An interview with Professor Derek Penslar, former professor of Israel Studies at Oxford University, offers one possible explanation for why Jewish nationalism is so divisive and garners such controversy.
Honor guard standing next to Herzel’s coffin in Israel. Unknown. Public Domain.
Debates over Zionism and its progeny, the State of Israel, often have a Manichaean quality to them. Critics of Jewish nationalism view it as synonymous with racism and colonialism, while advocates see it as a national liberation movement for an oppressed population. Rarely does either side concede much to the other.
Emotion plays its part here. But so too does the politics of the moment. The recent controversies over anti-Semitism in the UK Labour Party, for example, demonstrated clearly enoughâas if demonstration were neededâhow politics impinges on debate over the Jewish state and its founding ideology. It showed how easily conflict in the eastern Mediterranean can become a terrain where unrelated political questions are fought out.
Professor Derek Penslar, former professor of Israel Studies at Oxford University, offers one possible explanation for why Jewish nationalism is so divisive and garners such controversy. He points out there are multipleâsometimes contradictoryâideological and political issues embedded within Zionism and Israel. âThe Zionist project combines colonialism, anti-colonialism, and postcolonial state-building,â he explains. âThe entire twentieth century, wrapped up in one small state.â
The interview below is an attempt to engage with the history of Zionism and its afterlives in an informed and nuanced fashion. It brings out and, I hope, helps to clarify some of the key questions Zionists and anti-Zionists need to think about.
Theodor Herzl went from being a middle class, European Jew and journalist to a political thinker and activist, determined to build a Jewish state in the Middle East. What was the context of this transformation?
The most obvious context was the anti-Semitism that flourished in fin de siÚcle Europe. There is a famous legend that Herzl was transformed into a Zionist by the trial of Alfred Dreyfus in 1894. It is true that Herzl covered the trial as the Paris correspondent of the most influential newspaper in central Europe, Die Neue Freie Presse, but the trial in and of itself did not make him a Zionist. Rather, Herzl was deeply perturbed by European anti-Semitism in the early 1890s.
Herzl had himself experienced anti-Semitic insults. He was originally a lawyer, but there was only so far he could rise in the profession as a Jew. He also experienced anti-Semitic taunts as a student in Vienna. So in 1893-94 he started thinking about how to solve the âJewish Problemâ and he considered the possibility that Jews should become revolutionaries and overthrow the old order.
There is a strong connection between Jews and the left because the left allegedly had promised to offer a class and prejudice free society. The left was supposed to reject anti-Semitism although it often didnât. So Herzl was attracted to the idea of overthrowing the old aristocratic order and creating a new one. But he was a bourgeois, and socialist revolution quickly lost its appeal.
Another possibility he flirted with was conversion. He thought the Jews could convert en masse to Christianity. This idea was something that flitted through Herzlâs headâI wouldnât take it too seriouslyâbut it just shows the state of distress he was in.
He then fell into a kind of ecstatic state in the spring of 1895 while in Paris and he began to write constantly. Out of the mess of stuff he wrote, some of it mad, much of it quite lucid, came the material for a pamphlet which was published in 1896 and titled The Jewish State….
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE…| openDemocracy
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