Zionists Out of the Peace Movement

This post draws heavily on material published in some of my earlier posts.

In an otherwise well-written and informative article, "In Israel, religious extremism is pervasive, unchecked", Kathryn Shihadah repeats one of those deceptive, hoary myths about Israel that never seem to die. A little more than a third of the way into the article she asserts, "Israel's founders were secular".

It is true that many figures such as David Ben-Gurion, widely regarded as "the father of modern Israel", may not have been conventionally religious nevertheless Jewish identity is built upon a religious foundation. In Ben-Gurion's memoir, Recollections (London: Macdonald Unit 75, 1970), he acknowledged this: "Everything we are as Jews ... comes directly from the Bible. In size we are nothing as a people and never have been. Had we not been children of the Book, who would have heard of us?" (p. 16). Elsewhere in the book he asserts:

As to the Jews, I can only point to our Bible and to its sequence in the many Jewish initiatives to regain Israel stretching across the centuries since Masada and say: This is our Mandate. Come see for yourselves.

Since I invoke Torah so often, let me state that I don't personally believe in the God it postulates. I mean that I cannot 'turn to God', or pray to a super-human Almighty Being living up in the sky ...

Yet, though my philosophy is secular, I believe profoundly in the God of Jeremiah and Elijah. Indeed, I consider it part of the Jewish heritage and the Jewish obligation to hold to this concept of God ...

Certainly in Israel today we are Messianic. The Jews feel themselves to have a mission here; they have a sense of mission. Restoration of sovereignty is tied to a concept of redemption. This had determined Jewish survival and it is the core of Jewish religious, moral and national consciousness. It explains the immigration to Israel of hundreds of thousands of Jews who never heard of Zionist doctrine but who, nevertheless, were moved to leave the lands wherein they dwelt to contribute with their own effort to the revival of the Hebrew nation in its historic home. (pp. 120-122)

Ben-Gurion's remarks above echo his 1936 testimony to the British Peel Commission: "The Bible is our mandate.''

On a more personal note in Recollections he wrote: "for many of us, anti-Semitic feeling had little to do with our dedication [to Zionism]. I personally never suffered anti-Semitic persecution ... We emigrated not for negative reasons of escape but for the positive purpose of rebuilding a homeland ..." (p. 36). The idea of Palestine as the Jewish homeland to be rebuilt is, again, a foundational Judaic religious idea.

Ben-Gurion's position is no aberration. Theodor Herzl also successfully cultivated rabbinical support that continued to bear fruit decades later. In his Zionist manifesto, The Jewish State, he had a definite, positive role for rabbis—"on whom we especially call"—and synagogue in the movement. Herzl argued that Jews "feel our historic affinity only through the faith of our fathers" and the Jewish "Faith unites us."

The influential Moses Hess, in "Rome and Jerusalem," wrote of the Zionist movement: We will "draw our inspiration from the deep well of Judaism". A 2001 scholarly biography of Hess features a chapter on "Hess's 'Return' to Judaism and Narrative Identity". A recent article in Modern Judaism - A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience refers to Hess as "a Prophet of Spiritual Zionism" (see also the epigraph to this blog quoting Hess).

To turn to a more contemporary source, in Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, the late Israel Shahak writes:

The ideological defence of Israeli policies are usually based on Jewish religious beliefs or, in the case of secular Jews, on the "historical rights" of the Jews which derive from those beliefs and retain the dogmatic character of religious faith.

... close analysis of Israeli grand strategies and actual principles of foreign policy, as they are expressed in Hebrew, makes it clear that it is "Jewish ideology," more than any other factor, which determines actual Israeli policies. The disregard of Judaism as it really is and of "Jewish ideology" makes those policies incomprehensible to foreign observers who usually know nothing about Judaism except crude apologetics.

The existence of an important component of Israeli policy, which is based on "Jewish ideology," makes its analysis politically imperative. This ideology is, in turn based on the attitudes of historic Judaism to non-Jews, ... Those attitudes necessarily influence many Jews, consciously or unconsciously. Our task here is to discuss historic Judaism in real terms.

Although the struggle against antisemitism (and of all other forms of racism) should never cease, the struggle against Jewish chauvinism and exclusivism, which must include a critique of classical Judaism, is now of equal or greater importance.

To successfully challenge Zionism we must have an accurate understanding of it and part of that includes dispensing with the myths of Israel's secular founding and secular Zionism.

Labels: David Ben-Gurion, Israel, Judaism, Zionism