Nationalism began to emerge in the 19th century as a method for creating
cohesive modern states. The feeling among the leadership of post revolutionary
France was such that a united French national character had to be engraved
upon the hearts of all residents of the newly modernized country. A
significant portion of the nationalistic idea is tied the concept of nation
states made up of one ethnicity or nation. Ethnic groups within multi-ethnic
empires began adapting this notion of the nation state as an argument for why
they should have self determination.
The impulse to break up oppressive empires was and remains laudable. Allowing
territories within an empire the ability to develop democratic self-rule leads
to better governance and is a much more moral method of appointing the people
to serve in government. Many of the independence movements of 1848 and later
rallied around an idea of nationalism as a liberating concept. All the people
in this area of the empire deserve to be their own self-governing state.
Towards the 1870s, we witness the development of nationalism as a method of
unifying small countries within a larger ethnic group. Italy and Germany's
nationalism developed in this way after the two countries were formed out of
unifying many small countries that housed people of the same ethnic group.
Around the time of WWI, the Arabs considered the idea of a pan-Arab
nationalism, though such a pan-Arab state never materialized.
All these different streams of nationalism encounter a fundamental problem.
There never was and never will be an ethnically homogenous country. How do
ethnic minorities integrate in a Nationalism context. Especially ethnic groups
that are dispersed internationally. In Europe there were Roma people and Jews
living in almost every country. Does the nationalism absorb these minorities
into the general nation or are they excluded legally or socially from being
members of the nation of the nation state. Though there was initial optimism
that these minorities would get integrated into the national identity of their
respective countries.
Democracy is of the people, by the people, and for the people, but the people
are stupid. The people are highly antisemitic, and nothing united the European
economic classes quite like antisemitism. A useful tool in creating unity in
all kinds of contexts, it unified by excluding everyone's primary object of
hatred, the Jewish community. The roots of antisemitism stretch back
remarkably far, so the mere ideal of national unity was not going to destroy
it. Rather the empowering of regular people to get involved in politics
somewhat increased outright antisemitism, since monarchs generally discouraged
messy antisemitism as a destabilizing force in pre-modern and medieval
societies. The modern voters of the 19th century felt the benefit of
institutional antisemitism was much better than the risk mob violence posed to
the economy or general society.
Jewish intellectuals, mainly in Eastern Europe where their marginalization
from society was felt strongest, proposed a development in the concept of
nationalism. What if you could develop a Jewish nation to advocate on behalf
of the Jews since clearly the German, the French, and the Russian states were
really failing to properly integrate their Jewish communities. (There was also
a bit of anxiety over the possibility of proper integration that would lead to
the complete vanishing of the Jewish people through assimilation.) A Jewish
nationalism would be a modern way of connecting to Jewish identity that
non-religious people could still engage with, and if successful, a Jewish
national government would be able to reliably advocate for the welfare of
Jewish communities abroad. Most Jews supported a territorial nationalism in
the sense that the Jewish nation state would be a proper state with its own
territory. Functionally speaking the Jewish communities were too scattered to
have any real Jewish territory around.
The Jewish nationalist movement needed to create a shared piece of land for
all the Jews to have territorial sovereignty over, the less popular ideas of
Jewish autonomism that didn't believe in governing a particular territory
seemed too unrealistic. To gather support and legitimacy for a Jewish land,
the nationalists turned the to the historic homeland of the Jews, Palestine.
Perhaps the more assimilated Jews would have read in the antisemitic magazines
of the era that were calling upon Jews to return to their middle-eastern
homeland, or perhaps they drew their inspiration for the messianic literature
of traditional Jewish religion. But the Zionists, whether secular or religious
in philosophical orientation, had their eyes set on Palestine.
In order to reclaim the land, they needed to settle it. Many of the western
European Zionists treated it as a contemporary colonization project. They
would move to the land as Capitalists, establishing a European Jewish
bourgeoisie. These early settlers created agricultural industry that often
employed native labor who had expertise in farming in the Palestinian climate.
Eastern European Zionists, being more influenced by Marxist economic ideas
refused to reestablish Jewish life in Palestine as a bourgeoisie owning class.
They were going to only use Jewish labor, and that would mean adopting
socialist and planned economy practices to ensure the stability of their small
independent economic enclave within Arab Palestinian society.
Overtime the Zionist settlement in Palestine, the yishuv hachadash,
would grow in both numbers and in strength and succeed in getting the United
Nations to recognize it as a sovereign nation in the 1947 Palestine partition
plan. The Jewish communities globally were ecstatic. No more would the Jews be
subject to the whims of nationalism regimes that marginalized them. Finally
today, in 1947, Jews could be part of the world as a people with a nation
state to advocate for them. The Jews living in a nation comprised entirely of
their peers would be safe from antisemitism.
This idea persists in aliyah narratives to this day. One Ra"m,
speaking at the 2023 Har Etzion alumni Shabbaton in Teaneck, NJ, commented how
moving to Israel was a healing process in which he shed his insecurities and
biases that he gained living in galut, in exile (i.e. the diaspora). He
compared growing up in Long Beach, NY, in the United States, to growing up in
a home with emotionally absent parents. Upon moving to Israel, his exposure to
native born Israeli Jews was healing process in which he recovered from the
trauma induced by living in such a fundamentally antisemitic society.
But there's a problem. Israel is not a utopia. Ethnic violence has raged there
on and off since the British mandate. I don't need to carefully check the
numbers, in Israel in the present day, a Jew is at greatest risk of dying out
of antisemitism. In recent decades, Hamas and other Palestinian Islamic Jihad
groups have encouraged their followers to conduct suicide bombing, to fire
rockets into Israeli civilian areas to stab Jews with intent to kill in public
areas. Such a level of popular violence is not seen in even the most
antisemitic countries in Europe.
The harshness of the present day violence in Israel has been overshadowed by
the Holocaust. These deaths are seen as martyrs and heroes who are small
sacrifices in a larger positive movement in world where the exiled Jew is
reborn and brought home where he can honorably defend himself. There feels
like some change in the air. The official authorities are calling the attack
on October 7th, the most deadly day for Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Now, I won't delude myself, the purpose of this statement is to frame Hamas
and by extension the residents of Gaza as Nazis, which justifies the harsh
counter offensive currently underway. Nevertheless, it opens us to realize
that the country in which 1400 Jews died in one day, in what is probably best
compared to a pogrom, was not Ukraine or Russia, as was the case since the
days of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, until the pogrom of Kielce in 1946. Nor was it in
the United States, whose dense Jewish communities rival in size the Jewish
population of the state of Israel. No, it was in the haven, the refuge for the
persecuted Jew, the modern State of Israel.
Israel serves quite well as a haven for the Jews persecuted by the specter of
nationalisms that marginalize the Jewish residents of their motherland.
Perhaps unintentionally, the state of Israel has recklessly allowed another
form of antisemitism to brew. To gain traction and legitimacy. This
antisemitism is like that of the Orthodox Christian Ukrainian peasants who
labored under the boot of their Polish Catholic colonizers. The distant Polish
nobility had no interest in directly managing their estates in the conquered
provinces. Instead they contracted Jewish notables to manage the land
directly. The Arenda system, in which Jews were placed in a marginally high
position of power for the first time since the Roman empire. Both the
Christians and Muslims had made it illegal for Jews to own slaves in their
respective territories, but the Polish crown had found a way to give the Jews
slaves once again. Effectively, the Jews were a buffer that allowed the Polish
nobility to distance themselves from the mistreatment of the peasants who
worked their land. When the peasants revolted in 1648, they targeted the Jews
who were settled in their native territories. Some of the Polish generals who
were sent to quell the rebellion weren't too fond of Jews either and turned
over the Jews they were supposed to be protecting to the rebellious forces of
Khmelnytsky.
The project of the Zionist colonization of Palestine has an ugly secret. It
was built on displacing many of Arab residents who once occupied its
territory. During the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate, the Zionist
settlers would buy the land that they settled on. They set up large funds to
manage the purchase and ownership of this land. In the beginning the settlers
were more than happy to higher local agricultural workers who were already
familiar with best practices in the Palestinian climate. The later National
Socialist settlers who believed in creating a new Jewish proletariat refused
to higher Arab workers. The intended effect of this system was that it created
an independent Jewish economic enclave within the British mandate.
Practically, it broke the traditional system of leases and residency in
Palestinian society. Land could change hands many times, but generally the new
owners would continue to lease the land to the local peasants/farmworkers or
higher them to work on the new owner's farm. By insisting on using only Jewish
labor, the collectivist agricultural settlements that the Zionists created
would marginalize the local peasants from the economy, depriving them of jobs
and slowly displacing them as they would move to growing Arab urban areas to
find better prospects.
The next step of expulsion was in the 1948 war. Some historians argue that the
violent expulsions in 1948 were part of a master plan to rid the nascent
Jewish state of its Arab majority, though in practice the expulsions were
carried out somewhat uncoordinated by independently acting militias and
military groups. Massacres like the one at Dir Yassin scared Palestinian
civilians once they realized the extent of the cruelty that Jewish nationalist
para-military groups were capable of. Sometimes the Palestinians would flee of
their own volition while others were actively removed by Israeli military
groups. The end result of the uncoordinated operation was that by the end of
the war almost 800,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in that
were located in the newly sovereign Jewish state.
Israel's ultimate preference for their absence was made clear when the new
country outright refused to allow the refugees to return home, while
resettling a similar number of Jewish refugees in their country. The refugee
problem persists. As much as Zionists would wish it would go away and some
other country to resettle the Palestinians, it won't happen. Unfortunately,
the Jewish people are not the United States, we will have to face the
consequences of our actions. Though some may mourn our ability to relive the
mythic glorious conquests of Joshua and King David, that era is by-gone. Even
the Prophets tell us outright, King David's hand were too bloody to build
God's temple. In order for us to merit a peaceful existence in the land we
must work out a peaceful compromise. Though we like to blame Palestinian
leadership for refusing to make peace, it takes two to tango and the Likud
party has been a fierce and consistent opponent of any peace negotiations
since the concept was proposed.
We should not think of a peaceful compromise as a failure of Jewish strength
to retake the homeland. Though our passion for justice and nationalism runs
deep, our sages of old remind us, "Who is the hero? He who conquers his
desires." We have to consider the peacemaker, the compromiser as the true
hero. It takes much strength to be so vulnerable. Though we may think such
ideas of peacemaking be altruistic and impossible, they are necessary for our
survival. Either we compromise to end hostilities, or the spirit of the
beleaguered Palestinians will radicalize until it destabilizes the Jewish
state, threatening anyone there. We'd much rather ensure that the moderates
who believe in allowing the Jews to remain in the land are in political
control and not the radical antisemites who wish to expel them.
A compromise that is either a two state solution or a one state solution will
not be easy, but it is the more moral thing to do in this situation, and with
God's help, the merit of righteousness will protect us.
אם יתמהמה חכה לו כי בא יבוא לא יאחר
