Something perverse and very irrational has happened to the narrative regarding the Jewish people’s national identity; Zionism, the active political form of that identity; and Israel, its result. While that narrative had always been required to defend itself from attacks by Jewish and non-Jewish figures who rejected its essence—that the Jews originated from the Land of Israel, were exiled and always sought to return—something very frighteningly hideous has developed.
The attempts at the earlier negating of that narrative were a minority view. Following the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the 1920 San Remo Conference and the 1922 decision of 50 countries to confirm the creation of a mandate by the League of Nations as an act of “recognition … given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country,” a framework that “shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage … close settlement by Jews on the land … ,” the basic fundamental essence of the dispute should have ended.
However, as usual with matters involving Jews, it did not. For some Jews, they could not give up on their opposition. For many non-Jews, it just could not be that Jews might benefit in any way on this earth or have their existence justified. Moreover, the outlines of those arguments continue today, as if nothing of import has occurred in the past century and a half.
The Talmud relates an incident that bears greatly on grasping what has happened to the narrative. In the Tractate of Bava Batra, at folio 10B, we are informed that Yosef, a son of Rabbi Yehoshua, became ill and fainted. When he returned to full consciousness, he was asked by his father about what he had observed while not conscious. Yosef’s reply was: “I saw an inverted world. Those above were below, while those below were above.”
And so with Zionism and Israel, things are turned on their head. There is no logic. What happened didn’t happen, and what didn’t occur nevertheless took place. What was said wasn’t said, and what wasn’t spoken was heard.
Beyond the nonsensical arguments, the arrant disputes and the puerile championing by the anti-Zionists reveal the stark exuberant enthusiasm that marks a blind and ignorant repetition of the most outlandish assertions of shallow propaganda platitudes that fly in the face of basic truths, simple facts and uncomplicated recorded history sacrificing accuracy, balance and objectivity all to cast doubt on Jews.
Ultra-Orthodox theologians, such as the Sholom Dovber Schneersohn (the Rashab), the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, and Yoel Teitelbaum, the founder of the Satmar dynasty whose thinking was proven wrong by the Holocaust, are now employed as props by the likes of journalist Peter Beinart. Worn-out Bundist slogans of Doikeit (“Here in the Diaspora; not there in the homeland”) as well as the long-ago Reformist “America is our Zion” slogan and the parallel assimilation credo of seeing Jews not as a nation but rather as a religious community, destined to be dispersed among all the nations where they would integrate into their respective societies, contributing as if Jewish ideals to those societies. As Abraham Geiger phrased it, Judaism had outgrown the confines of territory and nationality, transcending the constricting barriers of time and space.
Then came the Holocaust, and far too many Jews were still in Europe four decades after the first Zionist Congress. And they actually did transcend the barriers of time and space, though as smoke and ashes.
In December 1903, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, responding to criticism voiced against Zionism, wrote: “The point of view of Zionism is that the salvation of the Jews lies only in themselves. ‘Make your own history’ has become our motto. Therefore, we go our own way and do not look back at outsiders. Of course, we are sorry that ‘people of progress’ … still sometimes look at us ‘with an unpleasant feeling.’ But we ourselves, in our souls, deeply and honestly recognize ourselves as ‘people of progress’ first of all. Therefore, we are and will continue to pursue our line calmly and proudly, least of all caring whether outsiders like us or not … .”
In that spirit, the charge of Israel perpetrating a presumed “genocide” in Gaza or against a “Palestinian people” must be seen as a semantic perjoration, when a word or term develops a negative meaning or negative connotation. It simply is not happening. Neither is there starvation.
Enzo Traverso has critiqued the instrumentalization of Holocaust memory to justify a current genocide by purposely neglecting or marginalizing the addressing of colonial history. Yet, while disagreeing that images of SS crimes on the Eastern Front during World War II can be compared to the actions of the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza, nevertheless, he proposes that “videos and podcasts showing Israeli soldiers smiling next to humiliated Palestinians … are reminiscent of the images of the war and genocidal crimes committed by German soldiers … by Italian soldiers in Ethiopia … by the French Army in Algeria in the late 1950s.”
For him, as well as for so many other progressives and anti-colonialists, that is enough to feel comfortable in applying the term “genocide.” Somehow, what Hamas or Fatah do never seems to conjure up any parallel reminisces in the minds, or rather the imaginations, of such observers.
This rhetorical process has been applied to other terms. A Jewish presence in the regions of the Jewish people’s historic homeland is “illegal.” Our residency there is an act of “settlement,” an intentionally pejorative description.
Language has become weaponized. The time should have come a long while ago to disprove its perverted usage as a tongue-lashing tool against Zionism. It is not too late.