Academics Duel Over Complex Truths of Zionism
Academics Duel Over Complex Truths of Zionism
Ralph Seliger: Academics Duel Over Complex Truths of Zionism
Considering it was on the Left rather than of the Left, the ?Jews and the Left? conference at the New York-based YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on May 6 and 7 was mostly free of rhetorical excess and rancor. (Editors of Dissent were participants, including Michael Walzer as the keynoter.)
Only one panel, on the nature of Zionism, produced heated disagreement. It pitted a single, sharply articulated view of Zionism as ?colonialism? against more sympathetic analyses. What occurred to this observer was not that one or the other was entirely right or wrong, but how multiple factually correct accounts need to be reconciled to construct a more inclusive truth.
Yoav Peled, a professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, recounted the academic debate over whether Zionism should be viewed as a form of colonialism or national liberation. I was impressed at how well he argued his case for Zionism as colonialism, but shocked when in cross-discussion among the panelists he would not transcend his ideological box; tempers flared after he provocatively asserted that the 1967 Six Day War was not defensive on the part of Israel, because it had attacked Egypt first. While narrowly true, Peled ignored critical details that had prompted Israel?s attack: Egypt?s expulsion of UN peacekeepers, its aggressive deployment of a large army along the border, its blockade of Eilat, the mass hysteria of ?patriotic? Egyptian mobs calling for war, and its new anti-Israel alliance with Jordan.
Peled rebutted the argument that Zionist immigrants to Palestine had no ?mother country.? He pointed out that Theodor Herzl had sought a ?mother country? (I would have said ?great-power patron?); Herzl had courted the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the Kaiser of Germany in search of one, but it was his successor as head of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann, who succeeded with Great Britain, procuring the Balfour Declaration and Britain?s creation of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. But the Zionist relationship with the British ?mother country? turned bitter and deadly with Britain?s closure of Palestine to Jewish refugees after issuing its 1939 White Paper. And, as fellow panelist Mitchell Cohen?a political theorist at Baruch College/CUNY and former co-editor of Dissent?countered, Peled left out any consideration of the Jews? perilous circumstances at that time, from the pogroms in Czarist Russia through the Holocaust.
Yet Peled?s talking points are worth pondering. He noted that until the First World War, Jewish settlements were referred to as ?colonies? (moshavot) and that the Bank Leumi (the ?National Bank?) was initially called the ?Jewish Colonial Trust.? Peled likewise rejected Zionist arguments that Palestine?s economy was developed by the Jews rather than exploited on behalf of an overseas colonial power, and that until resisting Arab attacks in the 1948 war, land was purchased rather than conquered; he pointed out that land was bought from absentee Arab landlords, forcing the removal of thousands of Arab tenant farmers and their families. He further argued that the development of a separate Zionist economic infrastructure, with advanced cultivation and production techniques, made it impossible for native Palestinians to compete.
By way of contrast, Ronald Radosh, a former leftist currently associated with the conservative Hudson Institute, described the near-universal left-wing support for Israel at its birth in 1948. He spoke of the passionately pro-Israel writings of the left-liberal journalist I.F. Stone and the strenuous advocacy of the Zionist cause by the onetime owner and longtime editor and president of the Nation, Freda Kirchwey. He also quoted pro-Zionist statements by Soviet UN Ambassador Andrei Gromyko and mentioned that the Communist Party organized a massive pro-Israel rally at New York?s Polo Grounds featuring such slogans as ?Arms to the Hagannah? and ?Save the Jewish State.?
There are profoundly humanistic reasons to defend the Yishuv, and later Israel, as a place of refuge and redemption for an oppressed and downtrodden people. If not for virulent, endemic, and ultimately genocidal anti-Semitism, there would have been no political Zionism. This is what motivated liberals like Stone and Kirchwey and provided the rhetorical rationale for the sudden and temporary about-face of the Soviets and their foreign supporters. But a comprehensive understanding of the conflict must combine Peled and Radosh?s separate truths. As Amos Oz observed years ago, it is not a clash of right and wrong but of right and right.
Ralph Seliger was the editor of Israel Horizons magazine from 2003 until it was discontinued by Meretz USA in 2011. He writes and blogs for a variety of venues, including the Forward?s Arty Semite, Tikkun, and the Partners for Progressive Israel Blog.
