Zionism and anti-Zionism

It is often about more than Israel

Zionism: The Tablet Guide is an interesting collection of essays edited by Leil Leibovitz. A few of them may amount to cheerleading for the state of Israel, but most do not. My main takeaway is that attitudes about Israel have changed with the times, reflecting external factors.

WWI Diplomacy

The Tablet volume reprints a lecture from fifty years ago by Chimen Abramsky, called “War, Revolution, and the Jewish Dilemma,” about the circumstances faced by Jews in Russia from 1914-1919. Among other things, Abramsky adopts a cynical view of the Balfour declaration.

For a limited period, at a crucial point during the First World War, the imperial interests of the British Empire and the national aspirations of the Jews coincided. Both agreed that the Ottoman Empire would disintegrate as a result of the war; that Britain would take its place as the leading power in the Near East

…Britain was in urgent need of aid from America. The Zionists offered to conduct a vigorous campaign in America to influence her to join the war, and, with all her industrial might, help to deliver a mortal blow to the Germans and their allies. To do this the Zionists aimed to mobilize the full potential of American Jewry.

Meanwhile, in Russia the czar had been deposed in February of 20171917. For Britain, keeping Russia in the war was crucial.

The mounting antiwar agitation in Russia was deeply disturbing to the Allies; the fact that many Jews took an active part in the Revolution of 1917 led to a profound belief within the British Government that a declaration given by them to the Zionists, favoring the development of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, would mobilize Russian Jewry to work inside Russia to keep her in the war, and thereby prevent her from negotiating a separate peace treaty with Germany.

The Balfour declaration, which had this aim, came too late. One week afterward, Lenin seized power, determined to carry out his promise to sign a separate peace.

Russian Jews join the Bolsheviks

The czar had been openly and fiercely antisemitic, so it is no surprise that Jews supported the Russian revolution. But when the revolutionaries split between the Reds under Lenin and the Whites who opposed him, leading Jews settled on Lenin as the lesser of two evils.

Wherever the Whites triumphed, albeit for short periods, thousands of Jews were killed in those places. The principal killing of Jews took place in the Ukraine and White­ Russia. Such massacres reminded one of the terrible persecutions of the Jews in the Ukraine during the period 1648 to 1650, and the like of which was not seen in Europe till the Nazi gas chambers. It has been estimated that about 100,000 Jews were killed during the years 1918 to 1920. Economically the Jews were totally ruined. The Red Army became the defender of the Jews.

Many Jews doubted that the Bolsheviks’ accommodation of the Jews would last, and they were right.

[Note: It was early in this period that my paternal grandparents fled Russia, ultimately arriving in St. Louis. Had they waited, immigration restrictions would have kicked in, and they would have had to remain in Eastern Europe and probably died in the Holocaust.]

Meanwhile, in America

Concerning America in the aftermath of WWI, Walter Russell Mead writes,

There were two postwar American foreign policy decisions that directly affected Jewish interests, the Johnson-Reed Act that drastically cut Jewish immigration and the Lodge-Fish Resolution in support of the Balfour Declaration. The majority of American Jews opposed both. A vocal Zionist minority was strongly in support of Lodge-Fish, and many other American Jews viewed any increase in Jewish settlement in Palestine as a good thing without embracing the political ambitions of the Zionist movement. But on the whole, right up through World War II, the American Jewish community would have gladly traded Lodge-Fish away in order to repeal Johnson-Reed.

In an alternate history in which Jewish immigration to America was not throttled, it seems unlikely that the state of Israel would have been created. Fewer Eastern European Jews would have fled to Palestine. And American Jewry would have regarded America, not Israel, as the vital refuge for Jews.

Settler colonization

Another essay in the Tablet volume is called “The Iron Wall,” by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, published in Russian in 1923.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators.

This is equally true of the Arabs. Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine , in return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. …

The Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration; and this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want.

His vision for the future would be that Jewish immigration would create a majority-Jewish state in Palestine, and that this state would provide its Arab minority with equal rights.

The difference between Jabotinsky and the establishment is that the latter thought that the Palestinian Arabs could be persuaded to live with a Jewish state. He doubted that the Arabs would be happy with this outcome, but he thought it possible that they would accept it as something that they could not change militarily.

Jabotinsky was reviled in his day by the Jewish establishment in Palestine and elsewhere. Today, this essay can be read as validating the charge of “settler colonialism.” The rebuttal to this charge is that Jews have lived in the area since Biblical times, as proven by archeology. That may be a fair rhetorical point, but it does nothing to ease the resentment that the large Jewish presence caused and that Jabotinsky recognized.

Third Worldism

What Zionists in the 1920s could not foresee was that the anti-Israel cause would be taken up by people other than Palestinian Arabs. In recent decades, the Iranian regime made the defeat of Israel central to its national purpose. And in other countries, the far left has joined with Islamists to embrace Third Worldism.

In a substack post, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour writes,

The leadership of the Democratic Party has decided to feed Israel to its left. This is no longer a matter of speculation or of reading tea leaves in polling data. Every plausible aspirant to the 2028 presidential nomination, Khanna, Van Hollen, Newsom, Pritzker, Booker, Gallego, Warnock, Emanuel, has moved, is moving, or is preparing to move toward some version of the anti-Israel position, whether by calling for an end to military aid, by denouncing AIPAC, by using the word genocide, or by maintaining the tactical silence that, in the current environment, functions as a form of the same concession.

…The establishment’s reasoning is basic strategic calculation: the left will not relent on Israel; a civil war inside the party over the Jewish state would destroy the coalition; therefore, the rational move is to concede this issue, preserve party unity, and proceed with the moderate agenda on everything else: affordability, climate, migration, AI, etc.

Mansour argues that this will not work. The radical left will simply pocket the concession to throw Israel under the bus and not relent on its other issues. But he says that the die has been cast.

The decision has been made. It will not be reversed by argument, because the men who made it do not believe they made a decision at all. They believe they recognized a reality. We are all Third Worldists now.

Once again, the Zionist project is caught in the middle of external conflicts. In this case, it is the conflict between Third Worldism and the Western tradition.

Third Worldism unites the left and Islamists. The Islamists are a bigger part of the alliance in Britain than in the United States. They have a shared hostility to markets, to American power, and to white people. (On straight vs. queer, the left and the Islamists would seem to disagree, but they apparently have set aside their differences.)

Whatever accidents of history that allowed the state of Israel to get to where it is today, I think that it would be terrible to see the country sacrificed on the altar of Third Worldism. That ideology strikes me as evil and backward. I believe that most Americans reject it. But it would not surprise me to see the Democrats adopt it in 2028.

substacks referenced above:

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Feed the Jews to the Mob