I am an unapologetic anti-Zionist. I do not accept that a “chosen” people ought to have exclusive ownership over any chunk of the planet. No self-respecting omnipotent deity — if such even existed — would sign over real estate of a paltry seven or eight thousand square miles of land to a tiny number of people on a puny planet in a vast cosmos of trillions of possible worlds. Where’s the ambition in that?
Moreover, I do not accept that any privileged group has the right to lay claim to any part of the planet or its resources. Each of the many worlds in the universe belongs to all of the living creatures in it. This essential belief probably explains why I’m a socialist on top of my many other faults.
Last week, on one of my walks, I listened to a couple of episodes with Shaul Magid on Daniel Denvir’s podcast, “The Dig.” Magid has exceptional recall, insight and clarity into the nature and history of Zionism and the two episodes I listened to covered a lot of ground. They are an excellent, quick introduction for anyone interested in what Zionism is, and how it came about:
- Magid – Zionism (episode 1)
- Magid – Zionism (episode 2)
Besides being an historian, Magid is also a rabbi. Having listened to his dissections of Zionism in “The Dig”, for all those criticisms I don’t think I ever heard him actually repudiate Zionism. It may be relevant that he’s also a citizen of the state of Israel. And yet — Magid’s a sort of un-Zionist Zionist. One of a growing percentage of American Jews.
In one of the podcast episodes, Magid remarks how similar his thought is to Hannah Arendt’s and that he almost always has one of her books on his desk. Like Arendt, Magid wrestles with the many contradictions and malignancy of Zionism’s illiberal, racist supremacism and its inherent incompatibility with democracy. But what really bothers him is how limited Zionism is, and how much damage it has done to Judaism.
So it was perfect timing that a new book of Magid’s just appeared. Emily Tamkin’s review of Magid’s The Necessity of Exile in the Forward, a Zionist Jewish cultural magazine, describes it as a book to challenge Jews to imagine something new and different. Tamkin diplomatically describes Magid not as an anti-Zionist but as a “counter-Zionist” — which will nevertheless provoke strong antipathies from some of her readers.
In his podcasts, Magid makes the point that Zionism has to a great degree replaced or become a dangerous central tenet of Judaism. Early Zionists had little or no interest in religion, today many Israelis are secular, and if Jews in North America and elsewhere do not support Zionism they are not even acknowledged as being Jewish.
Magid cites the November 3rd essay in the Jerusalem Post (“No longer part of us”) in which anti-Zionist Jews are characterized as Hamas sympathizers or more “charitably” as the “wicked child” in the Passover Haggadah — as outsiders, as non-Jews. Break the Sabbath all you want, eat pork and shellfish, and marry outside the faith. But don’t question Zionism!
Judaism may be an ancient religion, but rabbinic Judaism, particularly the elaboration of religious, ethical and moral positions developed in the Talmud over centuries, is of more recent vintage and is the legacy of disaporic Jews. On the secular side, innumerable elements of Jewish culture, from Yiddish and Ladino, literature, theatre, Klezmer music, food, humor, and general Yiddishkayt, are likewise cultural products of the diaspora.
With all this richness, and with the manifest poverty of Zionism, Magid’s book seems to promise an exploration of how Jews can reclaim both the religion and the culture from the death grip of an ethno-nationalism that violates so many of Judaism’s ethical prohibitions.
While there have always been tensions between Judaism’s liberal and conservative sensibilities, the religion of Rabbinic Judaism and the culture that developed around it have at least preserved liberal elements not found in the Revisionist Zionism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, the religious Zionism of Bezalel Smotrich’s National Religious Party, or the Jewish supremacist Zionism of Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power Party. For those who wax nostalgic for the defunct Labor or Meretz parties, their “kinder, gentler” version of Zionism was equally dedicated to ethnic cleansing and occupation as any of the recent extremist parties.
I reject the common view of older American Jews that Israel is an insurance policy, “the only safe place on earth for Jews.” If the last 75 years — and especially the last 75 days — have shown us anything, it’s how delusional this view is. Israel is neither a safe haven nor a light unto the nations. It is a profoundly screwed-up, repressive state run by extremists, coddled and preserved only at enormous cost by non-Jewish colonial world powers who need it for their own geopolitical purposes.
It enrages Zionists that young Jews are calling for freedom in Palestine “from the river to the sea.” The moral rot of Zionism can only envision ethno-nationalist supremacy within this geography. Any other vision invokes an irrational, illogical, and propagandistic reflex that claims these young Jews want a second Holocaust to extinguish the lives of their Israeli cousins.
Such claims invariably regurgitate talking points from the many Zionist organizations that exist solely to run defense for Israel’s indefensible foreign and domestic policies. But they also represent the failure to envision anything beyond the de facto Apartheid state that now exists from the river to the sea.
Magid’s book’s in the mail. I’m looking forward to reading what he’s got to say.
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