.

A radical sense of collective insecurity has always been the driving
force of Hard Zionism. Jabotinsky considered the Jews a “race”
threatened demographically by intermarriage and social assimilation as
well as endangered physically by antisemites. The Odessan leader
admired Mussolini’s fascistic militancy, dressed his own militia in
brown shirts, and called for creation of an “Iron Wall” of armed
force that would protect Israel from inevitable attacks by hostile
Arab nationalists.  He approved of terrorist violence against the
British and the Palestinians, rejected the UN’s partition of
Palestine into two states, and scoffed at the idea that Jews and
Palestinians could coexist peacefully, unless the latter accepted
Jewish supremacy in a single Jewish state.  Netanyahu’s father was
Jabotinsky’s secretary, and his coalition still follows his ethnic
supremacist line.

“Soft” Zionism, on the other hand, reflecting its left-liberal
origins, began by expressing a somewhat less intense sense of Jewish
vulnerability and a somewhat more sanguine view of the possibility of
peaceful coexistence with non-Jews.  My own family history reflects
this perspective.  From their home in a New York suburb, my parents
learned about the Holocaust from reliable witnesses, tried vainly to
convince other Americans that the slaughter was occurring, then worked
passionately to establish a Jewish homeland in Israel.  Working with
Israeli agents like Teddy Kollek, the future mayor of Jerusalem, my
father helped to refit an old freighter renamed the Exodus to
transport European survivors to Palestine.  In 1948 he ran guns to
the Jewish army, the Haganah.  He and his comrades insisted that
Israel’s real enemy was not the Palestinians or other Arabs, who had
been misled by their leaders, but uncaring British colonialists and
wealthy, power-hungry sheikhs.

Soft Zionists like my father welcomed the UN Partition Plan and
believed that Jewish and Arab workers could live peacefully together
under the auspices of a social-democratic regime.  Their faith was
that Israel could be both a Jewish state and a pluralist democracy and
that the need for military dominance would prove temporary.  When
Palestinians and neighboring Arab nations made war against Israel in
1948, this faith was shaken, but not shattered.  During that war,
Israeli troops and militias displaced some 750,000 Palestinians and
destroyed more than 500 villages.  Arguing (contrary to plentiful
contrary evidence) that the refugees had left their lands voluntarily,
the new state refused either to readmit them or to compensate them for
their losses.  Israel’s Jewish majority was bolstered over the next
two decades by substantial immigration from the Arab world and from
Russia – an application of the “right of return” accorded
exclusively to Jews.  But after the “Six Day War” of 1967, the
Israelis again found themselves in control of more than a million
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East
Jerusalem.  The question of how Israel could be both a Jewish state
and a democracy was again thrown into question, along with the related
question of the deep contradiction between militaristic nationalism
and Jewish ethics.

The Soft Zionist answer that emerged over the next generation was to
advocate a Palestinian state, one that would not threaten Jewish
control of Israel either demographically or militarily.  A state
occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip (and perhaps East Jerusalem)
was always conceived of as a disarmed entity with limited powers that
would be compelled as a condition of its existence to accept Israeli
military and economic superiority.  Not surprisingly, this idea was
not popular in the Palestinian “street” or among groups seeking
either to gain equality with Israeli Jews or to expel them from the
region.  Over the next three decades, a substantial majority of Soft
Zionists such as Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres
therefore alternated between the carrot of peace negotiations (the
“two state solution”) and the stick of IDF-led warfare against
resisters. Over time, the stick became far more prevalent than the
carrot.

The high point of Soft Zionist achievement was the 1993 Oslo Accords
in which the Palestinians led by Yasir Arafat and his Fatah
organization agreed to recognize Israel and live in peace with its
citizens, while the Israelis, led by Labor Zionists Rabin and Peres,
agreed to recognize the Palestine National Authority and to permit it
to rule the West Bank and Gaza by the year 2000.  The Accords raised
high hopes but failed to deal with a series of crucial issues,
including continued Israeli settlement of the Occupied Territories, an
asserted right of return for Palestinian refugees, and the status of
East Jerusalem.

Furthermore, substantial sectors of both communities, increasingly
influenced by politicized religious organizations and leaders, opposed
the agreement and rejected further efforts to compromise.  Between
September 2000 and February 2005 some 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000
Israelis died in an uprising that Palestinians called the Al-Aksah
Intifadah.  While organizations like Islamic Jihad and the Fatah
Martyrs Brigade organized suicide bombings in Israel, militant
Zionists multiplied settlements on the West Bank and vowed never to
leave “Judea and Samaria.”  One such ultranationalist, Baruch
Goldstein, assassinated 29 Muslim worshippers at the Tomb of the
Patriarchs in 1994, and another, Yigal Amir, assassinated Prime
Minister Rabin a year later.

One year after that, Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister, marking
the beginning of the end of Soft Zionist hegemony in Israel.  He
would rule again from 2009-2021 while the movement of settlers into
the West Bank became a flood, and would end by forming the most
extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history.  In practice,
Zionists of both schools accepted Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall”
principle, which seemed to them the only way to secure the existence
of a secure Israel with a permanent Jewish majority. Simultaneously,
Palestinian groups were learning not to trust liberal Zionist
professions of belief in a two-state solution or the bona fides of the
Palestine Authority (PA), whose governance activities on the West Bank
seemed little more than a fig leaf for expanded Israeli settlement and
harsh security measures.  Each side blamed the other for the failure
of previous negotiations, and the trust that had once persuaded some
members of elite groups to deal with each other nonviolently was
dissipated.

Netanyahu’s attempt to keep the Palestinian movement divided by
supporting the PA’s authority on the West Bank directly and Hamas’
rule in Gaza indirectly backfired spectacularly on October 7, 2023. 
Even so, Israelis traumatized by Hamas’ violence, including almost
all the Soft Zionists, united behind his regime’s determination to
uproot and destroy that organization completely, even if this meant
massive destruction of the civilian population.  A wave of revulsion
against Israel’s indiscriminate violence in the U.S. and other
nations endangered President Joe Biden’s chances to be re-elected in
November 2024 and led him to blame the Netanyahu regime for using
“disproportionate” force and failing to recognize the need for
some sort of postwar Palestinian state.

Although this prescription has a “Soft Zionist” ring, the new
state Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have in mind seems
virtually identical to that earlier proposed by the Trump
administration and its chief Middle East spokesperson, Donald
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.  This would be an entity backed
and financed by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, ruled by the PA or
some equally conservative elite, disarmed, pacified, and committed to
helping advance U.S. regional interests against the “Resistance
Front” led by Iran and Hezbollah.  The “two-state” solution
thus becomes part of a “two-bloc” solution for the Middle East,
with the Americans controlling the wealthier, more powerful bloc. 
What sort of state or regional arrangement the Palestinians of Gaza or
the West Bank might themselves want was not – and is not –
considered a relevant matter.

The repetitive pattern here seems unmistakable.  United States rulers
maintain their hegemony in the region by all means necessary,
handsomely rewarding states and groups that cooperate and conducting
covert or overt warfare against those that resist.  When Hard Zionist
policies do not provoke serious internal rebellions or interstate
wars, the Americans are happy to support leaders like Netanyahu, who
treat the Palestinians as “unpeople.”  But when Hard policies
produce uprisings or wars that destabilize the region, U.S. leaders,
whether Republicans or Democrats, make a Soft Zionist U-turn.

This is exactly what the Clinton Administration did in 2000, when Bill
Clinton attempted to hammer out a two-state agreement between
Israel’s Ehud Barak and Palestine’s Arafat.  Those who blame the
Palestinians for the failure of this effort do not understand (or
don’t want to) that what such deals actually offer is what Rashid
Khalidi calls a “one state, multiple Bantustan” solution.  The
Jewish state defined and defended by Zionists of either school always
retains absolute military, technological, and economic superiority
over any projected Palestinian entity.  The Palestinian statelet is
therefore designed to function, in effect, as an administrative
subdivision of Israel and an imperial outpost (allied with other
satellites) of the United States.  Little wonder that so many
Palestinians opt instead for a “single state” solution that would
compel the Israelis either to treat them as equals or publicly abandon
their democratic pretenses.

The situation recalls a vastly more ancient conflict that I wrote
about in a book called _Thus Saith the Lord: The Revolutionary Moral
Vision of Isaiah and Jeremiah_ (Harcourt, 2006).  There I described
the “soft” imperialism of Cyrus the Great, who liberated the
nations made captive by Babylon, allowed Jewish exiles to return to
Israel, and promised the world a new era of peace and justice under
Persian rule.  What a guy! The prophet Isaiah of Babylon was so
impressed by Cyrus that he declared him to be God’s Messenger. 
Even before the Persian leader died, however, it was clear that his
empire would have to be maintained by massive force.  Cyrus’s
successors were Darius and Xerxes, “’hard” imperialists who
“pushed the boundaries of the empire deeper into Asia and Europe but
found themselves trapped in an increasingly brutal struggle to
maintain control over their restive, far-flung subjects” (p. 160). 
As the Prophets recognized, the dream of a just and stable world at
peace could never be realized by power-hungry empire-builders.

So it goes to this day.  Hard and soft varieties of ethnonationalism
are opposite sides of the same coin – or, if you like, different
gears of the same engine.  Their common purpose, like that of a
“hard cop” and “soft cop” working over a suspect to obtain a
confession, is to maintain a dominant elite’s supremacy and
control.  When one approach doesn’t produce the desired result, the
other is called into play; in either case, the unruly suspect is
condemned for refusing to accept the inexorable demands of superior
power.

Zionism as currently defined connotes Jewish supremacy in Israel,
Israeli supremacy in Palestine, and American supremacy in the
region.  This compels those who advocate the equal dignity of nations
and the global solidarity of peoples to move beyond both “hard”
and “soft” Zionism in order to embrace a more humane – and more
Prophetic – perspective.  Call this viewpoint anti-Zionist,
post-Zionist, or better yet, radical humanist; whatever the label, it
calls us to move beyond the current system of endemic violence to
create a world in which the massacre of ethnic enemies and oppression
of subject peoples is _never _permitted – not even to save one’s
own group from an alleged threat of extinction.

THE DAY AFTER THE GAZA WAR – AND BEYOND THE JEWISH STATE

Left-liberal “labor Zionists” were still ruling Israel in 1958,
when I made my first visit to that country with a group of fellow
college students.  Liberal or not, most Israelis talked proudly about
the Sinai War, a military adventure in which the Israeli Defense
Forces, abetted by British and French troops, invaded Egypt and seized
the Suez Canal to prevent Egypt’s President Nasser from
nationalizing that valuable piece of European-owned property. 
Meanwhile, the Labor Party leaders whom we met informed us that
Israel’s great challenge was to remain culturally European and to
avoid becoming a “Levantine state.” After a week of listening to
this sort of propaganda, we went to Hebrew University to hear the
philosopher Martin Buber denounce the Sinai War, criticize Israeli
racism, and call for establishment of a “binational” state in
which Jews and Palestinians would share power with each other and make
peace with their neighbors.

The audience for this talk was very small – ten American students,
their two supervisors, and a smattering of people from Hebrew
University.  Even so, the author of _I and Thou_ told us he was
glad to speak to any audience, since most Israelis considered his
views utopian and disloyal.  I vividly remember his aura of wise
compassion (which I felt much later in the presence of the Buddhist
sage, Thich Nhat Hanh), his impassioned defense of the Palestinian
refugees’ right to return to their homeland, and his sadness at
being ignored or disrespected by his fellow Jews.  I had no clue then
but discovered fifteen years later, in Congressional hearings on U.S.
intelligence activities chaired by Senator Frank Church, that our
leaders on this tour had been dispatched by the C.I.A. to report on
the activities of “oppositionists” like Martin Buber.

Was Buber a Zionist?  Certainly, when that term did not imply the
existence of a state owned and operated by Jews in their own
interests, but embraced the idea later summarized by Edward Said as
“one state for two peoples.”  Buber’s inspiration was neither
the hard nationalism of right-wing nationalists like Jabotinsky nor
David Ben-Gurion’s slightly softer version, but the ideas of the
“spiritual Zionist” known as Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg), who
insisted that Palestine was never an “empty land” and declared
that it must be shared with existing Arab residents.  Buber insisted
that Palestine should become a state in which a Jewish community (NOT
a “Jewish state”) could live in peace and security with its
Palestinian neighbors under a constitution designed to recognize the
integrity and equal rights of each community.  Like Ahad Ha-Am, he
believed that a nation-state devoted to defending Jewish supremacy
against all competitors would inevitably deform Judaism and generate
violent resistance.

Others both in Palestine and North America had reached similar
conclusions, although for different reasons.  Reform Jews organized
by Rabbi Elmer Berger and his American Council for Judaism argued that
Judaism was a religion, not a political or cultural community, and
that Zionism obstructed Jewish assimilation into their own (true)
national cultures.  At the same time, Jews belonging to certain
devoutly orthodox sects asserted that a Jewish state was a
contradiction in terms, since a political body ruled by God’s law
and pursuing justice and peace could not exist until the start of the
Messianic age.

Martin Buber, on the other hand, was neither an assimilationist, a
Messianist, nor a nationalist.  In his view and that of a group of
intellectuals including Hebrew University president Judah L. Magnes
and Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, what was needed was a
democratic state whose constitution would recognize the communal
interests of Jews and Palestinians and their common interests as
workers.  By the time I met Buber, his organization, “Unity”
(Ichud), had already been bypassed by the Zionist party and rejected
by an increasingly nationalist Israeli public.  Later, the binational
idea was embraced by thinkers and activists ranging from Hannah Arendt
and Edward Said to Tony Judt but was opposed both by Zionists and by
Palestinian nationalists aiming to construct a single state in which
their constituents would constitute a majority.

Even so, the conflicts of the past two decades, culminating in
Israel’s catastrophic war on Gaza, have breathed new life into the
idea.  That war has delegitimized the Jewish state by revealing the
genocidal implications of Zionism.  But it also reminds us that
militant ethno-nationalism on the part of any group determined to
dominate all others leads in the direction of ethnic cleansing and
genocide.  For further discussions of issues relating to
bi-nationalism, see the work of Georgetown University law
professor Lama Abu-Odeh
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that of Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh of the Open University of
Israel (_The Arab and Jewish Questions, _Legend Press, 2020).

Whether the future of Palestine involves the creation of two states or
a single state, and whether the constitution of that state is
binational or unitary, it seems clear that Israel as currently
structured must be radically transformed.  But the fate of this land,
and, indeed, that of the entire region, has never been a matter to be
decided by its inhabitants, either Jewish or Muslim.  The imperial
powers’ control of the region, originally challenged by Arab revolts
against the British and French, has been maintained and even
strengthened by American/European wars and machinations.  From the
1958 U.S. invasion of Lebanon to two wars against Iraq, intervention
in the Syrian civil war, overthrow of the Libyan state, covert warfare
against Iran, and all-out support for Israel in a dozen regional
conflicts, the United States has not ceased to wield its military
power to decide who rules and who serves in the Middle East.  Equally
influential are the bribes in the form of civil and military aid
packages that keep obedient leaders in power and marginalize their
opponents, and the diplomatic maneuvers that provide temporary
settlements favorable to U.S. interests, such as the Camp David
agreement between Egypt and Israel.

As a result, to define the current struggle in the Holy Land as an
“Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and to speculate about possible
forms of settlement on “the day after Hamas” grossly misconceives
the real situation, which is that of imperial proxy warfare.  The
much-publicized differences of opinion between Israel’s Netanyahu
regime and America’s Biden administration are purely tactical (and
have not prevented Democratic as well as Republican leaders from
inviting Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress.)  These leaders’
strategic goals – the maintenance of U.S. hegemony and Israeli
military superiority in the region – remain unchanged.  But if the
imperial system in the Middle East is a _source_ of violent
conflict, which seems undeniable, how can one talk seriously of a
peaceful “day after” that leaves this system in place?

Understanding the connection between imperialism and war in the Middle
East, the late Johan Galtung, one of the founders of peace studies,
argued that peace in the region did not depend on a “two-state
solution” but on a “six-state solution” — the establishment of
an autonomous regional organization able to stand up to the U.S. and
to make collective decisions in its members’ interests. The guiding
principle, in his view, was to connect any possible peace plan for
Palestine and Israel to an effective diminution of American power to
enable local parties to decide their own fates.  A similar argument
has been made more recently by Kaye and Vakil in “Only the Middle
East Can Fix the Middle East: The Path to a Post-American Order
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If the American role in creating, exacerbating, and perpetuating the
Israel/Palestine conflict is not recognized – that is, if we buy
into the fantasy of noble imperialism and the _pax americana_ –
the “day after” solutions now being retailed by will prove equally
illusory.  Each day that the slaughter in Gaza continues makes it
clearer that Zionism can never again command the loyalty of Jews
dedicated to peace and justice or anyone else committed to the
development of a human community.  It is long past time for American
Jews to get rid of the Israeli flags that so often stand on
the_ bimas_ of their synagogues and temples.  But the American
flags standing there should also be eliminated.  Realizing the vision
of a human community – the vision of prophets from Isaiah to Marx
– means transcending all forms of ethno-nationalism that stand in
the way of human development.  The point is not to deny one’s
ethnic and cultural heritage but to overcome the fixation on national
(and in America’s case, imperial) identities and to move ahead, out
of the flames of the present holocaust, toward species-consciousness.

_Richard E. Rubenstein is an author and University Professor Emeritus
at the Carter School for PEACE AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION. _

_CounterPunch is reader supported! Please help keep us alive
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