Dueling Zionisms: The Best Lost, the Worst Won; or, Jabotinsky vs Einstein
“Zionism uproots religious Judaism in a stronger way than Reform or assimilation, by creating new standards of ‘Judaism’ which will constitute a new ideology that can be elevated to the status of a religion.” — Nachman Syrkin, founder of Labor Zionism, 1898
“The unique durability of the Jewish community is to a large degree based on our geographical dispersion, and the fact that we consequently do not possess instruments of power that will allow us to commit great stupidities out of national fanaticism.” — Albert Einstein, 1936
We often talk about Zionism as though there’s only one kind because one kind won in Israel, but there are many Zionisms. The first, Christian Zionism, began as a Protestant belief that Jesus would not return until the Jews gathered in Israel. For centuries, most Jews ignored Christian Zionists. Religious Jews thought the Messiah must come before a new Israel, and secular Jews wanted social equality where they lived. Jews with the wealth to leave Europe overwhelmingly chose the United States over Palestine.
Jewish Zionism began when European antisemitism made some Germanic (Ashkenazi) Jews long for their own state. In 1882, the Lovers of Zion funded the first Zionist colony in Palestine. Unlike earlier Jewish immigrants, Zionists did not come for religious freedom. They came to build a base for a Jewish state. Their “boots on the ground” approach gave them the name practical Zionists.
Practical Zionists prepared the way for Theodor Herzl’s political Zionism. Herzl was a wealthy Jewish Hungarian who had no interest in religion — he called himself a freethinker, he did not have his son circumcised, and he did not speak Yiddish or read Hebrew. Herzl believed the solution to European antisemitism was a Jewish state, so, in 1896, he wrote Der Judenstaat, a German pamphlet calling for turning a poor land like Argentina or Palestine into a state for all Jews. A year later, he co-founded the Zionist Organization to manage Zionist efforts while negotiating with the world powers for land for a new state in the organization’s choice, Palestine.
Being Jewish did not weaken Herzl’s European bias— he believed a colony of Ashkenazi Jews in Palestine would be “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” To build that “rampart of Europe”, Herzl planned to starve out the working-class natives:
“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country… expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” — Theodor Herzl, 1895
The great challenge for political Zionists was getting the other Zionists to work together. Yiddishists wanted to promote the language of the Ashkenazim, Hebrew revivalists wanted to make Hebrew a spoken language again, religious Zionists wanted a holy state grounded in their version of Judaism, and cultural Zionists wanted Jews to have a spiritual rather than a political home.
Ultimately, the critical divide between Zionists was not religion or language — it was their attitude toward ethnic cleansing. Most Zionists were nationalists like Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky. They wanted a “Greater (Eretz) Israel” composed mostly of Jews.
“Our thought is that the colonisation of Palestine has to go in two directions: Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel in areas outside the country.” — Leo Motzkin, 1917
“With compulsory transfer, we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] …. I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” — David Ben-Gurion, 1937
Binationalists like Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Buber wanted a democratic state where European Jews lived side-by-side with native Palestinians of all religions.
“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 within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state.” — Albert Einstein, 1938
“I am in favor of Palestine being developed as a Jewish Homeland but not as a separate State. It seems to me a matter for simple common sense that we cannot ask to be given the political rule over Palestine where two thirds of the population are not Jewish. What we can and should ask is a secured bi-national status in Palestine with free immigration.” — Albert Einstein, 1946
Binationalists became irrelevant as Labor Zionism grew. Labor Zionists claimed to be socialists, but they believed in national socialism, a socialism for Jews only. David Hacohen, a Labor Zionist leader, explained,
“When I joined the socialist students — English, Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Indian, African — we found that we were all under English domination or rule. And even here, in these intimate surroundings, I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there. … To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; to praise to the skies the Kereen Kayemet [Jewish Fund] that sent Hanlon to Beirut to buy land from absentee effendi [landlords] and to throw the fellahin [peasants] off the land — to buy dozens of dunams [12] from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, God forbid, one Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited; to take Rothschild, the incarnation of capitalism, as a socialist and to name him the “benefactor” — to do all that was not easy.” — David Hacohen
Labor Zionists should be called pragmatic Zionists because they accepted dividing Palestine into a Zionist and an Arab state as a step toward their goal of claiming the entire land. David Ben-Gurion explained,
“The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan: one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.” — David Ben-Gurion, 1937
Revisionist Zionists were not that patient. They wanted to seize all of Palestine and Transjordan by building what Ze’ev Jabotinsky called an iron wall of Jewish bayonets. Revisionist Zionism should be called fascist Zionism because its leaders admired Mussolini, who admired them in turn:
“For Zionism to succeed, you need to have a Jewish State with a Jewish flag, and Jewish language. The person who understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky.” — Benito Mussolini, 1934
In 1948, Jabotinsky’s political successor, Menachem Begin, visited the United States. Einstein, Arendt, and other prominent Jews signed a letter to the New York Times comparing Revisionism to fascism and Naziism:
“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
…The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a “Leader State” is the goal.”
In Israel’s early years, Ben-Gurion and Labor Zionism seemed to have won. But after the Herut Party merged with Likud and Likud began dominating Israel’s policies, Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism were revealed as Israel’s true founders. As I write, Israel’s Likud government is slaughtering Palestinians to fulfill Jabotinsky’s dark dream of Eretz Yisrael shielded by an iron wall.
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