The Zionist assault on Judaism

An Israeli soldier and a Palestinian woman at an army checkpoint in the centre of Hebron, a Star of David sprayed by Israeli settlers behind them, 18 May 2009

If we take the straightforward dictionary definition of antisemitism rather than the tendentious IHRA one, we find that Zionism itself exhibits signs of anti-Jewish ideology.

Merriam-Webster defines antisemitism as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” On this score, Zionism minced no words. In its foundational doctrine “the negation of the Exile,” Zionism, of course, did not discriminate per se against Jews as a religious, ethnic or racial group. It did, however, express hostility towards them, particularly in its devalorization of Jewish life and culture abroad over the past two millennia – often encapsulated in the dismissal and ridicule of “galut (exilic) mentality.” While targeting Jewish communities for the purpose of recruiting them to its settler project, Zionism repudiated them, denying their very validity, akin to conceptually eliminating the Palestinians as “natives” with no national existence or rights. It did so by defining Jews exclusively as a national group, a claim that annulled Jewish ethnicity, Jews’ ability to live among other peoples, and refashioned Jewish religion as an organ of the state – “Constantinian Judaism” as the anti-Zionist theologian Marc Ellis puts it. (Neither Diaspora Jews nor Zionists ever claimed that Jews are a race.)

Negation of the Exile

“Negation of the Exile” began as an assertion that Jewish life in the “Diaspora” was untenable, either in terms of the persecution generated by one nation inhabiting the lands of other nations and its opposite, the existential danger of assimilation, or both, as in the US today. If diasporic Jews would only grasp the fact of Exile, they would see themselves in their proper historical and political light: as proto-Israelis whose life abroad is ephemeral and can only be redeemed by settlement in the national and spiritual center of the Jewish nation, the Land – and State – of Israel. In this view Jews had become parasitic on other peoples. As the early Zionist ideologue A.D. Gordon put it: “We are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil, there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense, but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues, our ideals, our higher human aspirations. Every alien movement sweeps us along, every wind in the world carries us. We in ourselves are almost non-existent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other people either.” This view of Jews as a parasitic people resembles, the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell notes in his book, The Founding Myths of Zionism, modern European antisemitism. Indeed, Sternhell observes (p. 49), “A hatred of the diaspora and a rejection of Jewish life there were a kind of methodological necessity for Zionism…. Not only was Jewish history in exile deemed to be unimportant, but the value of living Jews, Jews of flesh and blood, depended entirely on their use as raw material for national revival.”

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