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
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