The Returns of Zionism: Plowshares into swords: review

Two accounts of the origins of Zionism

THE RETURNS OF ZIONISM
Gabriel Piterberg
Verso / 2008 / £6.99
PLOWSHARES INTO SWORDS
Arno Mayer
Verso / 2008 /£19.99

THis is a tale of two books. Both come from the same end of the political spectrum but there the similarity ends.
Piterberg’s The Returns of Zionism is a tour de force and deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in an analysis of the historical, political and ideological origins of Zionism. Meyer’s book is best placed on the coffee table.

It’s not that Meyer’s book doesn’t contain much that is interesting, not least concerning the origins of Brit Shalom and Ihud, early Zionist peace groups. But the book is descriptive and anecdotal, not analytical. Despite being a Professor of History at Princeton University, there isn’t a single footnote in Meyer’s entire book. This may be the academic version of dumbing down but it is inexcusable.

Meyer describes his book as a “critical historical study of Zionism and Israel”. The problem is that what passes for analysis is reduced to moral outrage – it is yet one more book in a crowded market. Meyer begins by telling us that he is a “non-Zionist Zionist”, which is about as useful as being a non-racist racist. Not once does Meyer even try to provide an analysis of what he means by Zionism. He expresses his sympathy with the founding objectives of Zionism, the creation of a Jewish state as a refuge, whilst deploring the outcome – a racially pure, settler colonial state.

Meyer’s treatment of Arthur Ruppin, known as “the father of Jewish settlement in the land of Israel” is illustrative. Meyer tells us that it was at Ruppin’s and Martin Buber’s initiative that the peace group Brit Shalom was formed in 1925. Yet a dozen years later and Ruppin is a member of the Jewish Agency’s Transfer Committee, looking for a means to expel a quarter of a million Palestinians. Meyer mentions none of this.

Piterberg shows how Ruppin, known as the father of Jewish land settlement in Palestine, was actually one of the most virulent racists in the Zionist pantheon.

He was a social Darwinist who believed in the betterment of “the Jewish race”. He was a follower of the British racist, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), who saw one of his main tasks as the eradication of the Jews’ “commercial instincts” which was caused by the infusion of the Oriental type in them! And with whom did Ruppin discuss these thorny questions? No less than Professor Hans Gunther, Himmler’s mentor.

This is not an aberration. Nowhere does Meyer analyse why Brit Shalom and Ihud’s espousal of a bi-national solution in Palestine failed. Brit Shalom never numbered more than 200 intellectuals, yet they were, according to Meyer, “Zionism’s premier association of public intellectuals dedicated to promoting Jewish-Arab understanding”. They included Chaim Arlossoroff, head of the Political Department andKalvarisky, head of the Jewish Agency’s Arab department. Its leader was Judah Magnes, the founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. These were not anti-Zionists, quite the contrary. Their inspiration was Ahad Ha’am, who believed that Palestine should be a spiritual and cultural home for Jewish people.

Brit Shalom comprised those who sought Arab collaboration and acquiescence in the Zionist project – this certainly contrasted with Ben Gurion and the Revisionists, whose policy towards the Arabs was that of the Iron Wall.

Meyer is equally flaccid when it comes to the “left” Zionists. He describes leading elements of Mapam, such as the “Marxist” Hashomer Hatzair, as “class driven”. In fact their party, Mapam, whose Ha’artzi kibbutz federation was Jewish only, never once engaged in joint class struggle with the Arabs. Meyer’s treatment of Labour Zionism is on a par with his infatuation with Brit Shalom.
Brit Shalom member, Chaim Arlossoroff, the Jewish Agency’s Foreign Minister was, as Piterberg shows, wholly hostile to the idea of joint Jewish-Arab workers’ organisations. Histadrut was set up as a

General Confederation of Hebrew Labour. In the case of the railworkers’ union, which was a bastion of the left and had a mixed Arab and Jewish membership, the Labour Zionists sought to include them in Histadrut precisely in order to separate off the Arab workers into a separate national section.

The only purpose of joint organisation for Arlossoroff was to “nullify the competition between the expensive and modern Hebrew labour and the cheap and primitive Arab labour.”

This was the reason for the Histadrut campaign for Jewish Labour. They sought to exclude Arab workers from the economy altogether and where that was not possible, as for government workers, theZionists sought higher wages for Jewish workers.

Arlossoroff, as Piterberg argues, displayed a “white settler consciousness”. Arlossoroff wrote that South Africa was “almost the only case in which there is sufficient similarity in the objective conditions and problems so as to allow us an analogy”. There too white workers faced insuperable problems competing with cheap black labour. The answer was a colour bar which reserved skilled jobs for white workers.

In Palestine the Zionists sought to exclude indigenous labour altogether. Gershon Shafir has noted that,

“The most distinguishing characteristic of the Jewish Labor Movement in Palestine was that it was not a labor movement at all. Rather, it was a colonial movement in which the workers’ interest remained secondary to the exigencies of settlement.”

In contrast to Piterberg, who places special emphasis on the foundation of the Israeli state as a settler-colonial state, Meyer sees little connection between what is happening in Israel today and its settler-colonial formation. Writing of Hashomer Hatzair he describes how this “fervently colonizing” organisation “marrying Jewish nationalism to utopian Marxism, became the most emphatic champion of bi-nationalism.” Just how colonisation and Marxism, utopian or otherwise, were compatible, is never explained.

In his chapter on Zionist colonisation, Piterberg argues that the pivotal change from plantation to settler colonialism occurred in the transition from the first wave of emigration from 1892-1904 to the second wave in 1904-14. It was a transition from the exploitation of Arab labour to its exclusion – first from the economy and then the land. This was led by Histadrut and the Labour Zionists who coined the slogan

“From Class to Nation” whereby the Arabs became the “class enemy”. It was only Arab “backwardness”, which prevented them from realising the progressive nature of Zionist colonisation. The Zionists dressed their colonial project up in the language of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden.

Piterberg’s book covers much more – about the history of Zionism, its myths and the construction of its own historiography. The Zionist historians rejected all the great Jewish historians of the Diaspora – Heinrich Graetz, Simon Dubnow, Salo Baron. These people lived in “exile” and therefore couldn’t appreciate “real” Jewish history.

As Piterberg notes, “Hannah Arendt committed what is for Zionist Israeli scholars, from Scholem to Shapira, the cardinal sin: she had a universalist perspective.” And although she veered between Zionist and non-Zionism, Arendt was a universalist above all.

Perhaps the best example of the ideological and political polarisation between Zionism and one of the leading figures in the Diaspora is the polemic between Hanna Arendt to Gershom Scholem. On 23 June 1963 Scholem wrote to Arendt, having just read her Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that had enraged the Zionist movement with its references to Zionist collaboration with the Nazis.
Scholem wrote sneeringly that, “In the Jewish tradition there is a concept Ahabath Israel, love of the Jewish people . . . In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German left, I find little trace of this . . .”

Arendt gave the following devastating reply:

“I am not one of the ‘intellectuals who come from the German Left’ . . . It is a fact of which I am in no way particularly proud and which I am somewhat reluctant to emphasize – especially since the McCarthy era in this country. I came late to an understanding of Marx’s importance . . . Let me begin . . . with what you call ‘love of the Jewish people’ . . . (Incidentally, I would be very grateful if you could tell me since when this concept has played a role in Judaism) . . . You are quite right – I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons. I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective . . .

I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect . . . I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument . . . But I can admit to you something beyond that, namely, that wrong done by my own people naturally grieves me more than wrong done by other peoples.”

Tony Greenstein
 

Mon 09, March 2009 @ 18:24