Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 04.12.2024
In the 19th century, most Jews opposed Zionism. The opposition to Zionism stemmed from different sources. Jewish liberals, committed to the idea of Jewish integration, thought that Zionism, by conceding to the permanence of anti-Semitism, would lead to more anti-Semitism. Orthodox Jews believed that Jews had been exiled in ancient times because of their sins and would return only with God’s will and in messianic times. They believed that taking action to return to Palestine en masse was nothing short of heresy. Another Jewish stream, the Autonomists, believed in the national and cultural specificity of Jews but thought that the solution to Jewish problems would be found within the places they lived by demanding cultural autonomy. Many promoted Yiddish (not Hebrew) as the Jewish national language. Many Jews thought that the division by nationality was highly inappropriate and joined socialist movements.
Zionism became a dominant movement among Jews after World War II and in the U.S. after the war of 1967 when Israel became conceived as a strategic asset for Western imperialism, particularly for the American imperialists.
The American Jewish writer Joshua Leifer writes:
“As a child, weekday mornings at my Jewish day school followed the same routine. We’d recite the pledge of allegiance, sing Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, and then recite the Shacharit, Judaism’s morning prayer service. Like a sizable, although perhaps now shrinking, segment of American Jews, I grew up in a traditional community where Israel was the geographic and spiritual center of the universe.
We were an outpost of Israel in New Jersey’s northwest Bergen county. Identification with the state of Israel was total, even if it was an Israel frozen in time, roughly the 1970s, the years of our Israeli teachers’ youth. We observed Israeli civil holidays with an ardor we never showed for their American equivalents. On Israel’s Independence Day, we marched in the town’s quiet, tree-lined streets. On Israel’s Memorial Day, the entire school assembled to sing maudlin songs mourning the handsome young soldiers who gave their lives for Israel – for us”.[i]
“We learned we needed Israel because only a Jewish state could protect the Jews after the Shoah. Our teachers, many of them survivors or their children, imparted to us the inhumanity of the camps and exalted the courage of resistance – the doomed rebellion of the Warsaw ghetto, the partisans camped in the Lithuanian forest. We were imbued with the sense that Israel constituted not only the Jewish people’s rebirth out of literal ashes but also exemplified the only reasonable response to the Holocaust’s most fundamental message: that the Jewish people must be prepared to fight if we are to survive.[ii]
“The Land of Israel, we were taught, was ours, and that meant we needed to defend it. As if to reinforce our sense of ownership, we learned to draw its outlines, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, almost with our eyes closed. Two states, negotiations, compromise – these were not part of the lexicon, let alone words like “occupation”, “siege” or “military rule”. I can hardly recall hearing the word “Palestinian” unaccompanied by the word “terrorist”[iii]
“Zionism as American Jews interpreted it, did not force them to choose between their Americanness and their Jewishness. Instead, it enabled them to fully embrace the former without relinquishing it. Observing the Sabbath required a certain separation from the American mainstream. Long-distance Zionism entailed no such sacrifice.”[iv]
“In the 1980s, having reached political maturity during the previous decade’s inward turn – away from civil rights, liberalism, and universalism – a new cohort of Jewish institutional leaders staked out a more hardline interpretation of what commitment to Israel meant. In the last years of the Cold War, neoconservative intellectuals merged support for Israeli territorial maximalism with militant anti-communism, synthesizing their version of Zionism with support for American militarism abroad. Establishment leaders often responded to those who objected to this worldview by casting them out of the communal tent”[v]
“With the near-simultaneous eruption of the second intifada and the “war on terror” after the September 11 attacks, differences over a potential Israeli territorial compromise diminished in significance as American Jewish organizational life rallied around fighting what was perceived to be a common enemy: Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden merged as two faces of an identical, fanatical Arab Other”.[vi]
“In 2008, Israel launched its Operation Cast Lead, a massive aerial bombardment and ground assault on Gaza. Faced with TV news broadcasts of injured children, collapsed houses, and entire families wiped out, I could not understand how the country I had been taught to love, which formed a part of my self-understanding, could have done something like this. Worse, no one around me seemed particularly disturbed. If anything, my community’s attitude was the reverse. Level the Gaza Strip, one friend’s father said. Turn it into a parking lotץ. Eventually, after years of conflict with family and family friends, late in my teenage years, and like many other young American Jews, I broke with the dogmatic, bellicose Zionism of my upbringing”[vii].
“Israel has become the enduring source of the most intense intercommunal conflict among American Jews. The emergence of youth-led protests against Jewish communal institutions’ support for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza has reconfigured American Jewish politics. Disillusionment and anger toward the Jewish establishment fueled the creation of new groups, such as IfNotNow, and revitalized older, existing groups, like Jewish Voice for Peace.”[viii]
Today, more than 1/3 of young American Jews are in the Pro-Palestinians movement, and this number is likely to grow. The Zionists in Israel are worried, and the Jerusalem Post writes:
“In the United States, a significant percentage of young Jews are sympathizing with Hamas. Some 37% aged 14-18 sympathize with an enemy actively working to murder as many Jews as possible and publicly vowing the destruction of Israel”[ix]
To fight Anti-Semitism, it is necessary to fight Zionism!
Down with the Zionist monster!
For Palestine, red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/15/american-jewish-zionism-activism
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Ibid
[iv] Ibid
[v] Ibid
[vi] Ibid
[vii] Ibid
[viii] Ibid
[ix] https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-831831