Separating the meaning of Jewish identity and learning, distinct from the Israeli state and its underlying doctrine, is worthwhile work.
It’s also urgent work, overdue. This is a maniacal, genocidal post from Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir:
For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!
Repulsion from Israel’s actions naturally affects how Jews are seen in the world, how we walk among others in the world – and ironically, for Zionists, validates their conception of the gentile world as forever hostile of Jews.
The existence of the State of Israel, the merger of Judaism with Jewish nationalism, has unavoidably changed what being a Jew is.
Zionist theoretician Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 of the way that the Jewish state would have to be constructed, that “it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.”
Colonization would have to continue “only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”
When Jabotinsky wrote this, Jews were immigrating to Palestine under British protection to fulfill the League of Nations Mandate promise of a yet-to-be defined “Jewish homeland” there.
Population “transfer” to create a Jewish majority state was envisioned by Zionist leadership, from founder Theodor Herzl onwards.
The UN Palestine partition plan of 1947 and resulting civil conflict provided the opportunity for Jewish militias and then the Israeli army to target and empty communities – to become sites for Jewish settlements with Hebrew names.
Israeli statehood on May 14, 1948 was accomplished by dispossession of most of the Arabs of Palestine – the expulsion of 750,000 Arabs from what would become Israel. This is called the Nakba (catastrophe) in Arabic.
Those Palestinians remain exiled despite a pledge from Israel to the United Nations in 1949 to accept returning refugees, as part of their admission as a member state.
The “restoration” of our sovereignty inflicted a catastrophe on Palestinians which will be part of Jewish history forever.
The creation of the State of Israel is presented as necessary Jewish self-assertion.
In September 1948, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban wrote that in a “just world” consultation and agreement would have been preferred. “But the world is more realistic than just. The doctrine of ‘accomplished fact’ has been entirely vindicated against that of ‘prior consent.’”
That doctrine forces for Jews a necessity of either identifying with Israel, or maintaining the identity of “Jewish/not Zionist,” an awkward thing to maintain while well-provisioned Jewish organizations present Zionism as Judaism.
That doctrine also destroyed Jewish communities across the Middle East and north Africa, and as far as India. Exercising naked power to force Arabs from their homes to privilege Jews in Palestine poisoned the place of Jews who lived for many centuries as citizens in neighboring societies.
Thinking of the vulnerability and degradation of Jews in the past, I struggle to reconcile those moments with this moment of Jews as a menace – and Jewish nationalism as a personal imprisonment.
The Zionist movement which descended on Palestine to “ingather the exiles” is now a state dedicated to a philosophy of Jewish redemption by violence, “an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority,” as described by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others in a 1948 letter to the New York Times, of the faction that is now in control of Israel’s psyche.
Israel operates with a logic in which opponents to the Jewish state intend a Holocaust – mindless, causeless enemies as in the Passover or Purim or Hanukkah stories.
While most Jews in the diaspora live in accommodation and cooperation with gentile co-nationals, Israel has sacralized and militarized the “they always turn on us” belief.
We live in two models of Jewishness – the Jew living in civil cooperation with gentiles, and the militant Jewish supremacist in Palestine.
The contradiction of those two models of Jewishness makes us a problem to ourselves and others, with no clarity.
Complicating this is our belief in the grandeur of our own culture and learning.
As a child, I was buoyed by stories of Jewish learning and achievement – unlikely persistence through the ages – uniqueness.
I felt I was one of a fine, special group.
I also absorbed the other, paired, narrative of Jewish history. In the ritual reading of the Haggadah text each Pesach, I was reminded that we were enslaved in Egypt, and that in every generation They rise up to destroy us. And we survive, achieve, and show our high quality.
The theme of Jewish life is that we were chosen for a great mission, and have been persecuted since.
In these narratives, living a Jewish life is fulfilling the endowment of Torah and generations of scholarship, earnest and humane – targeted by malice, of jealousy from peoples less… fortunate? Not Jewish.
It may be that feelings Jews have about gentiles are as problematic as prejudices gentiles have against Jews. We suffer from not only how gentiles may see us, but limitations on how we see non-Jews.
Mitch Abidor, in the magazine Jewish Currents, describes a passage in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint about a non-Jewish girl who tosses a flaming baton and catches it, and its significance to the “nice Jewish boys in the stands”:
Portnoy observes that “there was still a certain comic detachment exhibited on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.”
Legendary Forverts newspaper editor Abraham Cahan wrote in his novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, of Talmudic education (an experience Cahan had shared with his character during his youth in Lithuania). The process of extended reasoning and disputation in religious study seemed the acme of human ratiocination:
“Can you fathom the sea? Neither can you fathom the depths of the Talmud,” as we would put it. We were sure that the highest mathematics taught in the Gentile universities were child’s play as compared to the Talmud.
This feeling of higher thought as a specifically Jewish achievement is useful to surface in discussion of how we see our not-Jewish fellows.
Torah study may be mostly a treasure of the observant now, but the habits and outlook of study and productive disputation persist. Might the assumption of superlative Jewish quality also?
To accept the World-Against-the-Jew construct, one must accept the idea that there is a unique quality to Jews.
Our religion revolves around identity, descent from tribes in a substantive relationship with the true God. When we pray, we are praying to a god that particularly cares that we are Jews doing the praying.
The central prayer of Judaism is the Shema:
Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.
The Yiddish phrase pintele yid, Jewish spark or kernel, expresses the belief that there is an irreducible, distinct core of Jewishness that is in a born Jew, observant or secular or ignorant.
The story told about converts is that their nefesh (soul, spirit) was there at Sinai to hear Moses tell God’s covenant with his people.
This resolves Judaism as an embrace of Torah – fudges the membership story, in truth.
Is “Jew” a coherent national category, as we include Indians, Ethiopians, Yemenis, Poles and Romanians?
When devotion to Torah is the center of this identity, it does not require ruling from imagined supremacy.
The poison brewed when mixed with a colonial enterprise designed at a time Britain could design a plan “natives” had to accept.
The Israeli government recognizes Israeli citizenship for Jews, Arabs, and others, but then records the “nationality” of the citizen separately, so that I, an American citizen, in their system share the same “nationality” – “Jewish” – as an Israeli Jew.
Ultimately the identity is based on magic, superstition, folkways, and spiritual truth. Am I required to believe in the existence of “The Jewish Nation” as the term is meant in the Zionist state?
The Zionist proposition for the world’s relationship with Jews is, “Love us, love our land.” This is articulated in their claim, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
In 1906, Jewish educator Solomon Schechter said that he feared assimilation of Jews, loss of identity, “even more than pogroms.” He wrote that in the Jewish “exile,” the Zionist project could form “the great bulwark against assimilation… an opposing force.”
As we Jews “fight for our existence,” is it because diminishment of our self-held special place in the world feels like death?
American Jewish organizations promote connection with the State of Israel to nurture Jewish identity of the young.
Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or – even – silly, annoying, not so significant.
A popular 1970s Israeli song had the refrain, “The Whole World is Against Us.” It concluded,
The whole world is against us…
This song was taught to us
By our old fathers,
And we too shall sing it,
And after us — the sons.
And great-grandchildren of great-grandchildren will sing
Here in the Land of Israel,
And anyone who is against us
Can go to hell!
The whole world is against us…
It’s not clear how we wish to be regarded.
At the Enlightenment and revolutionary emancipation of Jews, converting from toleration to equal citizenship, there was a loss of community autonomy, statutory difference – the loss of definition as members of a nation within the nation.
Even stigmatized, community autonomy had its advantages. Jewish communities had their own recognized governance, internal taxation, regulation of their own personal affairs and laws, courts.
That concept of modern citizenship as individual equality conflicts with Jews residing as their own self-governing polity with representatives to the larger society, as was often the practice. This is sacrificed with equal citizenship, where all live under the same law.
Max Nordau, speaking to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, made interesting comments that when Jews lived isolated in ghettos they had society of their own. He says that while Emancipation had its intoxication, it left Jews in Western Europe in “misery” because they could not thrive as Jews among Jews.
Acceptance becomes a stressor; the more we become like our fellow nationals, the more desperate to maintain a difference.
By the logic of Nordau, the most salutary circumstance for Jewish happiness is isolation from the larger society – or living as the majority the Jewish state achieved in 1948.
UK Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in a 2016 address on antisemitism, presents the existence of Israel as a Jewish human right. “Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else.” (Emphasis added.)
Now, we’ve acquired the belief we’re only meant to be happy if we rule our own “Jewish” land? Or only be safe if we do? The rationale toggles between the two, that Israel represents Jewish safety or Jewish fulfillment.
Jewish history treasures – curates – narratives of persecution. The meaning of that must be considered. If we have grievance, contempt, or pity for those outside our circle, are we healthy?
For me, there has been not just a feeling of kinship but a higher expectation of Jews, expecting less of gentiles as a rule. Prejudice absorbed growing up is painful to examine.
The origin story of our people – chosen by God to a special mission of glorifying Him and his laws – may instill confidence, a sense of identity, but I think is “worth another think” as a problem when, as Peter Beinart points out, it is empowered as a state.
He writes, “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.”
Beinart’s comment suggests that many Jews now have Zionism as their faith – and faiths are based on taking certain premises as fact. It may be a creator of a particular sort, or in this case a belief in the Jewish people as a reconstituted modern nation-state. In any case, faiths can’t be debated.
Beinart, religiously observant and well-grounded in Jewish study, called his book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” and gave it the subtitle, “A Reckoning.” The necessary reckoning he forecasts for Jews I think will be ugly and with false starts and detours, and will necessitate re-evaluations of how we prejudge gentiles.
We number perhaps 16 million world-wide, and we Jews are at the pivot point of the USA’s wars on Iran, Iraq, and all sorts of involvement in bolstering Israel’s impunity in its neighborhood. Things at pivot points can get caught and mangled.
Dr. Michael A. Meyer wrote of American Jews, “For them the state is the flagship of the people to which they belong. Their Jewish identity is as much ethnic as religious, and their religious expression of that identity as much as affirmation of their peoplehood and the importance they attribute to preserving it…”
Polling shows this identification with Israel is less true than when written in 1994.
The American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization founded in 1943, is reviving the struggle within the Jewish community for Jewish life “free from the Zionist idea of Judaism as a nationality or the elevation of one nation above others. …grounded in justice, solidarity, and humility.”
We maybe are preserving ourselves without attention to what we become. An organized project to dispossess Arabs from their homes leaves us as what sort of people, declaring populations “human animals,” and promising a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48”?
Israel is now again attempting a land grab of south Lebanon, methodically blowing up evacuated villages so that Lebanese have no homes to return to.
Israel has no declared borders, only armistice lines after various wars since 1948. It has claimed and settled part of Syria, and in a defacto manner acquired all of mandate Palestine, settled it with Jews, but without recognizing citizenship of non-Jews living there. Gaza, populated in majority by refugees from the 1948 Nakba, it tried to settle, and strangled it at the best of times.
Israel has, since 1948, and especially since the 1967 occupation, arbitrarily detained one million Palestinians, and subjected them to routine beatings, humiliation, and abuse, reaching new depths since Oct. 7, 2023.
This abuse is enabled by indifference to the humanity of a classification of people – in this case non-Jews.
Having known abuse from both pogromists and cruel soldiers, we – we? – unleash them on Arab civilians.
Israel is a significant producer in the international arms trade, especially in mechanisms of surveillance and control of civilian populations.
One thing is taboo: anything other than seeing innocence in the actions of Jews in the world.
Cruelty, persecution, crimes against humanity are in a blind spot when it’s “our own people” as perpetrators. Exceptions to a virtuous rule.
There is anger at Israel’s blockade, bombing, and occupation of Gaza, and West Bank state terrorism, and the reaction of Israel defenders is often that the charged offenses match historic antisemitic canards — thus are invalid.
The problem with enumerating the package of common antisemitic slurs is that they always seem to create a kind of immunity: If something has been falsely charged of Jews, one needn’t avoid the crime charged?
Is it a matter of seeing ourselves as others see us? Is it a matter of the struggle for some objectivity? Is every ethnic/tribal identity a devaluing of those outside it?
For me to see the Jewish story with objectivity is as impractical as performing a non-trivial surgical operation on myself.
Do I touch on something unmentionable, “feed antisemitism,” by separating our human value from our outsize mythologizing?
I defend myself: It cannot be betrayal to think of Hillel’s teaching, the universal “What is hateful to you, do not do to another,” with an eye to truths we thought established in the Nuremberg trials, not to mention learned from the object lesson of the Nuremberg rallies.
Zionist Israel is Chelm. The legendary town of Chelm (not the real Polish city) in Yiddish stories is inhabited by remarkably foolish people who begin from foolish premises and build on them to ridiculous solutions.
The first stupid premise — that “Israel” can be taken from “Palestine” — is compounded by more and more technological excellence in killing and surveillance.
For believers that the Jewish story must include a modern nation-state in Palestine, it’s a certainty that I am “betraying my people” by writing out these thoughts. Or, naive to the innate antisemitism of the world.
In the Passover ritual meal, the “wicked son” asks, “What does this mean to you?” By not asking what the Exodus story means to “us” he separates himself from The Jewish People, showing his wickedness.
I think the only irredeemable sin, among Jews, is faithlessness to “Our People” – aligning with gentiles. As a comment posted on a Zionist website stated, “True Jewish morality begins with loyalty to our own people.”
If all Jews compose a Jewish nation in a literal rather than spiritual, figurative sense, the weight of treason comes into play for faithlessness.
Danish expatriate Israeli Jonathan Ofir wrote in an online essay titled “I Am Freed from Zionism,”
It’s hard to define the line where people sense you’re not loyal. But it is a kind of social control with cult characteristics. It’s like people have the understanding that you’ve gone too far and now you’re not with ‘us’ but against ‘us’.
Ofir’s provocative suggestion that Zionism is cultish makes me ask if there is some vulnerability that Zionism exploits in Jewish hyper-fixation on identity. Are we prone to the cultish division of the world into members and outsider “enemies” that installs an inner policeman to monitor for betrayal?
Certainly there is the cult characteristic of devaluing views from outside of the cult as worthless, ill-intentioned.
Intrinsic to Zionist belief is that Jews are historically vulnerable and non-Jews are unreliable, and that Israeli security is achieved by “realism” – relying on military superiority, “teaching” non-Jews lessons by massive retaliation and iron control.
Zionism began as a secular movement. The secular seamlessly slid to the sanctified, as the words of the Zionist anthem “Hatikvah,” with no mention of the deity, evoke the “Jewish soul,” necessarily implicating a God that made Jewish souls.
Considered with a step back, it has impressive gravity, being a selected people of God. Add the patina of antiquity and who can match the distinction?
When arms and sovereignty are grafted to this identity, we have Jewish identity transmogrified to something new – Jewish religious-nationalist power.
With Jews’ role of noble victim is the gentiles’ role of ignoble victimizers. In practice, we may view non-Jews as defective, lacking, having morally-vacant animality.
There is a witticism of uncertain origin, “Jews are like everyone else, only moreso.” I’d leave off the last part, and just say we’re human, with all the human prides and failings.
We are people; people do evil.
Israeli-born genocide scholar Omer Bartov has concluded that Zionism “became the ideology of the state. And it became not only militaristic and expansionist but also racist, extremely violent and ultimately an ideology that deeply harms both the individual and the collective.”
Bartov continues that in Israel there was “a radical transformation of Judaism itself into a political religion, intertwined with a certain translation of Zionism. …In Israel the specific version has, in effect, produced divine or rabbinic legitimation for genocide.”
Zionism becomes revenge, for correction of every humbled moment of Jews in history, and glorification of the god that selected us – to wreak on Palestinians reversal of centuries of obstruction of God’s promise of Jews being mighty and numerous in our land.
Fatally, omitted in the fury is remembering the promise of the land is conditioned on faithful following of God’s mitzvot.
The “eternal Jewish vulnerability” narrative is available in Jewish learning to be turned to Zionist purposes. In February, Israeli PM Netanyahu laid out concisely the mental landscape of Zionism grafted to Judaism – eternal world antisemitism:
If you look at the course of Jewish history, then what you see is this was a fairly constant phenomenon.
I mean, once we lost our land, once we were scattered among the Nations, we were ready prey. We were ready prey. And eventually, when there was societal change the Jews always were blamed. …And these attacks on the Jews were always preceded by vilification. Horrible vilifications that even so-called civilized and educated people adhered to: “The Jews poisoned the wells. The Jews spread vermin. The Jews slaughtered Christian children to use their blood for baking matzos.”
And this goes into modern times. The Nazis basically said the same thing. And all these vituperations, all these slanders were always accompanied, eventually, by exile or pogroms or mass murder.
That’s what happened to the Jews one country after another into modern times.
PM Netanyahu then defines the rationale for whatever violence is necessary to preserve the Jewish state in Palestine:
The great change in Jewish history which [Theodor] Herzl saw very clearly is that when the Jews have their own independent state they will have the independent power to roll back the physical attacks against us.
Functionally, it is the strategy of a paranoid person holed up with weapons. As in any religion’s foundational literature, justifications can be found. In the Talmud is the imperative, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
In territories under Israeli control, it has fostered land-stealing and ongoing terrorizing of Arab residents by Jewish “settlers” drunk on ethnic self-assertion, protected by the army of the Israeli state.
When we live among others, the paradox of this outlook on Jewish history, and its “solution” by territorial Zionism, is the abandonment of Jews’ right to be French, American, Indian, Syrian, Irani. In harmony with the Nazi legislation that German Jews were not German.
Zionist founding father, secular Theodor Herzl, in Der Judenstaat summarized the basis of Zionism – that Jews carry antisemitism with them. He said we go where there is no antisemitism and there generate antisemitism:
The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution.
Herzl describes an irredeemable gentile world. “In the world as it now is and for an indefinite period will probably remain, might precedes right. It is useless, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the [French] Huguenots who were forced to emigrate. If we could only be left in peace…. But I think we shall not be left in peace.”
Herzl’s and Netanyahu’s formulation is degrading of gentiles – that Jews cannot live among others. That there is something profoundly wrong with everyone but Jews.
This approach disregards the success story of a tribal cult from Judea maintaining and building culture over millennia, integrating converts wherever they’ve settled, up to our present.
Jewish pride can be consciousness of heritage, or be a sort of implicit contempt of gentiles.
The Zionist outlook, expressed by Maurice Samuel in 1924 — talking of Jews’ “wretched fate” – has Jews living in a trap which alienates us from humanity. One may be proud or lament the identity, but with no escaping it:
A century of partial tolerance gave us Jews access to your world. In that period the great attempt was made, by advance guards of reconciliation, to bring our two worlds together. It was a century of failure. Our Jewish radicals are beginning to understand it dimly….
The wretched fate which scattered us through your midst has thrust this unwelcome rôle upon us.
Do we demand safety, protection, because we share common humanity with rights to be respected, or because of our rare qualities — making us a special case?
Whether we think of ourselves as “ready prey” (Netanyahu) or precious unicorns of advanced civilization – or both – the point is we may think of ourselves as a different ilk than run-of-the-mill-humanity.
In America, the claim of being an extraordinary case makes a sisterly blend with Christians Zionist eschatology and “American exceptionalism” in Israel advocacy.
We are whatever we think we are. It isn’t a lament but a boast, that we are “a people that dwells apart.”
The Zionist solution is to be strong and a majority – jettisoning the aspiration of making a better world where the weak and less numerous can be safe.
In 1938, a Polish leader of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund forecast,
Zionism has always regarded the law of force, of nationalistic action, as the normal law of history and on this law has based its perspective on Jewish life… If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs)…
With Jewish identity focused on its ethnic nation-state rather than a world-wide people gifted Torah and obligations, its majoritarianism and contempt for others shows our vulnerability – as all other groups – to vice. Trauma has not ennobled us.
The whole of Torah revolves around the proposition of singular essential Jewish peoplehood.
Herzl’s proposition that we have “our right to exist as a separate people, according us our rightful place among the nations of the world” is built on it.
The inner policeman tries to stop critical examination of the identity – Disloyalty to faithful ancestors! Betrayal of my people! – to question Zionist corollaries of the statement, “I am a Jew.”
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Abba A. Solomon is the author of “The Miasma of Unity: Jews and Israel” and “The Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein’s Speech ‘The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews,’ Given to the Baltimore Chapter, American Jewish Committee, February 15, 1948.” Email
