Uri Avnery – Don’t talk Zionism

…by  Uri Avnery,  with Gush Shalom

[ Editor’s note: Oh my, I go overseas for a week and Uri writes an article on what a hoax Zionism is. An editor cannot turn his back for a minute without someone trying to slip a good piece by me without an editor’s note. But Erica gave me the heads up, so I now have the pleasure.

Something must be in the air. We are starting to see more publicizing on things like what a silly term “anti-Semite” is. I interviewed a Lebanese 79-year-old retired journalist today (yes, of Semitic origin) who told me with a twist of humor that he resents being told he is against himself, as he can’t afford the shrink bills.

AIPAC got crushed on its attempt to kill the Iran deal, and so did the Repubs when losing one last vote to kill the deal by insisting Iran be required to recognize Israel. If anyone wants to be depressed because we are ruled over by panderers and lunatics, you have my permission.

But now Uri joins the parade? “Say it ain’t so Joe, (I mean Uri), say it ain’t so.” Now all of you out there who have been tarred and feathered by the anti-Semite lynch mobs, you can sleep with just one eye open instead of two. I agree with Uri that real anti-semites in the traditional sense are about as common as vampires.

I have to say I thought Uri was doing a spoof piece on it until he began spilling the Theodor Herzl beans, the loon that came up with Zionism during a nightmare once and took a liking to it after failing to get wealthy Jews to subsidize sending poor Jews to the Herzl Promised land, which changed with each failed attempt.

So thanks Uri, I needed the levity today. But, we understand that you are presenting numerous sides of the issue by having a discussion with yourself, and that is why some of the varied tones in this article seem contradictory. It is a discussion between a couple different voices in the diverse Israeli-Jewish-Zionist debate. You’re paraphrasing them, and we know that you are there in the thick of it.

As a bonus, I have a rare day off tomorrow, which I will spend touring as many Beirut museums as I can without missing my plane, starting out at the American University Archaeological Museum.

The ancient history goes down 23 meters here. They have the stone tools and bones to prove it, and some DNA going back to the 35,000 BC period. I will keep an eye out for the first Jewish hand axe and be sure to get a good photo… Jim W. Dean and Erica P. Wissinger ]

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First published  …  September 19, 2015

In the early 1950s, I published a story by my friend, Miko Almaz. At the time, the new State of Israel was in dire straits, its leaders did not know how to pay for next month’s food.

Someone remembered that in a remote part of Africa there was a small community of Jews, who owned all the diamond mines and were immensely rich. The government chose their most effective money-raiser and sent him there.

The man realized that the fate of the state was resting on his shoulders. He assembled the local Jews and gave them The Speech. About the pioneers who left everything behind to go to Palestine and make the desert bloom, about their back-breaking labor, about their lofty socialist ideals.

When he was finished, there was not a dry eye in the room. Returning to his hotel, he knew that he had given the speech of his life.

And indeed, the next morning a delegation of the local Jews knocked on his door. “Your words made us feel that we are leading an unworthy life,” they said. “A life of luxury and exploitation. So we decided unanimously to present the mines as a gift to our workers, leave everything and return with you to Israel to become pioneers!”

David Ben-Gurion was a real Zionist. He believed that a Zionist was a Jew who went to live in Eretz Israel. Even a president of the World Zionist Organization was not a Zionist, if he lived in New York. He was adamant in his convictions.

When he traveled to the United States for the first time as Prime Minister of Israel, he was asked by his advisors what his message would be.

“I shall tell them to leave everything and come to Israel!” he retorted. The advisors were shocked to the core. “But Israel needs their money!” they exclaimed. “We can’t exist without it!”

A battle of consciences ensued. At long last Ben-Gurion was overcome. He went to America, told the Jews that they could be good Zionists if they donated generously to Israel and gave it their political support. After that episode, Ben-Gurion was never the same again. His basic convictions had been destroyed.

The same happened to Zionism. It became a cynical slogan, to be used by anyone to push his or her agenda.

Mainly Zionism became an instrument of the Israeli leadership to subjugate world Jewry and mobilize it for their national, partisan or personal aims.

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Can Israeli nationalism be welded to non-Israeli Zionism?

To come back to the story: there could be no greater catastrophe than for world Jewry to pack up and come to Israel. The immense power of organized US Jewry, the vast majority of which gets its orders from Jerusalem, is essential to the existence of the state.

I was thinking about all this when I read, over the weekend, a thought-provoking essay by the popular leftist Israeli writer, A. B. Yehoshua, who is almost alone among top Israeli writers in not being an Ashkenazi. His father belonged to an old Sephardic family in Jerusalem, his mother is Moroccan. This makes him, in today’s slang, a Mizrahi (“Easterner”).

In his essay Yehoshua makes a distinction between nationalism and Zionism. According to him, these two are not melded into one, as people in Israel are led to believe, but two different entities “welded” together and in constant conflict with each other. “Zionism” plays a dubious role in this duality.

In today’s Israel, this is a daring theory, bordering on heresy. In ancient Rome, people were burned for less. Like saying that God and Jehovah are two different deities. But to my mind this is a construction of obsolete terms. By now, we can dare to think much further.

Is Israeli nationalism really ever welded to non-Israeli Zionism?

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Zionism was born of the toxic fads of 19th century Europe

I must remind the reader again that, to begin with, the great idea of Theodor Herzl had nothing to do with Zion, in the literal sense (a hill in Jerusalem). Originally, Herzl wanted a State-of-Jews (not “Jewish State”), in Patagonia, southern Argentina.

The original population had just been eradicated, more or less, and Herzl thought that this empty country was fit for European Jewish mass settlement, after the remnants of the aborigines had been evicted (but only after they had killed off all wild animals).

When Herzl, a completely assimilated Viennese Jew, came into contact with real Jews, especially Russians, he realized reluctantly that nothing but Palestine would work. So his idea became Zionism.

He never liked Palestine, never visited it, except once when he was practically ordered to do so by the romantic German Kaiser, who insisted on meeting him in Jerusalem. The Kaiser remarked afterwards that Zionism was a great idea, but that “it can’t be carried out with Jews”.

Herzl’s idea of Zionism was quite simple: all the Jews in the world will come to the new state and be the only ones called Jews from then on. Those who prefer to remain where they are will cease to be Jews and finally become ordinary Austrians, Germans, Americans etc. End of story.

Well, it did not happen that way. Zionism was much too convenient an instrument for politicians – in Israel as abroad – to throw on the dung heap. Everybody uses it. American politicians who lust after heaps of Jewish money. Israeli politicians who have nothing else to say. Israeli government officials of all stripes who openly discriminate against Israel’s Arab citizens. Coalition Knesset members against the opposition. Opposition Knesset members against the government.

Let Binyamin Netanyahu call Yitzhak Herzog, the leader of the opposition, an “anti-Zionist”, and he will object more strongly than if he had been called a mere traitor. Anti-Zionist is awful. Unforgivable.

Yet if any one of these were asked what Zionism really is, he would stop dead in his tracks. Zionism – why, everybody knows what Zionism it. What a question! Zionism is er…er…er.

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But the anti-Semitic movement of 19th century Europe has evaporated

On the other side of the fence, the situation is much the same. Everybody accuses everybody of being a Zionist. You are for the two-state solution? A vicious Zionist plot! You don’t want Israel to disappear? So you are part of the worldwide Zionist conspiracy.

To call someone a Zionist is to end the discussion. Like saying that he is a Nazi, only worse, much worse. And then there are the remnants of classical anti-Semitism. What remains of the once proud movement that started it all — the very people Herzl met in the streets of Vienna and Paris, when he came to the logical conclusion that Jews could not live in 19th century Europe any longer — that great anti-Semitic movement is gone. Only pathetic remnants survive. Just enough to provide Zionists with the fuel they need.

Zionism, as such, the real honest-to-goodness one, died an honorable death in Tel Aviv, the moment the State of Israel was founded. In those days “Zionism” was a kind of joke among young people. “Don’t talk Zionism!” meant “Don’t talk highfaluting nonsense!”

What remains is the co-existence of two separate entities, not really welded to each other, that are bound to break apart some time in the future. Neither of them has much to do with Zionism.

There is the Israeli entity – a normal nation — at least as normal as any nation is. It has a motherland, a collective mentality, a geographical and political reality, economic interests, a majority language, internal problems galore. 75% of its population are Jews, 20% Arabs. The rest are Jews who are not recognized as Jews by the rabbis, who decide such things in Israel.

And then there is world Jewry. Its homeland is the entire world. It belongs to many different nations, has some vague common interests (created by anti-Semites), a religion, many traditions. Large parts of it have a commitment to Israel, a vague one that can easily become more indistinct.

One of the main functions of “Zionism” is to keep this people totally subservient to the interests of Israel’s current (and changing) leadership. Without this connection, Israel would have to exist on its own political, economic and military resources, a vastly reduced existence.

The bonds that bound these two entities together (or “welded”, according to Yehoshua) are religion and tradition. These days, when Jews all over the world and in Israel are celebrating the same “high holidays”, this is very obvious. The bonds are there, created over the centuries, but one may wonder how strong they really are today. How much stronger, if at all, than those between Irish-Americans and Ireland, or Singapore-Chinese and China? In a real test, how would they hold up?

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The debaters in Tehran more important than San Francisco’s

Ironically enough, the most extreme faction of religious Jewry – both in Jerusalem and in Brooklyn – rejects Zionism as a sin against God.

[Editor’s Note: Uri could not bring himself to mention their name so I will…Neturei Karta. Rabbi David Weiss is and old friend from the days of protesting the AIPAC convention in Atlanta over decade ago. And since that time when having argument with tribal hot heads and I slip in and ace in the hole, “Well, my rabbi David Weiss tells met that Zionism is a crime against Judaism”, the look on their faces is just priceless…JD]

The real damage caused by the Zionist mental stranglehold on Israel is that it falsifies Israel’s situation in the world. The official designation of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” is an oxymoron. A Jewish state cannot really be democratic, since the definition denies equality to non-Jews, especially Arabs.

For the same reason, a democratic state cannot be Jewish. It must belong to all its citizens.

But the problem is more profound. Israel’s bonds with world Jewry are infinitely closer than its bonds with its neighbors. One cannot fix one’s gaze on New York and also be profoundly interested in what people do in Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran, until Damascus and Tehran come so close that one cannot ignore them anymore.

Ironically, people in Tehran shout “Death to the Zionist entity!” In the long run, what is happening in Tehran is a hundred times more important to our future than the Republican Party in San Francisco.

Let me be clear: I don’t preach Separation, as a small group nicknamed “Canaanites” once advocated. The natural bonds which are real and do not hurt the vital interest of either party – Israel or World Jewry – will survive.

But with one condition: that they will not hurt the future of Israel, a future which demands peace and friendship between its citizens and neighbors,

And this future of the Jews throughout the world demands peace and friendship within their own nations. 

How does that fit into the Zionist doctrine? Well, if it doesn’t, too bad.

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Jim Davis

Jim Davis is the son of USMC MGySgt. Lesley Davis (Ret.) who passed away on April 24, 2006, from ALS caused by Agent Orange. His dad’s mission before he passed on was to ensure all veterans, spouses, children, and widows all received the benefits, medical care and attention, and proper facilities from the VA.

Because of the promise made to his dad to carry on the mission, in May 2006 Davis began as a one-man show sending out 535 letters every single week to all members of Congress requesting and politely demanding the fulfill their promises made over the past decades to care for life those who wore the uniform and their families.

Veterans-For-Change was born in August 2006 with a very small membership of 25 people composed of veterans, spouses, widows, family members, and friends and to date continues to grow.