Europeans, not Americans, painfully sought ways “to wash off” the Judenfrage (the Jewish Question) without being anti-Semitic and without going into “unwanted theological analysis” of Judaism and its relation to Christianity. But later, Americans became the architects of that solution in Palestine in the form and shape of Israel.
By the 1840s, the Young Hegelians, like philosopher and theologian Bruno Bauer, had begun circulating their mutedly “anti-Semitic” arguments that Jews could achieve political emancipation in Europe. Keen observers like the political theorist Karl Marx, however, who was writing a book about Bauer and the idea that Jews themselves were seeking “release from the bonds of Europe,” sought to expose this implicit racism rather than accept the notion that it was Europeans who were trying to rid themselves of Jews. Marx recognized that such circumlocution, a deliberate attempt to be vague or evasive, served as a precursor to the ideas that would later culminate in the Holocaust.
Marx's own attitude toward European Jewry has been characterized as ambivalent at best and hostile at worst. He published articles in several newspapers, clearly accusing Jews of being "economic criminals." His readers could conclude that “those Jews were responsible for hunger and rising prices in Europe.”
Towards the end of the century, another Jew, Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist and the father of modern political Zionism and the Zionist Organization, came to the rescue of both Jews and the Europeans who had been trying to find a solution to the “Judenfrage.” (Even referring to that term sends shivers down my spine, such an ugly and racist depiction of believers of a religion.)
If he had attempted early and been a little more successful in realizing the idea of Jewish immigration out of Europe to “somewhere,” he could have saved 6 million-plus Jews from concentration camps and gas chambers, and the Europeans from the collective shame and sin of the Holocaust.
That savior, promoter of the idea of Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state, Theodor Herzl, himself, did not believe in God or in Judaism. The state he wanted to create would be a secular state based on the idea of “national” and “ethnic” identity of the Jewish Nation. If you remember, in 19th-century Europe, those “nationalist” features were very attractive. It was not religion but secular characteristics, such as culture and the collective desire for legal equality, rather than any religious belief or lack thereof, that made these “nationalist” features so appealing. In other words, Herzl was not seeking to create a religious entity, despite the religious motives it consisted of (Zion, Eretz Israel/Land of Israel). His ideology, Zionism, was just that: a mundane, worldly political ideology.
Israel literally means “One who struggles with God." The origin of the name Israel is a Biblical verse, referring to Jacob: “Your name is Israel, because you struggled with God and with man, and prevailed.” Zion, on the other hand, is a historical location: a hill in the city of Jerusalem and thus the city itself.
Because Herzl used such religiously significant names when he developed an idea and related strategic and tactical policies for establishing and developing a national homeland for Jews in Palestine, Zionism immediately brought opposition from Orthodox Jews as well as those Jews who rejected the idea of a separate Jewish nationalism and considered themselves full members of the societies in which they were born and lived. The World Zionist Organization, established by Herzl in 1897, declared that Zionism aimed to establish “a national home for the Jewish people secured by public law in the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel).”
The idea of establishing "a national home for the Jewish people" was immediately understood by the rabbis to mean that it ascribed a distinctive nationality to Jews. Chief Rabbi Moritz Güdemann of Vienna, who maintained that the Jews were not a nation and that Zionism was incompatible with the teachings of Judaism, opposed it. Hermann Adler, the chief rabbi of the British Empire from 1891 to 1911, judged Zionism to be radically divergent from the main core of Judaism, which it would undermine. Other leading rabbis representing all shades of opinions denounced Zionism as a fanaticism and contrary to the Jewish scriptures and affirmed their loyalty to their respective countries.
Yet, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress on Aug. 29-31, 1897, in Basle. As a response to those accusing him of being an atheist on the day before the congress, he attended a synagogue service, having been prepared for the reading of the Law (Torah). He said, the purpose of the congress was to lay the foundation stone of the house to shelter the Jewish nation.
The verbal evasion Marx discovered in the solutions to the Jewish Question offered by the Hegelians was also in this Herzlian formulation: Despite the fact that his book’s title was “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”), the congress offered to build a “home.” After the congress, Herzl wrote in his diary: “If I were to sum up the congress in a word, which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly, it would be this: At Basle I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loudly today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.”
This was the British tactic to combine mobilizing the Jews with negotiating with the imperial powers and colonization. He, too, appreciated what the British authorities suggested, after noticing his diplomatic audience with the highest authorities when he tried to sell his idea of mass mobilization of Jews to what he had in mind as the “Jewish Home”: Palestine.
Herzl had talked to Sultan Abdulhamid II and promised that Jews would help the Ottoman Empire pay its foreign debt. The sultan answered, saying that since the Spanish expulsion in 1492, Ottomans provided lasting protection to Jews and would continue to do so if the Jews would seek refuge in the Empire as citizens. Herzl was disappointed in his talks with the German kaiser, the pope, Italian King Victor Emmanuel and prominent tsarists.
But the British minister for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, found the solution: “Do not migrate to Palestine; such a move not only enrage Turks, but also Arabs with whom we are in negotiations to dismember the Ottomans.” (He later turned out to be right: when the emir of Mecca, Sharif Hussein, heard that they were behind the secret talks to move Jews to Palestine and give it in its entirety to Jews, the Arab world turned against the British.) So, Chamberlain offered Herzl the “Uganda Scheme.” Britain would help create a Jewish homeland in a portion of British East Africa. Herzl saw it as a temporary refuge for Jews to escape rising anti-Semitism in Europe. Still, the proposal faced opposition from both within the Zionist movement and from the British colony.
But the British saw the light in the overall idea of Zionism. By supporting the Zionist plan, the British Empire would have 10 million Jews attesting to its greatness, and the new country, Israel, would help secure its interests in the new Middle East that it would shape after the demise of the Ottomans. In exchange, England would protect its client, the Jewish state, and world Jewry.
But Austrian-born German dictator Adolf Hitler and his killing squad did not have patience. When he started to implement his own final solution, Israel would have 6 million fewer population, and the “demographics” (the population proportions of the indigenous people and migrating Jews) would be a major issue that still goes on.
By then, Herzl had kicked the bucket, but his legacy had been put into practice by Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organization and first president of Israel, and Arthur Ruppin, director of Berlin's Bureau for Jewish Statistics in 1904, who moved to Palestine in 1907. If the Jews could not secure a majority in their new country, then they would have to do what European settler colonialism had done in Asia and Africa: reduce the number of the indigenous people. The presumed superiority of the “civilized” Jews was considered a requirement, and the colonizing Allied powers of Europe, who by 1918 controlled about 85% of the globe, stood behind the Zionist settler-colonial project.
In other words, all those leaders of Britain, France, the United States and Italy, in the Paris Peace Conference, in 1919, 30 years before the creation of Israel, knew what was going to happen to the “indigenous people.” In the words of Lord Balfour, famous author of the 1917 declaration on behalf of the British Cabinet, which supported a “home for the Jewish people,” Lloyd George, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom, had “made clear, to all the participants that he and his government always understood ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ to mean a Jewish state, and that it used the circumlocution merely to deflect Arab opposition ... The problem of coping with Palestinian opposition is ‘one of tactics, not strategy, the general strategic idea ... being the gradual immigration of Jews into Palestine until that country becomes a predominantly Jewish state.”
Now people talk about neo-Zionism as if it is different from what the late British author and journalist Arthur Koestler summed up: “One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.” They say, the new Zionism is “a far-right, ultra nationalistic ideology that appeared in Israel following the Six-Day War in 1967. Neo-Zionists consider the West Bank and Gaza Strip part of Israel and advocate for their settlement by Israeli Jews. Some advocate the transfer of Arabs not only from these areas but also from within the Green Line.
If we read our history books more carefully, we’d know that Herzl himself at the First Zionist Congress in 1897 had said it was the entire Palestine he’d have and it would be home for only Jews. Balfour knew, so did the presidents of France, the U.S. and Italy. Now, the U.S. president and French and Italian prime ministers know, Zionism has not changed: It depends on dispossessing Palestinians, the expulsion of them from their homes, and refusing their rights to return.
Thanks mainly to student and other conscientious people who protests the ongoing U.S. military support for Israel and its Gaza offensive, the overall attitudes are not favorable towards Zionist Israel. Now, most people know that being anti-Zionist is not being anti-Semitic. Those who gave the country of a nation to another are going to regret its consequences.
