Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Norman G. Finkelstein

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781859844427
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784784591
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

First published in 1995, this acclaimed study challenges generally accepted truths of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as much of the revisionist literature. This new edition critically reexamines dominant popular and scholarly images in the light of the current failures of the peace process.

PART I

Theory and History

1

Zionist Orientations

The Theory and Practice of
Jewish Nationalism

In Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study of Ideology, Yosef Gorny has provided the most authoritative study to date on the crucial period when the Zionist movement made its first contacts with, struggled against and ultimately prevailed over Palestine’s indigenous Arab population.¹ As its subtitle indicates, the focus is Zionist ideology. Gorny reveals in fascinating detail both the variousness of possibilities in the Zionist idea and its intransigent kernel that precluded any modus vivendi with the Palestinian Arabs.

Defining the Zionist Enterprise

Gorny begins by identifying the ‘ideological consensus’ within which most, if not the full gamut, of Zionist thinking unfolded. One element of this consensus, he stresses throughout the study, was at the core of Zionist belief and proved to be the principal obstacle to any reconciliation with the Arabs – namely, that Palestine should one day contain a Jewish majority.

Within the Zionist ideological consensus there coexisted three relatively distinct tendencies – political Zionism, labor Zionism and cultural Zionism. Each was wedded to the demand for a Jewish majority, but not for entirely the same reasons.²

The touchstone of the French Revolutionary liberal idea was that a rational and just social order could and ought to be constructed on shared political – i.e. democratic – values. Hence, the nation-state was conceived above all else as a consensual relationship and the citizen as its irreducible unit and building block. Originating in the post-French Revolution reaction to Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism, political Zionism’s point of departure was the presumed bankruptcy of the democratic idea.³ Romantic nationalists argued that more profound bonds both ‘naturally’ united certain individuals and ‘naturally’ excluded others. Ideally, they concluded, each such organically connected community ought to be endowed with an independent state. Having located the thinking of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, in such ‘German sources’, Hans Kohn, probably the most eminent authority on modern nationalism (and himself a Zionist at one time), goes on to observe:

According to the German theory, people of common descent … should form one common state. Pan-Germanism was based on the idea that all persons who were of German race, blood or descent, wherever they lived or to whatever state they belonged, owed their primary loyalty to Germany and should become citizens of the German state, their true homeland. They, and even their fathers and forefathers, might have grown up under ‘foreign’ skies or in ‘alien’ environments, but their fundamental inner ‘reality’ remained German.⁴

Analogous assumptions informed the distinctive Zionist approach to the Jewish Question. Throughout the Diaspora, its adherents argued, Jews constituted an ‘alien’ presence amidst states ‘belonging’ to other, numerically preponderant, nationalities. Anti-Semitism was the natural impulse of an organic whole ‘infected’ by a ‘foreign’ body (or too obtrusive a ‘foreign’ body).

In effect, the Zionist analysis of the Jewish Question duplicated the reasoning of anti-Semitism, which invoked the same argument to justify Jew-hatred. Indeed, the prescription it proposed for the Jewish predicament was inscribed in the logic of anti-Semitism as well. Political Zionism sought, not to combat anti-Semitism – which was viewed as, at best, a quixotic undertaking – but to achieve a modus vivendi with it. It proposed that the Jewish nation resolve the Jewish Question by (re-)establishing itself in a state that ‘belonged’ to it. To achieve this, Jews would have to constitute themselves somewhere as the majority: for, wasn’t the statelessness of the Jews pointed up precisely in the fact that, everywhere in the Diaspora, they formed a numerical minority? Majority status would consequently ratify the Jews’ constitutional title to a state. The Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who stood well within the Zionist ideological consensus (p. 165; all page references are to Gorny’s book) therefore stated that ‘the creation of a Jewish majority … was the fundamental aim of Zionism’, since ‘the term “Jewish state” … means a Jewish majority’, and Palestine ‘will become a Jewish country at the moment when it has a Jewish majority’ (pp. 169, 170–1, 233).⁵

For labor Zionism, the Jewish Question was not only the absence of a state but the class structure of the Jewish nation, which had become lopsided and deformed in the course of its long dispersion: Galut (exile) had created a surfeit of Jewish middlemen, marginal petty entrepreneurs and Luftsmenschen, and a deficit of Jewish laborers. Part of Zionism’s mission was to lay the basis for a healthy state by reconstituting the Jewish working class. Since the interests of this class (here labor Zionism was evidently borrowing from and adapting for its own purposes a page in Marx) required a socialist Jewish state, this was the only true solution to the Jewish predicament. Labor Zionism thus represented less an alternative than a supplement to political Zionism. The class struggle and economic development would unfold, ideally, in a field purified of ‘alien’ elements. In Ben-Gurion’s words,

The right to independent national existence, to national autonomy, which no reasonable person could regard as conflicting with solidarity between peoples, means above all: independent national existence on the basis of an independent national economy. (pp. 137–8)⁶

Labor Zionism imbued the demand for a Jewish majority with a dual significance: first, it would ratify the Jews’ right to claim title to the state and, second, it would signal their right to radically alter the demographic balance in Palestine, clearing the way for the territorial concentration of the Jewish nation. To quote Ben-Gurion again: ‘[T]he majority is but a stage along our path, albeit an important and decisive stage in the political sense. From there we can proceed with our activities in calm confidence and concentrate the masses of our people in this country, and its environs’ (p. 216; emphasis added).⁷

In general, the Zionist movement’s demand for a Jewish majority was grounded in a cluster of assumptions that gainsaid the liberal idea. Cultural Zionism, however, did not explicitly deny the desirability (or viability) of a democratic polity. Its demand for a Jewish majority represented not so much a categorical rejection of liberalism as a solution for certain alleged limits within it, especially in the domain of culture.

Cultural Zionists wished to resolve not the ‘problem of the Jews’ but the ‘problem of Judaism’ in the modern world. In their view, the survival of Judaism and the Jewish people was threatened less by anti-Semitism than by an increasingly secular civilization that rendered them anachronisms. The real danger was not the Gentiles’ icy rejection but, rather, their seductive embrace. The most pressing task of Zionism, therefore, was to elaborate a Weltanschauung relevant to the contemporary world yet still bearing the unmistakable impress of the Jewish people’s resplendent legacy. The success or failure of this enterprise would determine whether the Jewish nation survived.

This new national synthesis could not unfold, however, while Jewry remained scattered throughout the Diaspora. It required a ‘spiritual center’ which could concentrate and unify the energies of the Jewish nation and, ultimately, serve as a centripetal force for it. To create this center, Jews had to constitute themselves as the numerical majority in some state, since the crucial cultural institutions in any society are subordinate to the state and the state always bears the imprint of the majority nation. Even in the most democratic of states, the cultural life of the minority cannot but be – in the words of the outstanding theoretician of cultural Zionism, Ahad Ha’am – ‘cribbed and crammed’ (pp. 102–3).⁸

Cultural Zionism thus conceived a Jewish majority as the conditio sine qua non, not for a state of the Jews, but for the unbridled spiritual renaissance of the Jewish nation. Palestine, with its Jewish majority, would eventually serve as a spiritual beacon for world Jewry; it would not, however, be a state to which all Jews were, perforce, politically bound.⁹ Yet, the status of the demand for a Jewish majority was, for all practical purposes, defined by the hegemonic sectors of the Zionist movement. For them, the Jewish majority and the Jewish state were inextricably linked: a Jewish majority was the means and a state constitutionally beholden to world Jewry the end.

Gorny’s meticulous and exhaustive analysis of the documentary record convincingly demonstrates that, for all its tactical flexibility, the Zionist leadership never wavered in its devotion to the idea of a state of the Jewish nation. What this leadership offered Palestine’s indigenous Arab population was, at best, institutional safeguards that its ‘civil’ rights would not be violated once the Jewish state was established; but such protections for the future Arab minority did not preclude – indeed, they presupposed – that, in principle, the prospective state would belong to the Jewish people.

Consider the ‘compromise’ formulae put forth by the Zionist movement in the wake of the 1929 Arab riots, when the fortunes of the Zionist enterprise had reached their lowest ebb to date. Weizmann proposed the principle of parity – that is, total equality in the administrative representation of both peoples – but his intention (in Gorny’s words) was ‘to guarantee the civil status of the Arabs’ within a state whose ‘proprietorship’ would be Jewish (p. 206). Likewise, the ‘compromise’ Ben-Gurion favored at this time was not a bi-national state but a bi-national regime, in which (in Gorny’s words) ‘the Jewish people would have ownership rights over Palestine and the Arab community would have the right to reside therein’ (p. 212).¹⁰ Finally, Jabotinsky promised to Palestine’s Arab inhabitants full and equal rights as a national entity, in accordance with the finest traditions of Austro-Hungarian socialist thought, yet on the principle of a Jewish majority/Jewish state he would entertain no compromise (pp. 233–4).

The Zionist leadership’s devotion to the principle of a Jewish state of the Jewish nation found concrete and unambiguous expression in its insistence that, vis-à-vis the future state, diasporan Jews would have to be accorded a privileged status. Ben-Gurion, for example, denied that a Jewish state necessarily implied domination of the (Arab) minority (pp. 306–7). The minority could still enjoy full civil and national equality, and autonomy in education, culture and religion; indeed, a member of the minority might even be elected president or premier of the state. True, the Jewish majority would determine the cultural ‘image’ of the state, but that was (even) true in all democratic states. However, what would distinguish the Jewish state, in his view, was its orientation towards the entire Jewish people: ‘The state will exist not only for its own inhabitants … but in order to bring in masses of Jews from the Diaspora and to assemble and root them in their homeland.’¹¹

We have thus far identified the trends in Zionism that fell within what Gorny designates the Zionist ideological consensus. Gorny also devotes considerable space to those elements in the Zionist movement that stood outside the ideological consensus but were nonetheless committed to some version of Zionism.

Generally speaking, what attracted these dissidents to Zionism was its cultural dimension; politically, they favored a bi-nationalist resolution of the Palestine conflict, in which the ‘total equality of political rights of the two peoples’ would be recognized (p. 119). What especially interests us here, however, is not their programs and perspectives per se (of which there were many and all of which underwent crucial revisions over time). For, although the dissident Zionist circles (e.g. Brit-Shalom, Ihud) could count in their ranks some of the most eminent members of the Movement, including the distinguished sociologist Arthur Ruppin, first president of the Hebrew University Judah Magnes, and the renowned philosopher Martin Buber, they were, nevertheless, numerically weak and politically marginal. Rather, it is their critique – sometimes implicit, more often explicit – of the Zionist mainstream. This critique is noteworthy because it was both internal to the Zionist movement and thus not easily dismissed and, on any accounting, exceptionally cogent and incisive. Indeed, it is as pertinent today as it was when first elaborated.

The Zionist dissidents denied that the success of the Zionist project – at any rate, as they defined it – hinged on the Jews constituting themselves as the majority in Palestine. They were not in principle opposed to Jews becoming at some point the numerically preponderant element; what they objected to was the meaning conferred on the idea of a Jewish majority by their adversaries in the Zionist movement. The dissidents argued that behind the demand for a Jewish majority lurked the intention to establish a superior claim to the prospective state, one which would confer on Jews an ‘advantage in rights’ and implied the domination and suppression of the Arabs of Palestine (pp. 120, 145, 284). Hugo Bergmann of Brit-Shalom deftly exposed the regressive assumptions of mainstream Zionism:

The contradiction between the political outlook of Brit-Shalom and that of its opponents is not anchored in our stand on the Arabs alone. It is much more fundamental and deep-rooted. Our political convictions stem from the perceptions of Judaism. We want Palestine to be ours in that the moral and political beliefs of Judaism will leave their stamp on the way of life in this country, and we will carry into execution here that faith which has endured in our hearts for two thousand years. And our opponents hold different views. When they speak of Palestine, of our country, they mean ‘our country,’ that is to say ‘not their country.’ This viewpoint is borrowed from Europe at the time of its decline. It is based on the concept of a state which is the property of one people. … Thus several European States today believe that the existence of a State implies that one people, among the peoples residing there, should be granted priority right. … They justify this injustice by means of the sacred egotism of the State. (pp. 122–3; emphasis in original)

Bergmann also denounced the concept of ‘the people of the country’ which, in his words, ‘award[ed] prior right to one people over another, as if the one were the native son and the other a stepchild’ (p. 123). In effect, it controverted the de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• Part I: Theory and History
• Part II: War and Peace
• Appendix: Abba Eban with Footnotes: A Critical Review of Michael Oren’s Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
• Notes
• Index