#History #timeline

Zionism

Key takeaways

content: "@braitermanZionism2009" -file:@braitermanZionism2009

Reading notes

• Zionism historically reflected and responded to all early twentieth century political currents

• Purpose of this is to examine Zionism in light of postmodernism and postcolonialism

• Zionism first focused upon ideas of political bodies in space and their collision under the impact of history

• Most forms of secular Zionism lacked that ideological passion identified by Scholem as the motor of messianism

• Zionism in the 19th century was framed largely around religion and turned traditional religious culture into a religion of emancipation from all camps in western and central Europe

• As the century progressed Zionism came to reject this explanation and attempted to find more self-reliant foundations- via politics

• Zionism rests ideological upon unstable claims of social identity

• First claim from Herzl is that jews are a nation (For Pinsker, Jews were not yet a nation but ought to be)

• Zionism was auto-emancipation

• Early Zionists saw Jews as distinct, racial groups

• By the 1920's this racialist Zionism fell out of favour

• Buber claimed that Jews represent no type at all

• This hybrid conceptualisation centred on mid-century thought

• Thought Buber never fully realised how the historically and geographically diffuse character of Jewish existence complicates matters of a 'Jewish people'

• The construct of a people does not stand upon prior substance as much as the emergence and articulation of the construct, in space, time, constitute its own reality

• Second Claim concerns culture, territorial contiguity, and democgraphic mass

• Zionism creates a platform for the foundation of what Arendt calls ''a space of apperance''

• Groups disappear without a valid public space

• Classical zionism was especially sensitive to the crisis in the Palkes of Settlement (place in imperial russia for jews)

• Zionism made the claim that religious and diaspora sapce is an insufficient basis upon which to secure identity

• BUBER AND Kaplan supported such a thought that expressed importance of cultural diffusion over conservative religious practice

• Three practical questions drove the Zionist movement

• Where to establish a Jewish homes?

• Before Palestine, Argentina and Uganda were also briefly considered in the 1900's

• How much territory does such a construct require?

• 1930's saw furious debates concerning claims to all or some of the Palestine region- including present day Jordan

• What type of political form should stamp this space?

• The Zionist congress at the 1942 Baltimore conference decided to support in Palestine the creation of a Jewish commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world

• Against this commonwealth there was once a consensus across the political spectrum

• Historically Jewish opposition to Zionism came from those who rejected modernity, to those who embraced it, to those who wanted to revolutionise it

• Prior to the holocaust the ultra-orthodox in eastern Europe rejected Zionism because they predicated any large scale return of Jews to the land of Israel upon the coming of the messiah

• They also opposed irreligious ethos that characterised Zionist culture

• Liberal Jews saw a threat to the bourgeois emancipation

• Zionism was also not modern enough for many middle-class intellectuals who had faith in a larger world culture

• Marxist Jews believed in revolution at home

• Zionism was thus described as; romantic, provincial, reactionary, anachronistic, and racist

• Zionism won a consensus after the 1967 six day war

• Gavison concedes that it is no longer possible to ignore larger normative questions regarding the right of Israel to maintain itself as a Jewish state

• Such normative questions at the turn of the century are determined by a set of philosophical conditions almost axiomatic in contemporary literature

• One can claim as a simple truism that there is nothing ''natural'' about Zionism

• In an attempt to consolidate Jewish life in Palestine, Zionism enacted two fundamental collisions; between Jews-Israelis and Arabs-Palestinians, and between the secular and the religious components of Jewish culture and Israeli identity

• Both are critical to current debates regarding Zionism and the 'question of Palestine'

• Zionism(s)

• Whilst postmodernism undermines the view that Zionism is a coherent whole, it also allows Zionism to elude the critical scrutiny that reduces it to a single impulse

• Zionism has no essence apart from perhaps one identified by Leibowitz as ''the endeavour to liberate Jews from being rules by Gentiles''

• Zionism thrived under the very unstable basis of these confrontational tensions- an ever shifting ground

• In the 1900's the major split was between two liberal formations- political and cultural Zionism

• After world war one, the major schism was between socialist parties and nationalist revisionists

• Religious zionists didn't become prominent untile the Israeli occupation of the west bank and Gaza after the six days war

• Contemporary Zionism sees schisms around occupation, security, and multicultural society

• Political Zionism

• All forms of political Zionism start with a critical diagnosis of the diaspora crystallised into the negative image of the ghetto Jew

• It was fuelled by a succession of systemic anti-Jewish exclusions and violence towards the end of the 19th century, antisemitism in Germany and Austria during the 1870's, pogroms of Russia from the 1880-1917, and Dreyfus affair in Frnace during the 1890's

• Zionism has always argued for the right of self-determination and the impossibility of securing that right for Jews in Europe

• Herzl saw modern anti-Semitism as a result of Jewish emancipation, as Jews came out of the ghetto and began competing with the middle classes

• Classical Zionism was anti-utopian and non-absolutist in its claims and expectations

• The image of the muscle Jew that enthralled Max Nordau was not so much a political program as na erotic posture

• The Zionism of Herzl and Nordau was too ascetic, and never political enough

• These images of thought left unthought the constitutional design of such a state and how majority-minority relations ought to be handled

• This classical Zionism operated hand in hand with colonial legacy, but came to a head in 1939 with the British white paper terminating Jewish migration of Palestine- seeing empire and Zionism butt heads for the first time

• Cultural Zionism was the first opposition party within the movement prior to world war one

• Proponents such as; Ahad Ha'am, Buber, and Weizmann emphasised the creation of Palestine from the bottom up, of a ''cultural centre'' based on Jewish religion and tradition into language, history, and values

• This form of Zionism took root in the re-establishing of Hebrew

• The frame of reference was liberal

• Sought to create modern Hebrew culture as universal culture

• Ahad Ha'am confronted the disconnect of dream and reality of life in Palestine

• Critiqued the first Aliyah settlements due to lack of experience, dependence, and contempt for local Arab population

• He saw two problems when looking at Jewish life in the diaspora; assimilation and fragmentation, and dangers posed by Ultra-Orthodox, ghetto Judaism

• The difference between political and cultural Zionism is too easily overstated

• Herzl imagined the new society to be established in Palestine to be a liberal polity which includes cultural Jewish expression

• At the same time cultural Zionism was politically slippery, Ahad Ha'am assumed that a Jewish spiritual centre would gradually evolve into a national one- not a state for the Jews but a genuine Jewish state- values that stood opposed to political Zionism

• Cultural Zionist conception of culture failed to anticipate the effects of cultural production and consumption

• Socialist Zionism

• Socialism was the ideology best suited for the emergence of Zionism as a revolutionary movement

• Herzl noted that the first wave of immigration, those required to do heavy labour were predominately socialist

• Jewish national home built through cooperatives not capitalism

• Immigrants that came to Palestine during the second and third Aliyot (1902-14, 1919-23) were founders of the kibbutzim, labour orgs (Histradut), and self-defence orgs (Hashomer, Haganah)

• Jewish nationalism and socialist internationalism became pronounced in the 1920's in relation to the conflict between Hebrew labour and Arab workers in Palestine

• Ber Borochov (1881-1917) focused on the material and economic conditions, relations of production, and the tensions of the infrastructure and superstructure that determined Jewish life

• Thought that settling on semi-agricultural land would proletarise the Jewish petit bourgeois and prepare them for class struggle

• Zionism was only used to benefit the ultimate goal of socialism

• Critics from the left claim that socialist Zionism is less concerned with class struggle and more so concerned with a national home for Jewish people

• It was the non-Marxist Aaron David Gordon (1856-1922) that most conveyed the early pioneering spirit in Jewish Palestine

• Associated with left-wing culture of; self-fulfilment, religion of labour, conquest of labour

• Argued for the mythical regenerative powers of nature and of physical labour

• Labour Zionism marked a revolution in Jewish life, a return from bifurcated life represented by diaspora Judaism and city life

• Gordon naively assumed cooperation of a common Jewish-Arav economic interest

• Religious Zionism

• Religious Zionism roots itself in passages in the bible and Talmud

• By embracing Zionism religious Jews defied pios deferral, replacing a passive orientation regarding Israel with an activist approach

• This activist approach characterised in right-wing settlement was first advanced by Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935)

• From the second Aliyah

• Redemption and holiness were central to Kook

• Zionism is an integral part of what kook called; cultivation, purging, and refining

• The national religious party organised after the cease fire in the 1950's was limited to some goals; monopolisation of the rabbinate by orthodox Judaism by securing control over personal status issues, restrictions on the sale of nonkosher food, prohibition of certain things on Shabbat, formation of local religious councils, military deferments, religious schools

• After 1967 the goals of religious Zionism pushed further than there four cubits of halakha

• Territory settlement

• Meir Kahane ''we came here to build a Jewish, not a western country''

• Yeshayahu Leibowitz occupied a fringe position on the left

• Feared the subordination of religion to a secular state, and opposed occupation of Palestinian territories

• Argued all states ought to be secular with no intrinsic purpose

• Follower of kant, purpose of religion was religion for its own sake

• Revisionist Zionism

• Right wing Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940)

• Approach was largely a rejection of religious speculation and militarist in character

• In 1925 he established the alliance of revisionist Zionists

• Emphasis on hierarchy and social uniformity as to slip into fascism

• Defined discipline as a fundamental law of monism, the mass ought to be under one leader

• Jabotinsky understood Arab opposition as a militant- unlike other Zionists

• Envisioned an Arab minority enjoying constitutional protections of full equal rights and cultural autonomy once a majority Jewish population was forced upon them

• Post-Zionism

• Right wing religious nationalism has set much of the agenda shaping Israeli society after 1967

• These tensions exist within the constitution, defining a 'Jewish state' under which all ought to be afforded 'protections and equality'

• Post-Zionism argues to allow for both, Israel must be restructured as a 'democratic state of all its citizens' at the expense of its formal, Jewish character

• Represents a minority with deep roots in Israeli academia

• Spearheaded by the works of the new historians

• Major theoretical contribution comes from introducing ant essentialism into discussions of Israeli and Jewish identity, embracing a Foucauldian thesis that subjectivity does not simply exist in isolation from historical process and systems of power

• Silberstein notes that discourse works on an othering binary in Jewish life

• In its critique, it falls short of understanding problems of anti-Semitism and reduces Zionism as a Israeli Palestinian conflict and thus reduces it to an almost exclusively colonial project

• Zionism in herzls 'altneuland' is post-Zionist; it is not a Jewish state, but a state of the Jews

• Though of course Herzl was a product of his time, still advocating for the transfer of private property to Jewish peoples

• Zionism no longer holds much of the power to influence and organise much of the Jewish population like it once did

• Palestine

• George Antonius ''there is no room for Jews in Palestine'' (1938) captured the pan-Arab nationalism that eventually splintered due to French and British mandates

• Right

• Jews are a people with a  right to constitute itself in its own national home= in the land of Israel

• Rights require more so of a need than anything else- Daniel Boyarin