Pearls and Irritations

In her recent acceptance speech as recipient of British PEN’s Pinter Peace Prize, writer Arundhati Roy made special note of President Biden’s words on his visit to Israel shortly after 7 October 2023.

I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, Biden declared, and I am a Zionist

It was a statement of America’s undying loyalty to Israel which, like many such statements, papered over what is in fact a far more complicated set of issues. For while anyone can be a Zionist, converting to Judaism is no easy matter. Unlike others, Judaism isn’t a proselytising religion, and of the many things that Judaism is, it certainly isn’t Zionism.

It’s curious how spiritual movements founded with calls for love and peace have transmogrified at one stage or another into militant proselytisers. Thus was Christianity under the Crusades, Islam under the Mongols, Buddhism today in Myanmar. Yet in most respects Judaism would seem to be the reverse of that trajectory.

Judaism began as a tribal religion. Abraham’s tribe, the Hebrews, worshipped Yahweh, an especially jealous, vengeful deity. Nor was there was much peace-loving in what became the kingdom of Judah. The first five books of the Old Testament, what we Jews call the Torah, and parts of the extended Tanach, fairly bristle with Judah’s conflict with its neighbours. If Judah hadn’t beaten the Hittites, for example, Jews might well have ended up praying to the Hittite goddess Kattaha. But if that’s a fancy the archaeological record demolishes, there’s little argument about Yahweh being a particularly harsh taskmaster. So much so that Abraham was all too ready to sacrifice his son Isaac until Yahweh himself told him to drop his knife, assuring him he was only being tested.

It was the Babylonian Exile of 595 BCE that changed Judaism forever. The rabbis who assembled in Yavne after the destruction of the Second Temple initiated a body of teachings the overall effect of which was to transform the vengeful Yahweh into a monotheist deity so powerful he cannot even be named – the Ein Sof, or ‘endless unknowable’ of the kabbalists. Though some Jews remained in what we know now as Palestine, they were hugely outnumbered by Jews in the Diaspora, who for the most part carried out the Talmudic tradition, with its emphasis on principles like tzedekeh (justice) and tikkun olam (repairing the world). But unlike other ‘people of the book’, Jews of all denominations have eschewed proselytising. Arguably, the one exception to this has been Zionism which, as we are witnessing in it all its horror, has tried to legitimise itself with the militancy of the earlier scriptures.

If necessarily oversimplified for the current exercise, these fundamental developments are crucial to understanding how Israel became so out of control today. While from the mid-nineteenth century Zionists dreamt of returning to Jerusalem, not every Zionist wanted a Jewish state there. Theodor Herzel’s Political Zionism was the product of France’s Dreyfus case and the Russian pogroms triggered by the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II. What came to be known as Cultural Zionism encouraged further Jewish links to the Holy Land but vehemently opposed establishing a Jewish-privileged state there. It’s important to note here that other Jewish groups of the time, like the Bund, wanted nothing to do with the Zionist project. Some warned of the dangers inherent in it, or of its undermining cherished Jewish values. To many it was another false messiah.

Then came the 1930s. As the fate of Europe’s Jewry became ever more dire, Political Zionism gained traction, not only among Jews but Nazis as well, as evidenced in the infamous Haavara Agreement, through which some 60,000 German Jews migrated to Palestine between 1933 and 1939. It was an early German ‘solution’ to the so-called Jewish question. The scheme was problematic, to say the least. The Zionists in Palestine used it to increase their numbers, but only Jews who could pay to go did. For Germany the arrangement served to break the 1933 anti-Nazi boycott while getting rid of some of its Jews. Yet European and American organisations condemned the arrangement (as did, interestingly enough, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the most militant Zionist of his day), and as with the current crisis, the Haavara, or Transfer Agreement, tore the Jewish world apart.

While Diasporic Jews today are enjoined to support Israel come what may, an ever-expanding number of us are appalled, distressed beyond measure, at the genocide being conducted in our name. After cataloguing the many horrors Israel has rained down on Gaza, now Lebanon, now Yemen, goading Iran and risking world war in the bargain, Arundhati Roy was moved in her address to ask, ‘Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism?’ Yet this is the topsy-turvy, Alice in Wonderland world we live in. Facts and complexities are buried in torrents of words and slogans.

Jingoists are especially good on slogans. ‘Israel has a right to defend itself.’ ( Like this? ) ‘Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation… (substitute if necessary ‘Hezbollah’ or ‘Houthi’, but what does ‘terrorist’ mean?) ‘Intifada’ means ‘Israel has no right to exist’ – but it doesn’t actually mean that. ‘From the river to the sea’, likewise. ‘The greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust.’ (Compared to tens upon tens of thousands of Palestinians? ) ‘Holocaust’ and ‘antisemitism’ are routinely dragged out to distract from Israel’s unrelenting barbarism. Who has benefited? Certainly not Israelis. Certainly not Diasporic Jews, many of whom hold the tenets of tikkun olam and tzedekeh dear. It certainly doesn’t augur well for global peace.

It may not take much to be a Zionist these days. As Joe Biden said, you don’t even have to be a Jew. What he didn’t say, and may not understand, is that an ever-increasing number of committed Jews have lost all faith in Zionism. If they had any to begin with.

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