The enemy within

The state of Israel is under threat, not from military instability or Palestinian militancy but from its own moral contradictions. A new book explores the anti-Zionist movement. By David Shanks

A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism by Yakov M Rabkin. Published by Zed Books, €19.99

A dramatic revelation came recently to many of us trying to follow events in the Middle East in the mainstream media. It seems the existence of the state of Israel is opposed not just by Palestinians, but also by Jews, as evidenced by the appearance of several rabbis at Iran's “Holocaust denial” conference. 

These Haredi (ultra Orthodox) rabbis explained their politically-dodgy presence among Ku Klux Klan and neo-nazi figures: they were in Tehran not because they deny the Holocaust, the “Shoa”, but because they object to its use as a justification for the existence of the “state of Israel” and the abuse of Palestinians – the victims of the victims of the Holocaust, as they have been called elsewhere – and their rights.

Some of these rabbis, with their distinctive black dress, beards and curled side locks, belong to Neturei Karta, or Guardians of the City, one of a string of groups that cleave to the sense of the Judaic biblical “Land of Israel”, which can only be returned to in peace with neighbours – and certainly not by military force – and then only after the coming of the Messiah.

Many anti-Zionist rabbinical thinkers believe the state of Israel was “conceived in sin”; that it is an obstacle on the path to redemption, and should be peacefully dismantled.

In A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, Professor Yakov M Rabkin of Montreal University explores the history of these remarkable ideas which have been around since the establishment of Zionism in the late-19th Century.

Rabkin introduces us painstakingly to the world of anti-Zionist orthodoxy, where Zionism – the political movement that successfully established the state of Israel in 1948 as the world's first and only Jewish state – is the antithesis of Judaism and the destroyer of everything truly Jewish.

Political Zionism, a secular nationalist movement that came mainly from czarist Russia, was challenged from its beginnings by rabbinical authorities who were irritated by “the pretension” of Zionism's founder Theodor Herzl to speak for the entire Jewish people.

Zionism was, however, in tune with the spirit of the times. Rabkin reminds us that the father of the Israeli state, David Ben-Gurion, was an admirer of Lenin and the communist takeover. After the Great War, he had even been attracted to German national socialism, according to one author quoted by Rabkin.

Many of the ultra-Orthodox Jews are in the diaspora, seeing “exile” as “a divine decree” punishing Jews for “transgressions against the Torah [teachings]”. Exile is no mere matter of a postal address but is “a theological and cultural concept”.

Anti-Zionists' perceived divine punishments for Jewish transgressions include the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century AD and the Jews' expulsion from the land of Israel. Haredi Satmar congregations even interpret the Shoa as punishment for “the Zionist heresy”.

To many Jews, anti-Zionists represent a lunatic fringe of “self-hating Jews”. Though a minority, of “a few hundred thousand”, anti-Zionists “are hardly marginal”, writes Rabkin. Jewish history shows that rigorous minorities tend to become triumphant majorities, he says. Whatever about their numbers or influence, the complex history of these tenaciously-held ideas is fascinating.

Though anti-Zionists propose strategies of reconciliation with the Palestinians, they do not speak with one voice. Indeed, the non-Zionist Shas party, Israel's third largest, has participated pragmatically in government, even though it doesn't regard the state as desirable or legitimate.

Zionist fury and opprobrium at simply reporting on the phenomenon has, however, come down on the head of the author – even in Dublin. Rabkin, who gave lectures in Ireland to promote his book, was refused leave to recite a traditional traveller's public benediction in the Orthodox synagogue in Terenure because of his troublesome scholarship.

Rabkin's work is one of many that reflects a threat to the existence of Israel, not from military insecurity, but from its own moral contradictions.

The myth that “muscular Jews” settled “a land without people, waiting for a people without land” (as an early Zionist said) and were “making the desert bloom” (David Ben-Gurion's prophesy) is well rooted in Israel's account of itself.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first PM, wrote to his son in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war,” we are told in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe, a prominent Israeli academic at Haifa University. This is a brave attempt, with new sources, to reinstate the Palestinian narrative about the “Nakba” (Catastrophe) of 1948, which attended Israel's well-planned bloody birth.

The story he tells is so much about language. Zionists “did not wage a war that ‘tragically but inevitably' led to the expulsion of ‘part of' the indigenous people, but the other way round: the main goal was the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine,” writes Pappe.

In 1969, Israeli PM Golda Meir declared: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people ... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.”

In The Case Against Israel, Michael Neumann, professor of philosophy at Trent University, Ontario (and son of Franz Neumann, who supervised the research of Raoul Hilberg, the world's leading scholar on the Shoa) forensically dissects Zionism's self-justifications.

He argues that it matters little whether historical Zionists were enlightened socialists, or idealists, or racists. What matters is they imposed their sovereignty – through expropriation, expulsion, and more lately, intrusive settlements and segregation – on another group that had inhabited Palestine for centuries.

Violence from Palestinians was inevitable and some types justifiable. He urges Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank, including the settlements, and properly from Gaza. However, as Rabkin said at his Dublin lecture, “Palm trees will grow in Montreal before that happens.”

Unlike the others, Rabkin's story does not rely on standards of international law – the Geneva Convention, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights etc – but on the Jews' own fine, traditional religious standards, those of the Torah and its commandments. His study might help undermine the label of “anti-Semitism” that Zionists strenuously use to silence critics. It places the Haredi critique closer to ordinary morality.

He is eloquent in distinguishing between anti-Semitism and opposition to the policies of successive Zionist Israeli, or colonial, governments, and between Judaism and Zionism. He writes of Zionism's secularism that “revolutionised Jewish identity”, creating a double identity between traditional religious values and a more modern European-style nationalism.

A particularly shocking passage concerns negotiations by Zionist leaders with the Nazis –  others call it collaboration – which drew sharp criticism from American Reform and Haredi rabbis at the time. Following an agreement with high-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann, “Zionist organisations undercut efforts to welcome Jews anywhere else but Palestine”.

He quotes contemporary sources saying that Zionists sabotaged initiatives for the rescue of Jews in Europe, including one by President Roosevelt. “All the critical voices concurred in accusing the Zionist leadership of being much more concerned about the future state than the fate of the Jews in the extermination camps.” One Zionist leader put it baldly: “If we do not have enough victims, we will have no right to demand a state.”

Rabkin, whose book has suffered from translation from French into English – it's also in Italian, Spanish and Arabic, with Dutch to come – is trying to start a debate in which Zionists are refusniks. They assert “you are either for us or against us” (a reminder of George Bush) and distrust the liberalism of the societies that one-half of the world's Jews live in.

He quotes rabbis opposed to the Iraq war and Israel's support by the US. Rabbi Meir Weberman, one of Zionism's most articulate foes, has said: “The state of Israel stands condemned as a violator of the global order, and all attempts to oppose God's will can only lead to an equally global disaster.”

Rabkin, who has been accused of washing Jewry's dirty laundry in public, writes of a polarisation, a “civil war of conscience”, as an author he quotes put it – that “may divide Jews as irremediably as the advent of Christianity”.