The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  The focus in Shahak’s work was on Jewish life, but his message was universal: a cry against any and all fanatical religious or nationalist ideologies. It was also a call for the replacement of ethnocentrism by what he called normalisation, the adoption of a humanist approach to human beings. The final words of one of his most famous books, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, elegantly summarise his point of view:

  Therefore, the real test facing both Israeli and diaspora Jews is the test of their self-criticism which must include the critique of the Jewish past. The most important part of such a critique must be a detailed and honest confrontation of the Jewish attitude to non-Jews. This is what many Jews justly demand from non-Jews: to confront their own past and so become aware of the discrimination and persecutions inflicted on the Jews … Although the struggle against anti-Semitism (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.6

  In 1978 Boaz Evron, a leading journalist and pundit, listened to a monologue from an Israeli soldier serving in the occupation that transformed his intellectual views in such a way, as to turn him, like Shahak, into one of the pillars of anti-Zionist thought.

  Evron was born in Jerusalem, a second-generation Sabra, and hence belonged to a kind of local Zionist aristocracy. His life in Mandatory Palestine was very similar to that of Ghilan. Like him, he fought for the Stern Gang in the 1948 war and tended towards what was then called the Canaanite ideology.7

  The Canaanite movement was founded in the 1930s by a Ukrainian Jew by the name of Adolph Gurewitz, who soon found his first name a bit troublesome. As a student of classical and ancient history, he went in search of a biblical name (he chose ‘Adiya’) and a new identity. At first he was close to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement, but he wanted that movement to divorce itself totally from Judaism and to reinvent the Jewish community in Palestine as the new Hebrews or, in his words, the new Canaanites, so that the Palestinians, too, could identify with both the ‘return’ of the exiled Hebrews and the new-old identity offered to them. When Gurewitz arrived in Palestine in the 1930s, he worked with others in the Revisionist movement who shared his views. Most famous among them was the poet Uriel Halperin, who, like everyone else in this movement, soon changed his name to a Hebrew one, Yonatan Ratosh. The Canaanite platform proposed a joint Semitic state that would belong to both people on the land – an idea that has never succeeded in winning even one Palestinian to its ranks and was not very popular with the Jews in Israel either.

  In his youth, Boaz Evron was drawn to the Canaanites, which officially became a group in 1939, and it was from the Canaanite perspective that he developed his critical views on Zionism. But he also became a leading journalist and essayist for Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth, and from that key base he produced an impressive tract that would include most of the elements of the later internal Israeli critique of Zionism.

  According to Evron’s account of the soldier’s monologue, which sowed the seeds that grew into this tract, the soldier told of how he and his friends had entered a Palestinian school, locked about twenty eight-year-old boys in a classroom, threw gas grenades into the room, and held the doors closed, causing such panic that at least half the children jumped out of the windows, breaking their legs in the fall.8 The soldier characterised this action as a punishment for stone throwing by students from a nearby college, who were not caught.

  What attracted Evron’s attention was not so much the horrific story itself, which later appeared in a Kibbutz Movement publication under the title ‘A Tear-Gas Monologue’, but the fact that the soldier seemed to believe that telling the story absolved him and his friends from the deed. Similarly, soon after the June 1967 war a group of soldiers agreed to a series of interviews that were published as a book titled Conversations with Soldiers.9 Evron’s uneasiness turned into a review of liberal Zionism and its role in beautifying and hiding the horrors of Zionist colonisation and occupation since 1882.

  The participants in this book were, among others, Amos Oz, Avishai Grossman (a leading intellectual of the Kibbutz Movement), and one of Ehud Barak’s brothers. In the conversations included in the book, soldiers speak with one another, and the main theme is the necessity to kill in order to defend the homeland and to maintain one’s humanity and morality. Recently, it came to light that certain references to atrocities committed during the 1967 war were deleted by the military censor. The omitted pieces have not yet been published; the researcher who discovered them is awaiting permission but has stated that they describe war crimes committed by the soldiers who participated in the conversations.

  Listening to the soldiers strengthened Evron’s critique. In his 1988 book A National Reckoning, he questions whether the Zionist claim that the Jews were a territorial nation wishing to return to its homeland has any basis in fact or reality.10 He proposes instead that the Jewish state was a European project meant to solve the problems of the religious minority, the Jews, living within an anti-Jewish Europe. For most Europeans, emancipation of the Jews did not mean their integration on the Continent but permission for them to colonise Palestine and build their own Europe there.

  Like Shahak, Evron saw anti-Semitism both as the Christian refusal to accept the Jews as equal but also a response to the Jewish religious insistence on exclusivity and uniqueness. What the Zionists called the forced exile from Palestine by the Romans, ending in the ‘return to Zion’ in the late 1880s, was deemed by Evron to be a conscious Jewish wish not to be part of the society around them. Zionism, in his eyes, benefited from two developments in the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern and Central Europe. One was the continued wish of a large number of Jews to remain in their own separate communities and to insist on the uniqueness of the Jewish existence – a position that leftist and liberal forces in Europe did not accept because of their search for universalism and secularism. Plekhanov, for instance, construed the desire of the Bund, the non-Zionist Jewish socialist movement, to retain a Jewish identity within the global workers movement as unacceptable and called them ‘seasick Zionists’ – that is, Jews who remained in Europe only because they dreaded the trip across the Mediterranean to Palestine.11 The other development was the unwillingness of the Rightist and conservative forces in Europe to accept even the most secular and patriotic Jews as equal or legitimate members of society.

  Evron was the first Israeli to question the narrative of return. He did so not only because he saw no connection between the early Zionist settlers and the Jews who lived in Roman Palestine, but also, and mainly, because he felt that the myth of return was invented only after secular Jews had realised they would not be able to assimilate as equals into European society.12 Furthermore, he contended, because immigration as such was, from a modernised Jewish perspective, not a good enough solution, they looked for a more sublime reason to explain their failure and their need to leave Europe. Hence Palestine was invented as the ancient homeland, and the immigration described as return. Evron concluded this ‘heretical’ explanation by adding another, more mundane reason why the invention included the colonisation of Palestine: colonisation became possible because it meshed well with British imperial designs towards the Middle East.

  At the time of publication, Evron’s book and views were ignored. But while he was articulating this comprehensive challenge to Zionism’s most basic truism, another voice – far more powerful in its effect – began to be heard in the public arena.

  The voice of Yeshayahu Leibowitz was not so easily silenced as were the voices of previous doubters of Zionism in Israel. Leibowitz was a religious Jew who, although possessed of a physique that was the antithesis of the almost Aryan images of the Sabras and the new Jews of Israel, gained respect among many as if he were the bravest general returning triumphantly from the battlefield. Born in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, he showed signs of being a
chess prodigy but was prevented by his religious parents from choosing that as his career. Following the First World War, his family went to Berlin, away from the Russian revolution. In Berlin his career flourished, and by the time he emigrated to Palestine in 1935, he already held a PhD in chemistry and had engaged in considerable study of medicine. Leibowitz participated in the Zionist religious and political movements and served in the 1948 war in the Jerusalem area. He was a Renaissance man of vast knowledge, a man of major achievements and positions in disciplines ranging from the biological sciences to Jewish theology.13

  Leibowitz’s first doubts about the hegemony of Zionism were, as was true of other critics, aroused by a formative event. In his case, it was the Israeli operation in Qibya in 1953. This was an offensive retaliation for the killing of a mother and her two children by Palestinian infiltrators from Jordan. Despite Jordanian readiness to punish the culprits, the Israeli army attacked the village from which they believed the perpetrators came and, in the process, massacred sixty villagers, most of them women and children. Leibowitz wrote:

  We have to ask ourselves where this youth of ours emerged from – young people who had no mental inhibitions about committing this atrocity? What inner motivation for such acts could have been at work here? This youth is not a mob but the product of Zionist, humanist and social education.14

  His answer was that the state and Zionism had become more sacred than Jewish and humanist values: ‘If the security of the people and the homeland are sacrosanct, and if the sword is Zur Israel [one of God’s names in Judaism], then Qibya is possible and feasible.’15

  Leibowitz’s most famous references to Israeli conduct in the occupied territories were to call the settlers ‘Judeo-Nazis’ and the state the ‘Shabak State’.16 On many occasions in the 1970s and on into the 1980s, he argued that Israel could easily become a fascist, or even a Nazi state, and called on society to initiate civil war against such a scenario. Such remarks, along with his similarly uncompromising critique of Israel’s policies, lost him the maximally prestigious Israel Prize, which is regarded as the country’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize and is awarded, in a regal ceremony on Independence Day, to scholars and artists for a lifetime of achievement. When the committee of experts announced in 1993 that Leibowitz would be offered the Israel Prize, his opponents rushed to attack the decision on the basis of his past comments. In response, Leibowitz declined the award.

  Yitzhak Laor, a poet, writer and essayist for Haaretz – and one of the few Israeli intellectuals who has remained, since the beginning of his career, a firm critic of Zionism and of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians – has analysed well the relationship between the Zionist left and Leibowitz. While defining him as the ‘spiritual authoritative voice of the Israeli left’, Laor nonetheless wondered how a secular group of people, who usually detested any religious authority, were willing to accept his moral guidance. Perhaps this was due to his high national and international standing as a scientist that turned Leibowitz into a secular guru, or perhaps it was his directness and his journey from analysis to prognosis. From the time of the 1982 war in Lebanon, he had continually called for soldiers to refuse to serve in the occupied territories. According to Laor, what differentiated Leibowitz from the Zionist left was that his call for refusal was not merely a tactic in the struggle against occupation. Rather, it was a principled, pacifist point of view, which the Zionist left in fact condemned. ‘War belongs to the filthiest layer of human existence’, said Leibowitz. As Laor said, with such a view, Leibowitz challenged not only the occupation but also the sacred militarism of Israeli society.17

  He was, however, not an anti-Zionist, and his post-Zionist followers of the 1990s went much further than he did. Leibowitz refused to criticise pre-1967 Israel. In his eyes, it was the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that corrupted a legitimate ideological movement. His mantra remained the same with regard to the Arab–Israeli conflict: ‘What is important is that we do not rule over Gentiles and that Gentiles do not rule over us’.18 He predicted that ‘people like me would be put in concentration camp by the new political powers’.19 In this he was wrong. After his death, his fundamental acceptance of Zionism rehabilitated him, and a street in Jerusalem was named after him. None of the other thinkers mentioned in the present chapter have been honoured in this way. And yet he was so versatile and so powerful in his articulation of injustice that he was undoubtedly one of the major influences on the post-Zionist critique of the 1990s.

  Also within the Zionist frame, but nearly breaking out of it, is Uri Avnery. Born Helmut Ostermann in Germany in 1923, he was taken by his parents in 1933 to Palestine when the Nazis came to power. As a young man, he wandered ideologically between the Canaanite movement and the Revisionist movement until he found his way, during the 1948 war, into one of the Hagana’s élite units, Samson’s Foxes, which took an active part in the war’s ethnic cleansing of southern Palestine. A book he wrote while fighting, In the Fields of the Philistines – 1948, summarised his experience of the war and immediately became a best seller. Although meant as an anti-war document, it was not received as such.20 Avnery therefore wrote another, more explicit critique, The Other Side of the Coin, which was less successful but better reflected his disillusionment with the State of Israel’s policies towards the Arab world and the Palestinians.21

  Avnery was badly wounded in the war, and with the money he received for rehabilitation, he purchased a failed journal called HaOlam HaZeh (This World) and turned it into a subversive political publication. It was a yellowish paper in many ways – a lot of gossip and soft pornography decorated its pages – but it was also an important investigative publication that exposed corruption inside Israel and Israeli aggression outside its borders. Avnery was elected to the Knesset in 1965, and several times later on.

  Following the Six-Day War of 1967, his public profile rose – fame that in 1975 nearly got him assassinated. Soon after the war, he became one of the leaders of the anti-occupation movement and of a group of intellectuals and activists who sought direct dialogue with the PLO (he went to Beirut in 1982 to meet Yasser Arafat while that city was under Israeli siege). In 1975 he co-founded the Israeli Council for Israeli–Palestinian Peace, which was in many ways the first significant mechanism that enabled mainstream Israeli politicians to meet clandestinely with the PLO in an attempt to find a solution. Since 1992, Avnery has been active in the peace group Gush Shalom, which he founded; the group has attempted, unsuccessfully so far, to create a similar dialogue with Hamas and has been urging a worldwide boycott of products exported from Jewish settlements in the West Bank.22

  Like Leibowitz, Avnery did not represent an anti-Zionist point of view, and saw the 1967 war as the source of evil in Israel. But his exposures of pre-1967 oppressive policies towards the Palestinians in Israel and the aggression towards the Arab world were an important source in the 1990s for academics who were prepared to embark on a more fundamental challenge of the Zionist narrative or the idea of Israel.

  Other activists, such as Akiva Orr, Michel Warschawski, Ilan Halevi, and Uri Davis, stood outside, and clashed directly with, Zionism. Each of them had an epiphany, so to speak, triggered by an event that changed their perspective on the Zionist reality in Israel. In fact, there are so many others of whom the same can be said that I cannot mention them all in this chapter. Most seemed to follow a similar trajectory, in which a formative, sobering event exposed Zionism as colonialism, Israel as an apartheid state, and the United States as an imperialist nation.23 For the benefit of future historians, there is now a ‘dissident archive’, thanks to the psychotherapist Avigail Abarbanel, who recently induced a large number of Jews and Israelis to describe their experiences.24

  The late Akiva Orr was born in Berlin in 1931 and emigrated with his family to Palestine as a toddler. As did many teenagers at the time, he joined the Hagana in 1945 and served in the Israeli navy in 1948 (as a youth, he was a local champion in competitive swimming). Later he served
in the commercial national fleet, where he witnessed a sailors’ strike being brutally broken by the police, with the tacit support of the Labour-led trade union, the Histadrut. While completing his studies in the sciences, he became active in several political groups on the anti-Zionist left.25 In 1964 he left Israel and moved to London, where he became an important member of the Palestine solidarity movement and also participated in British socialist groups. He published extensively in the Black Dwarf, a newspaper edited in the 1960s by Tariq Ali, and joined the London-based organisation Solidarity, founded by the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. In the 1990s he returned to Israel, where he stayed until his death in early 2013.

  Although Orr published extensively on democracy, socialism and politics, one of his early publications – Peace, Peace and There Is No Peace, written with his colleague Moshe Machover and published in 1961 – reads as though it were written in the 1990s by a post-Zionist. Machover was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 and was a lecturer in mathematics when Akiva Orr arrived at the Hebrew University as a student. Peace, Peace is five hundred pages long and includes chapters on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 as well on the atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It was the first structured analysis in Hebrew of Zionism as a colonialist movement, and the first to suggest that the struggle for peace in Israel and Palestine must be anti-colonialist.