Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Kavon asks:
If the Zionist founders of the State of Israel were, indeed, imperialists, what empire did they represent? The pioneers who founded the modern State of Israel were young men and women who were fleeing pogroms and poverty in the Russian Pale of Settlement. It is true that Zionist founders such as Herzl looked toward imperial powers such as Britain and the Ottomans to back the building of a Jewish state. It is true that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 committed British imperialists to the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine. In the end, however, the British Empire betrayed the Jews of Europe to curry favor with the Arab world. It shut the gates of Jewish immigration to Palestine, abandoning the Jews to their fate in Nazi-occupied Europe.David Shasha, who is the Director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, had a reaction not unlike mine to Kavon's column.
THOSE WHO claim the Zionists have always been imperialists are actually racists. They deny the fact that although Jews lived in Europe and resembled the white-skinned Europeans with whom they lived, the Christians of Europe never believed Jews could ever be true Germans or Frenchmen. For more than a millennium, Christians and Muslims persecuted Jews, branding them inferiors and social outcasts, not caring what the color of Jewish skin was. We forget that racism is not only an issue of color. The Nazi regime destroyed 6 million Jews based on vile and false theories of Aryan racial superiority.
Racist hatred is not just a matter of hating a people for the color of their skin. The Holocaust is the ultimate proof of that. Europe and the Muslim world were never a home for the Jews. The empires of the Christian and Muslim world could have cared one iota about Jewish survival and the Jewish future. The Zionist enterprise was desperate and lonely. If only the Jews had the power of an empire, perhaps millions of Jews could have been saved from genocide. "Zionist imperialism" is an absurd phrase, an oxymoron. It is an anti-Semitic canard. It denies the tragic realities of Jewish history.
...
FINALLY, TO BRAND Zionism as imperialism is to deny the connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel that goes back 3,000 years. Jews were battling imperialists, whether they were Hellenists or Romans, long before the modern national movements of liberation. The British in India, as well as the French in Algeria, did not have an ancient connection to the lands they colonized. The Europeans exploited native populations for reasons of economics and jingoism. Not so the Jews. The Jewish pioneers settled in Palestine to find a place to live as free men and women, free of the domination of imperialists in the European and Islamic world.
Shasha writes from the perspective of a religious Syrian American Jew while I try to provide coherent political economic analysis of modern Eastern European and Jewish history.
I do not agree with everything Shasha says and will eventually provide a critique. Yet his response is important to read.
David Shasha on "The Myth of Zionist Imperialism"
[Kavon's] article is filled with so many distortions, half-truths and outright falsehoods I am not quite sure where to begin.
First, it appears that Mr. Kavon is quite happy to make use of Sephardic Jews in order to prove his point; less clear is whether he is willing to concede that figures such as Rabbi Alkalai were increasingly shut out of a larger Zionist discourse which developed into an exclusively Ashkenazi concern. Alkalai’s name is today barely known in Israel and in Zionist circles because he was Sephardic and Sephardim were deemed marginal in Zionist history.
Next, Kavon makes it plain that he believes that Jews did not live productively in the Arab world. This distortion is reflected by his remark that the Muslim authorities created the Damascus Blood Libel. We know from history and from our oral tradition in the Syrian community that the Muslims became involved in this tragic episode when Christians fomented the story that Jews were responsible for the murder of a priest and his servant. While this must not exonerate the Muslim authorities for their misguided and criminal actions vis-à-vis the Jewish community in Damascus, it is important that we understand the role of the French authorities and of the Church in this matter. Kavon is too concerned with demonizing Arabs to care about the accuracy of his statements.
Israel is not being accused of Imperialism because of what happened to European Jews. The European Jews were not themselves Imperialists. What happened was that in seeking to lobby for a Jewish state, the Ashkenazi Zionists sought to ally themselves to the European colonial powers rather than seek to unite with the Arabs fighting those powers. Now perhaps such a union was impossible – though not as impossible as one might think given the flexibility of the Arab national movement in the early 20th century – but it does not exonerate Weizmann and the others from the way they partnered with the British to act as fifth column against the emerging anti-Colonial forces.
Israel, from its founding, felt more comfortable with the European world than it did with the Middle East. To argue that Zionists were fighting the Ottoman Empire just like the Arab countries is to misrepresent the nature of Zionism and Arab nationalism. And, in addition, his crass manipulation of Alkalai and the Sephardi Zionists ignores the fact that the Sephardim were intent on working within the Ottoman framework rather than fighting it. He is so busy trying to co-opt the Sephardim that he forgets that the Sephardi approach to Jewish statehood did not at all conform to that of the Ashkenazim: the Sephardim consistently viewed Zionism in pragmatic rather than ideological terms.
The bottom line is that Kavon simply ignores Israel’s rule over its Arab minority and its post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Such a movement of Jews ruling Arabs has caused Israel to follow similar patterns to that of the Imperial powers in terms of militarism and colonial settlement. Linking Israeli power to ancient conceptions of Biblical history, the expression of such power has been harmful to Israel’s image and its connection to the ongoing socio-political realities of the region it resides in.
Though Israel has consistently justified its policies in relation to Arab intransigence and dysfunction, such moral relativism cannot exonerate it from its own actions. And these actions mark Zionism as an aggressive power grab that goes well beyond the safety and well-being of Jews; such power might paradoxically even contribute to Jewish instability.
Returning to the issue of Middle Eastern Jews, we can see, I believe, more clearly, the colonial nature of the Zionist project.
Rather than building Israel on the basis of ethno-cultural equality – something that is more obvious in terms of the Arab-Muslim community – Israel has sought to occlude its Sephardic component and, as Bernard Lewis has argued, install a Eurocentric regime into every facet of its society.
So, far from Israel being a paragon of egalitarianism as Kavon seems to be arguing, Israel has developed a neo-Imperial animus towards its non-European population and has forever tied its fortunes to the European world. This has led to colonialist behavior in the Occupied Territories and racist treatment of Sephardic Jews.
Sphere: Related Content
