Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (20 page)

Apart from his intellectual brilliance and his absolute insistence on all Jews behaving in accordance with the moral principles of Judaism, Asher Ginsberg had knowledge that made him a greater authority on the subject of Palestine than all of the founding fathers of political Zionism put together. Unlike them, he had bothered to go to Palestine to see for himself what the situation on the ground was, and what the practical possibilities for Jewish development in that land were. He was subsequently to tell associates in Russia that no one who had not been to Palestine and seen matters for himself should have responsibility for policymaking with regard to Jewish aspirations in Palestine.

Asher Ginsberg made his first visit to Palestine in 1891, six years before the coming into being of the WZO. On his return to Russia after three months of seeing for himself, he was disillusioned and bitter on account of “the wrong way” of Jewish immigrants. He was also deeply depressed. In his first devastating summary of what he had seen, he wrote, as Ahad Ha-am, that his intention was to reveal a bit of the truth—the bit which was “the ugliest.”

On the basis of what he observed with his own eyes, he believed there were two main obstacles to further Jewish settlement in Palestine.

The first was that there was very little cultivatable land which was not already in use. What was cultivated could not be purchased from the Arabs. What could be purchased was either totally infertile or would have to be cleared at immense cost in labour and money. (As it happened that did not turn out to be an obstacle because the money and the labour were provided).

The second obstacle was the existence of the Arabs. The Jews abroad, Ahad Ha-am wrote, thought little of the Arabs and supposed them to be incapable of understanding what went on around them. For thinking so the Jews abroad were “in error”.

It was, however, the “quality” and the behaviour of the early Zionist settlers that troubled Asher Ginsberg most. The more he saw of them in action, the more he came to the conclusion that they were the wrong people drawn in for the wrong reasons. They were, in his opinion, totally unsuited to agricultural development and, more generally, they were ill-prepared, ill trained or not trained at all. They were also full of mistaken and irrelevant ideas, ill-informed, ill-directed and ill-behaved.

In one of his articles Asher Ginsberg (as Ahad Ha-am) warned that Jewish settlers should under no circumstances arouse the wrath of the natives. Later he wrote:

Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine? Just the very opposite! Serfs they were in the lands of the diaspora and suddenly they find themselves in unrestricted freedom and this change has awaked in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination.
¹

When Jewish settlers implemented the WZO’s policy of boycotting Arab labour, Ahad Ha-am was outraged; and he gave expression to his despair in this way:

Apart from the political danger, I can’t put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to humans of another people, and unwittingly this thought comes to my mind: if it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve at the end of times power in Eretz Israel?
²

He added:“If this be the messiah, I do not wish to see his coming.”

Ahad Ha’am’s message could not have been more clear. Political Zionism was a false messiah.

Another legendary spiritual Zionist who spoke against political Zionism was Dr. Judah Magnes, the founder and first president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He warned time and time again that by establishing a political dominion in Palestine against the wishes and without the consent of the Arabs “we shall be sewing the seed of an eternal hatred of such dimensions that Jews will not be able to live in this part of the world for centuries to come.” And that, Magnes said to political Zionists, “is something you had better try to avoid.”
³

He went on:

We seem to have thought of everything—except the Arabs. We have issued this and that publication and done other commendable things. But as to a consistent, clearly worked-out, realistic, generous policy of political, social, economic, educational co-operation with the Arabs—the time has never seemed to be propitious.

But the time has come for the Jews to take into account the Arab factor as the most important facing us. If we have a just cause, so do they. If promises were made to us, so were they to the Arabs. If we love the land and have a historical connection with it, so too the Arabs. Even more realistic than the ugly realities of imperialism is the fact that the Arabs live here and in this part of the world, and will probably live here long after the collapse of one imperialism and the rise of another. If we wish to live in this living space, we must live with the Arabs.”

On the basis of all the evidence Asher Ginsberg concluded that Palestine could not provide a full-scale solution to the material problems of the Jewish people—their poverty and their insecurity. If realism was to prevail, the most that should be attempted in Palestine was the creation of an international spiritual centre for Judaism.

He defined it as being a model workshop for the regeneration of the Jewish people. Out of it, by example and teaching, a new and healthy influence would radiate. This, Asher Ginsberg believed, would reflect the essential nature of Judaism, was what was needed and, most important of all, was what could be done in Palestine. Nothing else could or should be attempted or even thought about. It was the case, he acknowledged, that some would find what he was saying disheartening because it offered no answer to the great question of the material condition of the Jewish masses. What was to be done to guarantee their security and give hope for an end to their poverty? The blunt truth was, he insisted, that means other than settlement in Palestine would have to be found to solve those problems. And those Zionists who still insisted that Palestine was the answer to the Jewish problem were guilty of not only deceiving others but, worse still, deceiving themselves.

But even if such a modest mission—the creation in Palestine of an international spiritual centre for Judaism—was to be accomplished, Asher Ginsberg believed it would only be as the result of a cautious and wellplanned approach. He defined this as being one that, in terms of Jewish settlers, would provide quality, not quantity, and appeal to their highest motives, not their lowest. And that was not all. If it was to reflect the essential nature of Judaism, a new Jewish yishuv (area of settlement) in Palestine, whatever its size, would have to be frugal and orderly, hardworking and socially cohesive. In short it would have to be created by dedicated and, above all, virtuous men and women, virtually to the exclusion of lesser beings.

Conclusion? Asher Ginsberg believed that if something other than a centre for the spiritual regeneration of the Jews were to be created in Palestine it would not be worth having, and might very well create a new Jewish problem.

Asher Ginsberg had the vision to realise, as Harkabi would many years later, that the Jews of the world would be judged in part, perhaps in the final analysis in large part, by what a small number of Jews did in Palestine in their name. If the false Messiah came and had his way, all Jews and Judaism itself would pay a terrible price. It was because the stakes were so high for Jews everywhere that Asher Ginsberg, Ahad Ha-am in print, believed that Jewish policy with regard to Palestine should be the concern of the entire Jewish people, and should not be determined by the muddle-mindedness and deception of a few in the name of all.

And he told Weizmann that the Balfour Declaration was not the green light for a Jewish state. The WZO, he added, had painted conditions in Palestine “in false colours” and had promised what they could not hope to deliver. (Eventually, of course, the Zionists did deliver, but in a way that would have made Asher Ginsberg fear even more for the future of Jewry and Judaism).

According to Walter Laqueur in
A History of Zionism
, Ahad Ha-am regarded Herzl as “little more than confidence trickster.”

Zionism’s criticism of Ahad Ha-am in his time seems to me to boil down to this. What he had to say was not only difficult for “real” Jews to grasp (real Jews were the impoverished, persecuted masses), it also offered no solution to their problems; and that being so, it was not relevant to their real needs and, consequently, was not what they wanted to hear. I think it’s reasonable to assume that Zionism probably did its best to limit the circulation of Ahad Ha-Am’s messages.

Uncomfortable though it may be for many and perhaps most Jews today, the truth is that Ahad Ha-am had the full moral authority of Judaism on his side when he denounced the Zionist intention (and so political Zionism itself) to create a Jewish state on Arab land. Because I am a Gentile and no expert on Judaism, I did not myself become aware of this truth until I read Harkabi’s book. Under the heading of Judaism and Zionism, Harkabi wrote this:

Zionism’s attachment to the Land of Israel is rooted in the Jewish religion; but Judaism itself is not Zionist, and Jews throughout the generations have not been Zionists even if year by year they uttered the fervent hope ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ or the admonition that ‘Living in Eretz Israel is of equal weight to all the other commandments.’ In doing so they were expressing their longings and desires—their grand design [the abstract will]—and not their policy [the practical will]. Of course there was a handful who did emigrate to the Land of Israel but their intention in most cases was to die there rather than to build a Jewish independent state.

Zionism is not an ideal; it is the realisation of an intention, a political programme. One has to distinguish between a wish and an intention. An intention depends on some practical beginning. For example, to say ‘would so and so were dead’ is to express a wish, not necessarily an intention to murder. A wish becomes an intention by means of taking a decision and implementing it by some action that leads toward its realisation; in our example, obtaining a weapon. Zionist historiography has thus erred in describing the Jews as always having been Zionist, for the distinction between love of Zion and Zionism as a political programme is essential to a proper understanding of Jewish history. Zionism was born when the messianic wish, embodied in the ideal or grand design of the ingathering became a political intention embodied in an organisation to settle Jews on the land.

From the time of the Bar Kochba Revolt (132 to 135 BC) until the rise of Zionism, the central political idea of Judaism was expressed by the three Talmudic ‘oaths’ that God required. They can be paraphrased as follows: there would be no mass movement of the Jews from the lands of the diaspora to the land of Israel, no rebellion against the nations of the world, and no excessive oppression of the Jewish People by Gentiles. This was an important Jewish doctrine, even though it did not arouse much discussion, since in the historic circumstances of the times it seemed obvious almost to the point of banality. The core of this idea is passivity—avoiding political action while patiently waiting for the Messiah to come, without attempting to precipitate His coming, which was strictly forbidden.

Thus Zionism was proscribed. Modern religious Zionism attempted to reinterpret and blunt the force of the oaths. It claimed, for example, that the oaths were a sort of package deal: because the nations of the world had not upheld their part of the bargain as expressed in the third oath, Jews may now immigrate collectively to their homeland. Such an interpretation makes Zionism merely conditional: were it not for the Gentiles’ ignoring the oath not to oppress the Jews, the Jews would have to refrain from migrating en masse to Eretz Israel. [We might note that the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidim (sect of Jews) exploit the oaths to castigate Zionism and interpret them as a package deal in precisely the opposite sense: it was the Jews’ violation of the oaths—by pursuing the Zionist enterprise—that led to the Holocaust.]
⁴

The oaths, Harkabi wrote, can be understood as “a decision to prevent any initiative that would undermine the Jewish way of life as it developed in the diaspora.” He added: “Jewish Orthodox circles, afraid of changes that would undermine this way of life, were strongly opposed to Zionism. They suspected that the realisation of Zionism would create a new and difficult challenge for Judaism.”
⁵
(In 2008, the title of a book written by a very dear Jewish friend of mine gave expression to the new and difficult challenge for Judaism that had been created by Zionism. As mentioned in the Preface to this volume of mine, he is Dr. Hajo Meyer, an Aushchwitz survivor. The title of his book, it bears repeating, is
An Ethical Tradition Betrayed, The End of Judaism
).

Amazing though it may seem to be in retrospect—amazing given the refusal today of all but a minority of Jewish Americans to criticise Zionism and its child openly—it was, in fact, in America that Jewish opposition to Zionism as mentioned by Harkabi was most strongly expressed in public.

The ink on Zionism’s dishonest mission statement was hardly dry when the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state. The resolution said: “Zion was a precious possession of the past... as such it is a holy memory, but it is not our hope of the future. America is our Zion.”
⁶
(Substituting England for America, Montagu was saying the same thing 20 years later in his secret memorandum to his cabinet colleagues. And that was also the position of Germany’s Jews before the Nazi holocaust).