Justice for Palestinians Is the Path to Redeem Zionism and Secure Israel’s Future

By Allan C. Brownfeld

Increasingly, thoughtful Jewish observers are coming to the conclusion that justice for Palestinians and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state is the path not only to redeem Zionism, as they see it, but to secure Israel’s own future. Perhaps ironically, it is early critics within the Zionist movement itself who may point the way to such a resolution of the present dilemma.

In a thoughtful new book, The Question of Zion (Princeton University Press), Jacqueline Rose, professor of English at Queen Mary University in London, examines the history of Zionism, which she sees as a movement searching for a persecuted and homeless Jewish people. In the process, however, it trampled the rights of the Arabs in Palestine.

“I came to this topic having been preoccupied for many years as a Jewish woman with Israel-Palestine,” Dr. Rose explains. “Having felt, most simply, repeatedly appalled at what the Israeli nation perpetrated in my name…I believe the creation of Israel in l948 led to a historic injustice against the Palestinians still awaiting redress. But at the same time, I have always felt that a simple dismissal of Zionism—as insult or dirty word—was a mistake. If something is wrong, there will be a reason for it. If it is deeply wrong, then our understanding of it will have to dig deep, for us on journeys we may not wish to take. Zionism was a vision long before it took on the mantle and often cruel powers of the modern nation-state…Zionism holds the key to the tragedy daily unfolding daily for both peoples in Israel-Palestine.”

Analyzing the messianic fervor of Zionism, she argues that it colors Israel’s most profound self-image to this day. The notion that God gave all of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people in perpetuity fuels the settler movement, as well as the Christian fundamentalists who embrace the same vision, albeit as a means to a different end.

Messianism, however, is a minority view in contemporary Israel and among the majority of the world’s Jews—as well as historically. “Up to l492,” writes Rose, “the messianic strand of Judaism had waned, but after the expulsion, the exiles from Spain responded with a wave of apocalyptic agitation, messianic birth pangs that would eventually reach their apotheosis in the life and movement of Shabtai Zvi…Born of catastrophe, it promises more. ‘Jewish messianism is in its origins and by its nature,’ writes Gershom Scholem, ‘a theory of catastrophe…This cannot be sufficiently emphasized.’ Messianic redemption is therefore a form of historic revenge. To put it crudely, it is a way of settling scores. The violence of a cruel history repeats itself as its own cure.”

Messianism is a minority view in contemporary Israel and among the majority of the world’s Jews.

In a sense, the Palestinians are simply the innocent victims of history, as Jewish nationalists sought to redress their grievances against Russian pogroms and the Nazi Holocaust by recreating a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. “One of the tragedies of this conflict,” Rose notes, “is that the Palestinians have become the inadvertent objects of a struggle that, while grounded in the possession of theland, at another level has nothing to do with them at all. A struggle that makes of them the symbolic substitutes, stand-ins, ‘fall guys,’ we could almost say, for something no longer spoken out loud, something quite else. In the context of Zionism, once the equation was set, once suffering had become degradation, any ethical sensitivity toward the indigenous people was viewed with abject horror, a form of self-indicting passivity…the Jews once again enslaved to fear. The Diaspora Jew is a wretch. To redeem him, or rather have done with him, the usage of force in Palestine becomes a gift.”

There is, Rose points out, “another strand of Zionism to be found in writers like Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Hans Kohn and Ahad Ha’am that provides the profoundest analysis” of the dangers inherent in messianic Zionism. She declares that, “The classic and famous Zionist claim—Palestine was a land without a people—was not just a blatant lie but a cover…It is for me one of the strengths of Zionism—one of the reasons why it should not be dismissed, even or especially by its critics—that it could have produced this dissenting analysis from within…all these writers witnessed in their lifetime the triumph of the Jewish nation that none of them could have confidently predicted, but the shape it assumed before their eyes made this a cause less for elation than for lament.”

Zionism—nation-building—was the ultimate form of “assimilation,” in the eyes of these internal critics, an effort to eliminate the notion that Jews were meant to be “a light unto the nations.” According to Arendt, “The Zionists were the only ones who sincerely wanted assimilation, namely normalization of the people (‘to be a people like all other peoples’).” Buber wrote in l939 that, “Of all the many kinds of assimilation in the course of our history, this nationalist assimilation is the most terrifying, the most dangerous.”

Objecting to Injustice

“Most simply,” writes Rose, “Buber is objecting to the injustice being perpetrated against the Arabs: ‘what nation will allow itself to be demoted from the position of majority to that of minority without a fight?’…Buber is warning that the outward injustice toward the Arabs not only harms them but will also have damaging consequences inside the new nation…Not only will the nation be the object of attack (‘what nation will allow itself to be demoted without a fight?’), but, by the mere fact of becoming a normal nation, it will corrupt its inner life and will not survive.”

Historian Hans Kohn, one of Buber’s closest disciples and friends, had been a devoted Zionist since l909. Explaining his decision to resign from the Zionist organization after the Arab riots of l929, he wrote: “Such events are eye-openers and call for decisions, the urgency of which we fail to appreciate in ‘normal times.’” For Kohn, normality veils the truth, and served to hide the incipient violence of the burgeoning state. “We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August. Since they have no armies, they could not obey the rules of war. We are obliged to look at the deeper causes of this revolt,” such as the fact that Zionists had not “even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous peoples.”

Jewish nationalism’s major internal critic was the writer Ahad Ha’am, dating from his first visit to Palestine in 1891. “What I have seen,” he wrote in his article “The Truth From Palestine,” is the “concrete truth…of which I wish to reveal a bit—the ugliest bit.” He was the first Jewish nationalist to recognize the darker side of the relationship between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. How, he asked, in a sharply critical review of Theodor Herzl’s book Altneuland, could the New Society obtain sufficient land for Jews from all over the world if the arable land that previously belonged to the Arabs remained in their hands as before?

“We Are Accustomed to Believe…”

Each paragraph of “The Truth From Palestine” begins with the phrase “We are accustomed to believe”; for instance, “that Palestine is empty, whereas in fact arable land is at a premium and there is very little left.” In 1913 Ha’am answered a letter from Hebrew writer Moshe Smilansky on the settlers’ treatment of the Arabs, specifically on the boycott of Arab labor: “If it is so now, what will be our relations to the others if in truth we shall achieve ‘at the end of time’ power in Eretz Israel? If this be the ‘Messiah,’ I do not wish to see his coming.”

From the beginning, Rose points out, there were Zionists who spoke openly of the need to remove the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. “In fact, Chaim Weizmann had been one of the strongest advocates of the transfer of the Arabs as a way of securing the Jewish identity of the state,” she writes.

States Rabbi Shlomo Aviner of Gush Emunim: ”From the point of view of mankind’s humanistic morality, we were in the wrong in (taking the land) from the Canaanites. There is only one catch. The command of God ordered us to be the people of the Land of Israel.”

In her book Rose recounts her interview with West Bank settlers Aaron and Tamara Deutsch, who insisted that Israel is the land God promised to the Jews. “We wanted to join our people and our destiny, our history and our nation,” the couple explained.

If such messianic views prevail, Rose believes, there is little hope for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. She urges instead that Israeli society end its vision of history as divinely sanctioned and re-enter the slow accommodation of political time.

She cites Martin Buber’s declaration: “If one has the intention of driving people who are bound to the soil out of their homeland,” then the limits of the permissible have been breached. “I shall never agree that in this matter it is possible to justify injustice by pleading values or destinies…If there is a power of righteousness that punishes evil-doing, it will intervene here and react…The day will yet come when the victorious march of which our people is so proud today, will seem to us like a cruel detour.”

“Zionism is more than one thing,” concludes Rose. “But in the ascendant today is a vision of the Jewish nation that is, I believe—precisely because it has, as it so fervently desired, made itself master of its own destiny—in danger of destroying itself.”

That many Jewish voices are calling for a return to an older humane Jewish tradition—echoing the many internal critics of Zionism such as Ahad Ha’am and Martin Buber—is a hopeful sign. To transform the debate from a messianic commitment to realize a narrow version of God’s will into a discussion of justice for the very real men and women involved would be a dramatic step forward.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.