Trying to understand Zionism; plus the Death of the Antisemitic Author
Learning a little what drove this damaging movement
(1936 political cartoon in Palestinian-Christian owned paper. “Don’t be afraid!! I will swallow you peacefully…”)
Quick note: I make little edits/corrections as I notice things after I publish the post, but the version that is emailed out is frozen in time at first publication. If you want the most up-to-date version with the fewest grammar mistakes and typos, follow a link to the online version, rather than reading from the email if you are subscribed.
I’ve been working on a post about Russia, but it’s grown and grown into something quite long, and I wanted to put this out, which I’d worked on a while ago, in the meantime, especially because it has a long series that I’m hoping people will listen to and can inform future discussions. These topics are intimately connected though, as I’ll explain.
Also in the meantime, in my last post I described the general origins of European socialist thought, and Karl Marx’s historical materialism story of society. My sister posited that it is essentially a just-so story, (or “source: trust me bro” in the parlance of our times) which I generally agree with, and haven’t come across anything disabusing me of that notion. If anyone has an alternate perspective, I’d be interested in hearing it—I know Marxism is quite popular, I’m trying to figure out if Marxists find it compelling just because it tells a story people want to hear, or if I’m giving short shrift to some foundational part of it. You can find our initial discussion, and add comment on that post, here.
Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem
I somewhat recently was looking to gain a more complete understanding of the history of the Palestine conflict, and I was recommended the podcast series Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, part of the Martyr Made podcast by Darryl Cooper (as far as I can tell this was the first real series in that bigger podcast). Published in 2015, it is an extremely detailed history starting with early beginnings of the Zionist movement in the late 1800s through the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. It's a hefty undertaking, six parts totaling about 23 hours together, plus a more recent 4+ hour addendum on how the savagery escalated since.
Now I know if some people are familiar with this podcaster they may look askance at this, and I will talk about this a little further in, but I absolutely recommend this podcast so highly—it represents everything we need in history to me: deep dives into understanding motivations and contexts, all the ways people have been wronged and why they were wronged, rather than jumping to point fingers or circle wagons. I will definitely be referencing different parts and things I learned from it in the future, some of them surprising—obviously you don't have to listen to it to follow along, but if you’re looking for a crash course, I'm not sure there's a better, more engaging one. It is captivating, thorough, insightful, and fair. It establishes why the early Zionists felt they were doing necessary work and the conditions in which Zionism arose—all of the different political and social conditions they came from and importantly, who they were as people, since they weren't actually some sort of all-powerful wizard cabal as conspiracy theories might have you believe. But it does not gloss over whatsoever and dives deeply into the most craven, colonial parts of the Zionist thinking and how it tore up Palestinian society.
Zionist image vs. reality, and Jews in the Russian Empire
The direct connection to the Russia topic is part of the surprising part to me. At one point, Cooper mentions to picture an early “Zionist” in your head—what picture comes to mind? For me it was exactly as he imagined it is for most people: some sort of old orthodox Jew praying at the Western Wall, or some sort of elite banker and powerbroker like one of the Rothschilds. I always saw it as a movement of privileged elites. However while it got the support of these types, and their finance and influence definitely allowed it to happen, the real drive of the movement came from the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire most of all, who were coming from an extremely different place (which later led to very diverging forms and expressions of Zionism).
It makes sense—what use did the Jews living relatively comfortably in the US or UK or France have for packing up their entire livelihoods and relocating to a largely barren place on the outskirts of a dying empire and doing hard manual labor building settlements and working the land from scratch? But for the Jews living in the Russian Empire, this actually may have sounded kinda nice—they wouldn’t have neighbors blaming them for everything that went wrong and continually destroying their villages and neighborhoods and murdering and raping them. Jews in the Russian Empire were very limited, and I say “Russian Empire” intentionally because very few of them were permitted to live in the heart of Russia: by law they were constrained to something called the Pale of Settlement, which primarily contained the outer lying regions of land acquired by Russia in wars—what is currently Moldova, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia; only if they met very strict conditions could they live in the Russian heartland near or in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
Revolutionaries and Militants and Zionism
The wave of pogroms, which Cooper does an excellent job capturing the horror of, started primarily in response to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by revolutionaries in 1881, which was blamed on the Jews in large portions of the society and indeed the idea of the commie Jew perpetrating anti-American/Russian/German/[insert country here] acts has become a very common antisemitic trope. Now, Jews and revolutionaries did have a decently large overlap, which is something I also never thought about that hard, but makes perfect sense: as a group that generally promoted and emphasized education but that was being held down by government policy and prejudice and forced to live in poorer regions, why would they not be adopting revolutionary ideologies in large numbers?
At one point he discusses how Trotsky was torn early on between Russian Bolshevism and Zionism, and ended up adopting the former and rejecting the latter, but was constantly trying to compete to recruit Jews growing revolutionary consciousness to Bolshevism and steer them away from Zionism. The Bundists, who saw Zionism as escapism, were doing similar—though they ended up in cooperation with Zionist-socialist groups despite being opposed to it. A large part of the early Zionists who were actually doing the immigration and living in Palestine building settlements were socialists or socialist-adjacent: the Labor Zionism movement became the dominant force of Zionism that was actually local in Palestine for quite a long time. It had a number of splits that developed into the later political parties: one conflict was between the Jewish (later Palestine) Communist Party, which was internationalist and believed in the Marxist idea of class solidarity across national lines and was open to inclusion of Arab Palestinians as well, and the socialist but nationalist non-Marxist group Ahdut HaAvoda that was only open to Jews (this was ancestor of the Israeli Labor Party, the main left party until last year when they merged into the Democrats, who are still not very popular—also, holy moly Israel has a lot of political parties), led by Polish Jew from the Russian Empire David Ben-Gurion, later the first prime minister of Israel.
This conflict actually precipitated the Jaffa riots in 1921, one of the early outbreaks of Jewish-Arab violence. It was a confusing situation, and what it seems like is in the general disorder the Arabs of the city mistakenly thought the Jews were coming for them when they were actually posturing for this internal dispute, and some Arabs formed into a mob and attacked Jews, which then led to reprisals. This also pointed out to me the gap between these on-the-ground Zionists, who ended up consistently taking on more militant views—another were the Revisionist Zionists led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, from Odessa in the Russian Empire (present Ukraine), who were essentially the Mussolini-inspired fascist party and ancestor of the Likud Party currently led by Netanyahu—and the Western supporters of Zionism, who didn’t quite have a concept of the violence and problems in the region. Reports actually detailing the lengths the Zionists in Palestine were going to to control the land, and build up militarily, and how unhappy the Palestinian Arabs were with things, were suppressed or painted over when presented to Western supports, including a lot of the UK government that was in charge of management of the region, who seemed to imagine they were just peacefully establishing themselves.
Colonies and the cycle of violence
This gets to another misconception I, and I think a bunch of people have had about early Zionism—the seeing it as a colonial project of Europe or America, which I think is influenced by the geopolitical current times, the seeing of Israel as bastion of American interest in the Middle East region. I agree that it is a settler-colonial project, but it becomes pretty clear it wasn’t established in the interest of these powers or a traditional colony meant for enriching the homeland: there was no homeland. These confrontational and belligerent Jews coming from the Russian Empire were doing so very far removed from the interests of the US or UK. A lot of the UK support for the Jewish home in Palestine was brought about by one extraordinarily influential guy, Chaim Weizmann (who also would censor any reports of Jews causing trouble in Palestine before they made their way to the general parliament or influential non-Zionists in British government), who used the tactic of leaning into the most common antisemitic trope there is, that there is a vast conspiracy of all-powerful world Jews: you had best support our project and not piss these guys off or you’ll lose the war, is what he said during WWI.
After the Balfour Declaration and then some years of the British military administration of Mandatory Palestine, the British officials outside some committed Zionists didn’t seem particularly pleased with the Jews or how they were acting, many questioning why they did this Balfour Declaration thing anyways. Other than specific Zionists in the British forces, they clearly saw themselves there as a peacekeeping force in a place that “wasn’t ready for self-government” after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, like the US in Iraq or Afghanistan, rather than laying down a long-term national colony. Most of the general British administration would have found it much easier and better if the Jews weren’t even there. It seems clear that the Zionists were using the UK, rather than the other way around, and it wasn’t a case that much in common with the colonial times of the East India project. It instead was a cycle-of-violence thing: the Jews were a people with great violence done to them, from the Romans to the Eastern Europeans & Russians, then the Nazis, and the Zionist part latched onto the structures they could use to become powerful, using the framework of violence and oppression, which is what they knew, to assert their will onto a new victim—the classic bullied child becomes bully perpetuation. Which was then extended even more widely when in reaction to the Zionist abuses, particularly the Nakba, the countries of the Arab world expelled their Jews, whose descendants now make up the majority of Jewish Israelis, giving them reasons to seek retribution beyond what the European Jews have.
Behind the Zionist image, and the Palestinian story
And as I mentioned, at the same time Cooper does not gloss over whatsoever the most craven, colonial parts of the Zionist thinking—how for example some of the most influential Zionists would have a “for public consumption” platform that they just wanted to set up some communities to live near their ancestral land away from antisemitism in harmony with the native inhabitants, while having "for our ears only” private planning noting they would definitely be needing to find ways to establish control over the local Arabs—but don't say that part in public. In another memorable part, he goes into horribly destructive land policy in the bylaws of the Jewish National Fund, which tore Palestinian society apart, the fact that once the JNF acquired land, it was declared Jewish in perpetuity, not allowed to be sold or even rented to non-Jews ever again, nor even be worked by non-Jews. This mandated displacement, as land would be bought from under Arab tenants, making it Jewish-only, thereby forcing them into urban ghettos.
One criticism I've seen of the podcast series, which he acknowledges himself, is that it's a more complete history of Zionists than it is of Palestinians, mostly because they are much better documented in or translated into English. He doesn't speak Arabic and not many of the primary Arabic sources of that era would have been translated, and the literacy rate in the mostly agrarian society of Palestinians of that era was quite low so written accounts from non-Europeans aren't plentiful to begin with—with all of these factors, I see why it came out as it did. He does a good job humanizing and detailing the struggle of the Palestinians regardless of this limitation, and spends a good portion of time looking at their road to developing a national identity as well. It's just not as much in their own words (which can be quite a double-edged sword; seeing the extent to which the Zionists tell on themselves with their own words).
Darryl Cooper sucks now, but you should still listen to this podcast
Now why would you look askance at my recommendation? Well nowadays (in just the past couple years) Cooper has fallen in with a crowd of pretty ill repute, becoming very close to the likes of Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan (my sister and I talk about Rogan here, if you aren’t familiar with his extraordinarily popular brand of destructive discourse masquerading as harmless curiosity, including a link to one of the very great pieces of comedy I’ve ever seen parodying him; just look at the timestamps comment even). As a somewhat related aside, both of these two have moved very much to the pro-Palestinian side. However humanist this may be, I don't find it to change the fact that both of them put out more than their fair share of noxious content and are pretty clearly antisemitic.
More worryingly, while on their two shows, he's made some pretty negationist history comments, to try to use the proper term—I recently learned that revisionist history really comes from the mainly decent and good process of evaluating our historical narratives from the lens of the overlooked peoples and events and updating it to accommodate that, rather than accepting all traditional narratives written by the winners of their time, but it’s gotten a bad rap from reactionary conservative forces trying to counter this process. Comments that border on Nazi apologia which I'll directly tackle with rebuttals.
One, he claimed that horrible conditions and mass starvation came about because the Nazis had no plan for the masses of political/ethnically undesirable prisoners and prisoners of war they took, and they had trouble supplying them. This ignores the fact that the Nazis were actually meticulous planners and the logisticians, and they did have a plan; the plan was in fact to inflict mass starvation on all the undesirable people of the land they wanted to clear for German living space. It was called the Hunger Plan, and it was documented in files presented at the Nuremberg trials, where Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Two, he claimed that Hitler did not authorize or approve of the infamous pogrom Kristallnacht, which is directly contradicted by sources including the personal diary of Josef Goebbels, his chief propagandist.
Three, he called Winston Churchill “the chief villain of World War II,” and that it was his fault more than any others that it became a World War with so many people dying. This is ridiculous on its face, but in any case, here is a thorough takedown of this position.
Four:
This is Hitler entering Paris beginning the occupation in 1940, and an image from the 2024 Paris Olympics ceremonies. The Nazi/transphobia double whammy! (I know drag queens and trans people are two separate groups with only a bit of overlap, but for these people hating, the phobia is the same.) So yeah…the dude has gone fully off the deep end and now I picture him as one of the extras at the museum from Rat Race.
Sometimes I think these popular historian types get too wrapped up in finding a novel angle or view to show they are unique thinkers or surprise people that they just end up with garbage and then try to support and supplement it with ever worsening garbage and end up fully down the rabbit hole. All of these examples for him are from the past year or two, so I don't think he was always mind-poisoned like this and that's why I’m still ok fully recommending the work he did in 2015. I really don't detect antisemitism in it. He is horrified and humanizes the Jews’ suffering of pogroms, antisemitism, and forced scattering at great length.
The Céline Connection and Death of the Author
I liken it to the case of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the Frenchman who wrote the 1932 novel Journey to the End of the Night, which is acclaimed as one of the greatest novels ever written, and I fully agree, it is utterly remarkable. The reason it's not quite so well known as most other greatest novels is that as World War II came on, Céline became (or revealed himself to be) a virulent antisemite and wannabe Nazi collaborator. Starting in 1937, he wrote screeds that were so extreme, Nazis thought they might actually be counter-productively unreasonable. He went into exile after the war until he was cleared of Nazi collaboration charges years later. But with a tarnished reputation, his novel and its sequel Death on the Installment Plan, or Death on Credit depending on the translation, did not achieve the fame or renown they would have otherwise. Like for the podcast, there is absolutely no detectable antisemitism, and the themes are quite humanist as long as you read it as criticism, which to me it clearly is, blisteringly portraying and satirizing militarism, colonialism, dehumanizing industrial assembly line wage slavery, among other things.
Interestingly, about four years ago a trove of lost manuscripts of Céline were discovered—he had always claimed that they were stolen when he fled Paris as the Allies were primed to liberate it, and it turns out they were, and they made their way to a journalist, who held on to them for almost 20 years, apparently with the motive of wanting to wait until Céline’s widow died so she would not profit off their publication. They include two whole novels he wrote in the earlier half of the 1930s, War (this linked article gives its view on why he can’t be separated from his antisemitism even in his earlier works—that the novel presents war-induced misanthropy and this hatred is a direct line to other expressions of hatred) and London, before any of his antisemitic publications. They are apparently extraordinarily visceral in a way that’s beyond even Journey to the End of the Night and Death on Credit (which are not lacking in that themselves), diving deep into the horrors and excesses of the raw human condition, but similarly also don’t show the targeted hatred. Even odder, in these two novels, one of the few sympathetic characters is a Jewish doctor who guides the narrator in his pursuit of medical study, and the depictions of the Jewish ghettos of London are apparently quite compassionate, so the sudden turn boggles the mind even more.
I'm sure most people are familiar with the question of whether our opinion of an author affects or should affect our opinion of the work—the Death of the Author question, which originally was more about how much to incorporate an author's biographical facts and background in critical literary analysis but has expanded to include whether an evaluation of the author’s morality and outside opinions affects the overall validity or worthiness of their work.
The Rules
I've always sort of gone by feel on this, but I think I'm sort of figuring out my criteria, and I think it comes down to a few things:
A. Whether there are connected views within the work. An example here for me is Harry Potter, which passed when we were younger, but upon critical examination, while being anti-fascist on the surface, is also filled with problematic portrayals and an overall conservative view. To learn that the author holds hateful views is honestly not that surprising in retrospect and I don't have interest in engaging further.
B. How contemporary their views or behavior are to the work in question. Example, Bill Cosby. The idea that he was secretly raping women while at the same time putting out family content makes the family content disgusting.
C. How bad their behavior is—an obvious example would be Hitler's art, no one's going to look at that positively, whether it had merit on its own accord or not. The cases where we are talking more about views than actioned crimes have a different, smaller impact.
D. If it doesn’t rule itself out based on the above three, if I'm consuming for pure enjoyment or for edification, and how historically significant or masterful the work is. I'm much more likely to look elsewhere if I'm just looking for enjoyment.
Given these, the cases of Céline and Darryl Cooper where I can detect no traces of the problematic views in the specific works, their expressed views turned at a later point than the work in question, and they haven’t actively perpetrated violence on people, don't give me big resistance in appreciating their work, and finding it worthwhile, though I certainly understand if you have different standards and it might turn your stomach to consume their work.
Anyway, I wanted to put in this interlude to recommend the podcast because it's given a bunch of threads that I know I'll end up talking about, and I'm only halfway through it. By the way, at some point I want to do a tally of how many of the figures I’m posting about or mentioning on this blog are/were antisemitic and how many are/were not—I’m not sure which side will be higher.
Look for my post diving deep into the story of Russia, its greatest voices, and how they shaped the world and led to revolution, soon.
A criterion I see people use a lot is whether or not they are actually supporting the bigot, putting money into their pocket or adding to their popularity. I actually have even fewer useful thoughts on this than usual because I have no rules. Everything I do is arbitrary cherry-picking and I'm not even sure I'm capable of doing anything else? If I am sufficiently motivated to read something, I'll do it. I actually just learned the other day that Arthur C. Clarke was probably a pedophile? I was better off not knowing! I didn't know a solitary thing about him or his life til then and now it's like, well. Great. Absolutely nothing actually changed in the world between me not knowing and me knowing, except that now I enjoy it less.
Hmm, some of this was unexpected. When I think of myths about zionism, it's usually from the other end. I don't think I've (knowingly, apparently) met anyone offline who associated zionism/Israel with privileged elites or as an arm of Western empire. That usually comes off as straightforwardly antisemitic. To me, if that's the immediate picture, it goes to the disconnect between how American Jews perceive Israel vs everyone else. I think most of those narratives around zionism are massively naive but at least have some relation to real experiences or motivations of someone who might actually follow-through on what zionism was selling (because "for public consumption" narratives were being sold to Jews too). I also don't know if people take Jews seriously about religious devotion, so come up with secular explanations that make more sense to them? It's random but I have this stupid joke from an article I read about a cousin-in-law (long story) quoting why she moved to Israel from the US: “I told her, the Messiah doesn’t come to Fair Lawn, New Jersey.” Some people actually care about that stuff. Christians have really hammered the notion of "Judeo-Christian" for their own purposes, which obfuscates that Jewish religious practices are really insular and not well understood by non-Jews, and popular Jewish depictions in media are focused on the cultural signifiers of mostly New York atheist secular Jews (Woody Allen, Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, etc.) to the point where that is more identifiably Jewish than Jewish religious practice.
Like my off-the-cuff stereotype image of an early 20th century zionist is a Polish Jew who lives in a shtetl, they're a member of local group where they do typical community/youth group bullshit (Beitar or more benign) while they talk about how great it would be to live in the Holy Land and how much it sucks to live in a mud pit surrounded by people who hate you, they read zionist literature or listen to zionist speakers, they donate money to the cause, and they die in Europe in the Holocaust without going anywhere.
I mean, just by the numbers, that has to be the most typical case, right?
And I think the usual American Jewish experience was to have tons of cousins or uncles or whatever who were that guy. American Jews mostly descended from Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews who came before 1925, after which their extended families could not get in due to quotas, so everyone else was murdered and the few who survived went to Israel.
Like I think these are pretty common patterns in family trees for American Jews (these are the husbands of 2 of bubby's sisters, one from Izbica and one from Leczna):
https://imgur.com/0YtjS4T
https://imgur.com/BXGpspe
So they have a vision of Israel based on two types of guys they were familiar with, one who represented a regretfully unrealized dream and one who represented deliverance from hell and from statelessness to a homeland. And from that, you get a vision of Israel that is: 1. Functionally "correct," as in, the zionist was correct in predicting that he should leave Europe and that their solution would have worked, millions of Jewish people and communities probably would still be alive if they had already established a state both outside the danger zone and where Jews have collective power; 2. Necessary, as Jews needed somewhere to go in a very literal way post-war but more so that other countries could not be trusted to open their borders and accept Jews fleeing violence at any scale; 3. Morally obligated from the world, as a form of reparations, but more like an actual investment in the future akin to 40 acres and mule* more than attempting to calculate the value of the loss that is owed; 4. Completely half-baked because the unrealized dream of a dead guy frozen in amber forever never gets into realities of how that sausage would get made.
(*as an aside, I was thinking about the irony of 40 acres and a mule being a promise made mostly for land stolen more recently than either the British or Ottoman occupation of Palestine. But, considering that the native claim to that land was never going to be a serious consideration at that point - we should have done it!)
This is all biased by being very America-centric, however, for once that doesn't make it a disproportionate "minority" experience, because the US has almost half the world's Jews (and Israel has the other half,) it's just distorted, not a small sample of people. I doubt most Israelis share the American conception of Israel, but the policies of the most powerful country on Earth are shaped by Americans, not Israelis. I think the most obvious bias/misconception is that American understandings of Israel are very Holocaust-centric. One way this plays out is something you already mentioned, where most Israelis come from. While a huge percentage of survivors ended up in Israel, that's not where the story begins and that doesn't mean a likewise huge percentage of Israel's population was survivors, but Americans aren't as aware of Mizrahi or Sephardic Jews. Lack of trust formed by trauma also isn't necessarily wrong but it's definitely not necessarily right, and nothing about Israel's actions as a real state that exists in real life indicate that it is going to be a long-term way to ensure the safety of Jews (imo the opposite.) American conceptions of Israel also ignore (or I think more accurately, are either ignorant of OR don't care about) the actual tenets of "zionism" as a philosophy or plan of action, because I think Americans tend to view Palestinian displacement as a like, unfortunate side-effect of Israel's development being messy rather than something that was specifically planned for. (Also Americans are Islamophobes.) People also don't really care that much about philosophical origins of things, because in practice whatever we retcon onto them so that they fulfil their current purpose might as well be real. Planned Parenthood was founded on eugenics, but the only people who care about that are the people who want to destroy Planned Parenthood. Ergo, people who care about what Herzl wrote in 1890 or whatever are reaching back to a time that was barbaric everywhere to argue against the present. I don't think they see the throughline that continues today from the originating philosophies. Also, political shit from the past is completely incomprehensible anyway. You come across references to various zionist parties or the Bund or their various factions/coalitions all the time when reading casually about Jewish life in Europe and it comes off as confusing politicking in Europe, bygone inside baseball from a bygone time. I probably wouldn't understand half of Woodrow Wilson's platform either and I don't agree with racist shitheads being president, but I'm still a Democrat, etc.
Personally, most elements of the above were part of my conception of Israel for most of my life BUT my conception of a *post-1948* zionist was different (and overwhelmingly negative), because to me, it was a guy who didn't consider the goal achieved yet, it was an arbitrary end point that could only be completed by taking more land. Israel sucks real bad but if I never see the word "zionist" again on social media in my life, it would be awesome. Same with "settler-colonial." There are terms like that which might be literally true or trickle into the parlance of our times (lol) from academia but they lose almost all their usefulness and often end up as a harmful bastardization, if not just being completely made up, mush of ideas (this also happens a lot with psychology, but maybe most famous is the sociological term "emotional labor," where its usage in vernacular has almost no relationship to the real term but it sounds like it has a lot of rigorous examination behind it.) If the term doesn't distinguish between people moving from one place to another to oversee the extraction of resources to send back, people moving from one place to another in territorial expansion, and people moving from one place to another because they want to want to live there, then it's a bad term, but it's often used interchangeably. It ends up with people inadvertently arguing against the free movement of people or for blood-and-soil ethnonationalist land bullshit. Stealing from people by force or trickery is the thing that's bad! Murdering people is the thing that's bad! Segregation is the thing that's bad! I agree with the people who say that the only solutions for peace in Israel-Palestine should be modeled off of sectarian conflicts, rather than trying to litigate the legitimacy of justifications used by either side of a conflict.
BTW the Russian Pale is like a wall where all information stops if you are researching Jewish ancestry. Even the maps suddenly become worse once you reach the border (https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/europe-19century-secondsurvey/embed/?layers=158%2C164&bbox=2817448.339766522%2C6427027.392676492%2C2835747.3930060593%2C6452696.897915288)