Anti-Anti-Zionism That Isn't Zionism
An article in Tablet magazine discusses the phenomenon of Jewish anti-Zionists. Personally, I think the term Zionism should either be abandoned as a holdover of a now completed historical quest or expanded in universal terms. However, I would never join an "International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network" because in today's discourse anti-Zionism inevitably means "opposing the activities of the international Jewish conspiracy."
Respectable Jews like Franz Rosenzweig were anti-Zionist when it was a matter of intellectual debate and not facts on the ground. To nowadays advocate turning Israel-Palestine into some binational Belgium, when even Belgium is falling apart, is prevarication or stupidity. Yet the article rightly distinguishes between people who should really be termed non-Zionists, who hold to a less Israel-centric Judaism, and the apparatchiks "who argued that Jewishness was relevant to the group’s mission primarily to the extent to which it could be used strategically in the public-relations battle over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and that to center their own identities much beyond that would, ironically, become another vehicle for Jewish self-obsession."
Israel Shahak and Norman Finkelstein are examples of this type, the house Jews of anti-Semites. Frankly I think they're cunts. Yet I do sympathize with sentiments like these:
As I state throughout this blog, I think the undue concretization of a spiritual ideal ("Zion") devalues it. As Rosenzweig put it in his time, Zionism is "in danger of changing from paths through the universe to streets leading to a certain house. That is to say, [it is] in danger of attaining an attainable goal . . . The Zionists will attain that goal by managing to found their Serbia or Bulgaria or Montenegro in Palestine." What nobility is there in greater Serb nationalism with a biblical tint, especially if propagated by self-satisfied bourgeoisie from afar?
Further, the Zionist tendency to negate the diaspora is ahistorical and demeaning. It reduces the the greatness of European Jewry to a tragic precursor of the triumphant Sabra tiller of the soil, who I frankly cannot identify with like I do the Kafkaesque minds of Mitteleuropa and the itinerant Kabbalists of the Middle Ages. Revive their legacy by all means, but leave the label "anti-Zionism" with the Arab imperialists, blinkered universalists and jealous rival nationalists to whom it belongs.
Respectable Jews like Franz Rosenzweig were anti-Zionist when it was a matter of intellectual debate and not facts on the ground. To nowadays advocate turning Israel-Palestine into some binational Belgium, when even Belgium is falling apart, is prevarication or stupidity. Yet the article rightly distinguishes between people who should really be termed non-Zionists, who hold to a less Israel-centric Judaism, and the apparatchiks "who argued that Jewishness was relevant to the group’s mission primarily to the extent to which it could be used strategically in the public-relations battle over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and that to center their own identities much beyond that would, ironically, become another vehicle for Jewish self-obsession."
Israel Shahak and Norman Finkelstein are examples of this type, the house Jews of anti-Semites. Frankly I think they're cunts. Yet I do sympathize with sentiments like these:
The members of this demographic who turned up at the Assembly of Jews voiced a range of complaints about the Jewish institutions in their lives. A 25-year-old environmental activist named Hillary Lehr from Oakland, California, said she no longer wanted to visit the Reform synagogue she’d attended as a child because its pro-Israel stance was casually embedded into ritual life, from prayers for the Jewish state to tzedakah boxes for the Jewish National Fund.
As I state throughout this blog, I think the undue concretization of a spiritual ideal ("Zion") devalues it. As Rosenzweig put it in his time, Zionism is "in danger of changing from paths through the universe to streets leading to a certain house. That is to say, [it is] in danger of attaining an attainable goal . . . The Zionists will attain that goal by managing to found their Serbia or Bulgaria or Montenegro in Palestine." What nobility is there in greater Serb nationalism with a biblical tint, especially if propagated by self-satisfied bourgeoisie from afar?
Further, the Zionist tendency to negate the diaspora is ahistorical and demeaning. It reduces the the greatness of European Jewry to a tragic precursor of the triumphant Sabra tiller of the soil, who I frankly cannot identify with like I do the Kafkaesque minds of Mitteleuropa and the itinerant Kabbalists of the Middle Ages. Revive their legacy by all means, but leave the label "anti-Zionism" with the Arab imperialists, blinkered universalists and jealous rival nationalists to whom it belongs.
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