off topic: since you mentioned Robert Fisk on your podcast
I would recommend Robert Fisk's massive book The Great War for Civilization in which he chronicles the fallout of WWI on Western Asia / the Middle East. It should be a great resource for seasons 15-25 of the civilizations series.
Chomsky praised it and then said it was the one book he couldn't finish in a day on account of it being too depressing.
Even though Robert Fisk starts the book with his own version of self-aware humor: He hears about Soviet helicopters shelling a nearby village while looking for a carpet in a rural market in Afghanistan. He arrives at the village to find helicopters still hovering over it - so he runs for cover into a house and cowers next to the already terrified residents. To reassure them he blurts out in Pashtu: "Please do not be afraid, I am a carpet."
as an explanation of the (truncated) comment below - which was an over-long essay - Just over a week ago I threw together some comments on the Sit Rep where you discussed the superman ideology and Israel but my notes were too muddled and i thought best to scrap them at the time and check up a few things - I'm coming back here with a comment on atheism (perhaps not a key element in the case you make) and zionism, as this seems a more appropriate place to bring them up. The essence of what i felt is that, though modern Israeli Zionism certainly is partly a product of european settler-colonial fascism, it is also derived from a kind of fundamentalist Judaism and, that (oddly), that suggestion applies as much to 'secular' zionism as 'religious' zionism. This argument drags the problem out of historical materialism (perhaps) and into religious murk but then Marx, though by nature deeply compassionate, neglects in his theories emphasis on the 'inner life' and 'inner togetherness' (I think), without which we won't find a true life in common, which we all want.
As to the nature of Zionism as expressed in this genocide. It is likely that every genocide has features that are culturally unique. On that account a couple of notions occur to me. It is emphasised often at the moment (as above - very understandably) that Zionism is not at all the same as Judaism and though broadly this is true, it is not the whole truth. There are concepts of Zion rooted in authentic Jewish religious thought and devotion (see Martin Buber, On Zion): it signifies a sort of 'kingdom of heaven on earth' towards which devotional activity ought to work but more than that, it has traditionally (this is obvious) been grounded in a notion of the region of Palestine as a holy and promised land. During the Sabbatean messianic frenzy of the 1660s-1670s (not long after Cossack pogroms) the majority of Jews all over Europe were packing for Palestine and the apocalypse. Judaism has a couple of unique features as a religion. One is that while it is at heart a universalist, monotheistic faith, in practice it has had a kind of working ethnic basis and this, indeed, has spiritual meaning (this is not a criticism rather a characterisation). Another feature, which builds on this vision of 'inherited' faith or allegiance or accountability, is the fact that historically it places little stress on clerical asceticism and rather emphasises collective devotion, almost as if the entire believing population forms a kind of 'monastic’ or ‘priestly' solidarity. Revelation occurred and occurs when believers are spiritually at one (this simplifies an awful lot but there isn't space for much nuance here). And the messiah will come when the collective spirit is aligned in virtue and piety with heaven. Judaism is founded on Torah, Land and People, together with a sense of spiritual mission of a kind for the world. Zion can be interpreted 'spiritually' or literally (and has been construed both ways, but I think it has been seen mostly in a 'literal' sense though Rabbinic Judaism post 70 ad was strongly of the view that the land would be granted at the end of times at a moment when everyone would be converted to the 'truth' or get their come-uppance...). It may be that the intense devotional solidarity of an 'ethnos' carries the danger of turning into a kind of 'religious nationalism', with the moral hazard of robust superiority towards non-members: this would be a kind of fundamentalist corruption of faith. The sacred text of the Old Testament was not meant literally (necessarily) but presented a symbolic mythos with an infinite number of dimensions over and in which every devout Jew is and was entitled to discuss, argue and find holy meaning (contact with God). However there are, unlike (I think) any of the other world sacred texts, numerous candidly genocidal actions in different books (Joshua, Saul etc) and, disturbingly, they are presented often as done under divine instruction. It is not clear whether these 'destructions' are historically accurate, but whether or not this is the case, there is little doubt that they would have been seen as 'real' by ordinary devotees for millenia - and probably still are. Amalek is only one of many such destructions. Religious thought argued that the fall of the Temple in 70 ad was brought about by political and spiritual 'over-reaching' by the Jewish population and that dispersal and atonement (by strict avoidance of war and politics) in later centuries reflected acceptance of divine punishment. There was thus a strong case in Judaism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for resistance to political Zionism and there is still a strong and important core rejecting it as a blasphemy. But the land of Palestine exerted a powerful, near-hypnotic pull both for 'secular' and religious (the other territorial options never had a chance in the 1890s against Palestine, even for the secular Zionists). I would argue that there was a secular 'religiosity' to even early Zionism (when land was mostly purchased) - in spite of its atheism - and that given the determination to restore and bind the growing population as a distinct cultural ethnos - it was almost inevitable that there develop a kind of penumbra of 'quasi-religious' authority around the zionist project (as around the settler-colonial project in America) - religious language was used early on powerfully to denote return to and the conduct of life in Palestine – in my opinion this 'plays with' emotional drives that touch on religious forces in the psyche – ie Aliyah was the word used to describe immigration in Zionism but it is a technical religious term for rising to a higher state of being – the pioneers’ of the early 1900s were ‘chalutz’ (meaning spiritual liberators)...there are many other examples (Eretz Israel etc etc) – the atheist Asher Ginsberg devoutly believed that getting back to the ‘essence’ of Jewish culture in Palestine would repair psychic wounds in Jewish people. Zionist thinking played with religious/spiritual mysteries while rejecting transcendence – but this is a dangerous game and I believe that as Zionism mutated over the 20th century there occurred a kind of interpenetration between the religious and the secular – between signifiers and energies (on the assumption, perhaps religious, that ‘religion’ deals with inchoate forces or energies driving human beings that are not rational or simple, whether a person is consciously ‘religious’ or atheist). By the 1920s the distinguished Kabbalist Isaac Kook (d.1935) had begun (while living in Palestine and fearing that Zionism could be murderous in form), to discern spiritual meaning and logos to the endeavours of the settlers, ‘it is only in the beginning that it appears in the form of chaos’. Temptation to messianic optimism grew: ‘we lay tefillin and the pioneers lay bricks’. His son lost the traditional bearings that held Isaac Kook to orthodoxy: the newly occupied territory began to seem like an opportunity to reclaim orthodoxy in its entirety. Though it is true that orthodox haredim communities living in Palestine continued to be repulsed by Zionist claims (quasi-religious in nature), more and more after 1948 anxieties about the precise duties of a believer in the ‘end times’ (as Kook and others saw the period) caused deep unrest. The 7th Lubavitcher Hasidic Rebbe (Menachem Schneerson, died 1994) initiated a rapprochement between modern science and technology and the sacred and tried to reintegrate lapsed Jews into practice of the faith – this movement was unapologetically messianic and apocalyptic and centred (and centres) strongly on events in Israel. There is too much to detail here but one of the underlying arguments I would make is that once messianic Judaism begins to see eschatological necessity and purpose to return to Palestine ramifying aspects of traditional religious belief begin to adhere to or live in the relative emotional emptiness of merely secular Zionism, affecting everyone, of any degree of faith (and there tend to be degrees). Fundamentalist Judaism can then have more influence than numbers might suggest. But in any case the number of believers of all kinds has steadily risen in Israel between the 1970s and the 2010s. Kook the younger, by the 1970s was talking with lunatic abandon about every soldier added to the army amounting to a new stage ‘in the process of redemption’. Annexation of greater Israel was a religious duty. Notions of holy victimhood were rife in his sermons. The 1967 war was experienced as a kind of spiritual event for most Israelis, secular and religious and took on deeper planes of meaning for the mystics: these were final battles. Such notions filtered into conventional discourse (with mystical authority). Gush Emunim and the dreadful gun-toting Moses Levinger charged the resurgence of settlement in the 1970s with hot zealous mysticism; ‘he is standing like a candle in Judea and Samaria’ (bring back the biblical names...). For decades the concepts had been alive as emotional triggers now they gained religious weight. Menachim Begin visited the Rabbi Kook and bowed before him. The ‘redemption’ of Israel was going to the be the ‘redemption’ of the whole world. In 1980 Rabbi Israel Hess published an article, ‘Genocide: a commandment of the Torah’ in a university magazine (look it up!). between the 1980s and the 2010s this horrible devils brew of fundamentalist mysticism and Zionist ideology only fermented, with crackpots like Rabbi Meir Kahane active in the Knesset. I don’t have time to go on much more but there is a lot more that could be adduced. Religious anti-zionism remains but fundamentalist religious Zionism has more power in the Israeli world: Netanyahu believes in himself only but he is able to touch buttons that are as much ‘religious’ in a decadent sense as they are ‘settler-colonial’: it may be that for a settler-colonial project to survive it needs to develop pseudo-religious charge.
Thanks again for this series / collection of facts that fall under one of the few remaining absolute taboos in the West, especially here in Austria and Germany.
I would be really interested in your take on how Zionism changes over time to accommodate external conditions, in particular in relation to the Left and to business elites.
To explain (lingering) solidarity with Israel, leftists often point out that during the early settlement of Palestine, market forces worked against hiring European Jews (who typically had little agricultural skills) over local labor who had plenty of skills plus deep knowledge of the land and climate. Therefore Zionists had to become anti-capitalists and support the Kibbutz movement precisely because of its socialist and anarchist leanings. The party representing Ashkenazi i.e. white European Jews even called itself the Labor Party.
Conversely when leftists weren't needed anymore the Kibbutz experiment waned along with the Labor Party dominance, and neo-liberal capitalism was adopted with a vengeance: playing Jews off against Palestinians and Bedouin (and later guest workers to replace Palestinian labor), Ashkenazim vs Oriental Jews vs orthodox Jews, vs later Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, recently apparently even the relative (Ashkenazi) elites against the politics favoring the few dozen families who have come to own most of the assets.
To be fair, there may be limits to accommodation, the many liberals and leftists who expected the Israeli elites would take a page from the South-African playbook during the "Oslo peace process" lost hope and have been disoriented ever since.
I had no idea how deep the anti-semitism ran in Zionist ideology. This series is absolutely essential and I’ll be re-reading soon. Thanks so much.
off topic: since you mentioned Robert Fisk on your podcast
I would recommend Robert Fisk's massive book The Great War for Civilization in which he chronicles the fallout of WWI on Western Asia / the Middle East. It should be a great resource for seasons 15-25 of the civilizations series.
Chomsky praised it and then said it was the one book he couldn't finish in a day on account of it being too depressing.
Even though Robert Fisk starts the book with his own version of self-aware humor: He hears about Soviet helicopters shelling a nearby village while looking for a carpet in a rural market in Afghanistan. He arrives at the village to find helicopters still hovering over it - so he runs for cover into a house and cowers next to the already terrified residents. To reassure them he blurts out in Pashtu: "Please do not be afraid, I am a carpet."
as an explanation of the (truncated) comment below - which was an over-long essay - Just over a week ago I threw together some comments on the Sit Rep where you discussed the superman ideology and Israel but my notes were too muddled and i thought best to scrap them at the time and check up a few things - I'm coming back here with a comment on atheism (perhaps not a key element in the case you make) and zionism, as this seems a more appropriate place to bring them up. The essence of what i felt is that, though modern Israeli Zionism certainly is partly a product of european settler-colonial fascism, it is also derived from a kind of fundamentalist Judaism and, that (oddly), that suggestion applies as much to 'secular' zionism as 'religious' zionism. This argument drags the problem out of historical materialism (perhaps) and into religious murk but then Marx, though by nature deeply compassionate, neglects in his theories emphasis on the 'inner life' and 'inner togetherness' (I think), without which we won't find a true life in common, which we all want.
As to the nature of Zionism as expressed in this genocide. It is likely that every genocide has features that are culturally unique. On that account a couple of notions occur to me. It is emphasised often at the moment (as above - very understandably) that Zionism is not at all the same as Judaism and though broadly this is true, it is not the whole truth. There are concepts of Zion rooted in authentic Jewish religious thought and devotion (see Martin Buber, On Zion): it signifies a sort of 'kingdom of heaven on earth' towards which devotional activity ought to work but more than that, it has traditionally (this is obvious) been grounded in a notion of the region of Palestine as a holy and promised land. During the Sabbatean messianic frenzy of the 1660s-1670s (not long after Cossack pogroms) the majority of Jews all over Europe were packing for Palestine and the apocalypse. Judaism has a couple of unique features as a religion. One is that while it is at heart a universalist, monotheistic faith, in practice it has had a kind of working ethnic basis and this, indeed, has spiritual meaning (this is not a criticism rather a characterisation). Another feature, which builds on this vision of 'inherited' faith or allegiance or accountability, is the fact that historically it places little stress on clerical asceticism and rather emphasises collective devotion, almost as if the entire believing population forms a kind of 'monastic’ or ‘priestly' solidarity. Revelation occurred and occurs when believers are spiritually at one (this simplifies an awful lot but there isn't space for much nuance here). And the messiah will come when the collective spirit is aligned in virtue and piety with heaven. Judaism is founded on Torah, Land and People, together with a sense of spiritual mission of a kind for the world. Zion can be interpreted 'spiritually' or literally (and has been construed both ways, but I think it has been seen mostly in a 'literal' sense though Rabbinic Judaism post 70 ad was strongly of the view that the land would be granted at the end of times at a moment when everyone would be converted to the 'truth' or get their come-uppance...). It may be that the intense devotional solidarity of an 'ethnos' carries the danger of turning into a kind of 'religious nationalism', with the moral hazard of robust superiority towards non-members: this would be a kind of fundamentalist corruption of faith. The sacred text of the Old Testament was not meant literally (necessarily) but presented a symbolic mythos with an infinite number of dimensions over and in which every devout Jew is and was entitled to discuss, argue and find holy meaning (contact with God). However there are, unlike (I think) any of the other world sacred texts, numerous candidly genocidal actions in different books (Joshua, Saul etc) and, disturbingly, they are presented often as done under divine instruction. It is not clear whether these 'destructions' are historically accurate, but whether or not this is the case, there is little doubt that they would have been seen as 'real' by ordinary devotees for millenia - and probably still are. Amalek is only one of many such destructions. Religious thought argued that the fall of the Temple in 70 ad was brought about by political and spiritual 'over-reaching' by the Jewish population and that dispersal and atonement (by strict avoidance of war and politics) in later centuries reflected acceptance of divine punishment. There was thus a strong case in Judaism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for resistance to political Zionism and there is still a strong and important core rejecting it as a blasphemy. But the land of Palestine exerted a powerful, near-hypnotic pull both for 'secular' and religious (the other territorial options never had a chance in the 1890s against Palestine, even for the secular Zionists). I would argue that there was a secular 'religiosity' to even early Zionism (when land was mostly purchased) - in spite of its atheism - and that given the determination to restore and bind the growing population as a distinct cultural ethnos - it was almost inevitable that there develop a kind of penumbra of 'quasi-religious' authority around the zionist project (as around the settler-colonial project in America) - religious language was used early on powerfully to denote return to and the conduct of life in Palestine – in my opinion this 'plays with' emotional drives that touch on religious forces in the psyche – ie Aliyah was the word used to describe immigration in Zionism but it is a technical religious term for rising to a higher state of being – the pioneers’ of the early 1900s were ‘chalutz’ (meaning spiritual liberators)...there are many other examples (Eretz Israel etc etc) – the atheist Asher Ginsberg devoutly believed that getting back to the ‘essence’ of Jewish culture in Palestine would repair psychic wounds in Jewish people. Zionist thinking played with religious/spiritual mysteries while rejecting transcendence – but this is a dangerous game and I believe that as Zionism mutated over the 20th century there occurred a kind of interpenetration between the religious and the secular – between signifiers and energies (on the assumption, perhaps religious, that ‘religion’ deals with inchoate forces or energies driving human beings that are not rational or simple, whether a person is consciously ‘religious’ or atheist). By the 1920s the distinguished Kabbalist Isaac Kook (d.1935) had begun (while living in Palestine and fearing that Zionism could be murderous in form), to discern spiritual meaning and logos to the endeavours of the settlers, ‘it is only in the beginning that it appears in the form of chaos’. Temptation to messianic optimism grew: ‘we lay tefillin and the pioneers lay bricks’. His son lost the traditional bearings that held Isaac Kook to orthodoxy: the newly occupied territory began to seem like an opportunity to reclaim orthodoxy in its entirety. Though it is true that orthodox haredim communities living in Palestine continued to be repulsed by Zionist claims (quasi-religious in nature), more and more after 1948 anxieties about the precise duties of a believer in the ‘end times’ (as Kook and others saw the period) caused deep unrest. The 7th Lubavitcher Hasidic Rebbe (Menachem Schneerson, died 1994) initiated a rapprochement between modern science and technology and the sacred and tried to reintegrate lapsed Jews into practice of the faith – this movement was unapologetically messianic and apocalyptic and centred (and centres) strongly on events in Israel. There is too much to detail here but one of the underlying arguments I would make is that once messianic Judaism begins to see eschatological necessity and purpose to return to Palestine ramifying aspects of traditional religious belief begin to adhere to or live in the relative emotional emptiness of merely secular Zionism, affecting everyone, of any degree of faith (and there tend to be degrees). Fundamentalist Judaism can then have more influence than numbers might suggest. But in any case the number of believers of all kinds has steadily risen in Israel between the 1970s and the 2010s. Kook the younger, by the 1970s was talking with lunatic abandon about every soldier added to the army amounting to a new stage ‘in the process of redemption’. Annexation of greater Israel was a religious duty. Notions of holy victimhood were rife in his sermons. The 1967 war was experienced as a kind of spiritual event for most Israelis, secular and religious and took on deeper planes of meaning for the mystics: these were final battles. Such notions filtered into conventional discourse (with mystical authority). Gush Emunim and the dreadful gun-toting Moses Levinger charged the resurgence of settlement in the 1970s with hot zealous mysticism; ‘he is standing like a candle in Judea and Samaria’ (bring back the biblical names...). For decades the concepts had been alive as emotional triggers now they gained religious weight. Menachim Begin visited the Rabbi Kook and bowed before him. The ‘redemption’ of Israel was going to the be the ‘redemption’ of the whole world. In 1980 Rabbi Israel Hess published an article, ‘Genocide: a commandment of the Torah’ in a university magazine (look it up!). between the 1980s and the 2010s this horrible devils brew of fundamentalist mysticism and Zionist ideology only fermented, with crackpots like Rabbi Meir Kahane active in the Knesset. I don’t have time to go on much more but there is a lot more that could be adduced. Religious anti-zionism remains but fundamentalist religious Zionism has more power in the Israeli world: Netanyahu believes in himself only but he is able to touch buttons that are as much ‘religious’ in a decadent sense as they are ‘settler-colonial’: it may be that for a settler-colonial project to survive it needs to develop pseudo-religious charge.
Thanks again for this series / collection of facts that fall under one of the few remaining absolute taboos in the West, especially here in Austria and Germany.
I would be really interested in your take on how Zionism changes over time to accommodate external conditions, in particular in relation to the Left and to business elites.
To explain (lingering) solidarity with Israel, leftists often point out that during the early settlement of Palestine, market forces worked against hiring European Jews (who typically had little agricultural skills) over local labor who had plenty of skills plus deep knowledge of the land and climate. Therefore Zionists had to become anti-capitalists and support the Kibbutz movement precisely because of its socialist and anarchist leanings. The party representing Ashkenazi i.e. white European Jews even called itself the Labor Party.
Conversely when leftists weren't needed anymore the Kibbutz experiment waned along with the Labor Party dominance, and neo-liberal capitalism was adopted with a vengeance: playing Jews off against Palestinians and Bedouin (and later guest workers to replace Palestinian labor), Ashkenazim vs Oriental Jews vs orthodox Jews, vs later Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, recently apparently even the relative (Ashkenazi) elites against the politics favoring the few dozen families who have come to own most of the assets.
To be fair, there may be limits to accommodation, the many liberals and leftists who expected the Israeli elites would take a page from the South-African playbook during the "Oslo peace process" lost hope and have been disoriented ever since.