Ten Myths About Israel. Ilan Pappé
It was particularly popular in Germany and the United States.
When the Reformists first encountered Zionism, they vehemently rejected the idea of redefining Judaism as nationalism and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. However, their anti-Zionist stance shifted after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. In the second half of the twentieth century, the majority among them created a new Reform movement in the United States, which became one of the strongest Jewish organizations in the country (although not until 1999 did the new movement officially vow allegiance to Israel and Zionism). However, a large number of Jews left the new movement and set up the American Council of Judaism (ACJ), which reminded the world in 1993 that Zionism was still a minority view among Jews, and which remained loyal to the old Reformist notions about Zionism.2
Before that schism, the Reform movement in both Germany and the United States had provided a strong and unanimous case against Zionism. In Germany, they publicly rejected the idea of a Jewish nation and proclaimed themselves “Germans of the Mosaic faith.” One of the German Reformists’ early acts was to remove from their prayer rituals any references to a return to “Eretz Israel” or the rebuilding of a state there. Similarly, already in 1869, American Reformists stated in one of their first conventions
that the messianic aim of Israel [i.e. the Jewish people] is not the restoration of a Jewish state under a descendant of David, involving a second separation from the nations of earth, but the union of the children of God in the confession of the unity of God, so as to realize the unity of all rational creatures, and their call to moral sanctification.
In 1885, another Reformist conference stated: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any laws concerning the Jewish state.”
One famous leader in this respect was Rabbi Kaufman Kohler, who repudiated the idea “that Judea is the home of the Jew—an idea which ‘unhomes’ [sic] the Jew all over the wide earth.” Another leader of the movement at the end of the nineteenth century, Isaac Mayer Wise, often ridiculed Zionist leaders such as Herzl, comparing them to charlatan alchemists claiming to contribute to science. In Vienna, the city of Herzl, Adolf Jellinek argued that Zionism would endanger the position of Jews in Europe and claimed that most of them objected to the idea. “We are at home in Europe,” he declared.
Apart from the Reformers, liberal Jews at that time rejected the claim that Zionism provided the only solution for anti-Semitism. As Walter Lacquer shows us in his book, The History of Zionism, liberal Jews regarded Zionism as a fanciful movement that provided no answer to the problems of the Jews in Europe. They argued for what they called a “regeneration” of the Jews, involving a display of total loyalty to their homelands and a willingness to be fully assimilated into them as citizens.3 They hoped that a more liberal world might solve the problems of persecution and anti-Semitism. History showed that liberalism had saved those Jews who moved to, or lived in, the UK and the USA. Those who believed it could happen in the rest of Europe were proven wrong. But even today, with hindsight, many liberal Jews do not see Zionism as the right answer then or now.
Socialists and Orthodox Jews began to voice their criticisms of Zionism only in the 1890s, when Zionism became a more recognized political force very late in the decade, thanks to the diligent work of Herzl. Herzl understood contemporary politics and wrote utopian stories, political tracts, and newspaper reports summarizing the idea that it was in Europe’s interest to help build a modern Jewish state in Palestine. World leaders were not impressed; neither were the Ottomans, as the rulers of Palestine. Herzl’s greatest achievement was bringing all the activists together at one conference in 1897, and from there building up two basic organizations—a world congress promoting the ideas of Zionism globally, and local Zionist outfits on the ground expanding the Jewish colonization of Palestine.
Thus, with the crystallization of Zionist ideas, the criticism of Jews opposed to Zionism also became clearer. Apart from the Reform movement, criticism came from the left, lay leaders of the various communities, and from Orthodox Jews. In 1897, the same year as the first Zionist conference was convened in Basel, a socialist Jewish movement was born in Russia: the Bund. It was both a political movement and a Jewish trade union. Bund members believed that a socialist, even a Bolshevik, revolution would be a far better solution to the problems of Jews in Europe than Zionism. They regarded the latter as a form of escapism. More importantly, when Nazism and Fascism were on the rise in Europe, Bundists felt that Zionism contributed to this brand of anti-Semitism by questioning the loyalty of Jews to their homelands. Even after the Holocaust, Bundists were convinced that Jews should seek a place in societies that cherish human and civil rights, and did not see a Jewish nation state as a panacea. This strong anti-Zionist conviction, however, slowly subsided from around the mid-1950s, and the remnants of this once-powerful movement eventually decided to support the state of Israel publicly (they even had a branch in the Jewish state).4
The reaction of the Bund did not trouble Herzl as much as did the lukewarm response of the Jewish political and economic elites in places such as Britain and France. They saw Herzl either as a charlatan whose ideas were far removed from reality, or worse as someone who could undermine Jewish life in their own societies where, as in Britain, they had made immense progress in terms of emancipation and integration. The Victorian Jews were disturbed by his call for Jewish sovereignty in a foreign land with an equal status to other sovereign states in the world. For the more established sections of Central and Western European Jewry, Zionism was a provocative vision that called into question the loyalty of English, German, and French Jews to their own home nations. Thanks to their lack of support for Herzl, the Zionist movement failed to become a powerful actor before World War I. Only after Herzl’s death in 1904 did other leaders of the movement—in particular Chaim Weizmann, who immigrated to Britain in the year Herzl died and became a leading scientist there, contributing to the British war effort in World War I—build a strong alliance with London that served Zionism well, as will be described later in this chapter.5
The third critique on Zionism in its early days came from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish establishment. To this day, many ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities vehemently oppose Zionism, although they are much smaller than they were in the late nineteenth century and some of them moved to Israel and are now part of its political system. Nonetheless, as in the past, they constitute yet another non-Zionist way of being Jewish. When Zionism made its first appearance in Europe, many traditional rabbis in fact forbade their followers from having anything to do with Zionist activists. They viewed Zionism as meddling with God’s will to retain the Jews in exile until the coming of the Messiah. They totally rejected the idea that Jews should do all they can to end the “Exile.” Instead, they had to wait for God’s word on this and in the meantime practice the traditional way of life. While individuals were allowed to visit and study in Palestine as pilgrims, this was not to be interpreted as permission for a mass movement. The great Hasidic German Rabbi of Dzikover summed up this approach bitterly when he said that Zionism asks him to replace centuries of Jewish wisdom and law for a rag, soil, and a song (i.e. a flag, a land, and an anthem).6
Not all the leading rabbis opposed Zionism however. There was a small group of quite famous authoritative figures, such as the rabbis al-Qalay, Gutmacher, and Qalisher, who endorsed the Zionist program. They were a small minority but in hindsight they were an important group as they laid the foundation for the national religious wing of Zionism. Their religious acrobatics were quite impressive. In Israeli historiography they are called the “Fathers of the Religious Zionism.” Religious Zionism is a very important movement in contemporary Israel, as the ideological home of the messianic settler movement, Gush Emunim, which colonized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 1967 onwards. These rabbis not only called on Jews to leave Europe but also asserted that it was a religious duty, not just a nationalist one, for Jews to colonize Palestine through the cultivation of its land (not surprisingly the natives of the land do not feature in their writings). They claimed that such an act would not be meddling with God’s will; on the contrary, it would fulfill the prophecies of the Prophets and advance the full redemption of the Jewish people and the coming of the Messiah.7
Most of the leading lights in Orthodox Judaism rejected