The Idea of Israel (11 page)

The political home for these early Jewish doubters of Zionism in Israel was the Communist Party, but soon most of them left the party, continuing on their path either individually or within new, smaller groups that eventually sought alliances with the PLO, and in particular with its left-wing factions, such as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Others were closer to the Chinese version of communism, and, as is typical of radical left groups, their internal arguments caused splits and divisions, followed by attempts to reunite. Their debates addressed the issue of how far nationalism, even Palestinian nationalism, deserved support from internationalist communists, Maoists and Marxists. Later in this chapter I will describe these debates; here it suffices to note that there were two logical conclusions for the participants. Those who saw the Palestinian national movement as the principal vehicle for implementing a socialist, Marxist or Maoist agenda eventually joined the movement in one
way or another. The other way was to remain an internationalist, a path that usually led to self-exile or to joining groups that were more internationalist. Either path was treated in Israel as high treason, and most of these activists paid a very high personal price. Most of these pioneers have been forgotten, and the price they paid has not been properly recorded. For that reason, it is important to tell some of those stories here.

Maxim Ghilan was born in Lille but spent most of his childhood in Spain during the Spanish Civil War; his father, a leading figure in the Republican camp, was murdered by the Fascists and the family escaped in 1944 to Palestine. Like so many others who challenged Zionism in the early years of statehood, Ghilan went through a nationalist phase and also fought with the Stern Gang during the last days of the British Mandate. In 1950 he was arrested as a right-wing activist, still loyal to the Stern Gang, which sought to overthrow the progressive Mapai regime that dominated Israeli politics for many years. Once in jail, Ghilan was changed by what he saw.

Witnessing the torture of Palestinian prisoners made him question Zionism during his first stint in jail. As a poet and a journalist, he had no qualms about using soft pornography to attract readers to anti-Zionist texts. He became famous as an investigative journalist when he exposed Israeli involvement in the assassination of Mehdi Ben Barka, leader of the Moroccan opposition in 1966, for which he was sent to jail for quite a long time. Ghilan’s entanglement in this affair was typical of him. Apart from his being comfortable with the use of eroticism as a means of attracting readers to challenging views in
Bool
(meaning ‘hit on’ in Hebrew), the journal of which he was an editor, he would sometimes plant stories of Israel’s involvement in the Arab world, some based on documents he received and some arising from his imagination. When Ben Barka was murdered, Ghilan wrote that Mossad agents were involved in the operation. Later, when the Secret Service came to arrest him, he claimed he did not know it was true. He was jailed for four and a half months for disclosing secret information to the enemy. But in fact he did not possess any such documentation. He was merely a keen observer of subversive Israeli activity in the Arab world, and it seemed likely to him that
a pro-Palestinian Moroccan leader – someone who annoyed a royal house that was not hostile to Israel – could be a target of Mossad.
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Like so many of these lone warriors of peace and justice, in 1967 Ghilan became a voluntary exile to Paris and, again like so many of them, returned after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Before leaving Paris, he asked close friends to find out whether the Secret Service would arrest him upon arrival. The agency later claimed that such a conversation never took place, but in any case, Ghilan was no longer a thorn in the side of the Israeli security apparatus. Nor was Israel a changed place, as far as Ghilan could determine, and when he died in 2005 he was as disillusioned with Zionism as he had been in 1948.
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Being an eyewitness to a different kind of brutality changed the life of another pioneer of anti-Zionist thought, Israel Shahak. One day in 1950, he watched, to his horror, a religious Jew’s refusal to help a wounded Palestinian citizen because it was the Sabbath and because Jewish law, the Halachah, prohibits such an act. This traumatic event turned him, according to his own narrative, into an anti-Zionist – a strong reaction triggered by his difficult biography. During the Second World War he had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto in his occupied home city before being recaptured and sent to the extermination camp of Poniatowa. Once again he escaped, this time with his mother; he temporarily survived the Nazi horror but was eventually arrested for a second time and spent the last days of the war in Bergen-Belsen.

The twelve-year-old survivor and his mother reached Palestine in 1945, where Holocaust survivors were not welcomed by those who made the decision to leave Europe before the Holocaust. Born Israel Himmelstaub, Shahak, like so many other Jews, Hebraicised his name once he landed in Palestine. But his full initiation into Israeli society was completed only when he served in an élite unit of the IDF and was then appointed to the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission.
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In the newly founded State of Israel, Shahak encountered the daily interpretations of Jewish rabbinical law and was distressed by the way it was applied towards non-Jews, namely, the Palestinian citizens. He
asserted that what he saw was a literal implementation of certain Jewish theological texts according to a tradition that stretched back to the early days of the religion. After researching these texts and global Jewish history, he concluded that the Palestinians were not only the victims of colonialist and oppressive military policies, but had also fallen prey to an overarching racist/theological ideology.

Writing later about his life, Shahak added another transformative event: the Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. In the wake of this event, he felt, as he put it later, betrayed by Zionism and in particular by its leader, David Ben-Gurion. It was not simply the Anglo–French–Israeli collusion in itself that reshaped the ideological and moral world for Israel Shahak; more significant for him was the narrative that accompanied it. This appeared most strikingly in the rhetoric of Ben-Gurion, who continually referred to the Sinai operation as the dawn of a new era which heralded the re-establishment of the biblical Jewish empire. This new messianism alarmed Israel Shahak and reaffirmed his worst fears about the new Jewish state. In his words, the State of Israel appeared to be a sinister and destructive war machine that would stop at nothing in its battle against the entire Arab world and specifically the Palestinian people. To his horror, this machine was fuelled by Jewish theology and modern nationalism.

The fusion of nationalism and religion was a lethal combination that reminded Shahak of the policies that ran roughshod over his life in Poland as a child. This association must have been extremely painful for a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who had only recently begun, after settling safely in Israel, a retrospective journey into his past. From that time on, his writings and activities were directed against the abuses and injustices perpetrated by his new state, as though such a commitment was the best way of confronting the horror he had undergone in Bergen-Belsen and elsewhere during the Holocaust.

One object of Shahak’s study was an especially sacred claim by Zionism: that Jews were persecuted all over Europe and hence needed a refuge, which should naturally be their ancient homeland in Palestine. Within Israel, the life of Jews in Eastern Europe had been, and still is, portrayed as a perpetual and relentless tale of
Christian and European persecution that ceased only with the emergence of Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel. To Shahak, this hegemonic Israeli narrative of modern Jewish life was manipulative and misleading, and he challenged it head-on.
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In the Zionist narrative, the modern history of anti-Semitism, as distinct from that of the medieval period, began in 1648, when the Cossacks of Ukraine, led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, rebelled against the Polish-Lithuanian Union of those days. It was a popular revolt in the sense that vassals and other marginalised groups, such as the Tatars, joined forces against an oppressive feudal system. ‘Khmel the Evil’ was the name by which contemporary Jews knew him, since he oversaw a wave of pogroms against Jewish communities in the area of the rebellion. Quite a few Jews died because of a plague that raged at the time; others were captured and forced to convert to Christianity or were sold into serfdom. A desperate letter written by a local rabbi to Oliver Cromwell, then the Lord Protector of the British Isles, states that 180,000 Jews were killed. In the Zionist narrative, it was pure anti-Semitism that imposed this fate on Jewish communities in Eastern Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century.
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Shahak was not the first to point out the fact that, in the eyes of the rebels, the Jewish communities sided with the oppressors, as tax collectors and moneylenders. Most of the time, the landowners were not present; Jewish agents acted as their managers, although of course most of the Jews slaughtered were not part of this arrangement. Shahak wanted the narrative to reflect some degree of Jewish responsibility, to assign a role to the Jews’ lack of empathy or identification with the oppressed peasants. He attributed this lack to Judaism’s separatism and sense of superiority. For Shahak, Jewish participation in the exploitation of others played a part in the chain of events in 1948 and the formative events that gave birth to modern Zionism.

To any Israeli who experienced the official educational system, this truly was heresy. In Israel’s history books, curricula, and popular programmes, the Jews were the helpless victims of a Christian anti-Semitism that targeted Jews because of who they were and not because of anything they did. The same explanation applied to the hatred and
aggression of Arabs or Palestinians against Israelis: Jews had done nothing that warranted such an attitude. The only reason for it was that Muslims held the same anti-Semitic views as Christians.

The memory of the Khmelnytsky pogroms was the cornerstone on which indoctrination in Israel was erected. The massacres appear prominently in official educational publications. I myself recall how it was hammered into us that the only way to stop this never-ending calamity was to create a Jewish state in Israel. Moreover, we also learned that Arabs, mainly Palestinians, were the modern-day Khmelnytskys, but that they would be unable to implement their evil schemes because the Jewish state had an army that would use every means in its possession against this last bastion of anti-Semitism.

Shahak did not pretend to be a theologian and did not demand that the holy Jewish texts be revised, but rather suggested they be superseded for the sake of more universal philosophies of humanity and liberty. His was a call for the universalisation of Holocaust memory, underscored by the recognition that the poison of racist supremacy lies dormant in the blood of every nation, including the Jewish one. He warned that continued adherence to anti-Gentile religious texts would retain this venom in the Jewish people.

Moreover, Shahak was the first historian, albeit not a professional one (he was a professor of chemistry), to revise the dominant Israeli tale of how Zionism emerged and operated. In his alternative narrative, Jewish life in the era of the Jewish state is informed by an exclusionist, chauvinist ideology. It was a seemingly outrageous conclusion, broadcast by a Holocaust survivor who did not hesitate to include both Nazism and Zionism in his historical case studies of dangerous exclusionist ideologies. He does not compare them per se; instead, he warns of the magnetic attraction that ideologies of racial superiority and supremacy can have for people and the horrific dangers they pose. So powerful are these ideologies that they can appeal to people – such as the Jews, the recent victims of horrid manifestations of these very ideologies – who should know better. With a moralising voice heard loud and clear, Shahak cautioned his fellow Israelis that those who did not learn from history were condemned to repeat it. More specifically, he admonished Jews who refused to come
to terms with the Jewish past, that they had become its slaves, repeating its immoral message through their adherence to Zionist ideology and their unwillingness to challenge Israeli policies.

The focus in Shahak’s work was on Jewish life, but his message was universal: a cry against any and all fanatical religious or nationalist ideologies. It was also a call for the replacement of ethnocentrism by what he called normalisation, the adoption of a humanist approach to human beings. The final words of one of his most famous books,
Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years
, elegantly summarise his point of view:

Therefore, the real test facing both Israeli and diaspora Jews is the test of their self-criticism which must include the critique of the Jewish past. The most important part of such a critique must be a detailed and honest confrontation of the Jewish attitude to non-Jews. This is what many Jews justly demand from non-Jews: to confront their own past and so become aware of the discrimination and persecutions inflicted on the Jews … Although the struggle against anti-Semitism (and of all other forms of racism) should never cease, the struggle against Jewish chauvinism and exclusivism, which must include a critique of classical Judaism, is now of equal or greater importance.
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In 1978 Boaz Evron, a leading journalist and pundit, listened to a monologue from an Israeli soldier serving in the occupation that transformed his intellectual views in such a way, as to turn him, like Shahak, into one of the pillars of anti-Zionist thought.

Evron was born in Jerusalem, a second-generation Sabra, and hence belonged to a kind of local Zionist aristocracy. His life in Mandatory Palestine was very similar to that of Ghilan. Like him, he fought for the Stern Gang in the 1948 war and tended towards what was then called the Canaanite ideology.
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