Examining Zionism — From Seeking a Refuge for Jews
to Controlling Millions of Palestinians
Allan C. Brownfeld
By Allan C. Brownfeld
Zionism: The Birth and Transformation of an Ideal
By Milton Viorst,
St. Martin’s Press,
318 pages, $27.99.
From its beginning in the late 19th century until today, Zionism, or Jewish
nationalism, has sharply divided Jewish opinion. It was conceived as a clear
break with Judaism and the Jewish religious tradition and has been
historically opposed by the majority of Jews, Orthodox, Conservative and
Reform. It gained support in the mid-20th century as a response to growing
anti-Semitism in Europe and the rise of Nazism in Germany. That support now
seems to be receding.
The Zionist idea of “Jewish nationality” is more similar to the nationalisms
which emerged in 19th century Europe than anything in Jewish history. Jehiel
Jacob Weisberg, a rabbinical authority who developed a creative synthesis of
Lithuanian Judaism and German Orthodoxy, pointed out that, “Jewish
nationality is different from that of all nations in the sense that it is
uniquely spiritual, and that its spirituality is nothing but the Torah … In
this respect we are different from all other nations, and whoever does not
recognize it, denies the fundamental principle of Judaism.”
To the question of whether Jews constitute “a people,” Yeshayahu Leibowitz,
the Orthodox Jewish thinker and Hebrew University professor, provides this
assessment: “The historical Jewish people was defined neither as a race nor
a people of this country or that, nor as a people that speaks the same
language, but as the people of Torah Judaism and its commandments … The
words spoken by … Rabbi Saadia Gaon (882-942) more than a thousand years
ago: ‘Our nation exists only within the Torah’ have not only a normative,
but also an empirical meaning. They testified to a historical reality whose
power could be felt up until the 19th century. It was then that the
fracture, which has not ceased to widen with time, first occurred, the
fissure between Jewishness and Judaism.”
How Zionism Was Born
In this important book, Milton Viorst, who served as the Middle East
correspondent for The New Yorker and has dedicated the bulk of his long
career to understanding the region, explores how the Zionist movement was
born and how it developed and evolved through the lives and ideas of its
dominant leaders. These leaders produced a thriving Jewish state but, Viorst
shows us, have squandered most of the goodwill it once enjoyed and have
placed Israel’s future in jeopardy. His previous books on the Middle East
include Shadow of the Prophet, Sandcastles, Storm from the East, and What
Shall I Do with This People?
He notes that, “I made my first visit to Israel a few months after the Six-
Day War. I recall feeling very upset that virtually no one I met during the
visit talked of Israel’s victory as an opening to a more stable Middle East,
in which the Jews could live comfortably in peace. Instead, most exulted
over the magnitude of the victory and Israel’s obvious military dominance in
the region. The few Israelis who expressed concern about the collective
intoxication produced by the victory seemed like spoilsports. This book has
been gestating in my mind ever since … The book I had not written — nor had
anyone else, I dare say — was an exploration of the question that first
upset me after the Six-Day War. How did Zionism, over the course of a
century, evolve from the idealism of providing refuge for beleaguered Jews
to a rationalization for the army’s occupation of powerless Palestinians? In
recent years, though Israel grew stronger and more prosperous as a nation,
Zionism became increasingly defined by military power. Meanwhile, Israel,
Zionism’s offspring, lost much of the sympathy it had once enjoyed from the
international community for oppressing the Palestinians under its control.”
When Theodor Herzl threw his energies into the Zionist cause in the late
19th century, Viorst points out, his program “was a direct challenge to the
rabbinic class … Rabbinic doctrine held that only God, having sent the Jews
into exile as punishment for their sins, could sanction their return. God
would dispatch the Messiah to lead them home, the doctrine held, when He was
ready to offer them Redemption. Meanwhile, their duty was to wait patiently
… By Herzl’s time, many Jews had reached a readiness to reject their rabbis’
Messianic dogma and take their destiny into their own hands.”
Equal Right of Citizenship
In Western Europe, as the Enlightenment proceeded, Jews were slowly given
the equal right of citizenship. On the heels of the French Revolution of
1789, France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man abolished the legal
inequality of Jews. Victorious French armies tore down ghetto walls wherever
they went. Many Jews across Western Europe aspired to assimilate into the
larger culture while still identifying as Jews. “In Budapest,” writes
Viorst, “Theodor Herzl’s family belonged to this category. They grew rich
under capitalism and moved to a sumptuous home outside the ghetto. The
education they gave their children was only modestly Jewish. They gave up
Yiddish and proclaimed their loyalty to the Hapsburg emperor. They were
stylish in dress. They participated in politics and the local culture.”
In Russia and Eastern Europe, Jews remained second-class citizens. The
Russian pogroms of the 1880s caused a growing debate about the future. Most
of the talk was of flight to the West, particularly to the United States. At
the same time, many Jews were identified with various revolutionary
doctrines. A smaller number spoke of migration to Palestine under the
umbrella of Jewish nationalism. Among the groups that contemplated migration
to Palestine was BILU, whose name was a Hebrew acronym of a biblical verse
that exalted hopes for Jewish freedom. In 1882, when the first biluim
arrived, some 25,000 pious Jews already lived in Palestine.
The author writes that, “The biluim scarcely took note of their settling on
land for which they had no legal title. … Their ideals contained no room for
contemplating Arab possession. They deeply believed Palestine was their
land. It was not necessarily holy, the claim of the pious Jews, but it was
intrinsically Jewish. BILU left to Herzl the conceptualization of a Jewish
statehood, but it never questioned the Jews’ right to Palestine.”
“Auto-Emancipation”
At the same time, Leo Pinsker, a Jewish doctor from Odessa, published a
small book called Auto-Emancipation whose powerful nationalism inspired the
founding in Vienna of the journal that first used the term “Zionism.” Like
Herzl, Pinsker was far removed from Jewish religious thinking. He showed
little interest in Palestine. The land he thought of for Jewish emigration
was “a small territory in North America or a sovereign Pashalik in Asiatic
Turkey.” In 1884, Pinsker convened a congress in Prussia, beyond the reach
of the czar’s secret police. Instead of calling for Jewish statehood, he
asked only for donations to BILU’s struggling settlements.
At the time of Pinsker’s death in 1881, Theodor Herzl, a journalist in
Vienna and an avowed atheist, with no connection to Jewish religious life,
began thinking about the plight of Europe’s Jews and how it might be
relieved. On August 29, 1897, in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl announced to the
delegates at the first World Zionist Congress that, “We are here to lay the
cornerstone of the edifice that is to house the Jewish nation.” In his diary
he predicted that, “perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty,” the
Jewish state would exist. In embarking upon this enterprise — and Herzl was
ambivalent about where such a state would be located — he was flying in the
face of Jewish tradition. “Rabbinic tradition,” writes Viorst, “held that
only God, through the Messiah, His agent, had the power to bring His people
home. In that sense, Herzl’s summons at Basel was a challenge to Judaism,
but it was also an echo of the rising drumbeat of the secular nationalism
spreading across Europe.”
Herzl’s thinking about Jewish life in Europe, which concerned him very
little in his early years as a journalist, was altered when in 1894 he was
assigned to cover the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a French army captain,
charged with treason as a spy for Germany. Amid growing anti-Semitic
demonstrations, Dreyfus was found guilty and imprisoned. Four years later,
the discovery of falsified documents within the general staff proved his
innocence, and he was pardoned. Still, Herzl concluded that anti-Semitism
was an incurable European plague, and Jews needed a land of their own.
“The Jewish State”
In 1896, Herzl’s book The Jewish State, was published. “It should be no
surprise,” reports Viorst, “that Herzl did not feel compelled to place the
Jewish state in Palestine. He recognized Palestine as ‘our ever-memorable
historic home,’ certain to ‘attract our people,’ but he declined to be
constrained by biblical geography. He had no interest in satisfying a
religious nostalgia … Herzl’s pragmatism told him, as it had told Pinsker,
that a refuge could be anywhere, and there were more promising places than
Palestine. The first choice he expressed … was Argentina.”
What is not widely understood about Herzl, Viorst shows us, is how much he
was influenced by the thinking of European anti-Semites and how he sought
their support for their common goal of removing Jews from Europe, a goal
opposed by the overwhelming majority of Jews themselves, who viewed
themselves as English, French, German or Italian by nationality, and Jews by
religion.
A book that made a major impact on Herzl was Eugen Duhring’s The Jewish
Question as a Problem of Race, Morals and Civilization. It was one of the
books then fashionable among intellectuals across Europe. Inspired by
Darwin’s genetic research, these works claimed a scientific basis for anti-
Semitism. Duhring went beyond the standard religious and social origins of
the anti-Jewish prejudice to assert the Jews’ racial depravity. In Herzl’s
Vienna it was a best-seller.
Duhring, from his seat at the University of Berlin, argued that the
assimilation of Jews was poisoning German culture. Being inbred, the faults
of the Jews had no prospect of fading away. He called Emancipation a
terrible mistake and urged that Jews be re-confined to ghettos.
Uncomfortable Truths
Herzl, notes Viorst, “was shaken by Duhring’s analysis … parts of the book,
he wrote, were ‘so informative that every Jew ought to read them.’ The
feeling conveyed by his words was that Duhring asserted some uncomfortable
truths … Even years later, Herzl described the book ‘as full of hate as it
is brilliant. The effect of Duhring’s book upon me was as if I had suddenly
been hit over the head. I suppose this has been the experience of many a
Western Jew who had already completely forgotten his national identity: the
anti-Semites reawakened it in him.’ As he grew older, he often cited Duhring
as the real source of his immersion in the ‘Jewish question.’”
As his commitment to Zionism grew, Herzl counted upon the assistance of
anti-Semites, who shared his goal of removing Jews from Europe. Professor
Yakov Rabin of the University of Montreal notes that, “It must be remembered
that both Zionism and anti-Semitism originated in Europe, the home of
colonialism and racial discrimination. The dominant current of the Zionist
movement continued to take inspiration from European nationalism by
encouraging settler colonialism that excluded and ultimately dispossessed
the local population. Zionism succeeded in setting up a state just as the
nations of Europe were recoiling from ethnic nationalism in the wake of the
atrocities of the Second World War. Moreover, the Zionists intended to
establish sovereignty over a territory in which they constituted an
immigrant minority made up of disparate ethnic groups …”
If Herzl’s views of removing Jews from Europe was welcomed by anti-Semites,
it was opposed by most Jews. Vienna’s chief rabbi, Moritz Gudemann, argued
that a state based on Jewish nationalism, built on “cannon and bayonets,”
was likely, over time, to acquire a strong resemblance to the warlike
intolerant states produced by the Christian nationalisms. When Herzl sought
a site for his first Zionist congress, the German Rabbinic Association
vetoed Munich. The Orthodox wing repeated the position that collective
Jewish migration violated the messianic edict. The Reform wing argued that
Jews were citizens of the countries in which they lived and had no desire to
establish a Jewish state.
Indifference to Indigenous Population
What is clear in the thinking of Theodor Herzl and other early Zionist
leaders was indifference to the indigenous population of Palestine. Before
the publication of his book The Jewish State, he wrote of the Palestinians:
“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border, securing
employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in
our own country. The removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and
circumspectly.”
After Herzl’s death in 1904, no natural successor to lead the Zionist
movement emerged. Slowly, in the turmoil of World War I, Chaim Weizmann
emerged. Viorst devotes chapters to Weizmann and other Zionist leaders who
followed, Vladimir Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Benjamin
Netanyahu, as well as Rabbis Abraham Isaac Kook and Zvi Yehuda Kook.
Though Herzl founded modern Zionism, Weizmann, who had emigrated to England
from Eastern Europe, was influential in promoting the Balfour Declaration,
without which Zionism would not have achieved its goal. In 1948, Weizmann
became the first president of Israel.
As with other Zionist leaders, Weizmann showed indifference, at best, to
Palestine’s Arab inhabitants. On his first visit to Palestine in 1907,
writes Viorst, “Weizmann took notice of the Arabs of Palestine, and the
picture he painted of them was not pretty. As cheap labor, he complained,
they were a barrier to Jewish economic development. In a later lecture at
Manchester, he spoke of ‘Arabs whose requirements were few and whose mode of
living is uncivilized … The Jewish colonies cannot be regarded as really
Jewish so long as Arabs form so powerful a part of the population.’”
Opposition from British Jews
In promoting a Jewish state to British officials, Weizmann met opposition
from the nation’s Jewish leaders. Viorst notes that, “To Weizmann the chief
obstacle to a British declaration came … from the Conjoint (a part of the
Jewish Board of Deputies), whose links to the Cabinet were closer than his
own. In calling themselves ‘native Jews,’ the Conjoint implied that the
Zionists were foreigners, thus of dubious loyalty. What Weizmann failed to
admit was that Zionism would have no need for a refuge at all if Europe’s
Jews were treated like Britain’s Jews.”
In fact, within the Cabinet, the chief opponent of the Balfour Declaration
was its only Jewish member, Lord Edwin Montagu. He was, writes Viorst, “a
Jew with a distinguished history of government service. In a memo titled
‘The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government,’ Montagu warned the cabinet of
being ‘misled by a foreigner,’ who insists ‘the country for which I have
worked ever since I left the university — England, the country for which my
family have fought’ — is not my home, that my national home is Palestine. He
called the declaration ‘an irreparable blow to Jewish Britons … an endeavor
to set up a people which does not exist.’ “
Assessing Chaim Weizmann’s attitude toward Palestine’s Arab population,
Viorst characterizes it as a simple refusal “to consider the legitimacy of
Arab grievances. As for Arab nationalism, he was unaware that it had grown
fiercer as the Turks receded and as President Wilson’s pledges of freedom
spread among them. He chose not to understand — as did generations of
Zionists, before and after — that the rift between Jews and Arabs had deep
political roots. Weizmann concluded from his meetings that no prospect
existed for a trusting relationship with the local Arabs, which he blamed
entirely on them. In a letter to Balfour from Jerusalem, Weizmann complained
that the Arabs he met were ‘clever and quick-witted … but treacherous by
nature.’ In a report to British army intelligence he called them ‘a
demoralized race with whom it was impossible to treat.’ In his memoir,
Weizmann compares talks with Arabs to ‘chasing a mirage in the desert: full
of promise and good to look at but likely to lead you to death by thirst.’”
Revisionist Zionism
Considering Vladimir Jabotinsky, we see the beginnings of Revisionist
Zionism, to which Netanyahu is heir. It was Netanyahu’s father who served as
an aide to Jabotinsky, and never abandoned his commitment to Jewish
sovereignty in all of Palestine. Jabotinsky embraced arms as the means of
achieving Zionism’s goals. He believed that Weizmann and mainstream Zionists
were deluding themselves about the potential for a diplomatic path to
statehood. In an article, “The Ethics of the Iron Wall,” he laid out his
strategy for overcoming Arab resistance. He recognized that Arabs understood
very well that Zionists sought to take their country from them. He believed
that Arabs might be willing to reach agreement with the Jews, but surely not
of their own free will. Published in 1923, the article became a classic of
Zionism.
Jabotinsky evolved from an advocate of liberal Western values to a
sympathizer with fascism. He grew up in Odessa. Russia’s most cosmopolitan
city. He emigrated to Rome to study and called Italy his “spiritual
homeland.” He wrote that, “The best part of my youth I spent in Rome … when
Italy was a free and pleasant country, liberal, peace-loving, carefree,
without the slightest trace of chauvinism … harming nobody, persecuting no
one. This is how everyone should live, and us Jews, too.”
These liberal views were short-lived. More and more, Jabotinsky embraced
authoritarianism and believed violence was the only means by which to
advance Zionism. Viorst points out that “he fantasized about replacing
Britain with Italy as the Jews’ protector. He even petitioned the League of
Nations to invite Mussolini to take over the Mandate.” Jabotinsky died in
1940 but his heirs, including Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, created
Irgun and the Stern Gang and embarked upon a campaign of terror and
assassination in Palestine.
Bible as a Work of Jewish History
In the case of David Ben-Gurion, an atheist like Herzl, completely alienated
from Jewish religious life, Viorst portrays his vision of Zionism as being
drawn “from the Bible, which he treated not as a religious tract but as a
work of Jewish history … His interest lay in the nationalist message that
the Bible maintained, which he regarded as the real foundation of Judaism.
He was not much interested in the law, the morality, or the religious
practices that the Bible taught. He considered the Talmud to be rabbinic
sophistry … Throughout his career, Ben-Gurion looked to the Bible as the
record of the Jewish people, as his intellectual inspiration.”
Ben-Gurion arrived in Palestine in 1906. After barely a month of field work,
he participated in the founding of Poale Ziom, a party that was deeply
divided between a pro-Marxist wing, which aspired to build a proletariat of
Arabs and Jews within a classless culture, and a Zionist group which called
for a purely Jewish society. Ben-Gurion was part of the Zionist group.
Later, Viorst notes, Ben-Gurion sought “to strengthen Jewish labor by
excluding Arabs from the labor exchange, which held a near monopoly on
available jobs. Ben-Gurion applied his strategy in the citrus groves of
Petah Tikva … In 1924, he adopted strong-arm tactics. The growers,
themselves Jews, had long preferred Arab workers, bypassing the exchange to
hire them at minimal wages. Ben-Gurion responded by installing picket lines
at the gates to bar Arabs from entering the groves … Ben-Gurion’s socialist
vision never extended to Arabs … He did not aspire to narrowing the Arab-
Jewish prosperity gap. On the contrary, his practice as a labor leader in
the 1920s were designed to perpetuate, even widen, the wedge between Arabs
and Jews.”
Ben-Gurion’s commitment to creating a Jewish state seemed to exceed his
concern for those Jews who were about to become victims of Nazism. In 1938,
he said that, “If I knew that it were possible to save all the children of
Germany by transporting them to England and only half by transporting them
to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter for before us lies not only
the number of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of
Israel.”
Partitioning Palestine
Ben-Gurion accepted the idea of partitioning Palestine, while right-wing
Revisionist Zionists demanded Jewish control over the entire area. But Ben-
Gurion’s response to his right-wing critics is instructive. He declared: “No
borders are eternal … By the time we complete the settlement of our state …
we shall break through these frontiers.” To his son Amos, he revealed even
more: “All our aspiration is built on the assumption … that there is enough
room for ourselves and the Arabs … But I regard this scheme (partition) as
an unequaled lever for the gradual conquest of all of Palestine.” In
Viorst’s view, “Clearly, Ben-Gurion regarded partition as a tactical retreat
to achieve a more ambitious objective.”
When considering what Zionism’s policies should be toward the Arabs, Ben-
Gurion understood that expelling them from the area would be morally and
politically indefensible, yet he said it would solve many problems: “It
would be rash to assert that in no circumstances..can such a transfer take
place.”
Later, in 1948, after the State of Israel had been established, and the war
for independence was under way, Ben-Gurion was involved in the decision to
embark upon what later became known as an act of extreme terrorism. “To
relieve Jerusalem,” writes Viorst, “the Jews had to overcome Arab control of
the road leading from the city to the sea. Among the Palestinian villages
standing in their way was Deir Yassin, which the commanders of the Irgun and
Lehi requested authorization to capture. Ben-Gurion gave his consent. Though
the attack encountered almost no resistance, the attackers slaughtered some
250 men, women and children. News of the killing panicked Arabs throughout
Palestine, triggering the flight of tens of thousands in search of asylum to
the neighboring Arab states. Ben-Gurion was furious at the bloodbath … which
he blamed on the Revisionist leadership. His chief concern … was not so much
the needless killing of Arabs as the reaction of Washington … The Deir
Yassin operation imparted to the founding of the Jewish state a bloody stain
that has never been fully washed away.”
“We Have Taken Their Country”
An interesting insight into Ben-Gurion’s thinking can be found in the memoir
of Nahum Goldmann, who served as president of the World Zionist
Organization. He recalled a visit with Ben-Gurion, after his retirement at
his home in the Negev. He recalls Ben-Gurion musing, “Why should the Arabs
make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel.
That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us,
but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from
Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them?
They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their land.”
The development of religious Zionism is explored in a chapter on Rav Abraham
Isaac Kook and his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. Far removed from the secular
nationalism of Herzl and Ben-Gurion, Rav Kook also turned his back on
Orthodox Judaism’s rejection of political Zionism. When the Balfour
Declaration was published, Rav Kook declared that he saw in it the
footprints not of Britain but of the Messiah. Redemption, he told a crowd in
London’s Albert Hall, would be bestowed at the same time on Jews as on all
humankind. His words seemed to attribute the Balfour Declaration not to
Great Britain but to God.
Rav Kook rejected traditional Orthodoxy by embracing Jewish nationalism as a
divine commandment, independent of the Messiah. In 1924, he founded a
yeshiva in Jerusalem to train rabbis in religious nationalism. His son Zvi
Yehuda followed his father as head of Mercaz Ha Rav. It emphasized not
scripture, but the holiness of the land. Its motto was “The Torah of Israel,
the nation of Israel, the Land of Israel.” It linked Judaism to the
Judaization of Palestine from the river to the sea.
Age of the Messiah
It also taught that the victory of the Jewish state in 1948 proved that the
age of the Messiah had arrived even if the Messiah himself had not made an
appearance. “In the years after the Six Day War,” writes Viorst, “Religious
Zionism relentlessly challenged the state over territory and consistently
won. An Israeli general noted wryly in a memoir, ‘At the end of the sixties,
the world was already watching the finish of the era of colonialism, and
precisely then Israel found itself marching in the opposite direction.’ Led
by Kook’s followers, Israel’s growing domination of Palestine’s Arabs had
become an irresistible force at the core of Zionism.”
Zvi Yehuda Kook rejected the conventional Orthodox tenet that the Holocaust
was God’s response to the sins of the Jews. “Like his father,” Viorst notes,
“he believed in God’s control of the universe, and so he felt compelled to
find a more positive explanation. Without a virtuous God, there was no
reason for Religious Zionism to exist.”
What Kook found in the Holocaust seemed to be God’s embrace of Zionism and
rejection of Jewish life in Europe. He wrote: “Our whole people has
undergone heavenly surgery at the hands of the destroyers … God’s people had
clung so determinedly to the impurity of foreign lands that … they had to be
cut away, with a great shedding of blood. This cruel excision reveals the
rebirth of the nation and the land, the rebirth of the Torah and all that is
holy.”
In Viorst’s view, “Zvi Yehuda was saying … that the Holocaust was God’s way
of ridding the Jews of the debased culture of Exile. The Holocaust cleansed
Jewish life, he said. In that sense it may have been Messianic. To Zvi
Yehuda, the Holocaust was ‘a deeply hidden, internal, divine act of
purification,’ without which the Jewish state would have been forever
corrupt. Kook’s statement came close to praising God for the Holocaust … the
terrain on which Kook took his stand held that the Holocaust, in the final
analysis, rendered a major service to the Jews by assuring them of a home
that was not just Jewish but undefined by an impure past.”
Campaign of Terrorism
In his chapter on Menachem Begin, the Revisionist leader who embarked upon a
major campaign of terrorism, including the assassination of Lord Moyne,
Britain’s chief official in the Middle East, and the bombing of the King
David Hotel in Jerusalem, Viorst notes that, “Begin maintained that the
casualties were fully justified, even though he said he mourned only the
Jewish deaths.” Later, before being sworn in as prime minister, Begin
visited Elon Moreh in the occupied West Bank. Asked whether he would annex
the West Bank, he replied, “We don’t use the word ‘annex.’ You annex foreign
land, not your own country.” He also rejected the term “West Bank,” which
implied a link to Jordan, insisting that “Judea and Samaria” was the
region’s real name, derived from the Bible. After the swearing in of his
cabinet in 1977, Begin visited Zvi Yehuda Kook’s home to kiss his hand and
elicit his blessing.
Viorst brings us to the present time in his final chapter, “Advancing To
Netanyahu,” which paints a picture of the growth of religious extremism in
Israel and a retreat from the peace process, which would lead to a two-state
solution. In 1996, Yitzhak Rabin had signed the Oslo II peace agreement and
looked forward to re-election and to completing the peace process. This,
however, was not to be: “… the Knesset had approved Oslo ll by only a 61-59
margin, and some of those votes came from Arab members, which led Likud to
protest the absence of a Jewish majority, which it claimed invalidated the
outcome … The zealotry of both Likud and the Religious Zionists reached a
fever pitch … West Bank rabbis, most of them ideological offspring of the
Rabbis Kook spread the notion that Rabin was a criminal in relinquishing
Jewish land to non-Jews. Under Halacha (Jewish religious law), many said,
Rabin was subject to the penalty of death … Benjamin Netanyahu, who had
emerged as the leader of the Likud, did not challenge the rabbis in their
accusations that Rabin was a traitor.”
On the evening of November 4, 1995, at the conclusion of a peace rally in a
central square in Tel Aviv, Rabin was assassinated. His assassin was Yigal
Amir, a student at the religious Bar-Ilan University. He told police that
“if not for the halacha ruling made against Rabin by a few rabbis,” he would
not have committed the crime. “After the murder,” writes Viorst, “Religious
Zionists did not soften their objections to peace. The rabbis who claimed
that Rabin’s evacuation of territory was a capital offense under halacha
accepted no blame for his death. Not long after the assassination, I talked
with Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, a Gush Emunim founder who was now head of the
Kiryat Arba yeshiva. Though mild in manner, he was known for his involvement
in deadly acts of settler violence”
Rabbi Waldman said: “Judea and Samaria — yes, Kiryat Arba itself — are our
heartland. The Six Day War brought us back here. The process was initiated
by God but depended on the actions of the Jews. Did we need permission of
the Arabs to return? Not at all. Was this an Arab land? Never. We were
driven out, and now we’re coming back. The very notion of trading land for
peace is absurd. Our military supremacy is the only basis for peace. Those
Jews who do not believe that we must be in command are endangering the
Jewish people.”
Netanyahu Opposes Oslo Accords
Benjamin Netanyahu was first elected in 1996, at which time he had a legal
duty to carry out Israel’s obligations under the Oslo Accords. That,
however, Viorst shows, “was not his plan. He had no intention of
contributing to a process that moved Israel toward the establishment of a
Palestinian state. It was contrary to everything his father had taught him,
and everything he had learned from the works of Jabotinsky and Begin … His
refusal to abide by the terms of Oslo II ended the fragile truce that had
been reached between Israelis and Palestinians. As prime minister, Netanyahu
resumed the construction of settlements. He also pushed the expansion
eastward of Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem, which all but severed the
West Bank into two parts. He bulldozed Arab homes and denied Arabs living in
the occupied territories the right to enter Jerusalem. He shrank the West
Bank area designated under Oslo II for Palestinian rule and took over Arab
water resources …”
In October 1998, President Clinton summoned Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat to
the Wye Plantation in Maryland in an attempt to salvage Oslo. Jordan’s King
Hussein was brought in to help. A week of talks produced an agreement in
which Netanyahu pledged to resume Israel’s commitment to evacuate Arab
territory, while Arafat promised to impose more stringent controls to
suppress violence. In the end, the Wye conference, though ostensibly ending
in agreement, contributed little to advancing the peace process. In 2002,
Saudi Arabia. at an Arab League summit in Beirut, offered a proposal, which
the Arab states approved unanimously, that, in Viorst’s view,
“revolutionized — at least on its face — the Arabs’ historic perspective
toward Israel. Called the Arab Peace Initiative, the Saudis proposed to
exchange Israel’s consent to a Palestinian state and withdrawal of its
forces from all the occupied territories for peace and normalization with
all the Arab governments. Abandoning the traditional Arab claim of the right
of all refugees to return to their homes, the Initiative called for
negotiating a ‘just solution’ to the refugee problem.”
This major Arab overture found little support in Israel, whose prime
minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, and his cabinet, overrode the one
prominent voice in Israel who welcomed the Arab plan, Foreign Minister
Shimon Peres. When he learned of the Saudi plan, Peres declared, “Israel
views positively every initiative aimed at achieving peace and
normalization.” Sharon made it clear that, “The Palestinian state is hardly
my life’s dream.” What Sharon did do was “disengage” from Gaza, but in a
manner which, Viorst illustrates, gave it continuing control: “Israel
retained total control over Gaza’s borders, airspace, and territorial
waters. It kept its hand on Gaza’s communications, water, and electricity
networks . In determining who and what could enter or leave, Israel sealed
off Gaza from the outside world. In refusing practically all human rights to
Gazans, it promoted a permanent hostility that not only failed to curb the
bloodshed of the Arab-Israeli wars, which was Sharon’s objective, but
insured its continuation.”
Netanyahu Recognizes No Arab Claim
In the case of Benjamin Netanyahu, Viorst argues that he was different from
the other prime ministers in the post-Begin period, except for Yitzhak
Shamir, in that “the attitude of all of them toward the Palestinians
contained at least a shade of ambivalence. Each recognized … that
Palestinian Arabs had a legitimate link to the land, even though they gave
priority to the Jews. This ambivalence explains why the ‘peace process’
survived, and why a peace plan of some sort was almost always cooking on the
political stove. But in contrast, Netanyahu recognized no Arab claim to the
land at all and had no ambivalence.”
Netanyahu, in a memoir titled A Durable Peace, claimed that even after Rome
crushed the Bar Kokhba revolt in AD 135, the year conventionally regarded as
the start of the Exile, the Jews retained power and independence within
Palestine. He asserts that the Exile began only with the Islamist conquest
of 636. When Muhammad’s forces not only overran Palestine but imported
colonists to take over the land from the Jews. Netanyahu concludes: “Thus it
was not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs but the Arabs who
usurped the land from the Jews.”
Beyond this, Netanyahu states that in asserting a right to nationhood, the
Palestinians “invented a new identity, in effect creating a ‘West Bankian’
people who demanded recognition as an entirely new nation. When I am asked
whether I will support a Palestinian state, I answer in the negative.”
In fact, Viorst points out, “… depending on the politics of the audience
sometimes he claims to support a Palestinian state, and sometimes he does
not. Netanyahu … resurrected the concept of the kehillot, the self-ruling
communities in which Europe’s Jews lived in Exile in the centuries prior to
the Emancipation. Most Jews later called them ‘ghettos.’ Begin at Camp David
offered Sadat such an arrangement for the Palestinians, naming it
‘autonomy,’ and Sadat, after much haggling, accepted it. But Begin
ultimately backed away even from his own idea, rejecting any dilution
whatever of Israeli power in the occupied territories. Netanyahu, despite
his occasional equivocations, is clearly committed to Israel’s total control
of the West Bank.”
Address to Congress
As the Israeli election of 2015 approached, Netanyahu was running poorly in
election polls. In a deal brokered by his ambassador in Washington, he
received an invitation, unknown to President Barack Obama, from John
Boehner, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, to address a
joint session of Congress. When Netanyahu gave the speech on March 3,
Republicans made up an enthusiastic audience, but Democrats in large numbers
boycotted it. “Netanyahu,” writes Viorst, “had for the first time made
Israel a partisan issue in American politics.”
Netanyahu’s numbers stayed down until the eve of the election, when the
polls showed Likud a seat or two behind Labor. At that point, notes Viorst,
“Netanyahu took another gamble, appealing to the Israeli electorate’s baser
instincts. The Arabs, he declared menacingly, were voting ‘in droves.’
Reversing the vow at Bar Ilan (to create a Palestinian state), he proclaimed
that no Palestinian state would be formed as long as he was prime minister.
His gamble paid off, and on Election Day, Likud won 30 Knesset seats to 24
for Labor. Most of the last-minute switch came from the more extreme right-
wing voters … The appeal worked … assuring Netanyahu of another term as
prime minister.”
When he convened his new government in May 2015, Netanyahu instructed the
members of his majority not to miss a single Knesset session, even for
emergencies, lest the opposition spring a surprise vote that could overthrow
him. To reassure his supporters, he repeated his promise that Israel would
control all of the occupied territory for the foreseeable future. He then
added. “I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword. The answer is yes.”
Even Labor Not Prepared for Negotiated Peace
“The election of 2015,” Viorst writes, “revealed that most Israelis were
still not ready to contemplate a negotiated peace. During the campaign, even
Labor was not prepared to raise the issue, as it could not challenge the
Israeli preference for perpetual combat. Israel had no peace party in the
2015 election, and even if Likud had lost, the winner would not have taken
office with a popular mandate to negotiate a treaty to end Israel’s wars.”
As Milton Viorst came to the end of writing his book, the Middle East was in
chaos. Arabs were killing one another across the region, and groups such as
Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra, and ISIS, unknown a few years ago, now dominate the
news. Arab states such as Iraq and Syria are in disarray, and no one knows
how or when the pieces will come back together. It is Viorst’s hope that, “…
in the interstices between the fragments there is probably room to maneuver
on behalf of a new Israeli-Palestinian relationship. Establishing even a
small oasis of peace between the Mediterranean and the Jordan will not solve
the Middle East crisis, but it would certainly be a start.”
To the question of whether this can, in fact, happen, Viorst concludes: “Not
when Israel continues to measure its security solely on its ability to
dominate the region by military force. Zionism, unquestionably, has come a
long way since Herzl’s time, but it is now mired in Jabotinsky’s ideals …
Put another way, it is stuck in the Begin era. Given the turbulence that has
engulfed the Middle East since the start of the Arab Spring, even Israel is
going to have to rethink how to keep the state afloat. Is Israel ready to
seize an opportunity to reach out for peace? The answer is certainly not
yet. But, given the turbulence of our times, is it not fair to ask whether
it must be soon?”
For those who would understand Israel, Zionism and the crisis confronting
the Jewish community as it comes to grips with these growing challenges,
this book by Milton Viorst is essential reading. With expertise and
knowledge acquired from decades studying this contentious issue, Viorst
shows how Zionism has squandered most of the goodwill it once enjoyed and
has placed Israel’s survival in jeopardy. Also placed in jeopardy are
Judaism’s moral and ethical values. Too many leading Jewish voices have all
too often turned a blind eye to Israel’s ethical failings. This, however, is
slowly changing, and this book is an example of that much needed
introspection and moral self-examination.•
Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist, and is editor of
ISSUES. The author of five books, he has served on the staff of the U.S.
Senate, House of Representatives and the Office of the Vice President.
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