Israeli Election: Theodor Herzl vs. Meir Kahane (Kahane Wins)
Two provocative columns in Ha;aretz today.
In the first, political scientist Shlomo Avineri writes about the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl's, fear that the Jewish state he envisioned would ultimately turn to anti-Palestinian racism.
In his novel, Old New Land, published in 1902, which purported to describe Israel in 1923, Herzl described a critical election in which an Avigdor Lieberman type runs for prime minister.
"In the book, not only do the country's Arabs have the right to vote, some of them serve in key posts. Among them is one of the novel's heroes, an Arab engineer from Haifa named Rashid Bey. To use a term from our day, Herzl envisioned a state that would be both Jewish and democratic, both a Jewish nation state and a state of all its citizens.
"A new party appeared in the 1923 campaign, headed by a man who had recently come to the country and wanted to annul his old citizenship and rescind the right to vote of all non-Jews. Herzl named the founder of the Jewish racist party Geyer (which in German means a bird that eats carrion), modeling the character and his ideology after the Viennese anti-Semitic leader Karl Lueger.
Geyer's argument was simple: This is a Jewish state, and only Jews should have the right to citizenship. Others can remain as tolerated residents, but they do not deserve equal political rights."
In other words, Lieberman.
The good news (this is fiction) is that the Lieberman character loses big.
Today's second column is by Gideon Levy. He writes that the current election campaign demonstrates that the racist rabbi Meir Kahane, who favored expulsion of all the Arabs, is back big time.
"Rabbi Meir Kahane can rest in peace: His doctrine has won. Twenty years after his Knesset list was disqualified and 18 years after he was murdered, Kahanism has become legitimate in public discourse. If there is something that typifies Israel's current murky, hollow election campaign, which ends the day after tomorrow, it is the transformation of racism and nationalism into accepted values.
"Lieberman and his soldiers are borne on the tides of hatred for Arabs, hatred of democracy and the rule of law, and the stink of nationalism, racism and bloodthirstiness. These have turned, horrifically, into the hottest electoral assets on the market. Like all others of his political ilk, he cynically fans these base urges, particularly among the weaker classes, the rejected, the poor and the immigrants. But not just there. Many young people, among them brainwashed soldiers, will give him their vote, and no one ostracizes them. He chose an easy, relatively weak target, Israel's Arabs, and sets his supporters on them. But his doctrine has seeped in much deeper than that.
"Lieberman is the voice of the mob, and the mob craves hatred, vengeance and bloodshed. A useless war in which hundreds of children were killed was received here sympathetically, if not happily. The parties from the right and center have tried to disqualify the Arab parties; these lists are also excluded ahead of time in every political calculation. And Arab students cannot rent an apartment.
When the intifada of Israel's Arabs breaks out here one day, we will know whom to blame - those who criminally incited against them and, no less, those who turned this incitement into something acceptable and legitimate. This cancerous growth has spread to all parts of society; it remains only to issue a desperate last call: Keep away from this abomination. Anything but Yisrael Beiteinu, lest it really become Israel, our home."
Imagine. This is as if David Duke was on the verge of winning, not the Presidency necessarily, but the GOP nomination and then dictating 1950's KKK style racism to the rest of the country.
The Palestinians are, no doubt, taking this in stride. They are used to nothing but bad news. But what about the good, secular liberals of Greater Tel Aviiv and Haifa and the kibbuizim? (Israel's "Blue States"). What a nightmare. But they are outnumbered by the crazies.
Poor Tel Aviv (a city named after Herzl's book. In Hebrew it is Old New Land). Poor Herzl.
"Herzl envisioned a state that would be both Jewish and democratic, both a Jewish nation state and a state of all its citizens."
Palestinian Quotas.
A state founded and maintained on a logic of ethnic demography is not a democracy. Herzl was living in a fantasy world, not the real one. He was a racist. Throwing the vast majority of a population off its land and letting a small percentage back in as long as they remain loyal to their new leaders...
Interesting subject in its relation to older Jewish quotas in the US and later of affirmative action. Quotas as such are problematic but no liberal defends the opposite of affirmative action in the US. But Israel is different.
February 9, 2009 10:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Had Herzl's dream been realized before 1940, there would have been no holocaust. There is nothing intrinsically racist about Zionism. Had things gone differently, an arrangement could have been worked out with the Palestinians, a state could have been created (see the Peel Commission report) and neither side would have suffered so grievously.
Rightwing Zionism is racist. The idea of Jewish nationhood in a part of Palestine is no more racist than any other nationalist ideology -- and certainly less racist than a bunch of Europeans displacing the Native Americans, First Nation Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.
February 9, 2009 11:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Had Herzl's dream been realized before 1940, there would have been no holocaust."
So it's the Arab's fault.
Brilliant as always.
February 9, 2009 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is nothing intrinsically racist about Zionism.
How can a group of people go to a foreign place, take over the land, exclude the native people, and rule it without being racist?
Not to mention the sheer ignorance. Even Zionists like Yosef Eliahu Shlush and Asher Ginzburg describe the racism of the settlers already in the twenties and thirties.
But what about the good, secular liberals of Greater Tel Aviiv and Haifa and the kibbuizim?
You mean the good white European people who set up this beautiful pure blooded European society on the shore of the Mediterranean, with an Opera House and a Philharmonic Orchestra and good table manners and evenings about Goethe, and kicked out the original inhabitants and then invited those unwashed Oriental Jewish hordes to come and be their servants and laborers and learn from them obediently how to be civilized and discuss Goethe, only to see these unwashed hordes take over the country and run it down with horrible, horrible racism that God knows from whom they could have learned it?
Yes, that could be really funny if the joke wasn't so lethal.
February 10, 2009 1:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
The United Semitic Peoples' Kemalist Republic
One Semite, One Vote, One State, No Yahwists.
An idea whose time is coming, and Lieberman will hasten the day.
February 9, 2009 11:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Pretty funny. And maybe true.
February 9, 2009 11:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
MJ: I thought Lieberman also wanted to push civil marriage, i.e., taking away the power of the religious to control that institution. Do the Shas supporters not see where Lieberman is going?
Don't forget the Catholic Church tried to protect itself by doing a deal with Hitler. Had he won WWII, how long would the Church have survived after that?
February 9, 2009 2:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Rosenberg,
How can you justify supporting a country where it is illegal for a Jew to intermarry with Arabs? Isn’t this a bit racist? How is it less racist than the Jim Crow laws? It looks the same to me. This hasn’t changed a bit under any Israeli leadership.
Don’t the Israeli’s realize the diversity you demand for the US would be beneficial to them? In what way are the Israeli’s different from the rest of humanity? Why can’t the Israeli’s allow the Arabs to have full citizenship and social benefits as the Israeli’s? How can the Israelis justify what appears to me their intense racism? Can you cite any other group of people in the world more intensely racist than the Israelis?
What do you think about the world dealing with Israeli racism the same way the world dealt with Apartheid in South Africa? It worked pretty well in South Africa didn’t it? I suggest we try the same for the Israelis. What do you think about that? Do you have some special interest which would prohibit you agreeing with such a strategy? Well then, please describe it to me.
February 9, 2009 11:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
different from the rest of humanity
What part of Chosen People was giving you difficulty?
February 9, 2009 11:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
What relevant difference is there if it's Herman Goering's chosen people, or yours? Who's doing the choosing, you?
February 9, 2009 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, I have a special interest. Israeli relatives.
I'd like to see them safe and secure within pre-'67 Israel living at peace with a sovereign Palestinian state next door, with Jerusalem as shared capital.
February 9, 2009 11:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
relatives
As do I, in Haifa. But are not the Palestinians our cousins? Some of them would like the "right of return".
Me, I don't want to return to Brooklyn, and that's the only place I left.
Our Palestinian cousins, per contra still have houses from which they were driven out, waiting for their "return".
February 9, 2009 12:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
You don't understand. The Palestinians are dangerous and animalistic. They're dark and smelly; not as smart as we are but they have bigger cocks. We have to protect the women.
Modern Jewish American tribalism is such an odd mishmash.
The confusion of the anger of the downtrodden with the whine of white resentment.
February 9, 2009 3:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Seth says:
"Modern Jewish American tribalism is such an odd mishmash. The confusion of the anger of the downtrodden with the whine of white resentment."
Shorter version:
"Modern American tribalism confuses the anger of the downtrodden with the whine of white resentment."
Shortest version:
"Anything we do not control is evil."
February 9, 2009 3:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
bigger cocks
Surely not.
I am, after all, (he said modestly) a professional.
February 9, 2009 11:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
As usual, totally wrong. Not only is it laughable MJ thinks that anyone who isn't a Labor or Meretz voter is a "crazy", his math is wrong. While it is regrettable that the polls for Yiroel Beteinu are strong, they are hardly about to take over the government. It is also not clear that if Netanyahu wins and becomed Prime Minister that he will want a rightist coalition that includes YB. Most of the speculation I've read says that Netanyahu will likely reach out to Barak and Labor. The fate of Kadima is also unclear, with some saying that if it is thrown into opposition, it will likely break apart and the key members will revert to Labor or Likud.
So enough with the hysterics, OK? Let's wait to see what actually happens before we proclaim the death of liberal Israel.
February 9, 2009 4:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
To simplify and shorten an argument: in view of the 19th century theorists of Zionism, it is not surprising that Zionism ended in racism. Those Zionist theorists were 19th century Romantic nationalists. Central Europe produced many strains of Romantic nationalism (for example, German) which contributed to the emergence of various strains of fascism and rabid nationalism (based upon the "Volk" or similar concepts). Since the rest of European nationalism was not exempt from this, there is no reason to believe that Zionism would be. (Although conservative historian JL Talmon would probably reject this argument, the logic of his analysis of Romanticism seems to support it.)
February 9, 2009 5:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
But what about the good, secular liberals of Greater Tel Aviiv and Haifa and the kibbuizim? (Israel's "Blue States"). What a nightmare.
Shibboleth. Wouldn't those be of the Ashkenazi elite? And maybe all the crazies have a feeling that when things go bad, it is they who take it in the shorts?
There may be wonderful people in Israel. That still doesn't mean a state imposed by the west will be accepted. Especially under the circumstances Israel has made for itself.
February 9, 2009 8:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
*A Window for Israel/Palestine Peace?
Just Foreign Policy and Jewish Voice for Peace have launched a campaign to urge President Obama to reform U.S. policy toward the Palestinians so that George Mitchell's diplomacy can succeed: lift the blockade on Gaza, authorize U.S. diplomats to talk to Hamas officials, get serious about ending Israeli settlements in the West Bank, insist that US weapons supplied to Israel be only used for self-defense, as required by US law.
You can sign their letter here:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/301/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=1814
Background:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/a-window-for-israelpalest_b_160830.html
February 9, 2009 9:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lieberman is pretty scary but he's not a Sabra or Western European Jew...he's Russian and his backing is largely Russian immigrants, and their model is authoritarian (see Stalin, Josef; Putin, Vladimir; Chechnya, destruction of). Netanyahu talks tough but he's someone who cares about what America thinks; he's also a shrewd politician who can gauge the mood of the electorate and say what they want to hear. I think that the Lebanon invasion of 2006 is still driving Israeli politics. Forced by the European, American, and moderate Arab governments to back down before they could do any real damage to Hezbollah on the ground, (and irritated by a world press that claimed Hezbollah 'won'), Israelis had to watch Hamas arm themselves in imitation of Hezbollah's strategy. The lack of international support for Kadima's efforts is driving Israel's moderates right. If no one appreciates Israel's relative restraint (I acknowledge that some Palestinian civilians were victims of war crimes by individual soldiers, but that was not IDF policy) then why bother? If the world has already labeled you as genocidal and compared your 600 civilians to the Nazis' 6 million, then what do you have to lose? Elect a guy like Netanyahu-- or Lieberman-- and don't stop until there's no one left to shoot back at you.
February 9, 2009 9:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you'd get your facts straight, you might come to a conclusion different than the naziesque final solution you recommend.
On the other hand, you're probably just a bloodthirsty cowardly bastard.
February 9, 2009 11:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Herzl was an old school racist and mostly quite open about it. His "dream" was to establish a state specifically for Jews by "spirit[ing] the penniless population across the border". He did mention that the zionists could bribe some wealthy land owners into doing the dirty work for them and that some might remain but nothing he wrote in his non-fiction work points to the idea that Israel was intended to be anything other than a colonial settler state where Jews would enjoy more rights than natives and that natives in large numbers would have to be displaced. Herzl even said as much to the Brits when he put his project to them.
If there had been a Jewish state in 1940, other things being equal, there presumably would still have been a holocaust as non-zionists (humanists, anti-racists, genuine as distinct from phoney liberals or leftists, that sort of thing) recognise that it wasn't just Jews that got killed in the holocaust, though I know zionists are still having difficulty with that one.
Also, there is no telling that 6 million Jews would have been able to make the journey from Europe to Palestine while the war was on or that Palestine prior to 1948 could absorb them. Or does avoiding WWII feature in MJ Rosenberg's ludicrous and offensive fantasy "what if"?
Actually given the family of ideas in which honest humanistic people place zionism, if there had been a zionist state in 1940 it may well have been on Hitler's side and Jews may have met disaster at the hands of the victorious allies. Trouble here is I still don't know all of the features of MJ Rosenberg's disgustingly judeocentric "vision" and of course, nor does he. He was emoting, nothing more.
His excuse for supporting a segregationist state is that he has family there. No family in South Africa or the American South then? Ah but thats' different, er, erm, er. No it's not. Having family on the superior side of segregation is no excuse for supporting and making up silly "what if" stories for an determinedly (if in denial) racist state.
Zionism is about a state for Jews where Jews from anywhere have more right to live than the native non-Jewish population. There was never a chance that a state specifically for Jews was ever going to allow a larger number of non-Jews to live within its boundaries. Equal rights for Arabs wasn't Herzl's dream, though it may have been his lullaby.
Other nationalisms are not intrinsically racist. They are based on the idea of self-determination for the people within certain boundaries. Some nationalists have tried to force minorities out of their fledgling state and some have succeeded in that but Israel is the only state in the world today that routinely legislates in favour of people who don't come from there and against people that do come from there. And of course it mobilises people from abroad to come and live there whilst denying that right to people who actually come from there. It is also the only state whose existence is actually predicated on ethnic cleansing and it is the only state in the world today whose ethno-religious majority has been established by an ethnic cleansing campaign still remembered by perpetrators and victims, indeed still on-going by various means. Israel is not a state for the people within its boundaries. It is a state for the world's Jews at the expense of the non-Jews from within its boundaries.
So, to summarise:
This article, together with the author's comments, is downright dishonest and not a little racist itself. For a Jew to invoke the holocaust as justification for Israel and then to let on that the other millions systematically murdered by the nazis don't count as holocaust victims is as racist as any notion in print.
Zionism, as in the idea that there should be a specifically Jewish state, is intrinsically racist and only a dishonestly selective reading of Herzl can suggest otherwise.
The idea that there could have been a Jewish state in 1940 and that that state could have absorbed, during WWII, six million people from Europe is idle chatter and emotive nonsense.
And this is a liberal space? This blind spot for Israel has brought Jews and liberals into disrepute. No wonder islamists are on a roll.
February 10, 2009 2:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
other millions
Thank you!
I'll bet there's plenty of Romany who are, even now, being harassed in one of the Axis state successors, who would just love a "right of refuge" to go along with the "right of return".
Sort of "Righteous Yids", saving persecuted goyim
February 10, 2009 1:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
other millions
see below. sorry.
February 10, 2009 1:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is a state for the world's Jews
And an involuntary one at that! Where, exactly, do I go to turn in my personal "Right of Return." (It's like the way the Mormons convert dead Jews without so much as notifying them...)
I thought of making a dramatic gesture, by pissing on the *text of the law in fancy Hebrew writing (you know the kind...) in front of the Israeli Embassy, but, frankly, I don't have the stones.
I think this could easily provoke the Boro Park Ayatollahs to make me the new Salman Rushdie.
(Plus, I would never know if I had the right text--I would have to trust my scribe--for all I know, I could be pissing on an advertisement for a hemmoroid surgeon.)
The trouble is, the uppity 'Rabs simply will not accept the results of the Plebescite on the Future of British Mandatory Palestine.
February 10, 2009 1:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dreams? lullabies? who could lose sleep? I'm sure that MJ is thick skinned enough to not lose sleep when his bogus points are challenged but he could at least try to engage with the arguments before he nods off.
February 10, 2009 1:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
"I suggest you learn not to lose any sleep over what this "levi9909" and the rest of those who agree with him think."
I'm sure Mr. Rosenberg has no intention of losing any sleep over what anybody else thinks! What do you take him for? Mr. Rosenberg knows the individual human will, either individually or acting in concert likewise with other individually individuald is the ultimate arbiter of action! They will tell us if macht will make us frei! And not Levi999 and his kind!
If we all believe in Zionism, we can make it happen! We can stop the Holocaust!
February 10, 2009 3:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
emekli sandığı
I used to be very pleased to discover this site.I needed to we appreciate you this great read!! I definitely enjoying every amount of it and that i have you ever bookmarked to look at new belongings you post.
araç sorgulama
March 23, 2011 12:19 PM | Reply | Permalink