“Wrestling With Zionism” —— A Chronology Of Jewish Critics From Zionism’s Birth Until Today

Wrestling With Zionism: Jewish Voices of Dissent By Daphna Levit, Interlink Publishing, 288 Pages, $20.00

By Allan C. Brownfeld

Zionism, many now forget, was always a minority view among Jews. When Theodor Herzl organized the Zionist movement in the 19th century, he met bitter opposition from Jewish leaders around the world. The chief rabbi of Vienna, Moritz Gudemann, denounced the mirage of Jewish nationalism. “Belief in one God is the unifying factor for Jews,” he declared, and Zionism was “incompatible with Judaism’s teachings.” In 1885, American Reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh rejected nationalism of any kind and declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine ...nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” It was only the advent of Hitler and the Holocaust which convinced many Jews that a Jewish state was necessary. Many are now coming to the realization that this was indeed a mistake, and a violation of Jewish moral and ethical values.

In this important book, Daphna Levit amplifies the voices of 21 Jewish and Israeli thinkers—-scholars, theologians, journalists and activists who challenge Zionism on religious, cultural, ethical and philosophical grounds, beginning in the late 19th century, long before the founding of the State of Israel. She brings together a range of viewpoints into a single historical conversation. Among those discussed are Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, and such dissenting Israelis as Yeshayahu Leibovitz, Zeev Sternhell, Shlomo Sand and Ilan Pappe.

Levit is an Israeli who now lives and works in Canada. She served in the Israeli army and slowly came to understand that the Israeli narrative of events was contrary to history. She saw with her own eyes the daily mistreatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. She writes: “My own lengthy process of disillusionment with the Zionist narrative and search for other dissenting voices began soon after the Six Day War of 1967, when I served as press liaison officer at the Allenby Bridge and watched Palestinian refugees attempting to flee across the border. The separation from my country was gradual and took several decades. In 2002, I left Israel for Canada, at a point when the Zionist agenda was becoming increasingly militant and intolerant of opposition.”

“A light to the nations”

A Jewish state, Levit believed, was meant to be a “light to the nations.” Instead, she points out, it became something far different: “Instead, we became a military power, armed to the teeth and blind to the victims of our own cruelty. I found other, perhaps more enlightened, kindred spirits in my quest for absolution from the guilt of my complicity in the actions of my country.”

The voices she has gathered together are indeed eloquent as they try to maintain the Jewish moral and ethical tradition in the face of the excesses to which nationalism leads. From the very beginning, Zionism’s slogan of “A land without a people for a people without a land” was refuted by the earliest Zionist settlers in Palestine, who discovered that the land was populated by people who had been there for many generations. Asher Ginsberg, a Russian-born cultural Zionist, objected to Herzl’s lack of Jewish “Nefesh” or spirit. He wrote under the pen name Ahad Ha’am, which literally meant. “One of the people.” In 1891, after his first visit to Palestine, he wrote that, “The land was not empty, its people are not savages, and Jewish moral superiority was unwarranted. Jews in Palestine were behaving in hostile and cruel ways to the native population.”

In September 1922, he wrote a letter to the Haaretz newspaper after a revenge killing of an Arab boy by Jews: “Is this the dream of the return to Zion which our people dreamt for thousands of years, that we should come to Zion and pollute its soil with the spilling of innocent blood?” He was adamant about the rights of people in their own lands and the abuse of those rights by a colonization project.

Defender of human rights

Levit writes that, “Although Ahad Ha’am may have been the odd combination of a secular Zionist promoting Jewish values, he was a staunch defender of human rights. The native inhabitants had been there for millennia and had every right to pursue their own national identity with no Jewish overlord.... He warned Jewish settlers in Palestine to treat Arabs fairly, cautioning that brutality and cruelty would lead to resentment and put the Zionist project in great danger. He was the first Zionist to seriously deal with the now ubiquitous question of Judaism as a nation-state or religion. He stressed that the only legitimate claim Jews could make for a sovereign nation was if it reflected Jewish tradition of morality and universal conscience. He implicitly endorsed a two-state solution to the problem of sharing the land with its existing population. Despite the relevance of his thinking to contemporary Israel, Ahad Ha’am has been relegated to a secondary status, after Theodor Herzl. His ideas so often contradict the dominant narrative of contemporary Israel that he is not yet appreciated as the visionary that he was. Except, of course, by those who actually read his essays.”

Levit reviews the thinking of a wide variety of Jewish and Israeli critics of Zionism. In 1938, alluding to Nazism, Albert Einstein warned an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation. To create a state “imbued with a narrow nationalism in our own ranks against which we have already had to fight strongly even without a Jewish state.” Einstein initially endorsed the idea of a homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people, but he opposed the idea of a state with borders, with an army and with temporal power. Peaceful coexistence in that homeland was more important than any national objective. He considered himself a cultural rather than a political Zionist. and supported the idea of a binational State, in which Jewish-Arab cooperation was a prerequisite.

In a speech given to the National Labor Committee for Palestine in 1938, Einstein declared, “I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain —- especially from the development of a narrow nationalism ...”

“Blasphemes the name of Zion”

The respected philosopher Martin Buber spoke out in 1942 against the aim of the minority to conquer territory by means of international maneuvers. From Jerusalem, in the midst of the hostilities that broke out after Israel unilaterally declared independence in May 1948, Buber cried out in despair, “This sort of Zionism blasphemes the name of Zion, it is nothing more than one of the crude forms of nationalism.”

In 1901, Buber agreed to be editor of Herzl’s Zionist journal. Der. Welt. But he left after one year, disillusioned with the material goals of political Zionism. “Instead,” writes Levit, “he launched his own publishing company and in 1916. Launched the journal Der Jude to provide a platform for Zionist literature and for debates about the direction of Zionism. He opposed the idea of Jewish nationalism that had become an end in itself. ‘The moment national ideology makes the nation an end in itself, it annuls its own right to live, it grows sterile.’ The land of Israel alone was an insufficient condition for the creation of a viable and long-lasting Jewish nation. The nation created had to be an exemplary ethical community seeking spiritual purpose.”

Buber scolded the nationalists whose only goal was living in the land they described as “promised”. To them, without having any sense of their spiritual purpose which he described as “the great up building of peace.” He noted that, “Their only wish is to join the wolf pack. If we are not acceptable in the pack, it is enough to live on its fringes, in its neighborhood...of all the many kinds of assimilation, in the course of our history, this is the most terrifying, the most dangerous, this nationalist assimilation. That which we lose on account of it, we shall perhaps never acquire again.”

A binational Jewish-Arab state

Martin Buber began advocating for a binational Jewish-Arab State in the early 1920s, arguing that it was necessary for the Zionists to live in peace with the Arabs, even at the cost of the Jews remaining a minority in the country. In 1925, he was involved with other Jewish Intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, in the creation of the organization Brit Shalom (Covenant. Of Peace). which called for a binational state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs. In 1938, Buber settled in Palestine to teach at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he continued to argue for a binational, rather than an exclusively Jewish state.

One chapter is devoted to Yeshayahu Leibovitz, an Orthodox Jew and. Longtime professor at the Hebrew University. He says that no nation or state should ever be worshiped as holy and advocated the separation of religion and state. He saw the occupation of Palestinian land as an abomination that was corrupting the soul of Israel. He did not want Judaism to serve “as a cover for the nakedness of nationalism.” Nor did he want it to be used “to endow nationalism with the aura of sanctity attributed to the service of God.” Reverence for the State of Israel as a Holy land was unacceptable, a form of idolatry. In Leibovitz’s understanding. of Judaism, no piece of land could be holy, nor could any nation or state. Only God is holy, and only His imperative is absolute.

In 1977, in his essay “The Religious and Moral Significance of the Redemption of Israel,” Leibovitz relates part of a conversation he had some twenty years earlier with David Ben-Gurion, a man he considered to be hostile to religion. Knowing that the separation of religion and state would keep religion independent “so the political authority will be compelled to deal with it,” Ben-Gurion had said, “I will never agree to the separation of religion and state. I want the state to hold religion in the palm of its hand.” This, says Leibovitz, “...reflects the cast of minds of a man who entertained a bitter hatred of Judaism....The status of Jewish religion in the State of Israel is that of a kept mistress of the secular government—- therefore it is contemptible. The State of Israel does not radiate the light of Judaism to the nations, not even to the Jews.”

Occupation of Palestinian Territories.

Leibovitz’s assessment of the occupation of Palestinian Territories is summed by Levit: “An Israel seeking conquest and control over the Occupied Territories would ultimately face self-destruction as a Jewish state and find itself entrapped in perpetual war with its Arab neighbors. The occupation of Arab lands was an abomination. He predicted that isolationism, self-perceived victimization, and nationalism would destroy any Jewish values, and if Israel did not withdraw immediately from the Occupied Territories, all of its energy would be tied up in ruling another people against its will. If Israel’s soul were not destroyed, the occupation would corrupt it.”

Another chapter is devoted to Zeev Sternhell, who served as head of the department of political science at the Hebrew University and is a widely recognized expert on fascism. He wrote an article in 2018 entitled “In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism.” Sternhell asks, “How would a historian, in 150 or 100 years, interpret our period? When did the state devolve into a true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants? When did some Israelis understand that their cruelty and ability to bully others, Palestinians or Africans, begin eroding the moral legitimacy of their existence as a sovereignty?”

In a 2017 article entitled. “Apartheid Under the. law,”. Sternhell decries the policies advanced by minister of justice Ayelet Shaked. Sternhell charged that she promoted laws that legalize the threat to Palestinian land for the benefit of the settlers. These lands are confiscated to build roads that could only be used by Jews. Sternhell notes that since most of the lawmakers in Israel accept or actively endorse what he calls “the apartheid system of Israel,” this policy of dispossession could not successfully be opposed. He laments that, “This is what the rule of law has come to in Israel.”

Intolerably ethnocentric

In the case of Shlomo Sand, Professor Emeritus of History at Tel Aviv University, he believes that the Jewish society in Israel has become intolerably ethnocentric and racist and that it has evolved a closed and exclusive cast, which Sand abhors. Jews in Israel today have greater privileges than others living in the same country. Even Jews living outside of Israel, who have never set foot in Israel, have more rights and privileges than Palestinians, whose families have lived there for many generations. “Ironically,” writes Levit, “until he became an academic historian, Sand had never doubted the axiom that the Jewish nation existed for four thousand years. Through his research, he found the legitimacy of this and other aspects of the Zionist narrative problematic, and he felt compelled to probe more deeply.”

In his book. “the Invention of the Land of Israel,” Sand attempts to analyze what he believes is the “overwhelming myth” of the longing for a Jewish homeland over thousands of years. “Although a valuable propaganda tool for Zionists,” writes Levit, “the narrative was a myth. Throughout their history, the Jews have shared nothing other than religion, with diverse linguistic and cultural traditions developed in a variety of host countries. The longing for the Promised Land was part of that shared Jewish religion, and through literature, prayer and ritual, it became a part of Jewish collective memory, but nowhere in the holy literature was there any aspiration for collective ownership of a territorial national homeland. In religious terms, the Holy Land was tangible and exalted, attainable only after the arrival of the Messiah. Only then would the living and the dead gather together in eternal Jerusalem. Any attempt to turn it into a physical site was considered a grave transgression.”

In the 1980s, three decades after the State of Israel was founded, a number of historical documents were declassified. A group of scholars emerged—- social and political scientists, historians, anthropologists and economists —-who studied these documents, using research methods in their various disciplines to re-examine Israel’s narrative of the Atab-Israeli conflict. The term “New Historians” was coined in 1988 by Benny Morris to describe the work of these scholars——who included Morris himself and, among others, Sinha Flapan, Baruch Kimmerling, and Avi Shlaim.

Israel’s “New Historians”

Perhaps the most controversial of these has been Benny Morris, a long-time professor of history at Ben-Gurion University. His investigation into the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem began in the 1980s when he had access to Israeli government archives. He found evidence of undisclosed expulsions of Palestinians and atrocities that had been committed by Israeli soldiers before, during and after the 1948 war, and revealed his findings in “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949” published in 1987. “The book was a cornerstone work of the New Historians, notes. Levit, “and definitively contradicted the official Zionist narrative.”

Morris claimed that 600,000-700,000. 60 per cent of the population, fled their homes to escape Israeli military assaults or out of fear of impending attacks or expulsions. The book provides detailed chronological accounts of the Arab exodus from Jewish-held parts of Palestine during the nineteen- month period from December 1947 to July 1949. Shattering the myth of the most moral military force in the world, the book meticulously described brutalities such as documented rapes by Israelis and about two dozen massacres and executions committed by Israeli forces during this period.

Another of the “New Historians” was Simha Flapan, who served as editor of “New Outlook” magazine, which promoted rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians. He is best known for his book. “The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities,” published in 1987, the year of his death. He shows, Levit points out, that, “Ben-Gurion was explicitly complicit ...in historical revision and is exposed by the documents to have consistently preferred territorial expansion to any compromise with the Palestinians. Very early in the history of Israel the predominant socialist Zionist aspiration was for a demographically homogeneous Jewish State, with borders extended as far as the nationalist affiliation of the leaders could dictate. The more right- wing the leader, the greater the territory required. Regardless of the ultimate size of the state, the demographic concern necessitated. The expulsion of Palestinian Arabs.”

Massive flight of Palestinians.

The 1948 war resulted in the massive flight of 85 percent of the Palestinians, an estimated 700,000 people, from there lands in what would become Israeli territory. “The myth,” Levit notes, “was that all these people left their homes voluntarily, obeying the commands of the Arab leadership who were about to send in the imminently. victorious Arab armies. Flapan contradicts this myth. He blames the Israeli leaders for encouraging the Palestinian exodus with ‘aggressive defense measures’ ‘psychological warfare and intimidation.”

Another Israeli historian whose work is discussed by Levit is Ilan Pappe, now a professor at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and previously at the university of Haifa. Pappe came to the conclusion that it was not possible for two independent states to exist in Palestine and that the only solution was the creation of a single state to be shared equally by all who live there, a binational state for Palestinians and Israelis. But with an increasingly oppressive Israeli government, such a solution was far from imminent.

“Long before Pappe,” writes Levit, “Zionists and non-Zionist Jews were searching for a solution that would have, in effect, created a single state. Ahad H’am, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, and even Hannah Arendt.” Ilan Pappe elaborated on his contemporary, but similar, response to this persistent problem in an interview conducted in 2015 by Khalil Bendid on Status hour.

Settler-Nationalist Movement.

Pappe declared that, “This is a struggle between a settler-colonialist movement, which arrived in the late nineteenth century in Palestine and still tries today to colonize Palestine by having most of the land with as few of the native people as possible. And the struggle of the native people is an anti-colonial struggle...If you would suggest today as a progressive person that you should divide South Africa between the white population and the African population, you would be regarded as best as insane , and at worst as someone who is insincere and a fascist. I think the fact that this logic —-which is so clear to many people in any other place in the world—- somehow fails to work in the case of Palestine.”

Levit provides this assessment: “The policies Israel decided to impose on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 have remained the same to this day and resulted in the expulsion of half of the native population, the destruction of villages and towns, and the appropriation of 80 per cent of Mandatory Palestine by the Jewish state. These were considered survival policies for the State of Israel and based on two principles: (1) the Jewish state must control as much land of historic Palestine as possible, and (2). Israel must reduce the number of Palestinian Arabs residing in it. In ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,’ Pappe writes that the population problem had already been recognized as a major issue for the early Zionists in the late nineteenth century. As early as 1895, Herzl had proposed a solution: ‘We shall endeavor to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed.’ And in 1947, Ben-Gurion reaffirmed the underlying principle: ‘There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only sixty per cent.’ In 2003, Netanyahu reaffirmed: ‘If the Arabs in Israel form 40 percent of the population, this is the end of the Jewish state...But twenty percent is also a problem...The State is entitled to employ extreme measures.’”

Pappe argues that the expulsions of Palestinians since 1948 constituted the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Contrary to the Zionist narrative, this strategy was not decided an ad hoc basis, when security considerations required strong measures, but in accordance with a plan explicitly drawn up in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. Plan Dalet. provided directions for the systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from the areas the Zionists wanted for the Jewish state. The inability to achieve peace in the Middle East is attributable to policies that violate international law that were conceived by the leaders of Israel, commencing, Pappe points out, with “the heroes of the Jewish War of Independence...with the indisputable leader of the Zionist movement, David Ben-Gurion. “

State-sanctioned Holocaust narrative

Israel’s State-sanctioned narrative of the Holocaust, Levit shows, has come under widespread criticism: “.... Pappe tackles it boldly. In ‘The Idea of Israel.’ An entire chapter, ‘Touching the Raw Nerves of Society: Holocaust Memory in Israel’ Is dedicated to analysis of this inviolable topic...Pappe discusses several prominent Zionists who have questioned the cynical exploitation of the Holocaust by Israel for domestic and international purposes. Among them is Nahum Goldman, founder and president of the World Jewish Congress, in the 1970s, and Avraham Burg, a religious former Speaker of the Knesset (1999-2003) who unambiguously expressed his concern in the title of his 2008 book. ‘The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from The Ashes.’”

Many Jews in Israel, the United States and elsewhere have discussed the incongruity of using the Holocaust as justification for injustice. One important voice cited by Levit. Is Norman Finkelstein, who studies the deliberate use of the Holocaust by Israel.

Born in New York to parents who were Holocaust survivors, he wrote “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.” He argues that the representation of the Holocaust was “fraudulently devised and marketed to the American public ...to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and U.S. support for these policies.” In Finkelstein’s view, it is objectionable that, despite being a formidable military power, Israel “casts itself as a victim state and thus garners immunity to criticism.”

Among the scholars who have attempted to expose the use of the tragedies of the Second World War is Israeli historian Tom Segev. In his book “The seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,” Segev presented the early Zionist leadership as interested exclusively in those Jews from Europe who were willing and able to move to Palestine. In the 1930s leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine were either naively blind to the perils of Hitler’s rise or consumed entirely by their enthusiasm for Zionism. Ben- Gurion said: “Zionism bears the obligation of a state, it therefore cannot initiate an irresponsible battle against Hitler.” The Jewish community in Palestine struck an agreement with the Gestapo not to support a worldwide boycott of German goods so that German Jews could bring their possessions into Palestine.

“Historical reckoning of the Jewish people”

Ben-Gurion is quoted as explaining: “if I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second—-because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.”

Levit also discusses the work of one of Israel’s leading journalists, Gideon Levy of Haaretz. In one of many televised interviews, Levy said that when he started covering the West Bank, he was a young and brainwashed Zionist. In those days, when he saw settlers cutting down olive trees or settlers mistreating Palestinian women at the checkpoints, he considered these incidents as exceptions, rather than official government policy. Eventually he had to accept that he was witnessing a punishing persistent reality. Although he has received multiple death threats, Levy defines himself as a “patriotic Israeli” who is ashamed of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians.

As Levy sees it, Israel has lost its moral compass. He describes Israel as as an unrestrained country that blatantly ignores international law and repeatedly defies U.N. security Council resolutions. He has called Israel’s more than fifty-year occupation of Palestinian land “criminal,” “brutal” and “rotten.” In an article entitled. “AIPAC Is Destroying Israel,” he criticizes the so-called “lovers of Israel” for the damage they have inflicted on the country: “The American Israel Public Affairs Committee may be the organization that has caused the greatest damage to Israel. It has corrupted Israel, taught it that everything is permissible to it. It made sure America would cover up and restrain itself over everything. That it would never demand anything in exchange. That Uncle Sam would pay—-and keep mum. That the supply of intoxicating drugs would continue. America is the dealer, and AIPAC is the pusher.”

Give U.S. politicians a tour of occupied territories

One recommendation made by Levy, writes Levit, “...was giving U.S. politicians a tour of the Palestinian Occupied Territories, especially Hebron. He proposes that anyone who doubts that Israel oppresses the indigenous Arab population should spend just a few hours in Hebron, an occupied city in the West Bank. No honest human being could visit Hebron without being shocked...Armed Israeli settlers live in the center of the city and Palestinians must travel on separate roads, which are patrolled by Israeli soldiers. Many of these roads are covered by large nets, above which the settlers and their families live. The gratuitous humiliation includes settlers dropping objects such as dirty diapers—even urinating—from their windows above.”

Another important journalist whose work is discussed by Levit is Amira Hass. She began reporting from the Occupied Territories for Haaretz in 1991 and is the only Israeli Jewish journalist who has actually lived full-time among Palestinians. In her introduction to “Drinking the Sea of Gaza,” Hess explains her work as, in part, the result of her experience as the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. One day in 1944 at Bergen-Belsen, her mother was being herded from a cattle car along with the rest of the human cargo: “She saw a group of German women ...watch with indifferent curiosity...For me these women became a loathsome symbol of watching from the sidelines...my desire to live in Gaza stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity but from that dread of being a bystander , from my need to understand ...a world that is ...a profoundly Israeli creation. To me Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It represents the central contradiction of the State of Israel...democracy for some, dispossession for others.”

Hess warns Jews living outside of Israel not to become accomplices and she reminds Israelis that apartheid is considered a crime. It is the moral duty of Israelis, she says, “to use our privileges to fight the regime of privileges and as much as possible reduce the level of our collaboration with the dispossession.” The Gaza Strip is roughly 362 square kilometers, with over 1.8 million people. It is ranked as the third most densely populated area in the world. And, according to Hass, it is one huge prison: “It is an Israel-mediated, pre-meditated, pre-planned and planned project to separate Gaza from the West Bank. Gazans. Have no freedom of movement, no control over their own lives and no power to shape their own future.”

An end to water service

In a 2019 article, Hass writes about the supply of water to twelve Palestinian villages in the West Bank. After six months of clean running water, representatives of the Israeli Civil Administration, soldiers, border police, and bulldozers arrived to put an end to this basic service. She reported that, “The troops dug up the pipes, cut and sawed them apart and watched the jets of water that poured out. About 350 cubic meters of water were wasted. This was done despite the critical scarcity of water in the region. As the Civil Administration diligently destroys water lines for many Palestinian villages, it immediately connects illegal Jewish settlements and outposts to water and electricity and even paves the roads leading to them. Although these villagers had managed to construct a water line and widen the roads to facilitate the delivery of water, a right-wing Israeli group pressured the Civil Administration to destroy the infrastructure under an inhumane law that prohibits Palestinians from hooking up to existing water systems. The chairman of the council of villages, Nidal Younes, asked why they demolished the water lines and one of the border police officers answered him, in English, telling him it was done to ‘replace Arabs with Jews.’”

Levit cites lawyer Michael Sfard, who practices international human rights law, representing people who have been deprived of basic rights for over fifty years. In a 2019 interview with David B. Green in Haaretz, he wrestled with the definition of Zionism: “if Zionism is the belief or the desire that the Jewish people will have a place where they can exercise their right of self-determination as a nation, and that place is here, then I’m a Zionist. If being a Zionist means thinking that this should come at the expense of other people who live here, and they should become second-class citizens, then I am not a Zionist.”

Levit provides this assessment: “As a result of persistent distortions by interlocutors, who were presented as ‘reliable,’. Israel’s image as a benevolent occupier of a land full of untrustworthy Palestinian terrorists- in-waiting has been perpetuated among its supporters. In the evolving Israeli historical narrative, the perception promoted was that Palestinians sometimes felt no particular attachment to their homes or to the land on which they had lived and worked for generations. Prime Minister Golda Meir, admired by many as a grandmotherly humanitarian, clearly held and advocated this view. ‘it is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine, considering itself a Palestinian people, and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.’”

Israel’s rationalization

The continuous repetition “of this misinterpretation,”. declares Levit, “abetted Israel’s rationalization and justification of its right to exist on Palestinian land. David Ben-Gurion offered his own variation on this theme. ‘The Palestinian Arab,’ judged Ben-Gurion, demonstrated no ‘emotional attachment’. in the country. ‘He is equally at ease, whether in Jordan, Lebanon, or a variety of places. They are as much his country as this is. And as little.’ Since, presumably, the Jews had stronger emotional ties to the land of their ancestors, it must be concluded that Palestinians should just cooperatively move along to another location.”

This book, Levit points out, “...was not intended to be a comprehensive history of opposition to the moral bankruptcy of militant nationalism, for that would require a much longer work. Instead it presents the evolution of dissent since the time that the quest for National Jewish identity and independence in nineteenth century Europe grew into the Zionist movement. In doing so, it uncovers a legacy not only of perspectives and ideas, but of moral courage, commitment and imagination.”

Sharpest critics of Jewish nationalism have been Jews

This book shows us how using the term “anti-Semitism” to characterize criticism of Israel and Zionism is completely ahistorical. The sharpest critics of Jewish nationalism, as this book shows us, have been Jews, seeking to maintain Judaism’s highest moral and ethical standards. And to apply them equally to men and women of every race and nation. This history is largely unknown to many Jews, and to many others, and Daphna Levit has performed a notable service in telling this important—-and uplifting story.*