Zionism as a master-race ideology
Holding placards stating “Judaism rejects Zionism and the State of Israel,” “Bibi’s on a world tour to fuel antisemitism,” and “The Jewish religion forbids the existence of the State of Israel,” dozens of radical haredim gathered in front of the US Consulate-General in Jerusalem on Tuesday to protest against Zionism and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress. Caption by JPost, photo by Marc Israel Sellem, March 2015.
Zionist Invention of Iran Threat – An Interview with Prof. Yakov Rabkin
July 26, 2015
Good evening from the Editorial Team of ProMosaik e.V.
We have already talked about Iran in the last days, after the historical Iran Deal in Vienna, achieved after 12 years’ of work this 14th of July 2015. The only State opposing to this deal is Israel which talks about how dangerous Iran is for the Zionist State.
We have talked to Prof. Yakov Rabkin of the University of Montreal about this invention and culture of fear on which Zionism is based. We thank him a lot for his time.
We had already published his great article about Iran before the deal, when Netanyahu spoke in front of the US-Congress about the so called “Iranic threat”.´
Dr. Milena Rampoldi: How has Israel invented the Iranian threat and with which means does Israel try to keep it for ever?
Prof. Yakov Rabkin: In an earlier article I outlined the history of that invention. Israel used its allies and agents to promote it and make it into an international issue. Thus Israel was able to distract world attention from the Palestinians, and deal with them with impunity.
No less importantly, this fabrication offered Israeli society another “existential threat”. Apparently, the non-existent Iranian bomb has now been replaced by another “existential threat” – BDS, international peaceful campaign to apply boycott, divestment and economic sanctions to make Israel change its policy toward the Palestinians. Some Israelis believe that their society would implode without these existential threats. Fear is what holds it together.
MR: How are the real relations between Jews and Iranian people in Iran which has a big Jewish community?
Prof. Yakov Rabkin:While I have no direct knowledge of the situation of Jews in Iran, it appears they are doing no worse than other Iranians. There have been no violence or specific repressive measures reported.
MR: How can a refusal of Zionist ideology help us today to promote the friendship between the Jews and the Muslim peoples in general and Iran in particular?
It is important to emphasize that Zionism has been a rupture and a rebellion against Judaism. Most Jews opposed it when it emerged in the late 19th century. One must reject antisemitic conspiracy theories and understand that Jews around the world, whatever their vocal support Israel, have no influence on Israeli policies. They should not be held responsible for what Israel is and does. Then one could see that Judaism and Islam are the two closest religions to each other, that Jews lived a lot better in Islamic than Christian realms and that many classical works of Judaism are written in Arabic. Moreover, Jews with their experience of antisemitism in Christian countries can help Muslim to cope with the growing Islamophobia.
MR: What would you say to the German Chief of the Zentralrat der Juden, Dr. Schuster, who said the Iranian deal is dangerous for Israel and for the stability of the whole Middle East?
Israel fans around the world repeat whatever they are told to say by their Israeli masters. With all due respect to functionaries of Jewish organizations in Germany, they may be less well informed than their government that signed the Vienna agreement. This kind of support for Israel is not innocent. Recently it was revealed that Jewish organizations were covertly used by the Israeli army to spread its message during the attack on Gaza in 2014. Obviously, those Jewish functionaries who agreed to do this expose rank-and-file members of their organizations to reprisals, including violence. This is particularly grievous since most Jews, at least in the United States, support the Vienna agreement with Iran. Moreover, American Jews support it more than the average Americans.
This shows the growing estrangement of American Jews from Israel, which only strengthens the point I made in my answer to your prec[v?]ious question. In view of this, one wonders who exactly represent functionaries of Jewish organizations: Jews in their countries or the State of Israel.
MR: How long will people take to understand that Netanyahu’s position is wrong. What can we explain to these people to change their position?
Netanyahu relies on support from one of the main donors to the Republican Party. One can expect the Prime Minister’s credibility to remain sterling in those circles and their media. Elsewhere, he appears a lot less credible. But at issue is not his personality. Israel’s political mainstream is behind Netanyahu in denouncing the Vienna agreement. This is part of the inexorable shift of the Israeli public to the right. And this leads to Israel’s growing isolation in the world, including isolation from Jews in major countries.
Prof. Rabkin, photo from his publisher, Fernwood.
Yakov Rabkin’s devastating critique of Zionism: it is opposed to Jewish tradition and liberalism
By Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss
June 27, 2017
Last year one of the most important books on Zionism, ever, was published in English by Pluto: What Is Modern Israel? by Yakov Rabkin, a professor of history at the University of Montreal. The central theme of the book is how Zionists have exploited Judaism and western traditions to offer Israel as a liberal democracy when it is actually a nationalist colonialists project hanging on by its paranoid fingernails.
Rabkin has expertise. He is a religious academic, and it is his Judaism that has brought him to embrace universalist cosmopolitanism when it comes to interpreting history in our century. Given his background, he has been able to defy what he calls the “climate of intellectual terror that surrounds the Question of Israel.”
Published on 20 May 2016, Pluto Press, pb, £16.99
In reading his book, it struck me that the greatest service I could provide to a reader is to roll out Rabkin’s deadly insights about the nature of the “Jewish state,” and the essential antagonism of Judaism and Zionism. What follows is a long sequence of Rabkin’s observations and findings, all of which aim to end that climate of terror and allow westerners to speak freely about the Zionist era. Let’s go.
Zionism has four essential goals, Rabkin says.
1, “to transform the transnational Jewish identity centred on the Torah into a national identity like that of other European nations.”
2, “To develop a new vernacular language.”
3, “To displace the Jews from their countries of origin to Palestine”.
4, “To establish political and economic control over Palestine.”
Thus, Zionism is a case of “imposed modernization typical of western colonialism,” a policy rejected by both Arab and traditional Jewish populations.
Israel’s self-ascribed identity as a ‘Jewish state’ brings legitimacy to the renewal of ethnicity as the criterion for belonging
Politically, Israel has been able to rely on the solid support of the elites of Western nations, in part due to Zionism’s colonialist aims:
“The essentially European character of this recently established settler colony, which resembles in many ways the United Kingdom’s former colonies throughout the world, also explains Western support of Israel. Its self-ascribed identity as a ‘Jewish state’ brings de facto legitimacy to the renewal of ethnicity as the criterion for belonging.”
Rabkin notes the popular trend we’ve been chronicling:
“Western partiality toward Israel suffers from a democratic deficit: contrary to their elites, the majority of the citizens of the Western nations consider the state of Israel as a threat to world peace.”
The distinction between left and right wings of Zionism is far less meaningful than is Zionism’s hostility to liberalism:
[I]t would surely be more useful to speak of a division between liberal cosmopolitanism and ethnic nationalism. Zionism, meanwhile, is fundamentally hostile to liberal cosmopolitanism, which explains why the Zionist “left,” in Israel and elsewhere, has gone largely over to the “right.” What unites the two camps—their conviction of the legitimacy of Zionism—is more substantial than the stylistic or tactical differences that divide them.
Rabkin links the rise of Zionism with the secularization of Jewish identity in modernity, and the Jewish aspiration to normal experience among the nations:
Jewish secular identity acquired a socio-cultural dimension: those who consciously rejected Judaism could preserve, at least for a while, a specific language (Yiddish), and a few cultural markers. This new identity was conjugated in a wide range of political options, often of socialist or nationalist inspiration. By consummating the break with tradition, the concept of the secular Jew, at variance with the traditional Jewish vision, made it possible to redefine the Jews as a “normal people” and thus became the cornerstone of Zionism.
But it was a special definition of peoplehood.
The concept of the Jewish people that Zionism relied on had little in common with traditional definitions of the term. Religious scholars know that: “the Torah, and only the Torah, makes of the Jews a collective identity.”
Jewish tradition has long put exile at the centre of Jewish existence. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch:
Torah… obliges us, until God shall call us back to the Holy Land, to live and to work as patriots wherever He has placed us, to collect all the physical, material and spiritual forces and all that is noble in Israel to further the wealth of nations which have given us shelter.
But the new secular Jewish identity gained popularity in Eastern Europe and especially Russia, and it “eliminated the religious—and thus normative—dimension of Jewish identity and retained only its biological and cultural dimensions.”
Prof. Yakov Rabkin, at the Cork conference on international law and the state of Israel, April 2017.
Photograph by Tom Suarez
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At the same time as it countered Jewish religion, Zionism also countered liberalism: “Zionists consider a liberal, multicultural society as a major obstacle to the expansion of a Jewish national conscience.”
Zeev Sternhell:
“To accept the liberal concept of society would mean [for Jewish nationalist intelligentsia] the end of the Jewish people as an autonomous unit.”
Thus, Rabkin says: “The main threat to Zionism is European liberalism, which offers Jews an individual choice but, according to many Zionists, denies them the opportunity to live a true national life.”
Zionism is at root a response to challenges of liberalism: “far more Israelis take up residence in the world’s liberal democracies than citizens of those countries immigrate to Israel.” That goes for Russian Jews too:
“Out of the 1.2 million Jews who emigrated from Russia at the turn of the 20th century, a mere 30,000 made Palestine their destination, and of those, only a quarter remained there.”
The Jewish tradition of exile is so strong that when Soviet Jewry was allowed to emigrate, Israel was required to carry out “a full scale diplomatic campaign in an effort to prevail upon its allies (primarily the United States and Germany) to limit immigration to their countries of Soviet Jews.”
Rabkin says Zionism was pioneered by assimilated, secular Jews who felt that emancipation had freed them to penetrate the highest levels of European society, and found they were rejected, so they sought a nation like other nations out of this frustration. Torah had been the basis of Jewish unity till Zionism. But when they went back to the land of Israel, “they would no longer need to follow [Torah’s] precepts, for their national consciousness, as experienced in the land of Israel, would be sufficient to sustain that unity.”
Israel allowed these Jews to forgive themselves assimilation: because they were assimilating into “normal” history:
“Only the state of Israel offers the Jews the ultimate freedom to reject totally their spiritual heritage and become a ‘normal people.’ The new Israeli identity appears to facilitate collective assimilation while sparing those who adopt it the feeling of guilt often linked to assimilation on an individual basis.”
Rabkin quotes Rabbi Amram Blau saying that Zionism brought greater injury to the Jews than to the Arabs:
“The Arabs may have lost their land and their homes, but by accepting Zionism, the Jews lost their historic identity.”
And he quotes Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, characterizing the two-tier system of rights for Jews and occupied Palestinians as “Herrenvolk [master race] democracy.”
The elevation by Zionists of the volk [a superior people with a special destiny] as the exclusive subject of Jewish history led rabbis to denounce this “cardinal element” of Zionist ideology, Rabkin says. He quotes Robert Wistrich.
“There is no Jewish nation… [Jews] should cultivate the ancient Hebrew language, study their rich literature, know their history, cherish their faith, and make the greatest sacrifices for it; they should hope and trust in the wisdom of divine providence.”
Zionism depends on antisemitism, and it also fosters it.
“Political Zionism intentionally stirs up anti-Semitism,” I. M. Rabinowitch wrote in 1974. “From the very beginning, it has been the policy to deliberately incite hatred of the Jew and, then, in feigned horror, point to it to justify a Jewish state.”
Rabinowitch said that Zionism contains the “most fertile seeds for proliferation of antisemitism” – an element of dual loyalty. Rabkin then quotes a former Israeli diplomat describing the role of Jews in the west as “an Israel-vassalized diaspora.”
Here Rabkin is unintimidated by the climate of intellectual terror. The vassalizing of the diaspora goes beyond double allegiance to “a form of exclusive allegiance to the state of Israel.” (Remember Dennis Ross calling on U.S. Jews to be “advocates” for Israel, not for Palestinians.) Rakin says:
“The unconditional defence of Israel into which certain community leaders have dragooned the Jews tends to expose them to criticism, which in turn justifies Zionism and makes the state of Israel indispensable as an insurance policy. Even proudly secular Israelis find this policy suicidal for the future of the diaspora…
“The denigration of Jewish life outside of Israel has long been a feature of Zionist thought and practice. The mobilization of the diaspora to justify whatever political or military action Israel might undertake constitutes its critical element.”
Not that Zionists knew how to deal with Palestinians. The Zionist activists in Europe never knew the “tolerant variety of nationalism” that arose in the US and Canada that distinguishes between nation, religion, society and state. Rather, the two slogans adopted by the Zionist pioneers clearly illustrated their intentions: “conquest through labour” and hafrada (separation).
“In other words, the Zionist movement adopted a policy of separate development that remains in force up to the present, and explains in large measure the perpetuation of the conflict with the Palestinians and the isolation of the state of Israel in the region.”
These undertakings have led to great Israeli insecurity. Today the term “security” has replaced the concept of self-defence that was widely employed before the creation of the state.
“Israel, often held up as a place of refuge, and even as the ultimate refuge, may well have become the most precarious place of all for the Jews… Now, in contrast to the early years of Zionism, the sense of victimhood has become, over the last few decades, an integral part of Israeli Jewish identity.
“Some of those who have persisted in seeing themselves as victims have come to realize that they are actually victims of the Zionist enterprise, which has subjected them to interminable wars and, in the case of the Arab Jews, chronic social and economic inferiority.”
These conditions generate paranoia, which Rabkin traces to a biblical curse: “you shall flee though none pursues” (Leviticus).
Israeli Jews are aware at some level that their country is based on unstable foundations:
The sense of fragility is fed by awareness of Palestinian hostility, and of the hostility of the region’s population as a whole, a hostility often attributed to so-called “essentialist” causes—Islamic religion and irrational Jew-hatred—rather than to perfectly understandable social and political ones, such as the anger generated by discrimination, dispossession, and deportation of the indigenous population.
Israeli leaders’ demand that others recognize Israel as a Jewish state “testifies to the fragility of the Israeli state, for all its power and prosperity, as felt by many Zionists.” While Zionist fears of becoming a minority cause them to encourage discriminatory immigration policies that only exacerbate the problem.
“Jewish self-hatred” has been a hallmark of the Zionist ideology of national revival. And this too undermines any sense of Israeli permanence.
“Jewish tradition teaches that the Jews must take into account the impression they may make on others, even those who have persecuted them in the past… But the Zionist education system from its inception has promoted the use of force, self-affirmation, and combativeness. The Zionists looked upon the requirement to behave as moral exemplars with scorn and ridicule, caring little for the impression they, and later their state, make upon the world, and above all upon its immediate neighbors. Ben-Gurion formulated the proposition thus: ‘What matters is what the Jews do, not what the goyim think.’”
Thus Zionism produced a state that rejected “Judaism and its humility.” The new Zionist/Israeli culture sees itself as resolutely European. “So it was that dozens of songs, nursery rhymes, and children’s stories were translated from Russian into Hebrew during the early years of Zionist settlement.” But not Arab songs!
Zionists used violence to strip Jews from their religious tradition:
“Many of the founders of Jewish armed groups, in both Russia and Palestine, also recognized that the use of force was a way of tearing the Jews from Jewish tradition.”
Rabkin is not afraid of the Nazi analogy. Israel and Nazi Germany are “powerful states that scorn individual morality, practice racial discrimination, and commit crimes against humanity.” Civic spaces in Israel have become associated above all with “death for the fatherland,” a linkage going back to the beginning of Zionist colonization.
Hannah Arendt’s warning about Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann’s not being guilty of “crimes against the Jewish people,” but of his being a normal response to an evil bureaucratic system carries “a universal meaning, which should stand as a warning to any state that adopts ethnic discrimination as state policy,” Rabkin says.
Israel’s behaviour, the incarnation of the principle ‘might makes right’ has undermined the very bases of international public law
“There can be little doubt that after the Nazi genocide, the use of force became an article of faith for a large number of Jews. To cast doubt upon the legitimacy and efficacy of force is, in Zionist circles, tantamount to treason.”
That article of faith has caused Israel to abrogate international law:
“Since the proclamation of the state, Israeli policy has remained constant. It reflects the imperative to perpetuate a state established against the will of the native Arab population and situated predominantly on lands that had once belonged to that population….Israel’s behaviour, the incarnation of the principle ‘might makes right’ has undermined the very bases of international public law conceived to reduce conflict and promote peace.”
Rabkin is clear about the racist character of such Israeli institutions as the Jewish National Fund:
“This institution has played a crucial role in the development of the Zionist state. In response to an anti discrimination action brought against the JNF in 2004, the organization confirmed that ‘the loyalty of the JNF is given to the Jewish people and only to them is the JNF obligated. The JNF, as the owner of the JNF land, does not have a duty to practice equality towards all citizens of the state.’”
Among Haredi Jews, the criticism of Zionism is alive:
“While the respected Israeli intellectual Boaz Evron argues that ‘Zionism is indeed the negation of Judaism,’ the words that, for decades, have been inscribed on the walls of the Haredi quarter of Meah Shearim in Jerusalem echo this basic position: ‘Judaism and Zionism are diametrically opposed to each other.’”
And of course, Zionism’s international reputation has been transformed:
“Zionism as a symbol of the struggle against racism and for human rights has acquired the characteristics of an ideology that produces Jewish racism and an institutional system that has much in common with South African-style apartheid.
“The Zionist state, which was to have been an instrument of national liberation, has in reality become a skilled manipulator that has attempted to monopolize control of the land, the water, and the country’s other resources.”
Many Zionists have become disaffected:
“Emigration affects primarily the best-educated strata of the population. An estimated 25 percent of Israeli academics work in the United States.”
They understand that Zionism is out of step with history:
“[T]he post-modernist trend presages the collapse of Zionism, in which nationalism is perceived as a form of oppression that must give way to the affirmation of otherness and multiculturalism.”
Rabkin sees Israeli political culture as growing more and more authoritarian:
[T]he totalitarian current gives no sign of abating. If probing questions about certain Israeli policies are sometimes tolerated, not only are all fundamental critiques of Zionism delegitimized, but likewise any individual who might have dared to formulate such criticisms in the past. Such people are systematically excluded from community activities…
Let us recall that the leaders of socialist Zionism made the decision to assassinate Jacob de Haan [in 1924] above all because he “spoke ill of the movement to the outside world.”
This totalitarian culture has special implications for American Jews, those who uphold Zionist doctrine, and those who don’t:
[S]ensitivity to any criticism of Israel can easily be explained by the fact that for many people allegiance to Israel has long replaced Judaism as the anchoring principle of Jewish identity. But in the diaspora, this allegiance extends to an ideal, even imaginary, state rather than to the real and existing state of Israel, that economic and military power that dominates the region. Still, there also exists a Jewish identity whose sole content is to criticize and even to denounce the state of Israel…
The author shares in the hope for Israel to transform itself:
A former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, believes that converting Israel into a state of its citizens, and erasing its Jewish nature, is “our only hope for survival.” Prominent poet and intellectual Yitzhak Laor argues, “We don’t have to leave this place or give up our lives… we have to get rid of Zionism.”
Rabkin quotes other Jewish anti-Zionists on the urgency of this idea:
We must stop treating Israel as a romantic dream and learn to see her as a heterogeneous country
In accepting the idea that the structures of Zionism could simply be dismantled, Rabbi Moshe Sober emphasizes its psychological aspect—and expresses guarded optimism about its practicality: “A solution is not impossible; it is not even particularly costly. But it will never be achieved unless we can allow ourselves to forget for a moment our cherished beliefs for which we have sacrificed so many lives, and look instead at the actual realities of the situation. We must stop treating Israel as a romantic dream and learn to see her as a heterogeneous country in which two fiercely proud ethnic populations of similar size are struggling for control….”
Sober’s understanding leads to the acknowledgment of apartheid: “All discussion of the occupation simply conceals another reality, [Sober] concludes. Israel has in fact become a binational state that denies political rights to one of those nations.”
Rabkin is also critical of Israel’s need for geo-political supremacy in its region. Here too he sees racism:
Although both Israel and the United States possess nuclear weapons, they deny Iran the right to acquire similar weapons, arguing that its rulers are irrational religious fanatics. Clearly the principle of double standards is at work, reflecting the revival of the concept of so-called civilized countries that, against empirical evidence, are claimed to possess a monopoly on rationality in international politics.
The sense of superiority has nothing to do with Judaism or antisemitism. It is inherent to Zionism, which is opposed to liberalism.
References to Judaism and to Jewish tradition are of little help in understanding the contemporary Israel; quite the contrary, they are more likely to mislead, for Zionism and the state that incarnates it are revolutionary phenomena. It is easier, in fact, to understand that state’s politics, structure and laws without reference to either the Jews or their history…. It is thus imprecise to speak of a “Jewish state” or a “Jewish lobby”: “Zionist state” and “Zionist lobby” would be more appropriate.
Israel has… succeeded in making the Zionist outlook—by definition anti-liberal—acceptable to the general public as well as in the media and the academic world, even in countries with a long liberal tradition where the state, rather than confessional or “tribal” loyalty, theoretically ensures the rights of the citizen…. [T]he JNF, which for a century has been establishing segregated settlements that are out of bounds to Arabs, enjoys not only Canadian fiscal benefits, but the personal participation of top federal officials in the organization’s fundraising efforts.
The overt transformation of Jewish organizations around the world into Israeli vassals
We must criticize U.S. Jewish leaders for being such willing servants of this ideology, damaging both U.S. and Israeli notions of citizenship:
The leaders of major Jewish organizations in the United States and elsewhere routinely act on behalf of Israel… Those leaders appear to have bypassed the limits of the “double loyalty” Jews are often accused of harbouring, insisting that loyalty to the state of Israel must prevail over all others, including that toward their own country.
This leads to the increasingly overt transformation of Jewish organizations around the world into Israeli vassals. Moreover, by emphasizing the primacy of an ethnically and denominationally defined “Jewish nationality,” the state of Israel turns its back on the idea of an “Israeli nationality” that would reflect that multicultural society that has taken shape on this land in the Eastern Mediterranean over the last century…
Israeli leaders ignore borders, intervening in the political process of other countries, particularly in the United States where Israel often plays Congress against he White House. In the Middle East, the IDF pays no heed to borders, striking targets in its neighboring countries, interventions carried out with impunity…
Rabkin’s conclusion is that Zionism is itself a prescription for unending conflict:
“Israel, for all its embrace of modernity, remains bound by the Zionist ideology, which ensures that in spite of its respectable age it remains a daring frontier experience rife with conflict within and without.”
For those who want more of Rabkin’s sharp insights, here is a great youtube of him taking apart a Zionist ideologue, Dennis Prager.
NOTE
In an interview in 2016, Haaretz’s left/liberal publisher, Amos Schocken explained why Haaretz was a Zionist publication:
“Zionism is a viewpoint that sees the national home in the Land of Israel as a solution for the Jewish people in the framework of a democratic, Jewish state. That has been Haaretz’s view since its establishment, and throughout the years it has been my view too.
Zionism’s purpose was to establish a safe haven for the Jews where they would be responsible for their own fate and no longer be a minority among other peoples dependent on the decisions of others. In light of the Jewish experience throughout history, this goal is entirely justified.