"Israel's claim to the Holy Land rests on the existence of God

The ideological foundation for the modern state of Israel is the political philosophy of Zionism; its fundamental assertions were practical, secular, and activist in nature. Unlike traditional Judaism which passively awaited God's intervention via an expected Messiah to lead world Jewry into a messianic age of Jewish redemption, empowerment, and leadership, Zionism declared it important that Jews take their destiny into their own hands. "Zionism," notes Charles Silberman, "... transformed the meaning of Jewishness messianism. Instead of waiting for God to bring about the Messianic Age in His own way and time, as the Orthodox believed ... the Zionists insisted that the Jews had to go to work to bring about their own redemption." [SILBERMAN, p. 39] And the most pressing Zionist issue at hand was the desire for an explicitly Jewish national homeland. Although in early Zionist years a temporary Jewish homeland in parts of Argentina or Kenya was considered, few of the rank and file members of the movement took such suggestions seriously. The emotional attachment, after all, unlike other European-based nationalist movements, was based on traditional religious beliefs: the ancient homeland that God had reputedly given to the Israelites. The homeland was not really negotiable. It had to be a return to Zion: Israel. "Even those who rebelled against religion," notes Ehud Luz, "could not ignore the need to deal with it, for the simple reason that Jewish nationalism drew its legitimacy from the Jewish religion: Zionism was rooted in the Jewish past, and no one denied that this past had a religious character." [LUZ, p. x] "The mythos-driven craving for the ancestral land," suggests Israeli Jay Gonen, "is tied to deep unconscious layers in the Jewish psyche." [GONEN, J., p. 200]

Sometimes these "cravings" are not so unconscious. The underlying links between the religion of Judaism and secular Zionism is so great that Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah (the international Zionist women's organization), was the first woman to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary. [HESCHEL, 1983, p. xiv]

Part of the Zionist revival included reclaiming the nearly dead language of Hebrew (which had been reduced over the centuries to use only for religious purposes). Intended to be applied to a new, secularized Zionist society, as early as 1926 scholar Gershom Scholem noted the latent undercurrents in attempting to secularly appropriate a religiously-charged language: "The Land [of Israel] is a volcano. It provides lodging for the language [of Hebrew] ... What will be the result of the updating of Hebrew? Will the abyss of the holy tongue which we have implanted in our children not yawn wide? People here do not realize what they are doing. They think they have made Hebrew into a secular language, that they removed its apocalyptic sting. But that is not so ... Every word which is not simply made up but rather taken from the treasure house of well-worn terms is laden with explosives." [RAVITZKY, A., p. 3]

"Although in rabbinic times an Aramaic translation of the Torah was declaimed alongside the biblical text in public readings ...," notes Barry Holtz, "it was the Hebrew original that was venerated and preserved. This sense of the sacred quality of the language begins with the Bible itself. God speaks, and through language the world comes into being. Jews, at least since rabbinic times, have taken the holiness of the language with great seriousness." [HOLTZ, B., 1984, p. 21]

"There is no Sabbath Judaism without Zionism," notes Dagobert Runes, "Every daily prayer of the observing Jew carries the undertone of return to Zion. The four great holidays of the Jewish faith are imbedded in Zionist land and Zionist homecoming. Judaism is a little possible without Zionism as Christianity without Christ." [MARX, K., 1959, p. x] "Herein lies the ambiguity of Zionism," says Jacob Neusner,

"It was supposedly a secular movement, yet in reinterpreting the

classic mythic structures of Judaism, it compromised its secularity

and exposed its fundamental unity with the classic mythic being of

Judaism ... What has happened in Zionism is that the old has been

in one instant destroyed and resurrected. The 'holy people' are no

more, the nation-people take their place. How much has changed

in the religious tradition, when the allegedly secular successor-

continuatorhas preserved not only the essential perspective of the

tradition, but done so pretty much in the tradition's own symbols

and language?" [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 100]

"The fact," notes Alan Dowty, "that many early Zionists sought to 'divorce' themselves from Jewish history does not, however, mean that they always succeeded in disentangling themselves from its grip. In fact, the illusion that Zionism could escape the legacies -- negative and positive -- of the Jewish past, through an exercise of sheer ideological will, may have been the greatest conceit among the necessary self-deceptions of the founding fathers ... Holidays and national symbols were also inevitably drawn from the past, even if attempts were made to alter their content and significance. The very legitimacy of the entire [Zionist] enterprise also rested, in the end, on Jewish history and religion, a factor that grew in importance as conflict with the Arab population developed." [DOWTY, 1998]

Early Zionism in Israel also stressed a "back to the land" ethic, emphatically distancing the new Jewish people from their traditional "Shylock" economic middleman roles in Europe for honest labor in the farm fields of Palestine. Community-owned socialist agricultural enterprises called kibbutzim sprouted up everywhere and were heralded as the foundation for a new, proud, hard-working Jewish identity. By 1986, however, Etan Levine noted that "today's kibbutz member is profoundly disturbed by the failure to transmit its values to the young ... To many an Israeli, today's kibbutz is seen as sort of a country club, using hired labor for the Arab and Sephardic towns, and exploiting the kibbutz's favorable tax status and its undue influence in the Israeli Knesset." [LEVINE, E., p. 46]

Rudiments of the Zionist world view began to take hold among a few Jewish thinkers in the mid-1800s. Moses Hess wrote Rome and Jerusalem in 1862, a work generally credited to be the origin of Zionist theory, although the term would not be invented, nor the ideas distilled, till decades later. "Hess," wrote later Zionist philosopher Martin Buber, "was no 'precursor' of the Zionist movement. He was its initiation." "Everything we have attempted," said pre-eminent Zionist activist Theodore Herzl, "can be found in this [Rome and Jerusalem] work." [HESS, opening page]

"The pious Jew is before all else a Jewish patriot," wrote Hess in this seminal work of Jewish secular nationalism, "the 'new-fangled' Jew who denies Jewish nationalism is not only an apostate, a renegade in the religious sense, but a traitor to his people and to his family. Should it prove true that the emancipation of the Jews is incompatible with Jewish nationalism, then the Jew must sacrifice emancipation ... The Jewish religion is primarily Jewish patriotism. This the Jewish 'Reformers' who 'emancipated' themselves from the Jewish nation knew quite well. They are wary of expressing their true sentiments frankly." [HESS, p. 27-28] In an earlier work, entitled Money (1845), Hess had located the worldwide Jewish community in a socio-economic Darwinian sense far from their collective self-perception as humankind's consummate victims: "The Jews, who in the natural history of the social animal would have had the world-historical mission to elicit the predator in humanity, have now accomplished the task." [REINHARZ, p. 85] (The turn of the century socialist/Zionist Ber Borochov echoed this perspective of non-Jews, noting that non-Jews tended to gain "their livelihood from nature," and that "it is obvious that Jews, in contradistinction to all other nations, derive their livelihood exclusively from man." [BOROCHOV, p. 62] Hess also, like so many in the Jewish political world in our own day, abandoned "universalistic" political activism for Jewish "particularism." Hess was for years a communist theorist, even writing in 1847 "a draft for a communist manifesto." [GIDAL, p. 223]

A second Zionist theorist of considerable import was Leon Pinsker whose treatise Auto-Emancipation appeared in 1882. "We have not ceased even in the lands of our exile to be spiritually a distinct nation," he wrote, "but this spiritual nationality, so far from giving us the status of nation in the eyes of other nations, is the very cause of their hatred for us as a people." [SACHAR, p. 300] Traditional religious belief that Gentile hostility to Jews was a punishment from God was secularly adjusted in Pinsker's argument; he proclaimed what in our day has become Jewish canon: Jewish irresponsibility for their roles in history and the declared irrational essence of a corresponding "Jew-hatred." Pinsker, says Walter Laqueur, "regarded Judaeophobia as a psychic aberration, but in his view it was hereditary. Transmitted as a disease for two thousand years, it was incurable ... Prejudice, subconscious notions, could not be removed by reasoning, however forceful and clear." [LAQUEUR, p. 71] "One of the fundamentals of Zionism," confirmed Zionist heroine Hannah Senesh in later years, "is the realization that anti-Semitism is an illness which can neither be fought against with words, nor cured with superficial treatment." [UMANSKY/ASHTON, p. 175]

The most famous Zionist, however, was Theodore Herzl, a journalist (he was a correspondent for Vienna's Neue Freie Presse, the most influential newspaper in the Hapsburg Empire), and playwright, who struggled as a dreamer and activist towards resolution of "the Jewish problem" in Europe. Herzl's novel Altneuland has been described as "the foundation document of the modern state of Israel." [SELZER, p. 42] "Herzl," says Michael Selzer, "endorses as valid the negative image of the Jew with which he had earlier condemned and then catered most extravagantly to [for funds], [the book was the] creation of a fantasy state in which the self-hating Jewish readers of the book could find and identify themselves with their complete antithesis." [SELZER, p. 42] Herzl's idea of Israel, says Amnon Rubenstein, was "a mini-Switzerland in the heart of the Middle East." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 11]

As late as 1893, he seriously entertained the idea that the problem to anti-Semitism could be resolved by a mass conversion of all Jewish children to Christianity. [AVISHAI, p. 37] The publication of Herzl's ideas about the creation of a Jewish homeland, The Jewish State, and mass Jewish exodus to it, became the most influential work in Zionist history.

Jacques Kornberg notes Herzl's essential world view, so deeply rooted in the Jewish martyrological and persecution tradition: "Herzl's litany of Jewish suffering was wildly exaggerated, for he claimed that Jews were 'always the carefully looked after and cultivated leeches or the ... chamber serfs ... of the powerful.' In Herzl's view of Jewish history there were no periods of security or normality. Later this view was to become part of his Zionist conception of the Jewish dispersion as a 2,000 year period of captivity and unfreedom." [KORNBERG, p. 84]

And as World Zionist Organization president Nahum Goldmann once wrote:

"[Theodore Herzl] put [the Zionist issue] in a famous and totally

misleading saying: 'The problem of Zionism is one of means of transport:

there is a people without a land, and a land without a people' ... He

utter[ed] a double falsehood: first, Palestine was not a country without

people, since there were hundreds of thousands of Arabs living there;

and second, the Jews were not a landless people, for the assimilated

Jews were good Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen and so on."

[GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 88]

Eventually Herzl and his cohorts were visiting powerful people throughout the world, lobbying the Zionist ideas intensely, seeking both funds and political favors from the wealthy. Among those from whom he sought help -- particularly in concessions for Jewish immigration to Palestine -- in his single-minded focus on Jews was the Sultan of Turkey. "When Herzl," notes Hannah Arendt, "during these negotiations received cables from students of various oppressed nationalities protesting against agreements with a government which had just slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Armenians, he only observed: 'This will be useful for me with the Sultan.'" [ARENDT, in SELZER, p. 236]

Alfred Lilienthal notes the curious similarity of traditional Zionism and anti-Semitic ideology regarding the Jewish inability-- or resistance -- to assimilate into non-Jewish societies. Seminal Zionist writings, like those of Hess, Herzl and Pinsker, says Lilienthal, argued that "Jews formed in the midst of the nations, among which they reside, a distinctive element which cannot be readily digested in any country. (Strangely, these were practically the same words for which the [anti-Semitic] Dearborn Independent and Henry Ford, Sr. were to be sued more than sixty years later by American Jews of Zionist leanings)." [LILIENTHAL, p. 13]

This classical anti-Semitic accusation -- that Jews live within a host society, but are not truly a fully dedicated part of it -- is actually a fundamental belief too of the Zionist credo. An essential principle of Zionism is the secular revamping of the old religious notion of Jewish identity throughout the world: galut -- exile. As noted earlier, the idea of galut asserts that Jews -- dispersed from ancient Israel throughout the world -- are everywhere in places they do not belong. Their own true home can only be Israel. Zionism holds that, because Jews are scattered throughout the world in other peoples' lands, Jews are ethically, spiritually, morally, and physically impaired from their true natures. In Hebrew, one of the meanings of galut is "sighing under the yoke of oppression." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 178] In the Zionist view, Jews are not -- and cannot be -- connected to the lands, culture, and peoples of their Diaspora (dispersion). "The Zionist critique of assimilation," notes Donald Niewyk, "... rested on a certain conviction that all efforts to blend with non-Jews must lead unswervingly to deformed Jewish lives. The new discipline of psychoanalysis was mustered to demonstrate the neurotic side effects of divided consciousness. Rootlessness and inferiority complexes were shown to generate everything from revolutionary activity to Jewish anti-Semitism, extreme German nationalism, and suicide." [NIEWYK, p. 126]

Only gathered together in their own nation can Jews of the world attain "normalization." Once the Jewish people had "normalized," hoped Theodore Herzl, the Zionist "father" of modern Israel, "it is the anti-Semite who will be our staunchest friends, and the anti-Semitic countries which will be our allies." [FEUERLICHT, p. 222] In modern Israel the term galut is a slur. "Galut has become a general term of contempt," says Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "bearing no relation to where one lives." [LIEBMAN/COHEN]

"In classical Zionist thinking," says Liebman and Cohen, "the non-Jews are not to be blamed for their hostility to the Jews. The fault lies in the unnatural condition of Jews living as strangers in a host society that understandably harbors suspicions of them and their intentions." [LIEBMAN/SILBERMAN, p. 58] Even David Ben-Gurion, revered by many Jews as a pioneer Zionist and the first prime minister of the modern state of Israel (to 1963), said that

"The cause of our troubles and the anti-Semitism of which we complain

result from our peculiar status that does not accord with the established

framework of the nations of the world. It is not the result of the

wickedness or folly of the Gentiles which we call anti-Semitism."

[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 58]

From a Zionist racial perspective, notes Donald Niewyk, "even a moderate Zionist such as Gustav Krojanker could describe anti-Semitism as the ideological superstructure of 'instinctive animal peculiarities' that were natural among groups 'divided by blood and history.'" [NIEWYK, p. 127-128]

For decades, the Zionist movement basically agreed with the standard anti-Semitic criticisms of the Jews of Europe, that Jews were exploitive, often unethical, elitist separatists in their self-perceived "host nations," and they were entrenched in the centers of commerce, overly fixated upon the accumulation of money. "The Zionist position," says Aleksander Hertz, "was ... similar to that of the anti-Semite. Both spoke of the organic separateness of the Jews and their alienness. Although they differed fundamentally in their evaluations of the role of the Jews and their historic significance, their intellectual premises were the same, and they did not differ greatly in their conclusions." [HERTZ] "Intriguingly," notes Bernard Avishai, "political Zionists often accepted as true some of the anti-Semite's most outrageous stereotypes of the Jew ... Accordingly, political Zionists were often unable to articulate precisely what Jewish principles were to be defended -- apart from the assertion that the Jewish people should survive." [AVISHAI, p. 25]

In pre-World War II Nazi Germany, Zionist assertions that Jews were an inassimilable people mirrored, and reinforced the Nazis' own arguments. Both groups asserted that there should be no Jews in Germany. "The anti-Semitic barrage continued weekly with Zionist aspersions sounding painfully similar to the Nazi line discrediting the German citizenship of the Jews," notes Edwin Black, "It became that much harder for German Jews to defend against Nazi accusations of illegitimate citizenship when a land and visible group of their own [Zionists] continually published identical indictments ... Zionism had become a tool for anti-Semites." [BLACK, E., p. 173]

On June 21, 1933, the German Zionist Federation sent their evaluation of the Jewish presence in Germany to Hitler, saying:

"Zionism believes that a rebirth ... such as that in German tradition

resulting from a combination of Christian and national values, must

also come about within the Jewish communities. Racial background,

religion, a common fate and tribal consciousness must be of decisive

importance in developing a lifestyle for Jews too." [BLACK, E., p. 175]

The Israeli scholar Yehezkel Kaufman, who represents the revisionist history so popular among Jews today that deems anti-Semitism to be completely irrational in origin, noted that in Zionism's early decades of development

"Zionist ideology itself was by no means free from the influence of

anti-Semitism, and Zionism actually based the national movement

on a rationale of charges that it took over from the anti-Semites, and

attempted to find a core of justice in the hatred of the Jews. Jews of

the Galut, the countries of dispersion, really deserve to be hated: their

customs, tendencies, businesses, attitude to the their environment, etc.

are the same source of the hatred, the justifiable hatred. Therefore,

they must leave Galut." [KAUFMAN, p. 2451]

"Our function now [as Jews]," wrote Joseph Brenner, an important early twentieth century Zionist, "is to recognize and admit our meanness since the beginning of history to the present day, all the faults in our character, and then to rise and start over again." [SILBERMAN, p. 39] "With a burning and passionate pleasure," he wrote elsewhere, "I would blot out from the prayer book of the Jews of our day 'Thou hast chosen us' in every shape and form." [DOWTY, 1998, p. 1] "The old Jew in Zionist iconography," notes Haim Breseeth, "was not dissimilar to the standard anti-Semitic portrait -- the 'inversion of what is productive,' 'the rootless, cosmopolitan, unproductive, and passive entity, inevitably attracting the hatred of its social environment, as it were. Zionism was to eradicate this type of Jewishness and replace it with the new Jew." [BRESEETH, p. 194]

"The vocabulary of abuse [from Zionists about the Jewish people of Europe] in Hebrew literature," notes Yehezkel Kaufman, "-- where Jews speak to one another without fear of exaggeration -- is of a sort you would find only in anti-Semitic literature of the worst type .... Frishman: 'Jewish life is a 'dog's' life that 'evokes disgust.' Berdichevski: 'Not a nation, not a people, not human.' Brenner: 'Gypsies, filthy dogs, inhuman, wounded dogs.' A. D. Gordon: 'Parasitism, people fundamentally useless.' From the articles of Shwardron: 'Slaves, helots, the basest uncleanliness, worms, filth, parasitic rootlessness.' (See his writings in Moznaim, 1933, nos. 33-38). In honor of the anniversary of Histadrut [the national Israeli labor federation], Davar, the Palestinian [i.e., pre-1948 Jewish] newspaper, printed a vowel-pointed headline: 'National resistance, the regeneration of a parasitic nation.' " [KAUFMAN, p. 241]

As Joachim Doron notes, "the Jewish self-criticism so widespread among the German Zionist intelligentsia often seemed dangerously similar to the plaints of the German anti-Semites." [FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 24]

Shaul Avigur, the head of the organization which aided illegal immigration to Israel against British Mandate curtailment, had great disdain for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who made it to Israel. Avigur remarked that

"They are different ... completely different [from other Jews in Israel].

The propensity to inform is widespread among them ... in commerce

they engage in everything possible; the children buy and sell dollars;

corruption is horrible; ... prostitution is terrible." [PORAT, p. 162]

"The [European] ghetto Jew was doomed from the Zionist perspective," says Haim Breseeth, "-- human dust, as [former Israeli president] Weitzmann named him, a historical figure with a despicable past and no future. Thus, the ghetto Jew became the antithesis of the Israeli Jew, even before the creation of the Israeli state. This is very different from how every other Jewish community, notably the buoyant American Jewish community, has perceived the European Jews." [BRESEETH, p. 194]

"It is a sad opinion one hears many people expressing," complained Yehezkel Kaufman in 1949, "-- that anti-Semitism is in a certain sense an anteroom to Zionism. Many Zionists, and not only Western European Zionists, believe with complete naivety that to be 'good Zionists,' we must first become 'good' anti-Semites, we must first hate ourselves... [KAUFMAN, p. 244] ...If you were to open the notebook of a Hebrew school student [in Israel] you might read such phrases as these: 'The Jews in the Diaspora are living unhealthy lives, as unsavory tradesmen, and sometimes have unsavory private lives too ... They are corrupt ... The Gentiles around them are living healthy lives,' or: 'The Jews in the Galut prefer storekeeping, banking, and peddling' and that is why the Gentiles hate them; 'the lack of Jewish farmers and Jewish workers has been the reason for their unnatural lives, and has aroused hatred." [KAUFMAN, p. 244]

"[Theodore Herzl, the official founder of the modern state of Israel] did not claim that the charges of the anti-Semite were altogether unjust," observed Walter Laqueur, "The ghetto, which had not been of their making, had bred [in Jews] certain asocial qualities: the Jews had come to embody the characteristics of men who had served long prison terms." [LAQUEUR, p. 88] Likewise, Zionist writer Theodore Lessing, says Daniel Niewyk, believed that European Jewry's "preoccupation with security and material wealth had brought them a half-deserved reputation as exploiters." [NIEWYK, p. 137]

"Reading today -- in the post-Holocaust era -- the writings of the founders of Zionism," says Amnon Rubenstein, "one is slightly embarrassed by the abuse against the very nature of the Jewish communities in exile, in galut ... [But] Zionism did not usher in this mood. Nineteenth century Hebrew and Yiddish literature ... vilify the Jewish existence within the traditional Pale of Settlement, the 'parasitical' occupations which mar it and the sickening submission to brute force and oppression." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 5]

Of course, modern Israeli propaganda needs, and Jewish identity needs, have changed in recent years. Today the official Zionist view, malleable to the times, has reabsorbed traditional Jewish thinking about a mystical, omnipresent anti-Semitism, useful in hardening trans-world Jewish solidarity with Israel -- the Protector. As Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen note:

"The role of anti-Semitism in formulations of Zionism and in the

importance attributed to the existence of the Jewish state has not

diminished. What has changed is the benign image held by Israeli

leaders of the Gentile. It is no longer the Jew who is indirectly

to blame for being hated. Anti-Semitism is no longer the expected

hostility of the hosts toward their uninvited guests. As in the

traditional Jewish past, anti-Semitism is now attributed to the

Gentile's irrational hatred of the Jew ... The origins of anti-Semitism

are no longer explained in terms of Jewish estrangement from their

host societies, but as endemic to the non-Jew." [LIEBMAN/COHEN,

Increasingly in recent years, the modern state of Israel, and many Jewish apologists throughout the world, publicly espouse views about themselves and Israel that are implicitly irreconcilable. The widespread Jewish illusion of harmonizing completely contradictory worldviews (universalism and particularism) is likewise echoed in the ideology of Zionism (although some important Zionist strands have been disbanding not only allegiance to universality, but to democracy as a social principle). As the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, (in this realm yet again a claim of Jewish "uniqueness") put it:

"Two basic aspirations underlie all our work in this country: to be like all

nations, and to be different from all nations." [ARONOFF, Myths, p.

Another example of Israel's implicitly contradictory nature, notes Rachelle Saidel, is that the eventual "linking [of] the creation of the Jewish state to the murder of six million Jews causes this state to be born with a built-in paranoia. This 'birth defect' has led Israel to beg for normalcy -- to be treated as all other nations, while at the same time pointing out how -- because of the Holocaust, it should be treated differently." [SAIDEL, p. 17]

The clumsily veiled chauvinism at root here is, as always, the classical religiously-based Jewish notion of the necessity for Jews to be "a people apart," "unique," distinct from all others. ["Lo, the people shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations." --NUMBERS 23:9] For some Israelis, notes Myron Aronoff, the biblical admonition that Israel "is a people that shall dwell alone and shall never be reckoned among the nations, [is] a curse. However, others consider it an affirmation of Israel's chosenness." [ARONOFF, p. 178]