Charged with being anti-Semitic, critics of Israel commonly counter that it is not Jews they are attacking but Zionism. Yet for accused and accuser alike this is often as far as the debate goes. Clinging fast to their prejudices, they are apt to retreat into hostile silence. The result is that while Israel is seldom missing from news bulletins, the ideology that inspired it eludes proper examination. Rarely is it acknowledged in the West what a powerful force Zionism remains — that quite apart from being the abiding inspiration of the Jewish state, it has for some years played no small part in shaping US foreign policy.
Over the coming weeks the consequences of Zionism are likely to become more starkly evident than usual as some of its most uncompromising adherents, extremists among the Jewish settlers of Gaza, furiously resist the efforts of the Israel Defense Force to evict them from land which they are convinced they were biblically destined to inherit. As battle rages, there will be special reason to reflect on the tenacity of this fateful ethno-religious movement.
The taboo that bedevils discussion of Zionism has been a source of unease to the British literary academic Jacqueline Rose. In 2003, Rose gave a series of lectures on the subject at Princeton University — lectures which have now been published in Britain under the title, “The Question of Zion”. A Jew with an anguished conscience, Rose well knew that she was subjecting Zionism to critical appraisal in the midst of an institution much patronized by American Jews, a college of higher education where many are loath to accept that Israel is other than the innocent party in the Middle East conflict. Where, she was bluntly asked, was her critique of Arab nationalism, of Arab hostility toward Israel?
It was bold of Rose, a friend of the great champion of the Palestinian people, the late Edward Said, to anatomize Zionism in so unsympathetic a milieu. Nor did she fight shy of tackling thorny issues — such as why Israel so persistently (and so aggressively) denies its own capacity for aggression. At the outset, she recalls the staggeringly crass remark made by Prime Minister Golda Meir during the 1973 Yom Kippur War — that Israel was innocent of all blame for the military conflicts in which it got involved. Rose feels that it is a matter of urgent necessity to make sense of Zionist blindness, the blindness that extends from Israeli politicians to embattled settlers in the occupied territories who are eminently capable of inviting visitors to admire the landscape — even as they drive them along heavily fortified settler roads which have been built over Palestinian territory as part of a concerted Israeli effort to efface the very existence of the Palestinian people.
Believing that Zionism sprang from the legitimate desire of a victimized race for a homeland, Rose is nevertheless quick to acknowledge that Israel was founded on a historic act of injustice to the Palestinian people, and she confesses to being horrified by the violence that Israel has committed in the name of the Jewish people. The purpose of “The Question of Zion” is to uncover the roots of Israel’s pathology. A devotee of that characteristically Jewish field of inquiry, psychoanalysis, she believes that the path to salvation lies in self-knowledge. Her chief preoccupation is to clarify whether the brutality and urge to conquest that have marked Israel’s brief history were inherent in the Zionist project; or whether the story of Zionism might have been different — if only the warnings of wiser heads, of Jewish humanists like Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, had been heeded.
Rose points out that a neglected yet profoundly influential strand of Zionism positively thrives on catastrophe. Her book opens with an arresting discussion of the seventeenth century mystical messiah, Shabtai Zvi, whose self-appointed mission was to return the Jews to Palestine and who was apparently prepared to stop at nothing in his pursuit of this goal. One day in 1665, this sinister manic-depressive (who was to convert to Islam) smashed down the door of the Portuguese synagogue in Smyrna, preached a blasphemous sermon and arrogated to himself the right to apportion kingdoms to the men and women of his congregation. Investing the Ten Tribes of Israel with absolute unchallengeable might, he declared that “none are able to stand up against them”.
The relevance of all this to what is now happening in Gaza needs no underlining. In the talk of Jewish settlers who seem to relish danger and boast of being “invincible”, Jacqueline Rose hears distinct echoes of Zvi’s brand of extreme messianism. For such zealots, redemption is intimately bound up with “ruin and dread”; indeed, the more daily life wears the aspect of catastrophe, the closer to the biblical “end of days”, to the fulfillment of their religious destiny, they feel themselves to be. It follows that living on a knife edge is the inescapable condition of the true Zionist.
Yet if Rose is a critic of Zionism, she is also protective toward it. Abhorring the use of the term as an insult, she is vehement in her rejection of the view that there can be no middle ground when it comes to opinions about Zionism and the nation-state in which it has found political embodiment. Much of her argument is concerned with an alternative Israel, with the Zionist vision projected by Buber and others. For all their commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, such writers shrank from the tribal nationalism and exclusivity of Israel’s founding fathers, Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, maintaining that for Israel to make itself sovereign would be to blaspheme the very name of Zion.
What is too easily forgotten, Rose insists, is that Zionism evolved a critique from within, what she calls a “resonant counter-narrative”. Aghast at Israel’s actual evolution, she derives solace from imagining the Israel that might have been, a country of the mind that disavowed the ambition to be a “normal” nation and aspired to an altogether nobler destiny. Thus does Rose seek to redeem Zionism from the charge of being intrinsically pernicious.
Jacqueline Rose believes that there was a moment, in 1948, when Zionism’s better self might have prevailed — a moment that was tragically missed. Her final chapter poses plangent questions.
How did one of the world’s most persecuted peoples become systematic persecutors themselves? Why were thinkers like Buber reduced to such marginal significance? Why is it that the figure of the warrior, of Ariel Sharon, came to personify the Jewish state instead?
Mourning Israel’s moral downfall, she writes about the baleful legacy of the sense of shame implanted in Jews by the holocaust.
What her stylish meditation never directly confronts, however, is the question how far the agonies of the Jewish experience have been inseparable from the Judaic assumption of being the “chosen people”. If Zionism is a taboo subject, it has more than a little to do with the difficulty of addressing the inflammatory implications of this ancient claim.
