Judaism Without Zionism, Part One
I’ve been getting further into this. There’s actually a long history which narrows after the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel but may now revive, as the pillars of liberal Zionism crumble completely. My guide for the moment is Shaul Magid’s “The Necessity of Exile.” He self-identifies his point of view as “counter-Zionism,” though the book elaborates the whole panoply of Jewish anti-, non-, liberal, socialist, and post-Zionisms, emphasis plural.
Magid has an interesting background. He was not raised religious. He became a serious hippie, living off the grid in New Mexico, then embraced ultra-orthodox Hasidism, both in the U.S. and Israel. It’s not as odd a transition as you might think. Both were searches for a spiritual identity. Later he left Hasidism and became degreed and a scholar of Jewish studies and Hasidism in particular, currently at Dartmouth.
Some of Magid’s essays are published on the Tablet Magazine website. Tablet is capable of publishing absolutely outrageous crap, so credit to them for broad-mindedness.
The ultra-orthodox Jews both in the U.S. and Israel have never really embraced the idea of a Jewish state, though a minority is much more actively against Israel than the majority. (They used to do an annual, ritual burning of the Israeli flag in Brooklyn.) Those reconciled to a state still exert enormous leverage on matters of public policy. As you might expect, Magid is deeply versed in history of the Jewish religious response to Zionism, which before the Holocaust was usually hostile.
One interesting bit in Magid of particular relevance to the Left is the link between the BDS (Boycott-Divest-Sanction) campaign and the extremist Israeli settler movement. The latter is pretty much dominant in Israeli politics today and will be for the foreseeable future, with or without Netanyahu as head of state. I am not alluding to “horseshoe theory,” which I’ve always thought is annoying and stupid. (Maybe I was a little too close to one end of the horseshoe.)
On BDS, what we could call the strong form calls for a boycott of anything associated with Israel and the territories. The weak form would be restricting boycotts to association with the occupied West Bank. Under the strong form, there is no distinction between pre-1967 Israel (inside the “green line”) and the West Bank. Of course, the settlers uphold precisely the same lack of difference. In other words, the strong form of BDS accepts the occupation as normal and obviates consideration of any two-state solution. Similarly with the “from the river to the sea” slogan, also adopted explicitly these days by the Israeli right.
This prompts me to reconsider what I wrote about the two-state solution (‘TSS’). Of course it looks as unrealistic as ever, if not more so. The liberal Zionist notion, and mine, of shrinking the occupation incrementally (to the Israeli right, there is no “occupation”) presumably would depend on the cooperation of Palestinians, who have little reason for confidence in any such process. After all, uprooting the burgeoning Jewish settlements on the West Bank and now, rebuilding Gaza, would take decades.
The significance of the TSS is figurative, not concrete, and no less political for that. It proposes a strict concept of a national home for Palestinians, under the protection of their own state. That is much clearer than the gauzy idea of an evolving democratic secular state with equal rights for all, which is hard to visualize given the past hundred years.
Another topic of interest is the prospect of Israel establishing diplomatic relations with neighboring Arab governments. The implication of any such accord is to throw Palestine under the bus, as it were. Of course thanks to Trump and his crooked, idiot son-in-law Jared Kushner, this was advanced significantly. Biden is doing his part with this indulgence of King Bone-Saw of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Ben Salman (‘MBS,’ no relation).
The problem lurking inside any such reconciliation, any aspect of which looks good in isolation, is to further ghettoize Palestine politically. Insofar as Palestine is utterly abandoned, its inhabitants have nothing to lose and become more dangerous both to Israelis directly, to themselves, and to regional stability. Regional stability affects international stability. Regional stability is dodgy these days given the rising hostility to Iran. The latter is nothing to sneeze at, given its connections in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza. And it may or may not have nukes, and if not, it might be able to get them.
I reiterate my utter rejection of any “they had it coming” implication. No victim of October 7th deserved his or her fate. But the entire history of Israel and Zionism made this pressure cooker, and absent outside intervention by Israel’s chief sponsor, the U.S., the only thing it can do is explode.
I just noticed one of the #NeverTrump Republicans note that everything Trump touches, he ruins. Israel is one of those things.
There is much else of interest in the Magid essays. I’m about halfway through the book. Probably I’ll have more to say in a few days.