Zionism is irrelevant

This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land - making sense of what's happening in Israel/Palestine

Talking about Zionism gets about as toxic as it gets yet Zionism is basically irrelevant right now.

To understand why means knowing that the basic theory of Zionism is pretty simple and maintains that the so called ‘Jewish problem’ can only be solved by all Jews going to live in a Jewish State. I use the word ‘a’ advisedly because the early Zionists did not think it was necessary for that state to be located in Palestine, Herzl, the Father of Zionism, for example, was at one time in favour of a Jewish state in Uganda.

The history is interesting but the current facts are more relevant. The Jewish state has existed for over seven decades yet it is not home to the majority of the Jewish people.

Israel also happens to be the most dangerous place in the world for Jews. This partly explains why the bulk of the diaspora is disinclined to live there.

Ideologically the resistance to Zionism from within the Jewish community comes from two sources. First, and most vocal, are ultra-religious Jews who believe that until the Messiah arrives the Jewish people have no right to establish a state.

Secondly, although this is largely forgotten, Jewish opposition to Zionism was historically most prominent among socialists, in particular the Jewish Workers’ Bund, which in the pre-holocaust years constituted by far the biggest Jewish political organisation in Europe, particularly in the East.

Bundists believed that Jews were an integral part of the working class movement in the countries where they lived and that discrimination against Jews should be fought by allying the Jewish workers’ movement with other movements fighting for change. Incidentally, the Bund was so significant in the socialist movement that its backing for the Marxists in Russia helped propel them into being the majority or Bolsheviks of the social democrats who triumphed in the Russian Revolution.

This is largely water under the bridge but an intellectual case remains for insisting that racism against the Jews should not be fought by abandoning the field of battle and letting the antisemites win.

In the wake of the Nazi holocaust many Jews saw Zionism in a different light, not least because of the lack of alternatives. This meant that Zionism moved from being a fringe movement among European Jewry to becoming mainstream.

This brings us to the other problem because the holocaust had little impact on the very long established Jewish communities of the Arab countries, notably in Iraq, Egypt and Yemen, where political Zionism had even less impact on the community than in Europe. The existence of Arab Jews was barely acknowledged by founders of the Zionist movement who envisaged the creation of a very European orientated Jewish state.

The reality today is that the majority of Jews who live in Israel are of Mizrachi or Eastern origin, many of whom would probably still be living in the Arab world had Israel not been established.

Another reality is that after more than seven decades of statehood Israel is a well-established nation, with characteristics that set it apart from the Jewish diaspora. Generally speaking Israelis do not strongly identify with overseas Jewish communities and certainly do not expect their homeland to be dependent on Aliyah (literally, going up but understood to mean emigration) from foreign Jews. Meanwhile in the diaspora itself the reality of Zionism is largely that of being an insurance policy which Jews living outside Israel do not expect to have to cash in.

Not only did the founders of Zionism have little more than a hazy idea of the existence of the Jews in Arab lands and almost certainly none at all of the black Jews in Ethiopia but they were also only dimly aware of the Arab people in Palestine. This explains the original Zionist slogan of ‘a land without people for a people without a land ’.

Fast forward to today where the word Zionism is bandied about with equal enthusiasm by antisemites, pro-Palestinians and indeed supporters of Israel. Zionism is no more inherently racist than support of a Palestinian state can be said to be inherently antisemitic.

Israel is not so much a Zionist state but a state created by Zionism, quite a different matter. The fate of Israel and Palestine will not be determined by Zionism, which implies an endless influx of Jews from foreign countries but by the two communities who are there and have a distinct identity.

Denying a unique Israeli identity is every bit as ignorant as denying a distinctive Palestinian identity which arose in tandem with the development of the Jewish state.

Now all that remains is the small matter of reconciling these two communities.