[shniad at sfu.ca: [R-G] Zionism at 100: Remembering Its Often Prophetic Jewish Critics]

[Hans Ehrbar]

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http://www.acjna.org/article_view.asp?article_id=94

Issues Summer 1997 

Zionism at 100: Remembering Its Often Prophetic Jewish Critics 

Allan C. Brownfeld 

The First Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland in August 1897.
Three days after the August 29-31 gathering, Theodor Herzl, who organized
the congress and led the Zionist movement until his death in 1904, declared:
"If I were to summarize the Basel Congress in a few words . . . I would say
this: in Basel, I have founded the Jewish state." 

Historian Heiko Haumann of Basel University, who organized this year’s main
exhibition on the anniversary in Basel and edited the accompanying book, The
First Zionist Congress In 1897, declared: "Herzl was to be proved right. The
Zionist movement grew from humble beginnings to become a factor of
historical importance and little more than 50 years had passed as, on
November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly agreed to the
foundation of a Jewish state and the division of Palestine." 

The Zionist idea, of course, did not start with Herzl. One of his
predecessors, Moses Hess, advanced the view that "homelessness" was the
heart of the Jewish problem. He argued that Jews needed to lead a "normal
national existence" and wrote that, "Without soil a man sinks to the status
of a parasite, feeding on others." His thesis was that Jewish identity is
essentially national and that anti-Semitism would always resist Jewish
integration into European society. There was, he believed, only one possible
solution: a return to the land of Palestine. 

Now, as celebrations commemorate Zionism’s 100th anniversary, what has been
largely forgotten is the fact that it was at its beginning a minority view
among Jews and that at the present time it still remains a minority view.
Most Jews believe that their Jewish identity rests on their religious faith,
not any "national" identification. Jews in the United States, England,
France, Canada, Australia, Italy and other countries do not view themselves
as living in "exile," as Zionist philosophy holds. Instead, they believe
that their religion and nationality are separate and distinct. The God they
believe in is a universal one, not tied to a particular geographic site in
the Middle East. 

Prophetic Critics 

At this time it is appropriate to remember the many Jewish critics of
Zionism and their often prophetic analysis of the philosophy which Herzel
and his predecessors and followers presented. 

Theodor Herzl, many now forget, did not believe in God or in Judaism. The
state he sought to create would be a secular state based on the idea of
Jewish "national" and "ethnic" identity and incorporating those features he
found most attractive in 19th century Europe, particularly Germany. This
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. 

In his biography of Herzl, The Labyrinth Of Exile: A Life Of Theodor Herzl,
Ernst Pawel writes: "The Anglo-Jewish aristocracy, while subscribing to the
idea of Jewish solidarity, felt resolutely British. By presuming to speak
for ‘the Jewish people,’ Herzl — the goy who did not know any better than to
send Montagu a postcard written and dated on the Sabbath -- threatened to
blur the line between religious identity and national allegiance which
protected their rights and defined their public image. Sensitive to the
atmospheric change, Herzl scaled down his demands and his expectations,
calling merely for the formation of a Society of Jews to promote the legal
acquisition of territory for such Jews as were unable to assimilate. But the
Anglo-Jewish Association under the presidency of Claude Montefiore turned
down even this modest proposal: a Jewish state, they declared, ‘was neither
possible nor desirable.’" 

Sir Samuel Montagu, 64 at the time, a Liberal Member of Parliament since
1885 and a baronet since 1894, received Herzl in his office at the House of
Commons. Herzl noted in his diary: "At the sight of this imposing
parliamentary establishment . . . I came to understand why the English Jews
would cling to a country in which they can enter this House as masters." 

Mirage of Nationalism 

The chief rabbi of Vienna, Mortiz Gudemann, denounced the mirage of Jewish
nationalism. Belief in One God was the unifying factor for Jews, he
declared, and Zionism was incompatible with Judaism’s teachings. The Jewish
Chronicle of London judged that the Zionist scheme’s lack of a religious
perspective rendered it "cold and comparatively uninviting." The executive
of the Association of German Rabbis, representing the Jewish communities of
Berlin, Frankfurt, Breslau, Halberstadt and Munich, denounced the "efforts
of the so-called Zionists to create a Jewish National State in Palestine" as
contrary to the "prophetic message of Judaism and the duty or every Jew to
belong without reservation to the fatherland in which he lives . . ." 

Adolf Jellinek, who became known as the greatest Jewish preacher of his age
and a standard bearer of Jewish liberalism from his position as rabbi at the
Leopoldstadt Temple in Vienna, deplored the creation of what he called a
"small state like Serbia or Romania outside Europe, which would most likely
become the plaything of one Great Power against another, and whose future
would be very uncertain." This, however, was not the real basis for his
opposition. He argued that it threatened the position of Jews in Western
countries and that "almost all Jews in Europe" would vote against the scheme
if they were given the opportunity. He stated: "We are at home in Europe and
feel ourselves to be children of the lands in which we were born, raised,
and educated, whose languages we speak and whose cultures constitute our
intellectual substance. We are Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Hungarians,
Italians, etc. with every fibre of our being. We long ago ceased to be
genuine full-blooded Semites in the sense of a Hebrew nationality that has
long since been lost." 

For Reform Jews, the idea of Zionism contradicted almost completely their
belief in a universal Judaism. The first Reform prayerbook eliminated
references to Jews being in exile and to a Messiah who would miraculously
restore Jews throughout the world to the historic land of Israel and who
would rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. The prayerbook eliminated all prayers
for a return to Zion. 

In November 1885, nineteen Reform rabbis met in Pittsburgh and wrote an
eight-point platform that one participant called "the most succinct
expression of the theology of the Reform movement that had ever been
published in the world." The platform emphasized that Reform Judaism denied
Jewish peoplehood and nationalism of any variety. It stated: "We recognize
in the era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching
realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the
kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no
longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a
return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor
the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state." 

Zionism Was Anathema 

For Isaac Mayer Wise, the leader of American Reform Judaism in the 19th
century, Zionism was an anathema. He rejected both the premise and
conclusion of Zionism that anti-Semitism was an absolute condition in all
nation-states where Jews were a minority and that a separate nation-state
for Jews was thus a necessity. Writing in The American Israelite, Wise
declared that, ". . . The Herzl-Nordau scheme appears to be about as
important to Judaism as was Pleasanton’s blue grass theory to science or as
is ‘Christian Science’ to medicine. Pleasanton’s empiricism was at least
harmless, but Herzl-Nordau’s is so fraught with the possibility of mischief
. . . it becomes the duty of every true Jew to take an active part in
efforts to destroy it." 

The overwhelming majority of faculty and students at Hebrew Union College in
Cincinnati believed that Zionism was antithetical to the beliefs of Reform
Judaism. Professor Louis Grossman in 1899 expressed the dominant sentiment
when he said that, " . . . A sober student of Jewish history and a genuine
lover of his co-religionists sees that the Zionistic agitation contradicts
everything that is typical of Jews and Judaism." In Hebrew Union College’s
opening exercises on October 14, 1916, President Kaufmann Kohler stated that
"ignorance and irreligion are at the bottom of the whole movement of
political Zionism." 

In 1897, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution
disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state. The resolution
stated: "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." In
1904, The American Israelite noted, "There is not one solitary prominent
native Jewish-American who is an advocate of Zionism." 

In 1912, when Zionists pressed for the promulgation of the Balfour
Declaration, it was a Jewish opponent who spoke out against the concept of
an exclusively Jewish state within the British Cabinet. Edwin S. Montagu,
Secretary of State for India in Lloyd George’s World War I cabinet, said he
would accept the declaration calling for a Jewish national home in Palestine
only conditionally as "a military expedient" (the Allied Powers were not
doing well in World War I against the Central Powers at the time), and only
after the wording of the policy statement had been rephrased. Montagu
informed the chief that he had "striven all his life to escape the ghetto,"
to which he now faced possible relegation as a result of the proposed policy
paper. 

Hard-Won Status 

Montagu, not wishing to endanger the hard-won status of Jews as an
integrated religious community enjoying equal rights and obligations in the
countries in which they lived, resented the Zionist effort to convince Jews
that they were an "ethnic-racial" group. He believed, as well, that there
was an injustice involved in turning over control of a land to those who
then constituted only 7 percent of the population. 

Montagu went so far as to accuse those in the British Government who sought
to create a Jewish state in Palestine of anti-Semitism. In a document
entitled "The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government" dated August 23,
1917, marked "Secret" and made public by the British Government only in
1970, he writes: "I have chosen the above title for this memorandum, not in
any hostile sense, not by any means of quarreling with anti-Semitic views,
which may be held by my colleagues, not with a desire to deny that
anti-Semitism can be held by rational men, but I wish to place on record my
view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result
and will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country of the
world. 

"The war has indeed justified patriotism as the prime motive of political
thought. It is in this atmosphere that the Government proposes to endorse
the formation of a new nation with a new home in Palestine. This nation will
presumably be formed of Jewish Russians, Jewish Englishmen, Jewish
Roumanians, Jewish Bulgarians and Jewish citizens of all nations — survivors
or relations of those who have fought and laid down their lives for the
different countries which I have mentioned at a time when the three years
that they have lived through have united their outlook and thought more
closely than ever with the countries of which they are citizens. Zionism has
always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any
patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. If a Jewish Englishman sets his
eyes on the Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British
soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine, he
has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British
citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public life
in Great Britain or to be treated as an Englishman." 

No Jewish Nation 

What would a "national home for the Jewish people" really mean? "I do not
know what this involves," wrote Montagu, "but I assume that it means that
Mohammedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews, and that the Jews
would be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly
associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English
or France with the French, that Turks and other Mohammedans in Palestine
will be regarded as foreigners . . . I assert that there is not a Jewish
nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this
country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of
desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they
profess to a greater or lesser degree the same religion. It is no more to
say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than
it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of
the same nation . . ." 

Placing the question of Palestine in a larger perspective, Montagu states:
"I deny that Palestine is today associated with the Jews. It is quite true
that Palestine plays a large part in Jewish history, but so it does in
modern Mohammedan history, and, after the time of the Jews, surely it plays
a larger part than any other country in Christian history. The Temple may
have been in Palestine, but so was the Sermon on the Mount and the
Crucifixion. I would not deny to Jews in Palestine equal rights to
colonization with those who profess other religions, but a religious test of
citizenship seems to me to be only admitted by those who take a bigoted and
narrow view of one particular epoch of the history or Palestine, and claim
for the Jews a position to which they are not entitled." 

In a speech to the Menorah Society Dinner in New York City in December 1917,
Chief Judge of the New York State Supreme Court Irving Lehman, brother of
Governor Herbert Lehman of New York, stated: "I cannot recognize that the
Jews as such constitute a nation in any sense in which the word is
recognized in political science, or that a national basis is a possible
concept for modern Judaism. We Jews in America, bound to the Jews of other
lands by our common faith, constituting our common inheritance, cannot as
American citizens feel any bond to them as members of a nation, for
nationally we are Americans and Americans only, and in political and civic
matters we cannot recognize any other ties. We must therefore look for the
maintenance of Judaism to those spiritual concepts which constitute
Judaism." 

In 1919, a petition was presented to President Woodrow Wilson entitled "A
Statement to the Peace Conference." It reflected the then dominant Reform
position on Zionism and Palestine. The petition asserted that the opinions
expressed therein represented those of the vast majority of American Jews.
Those signing included Rep. Julius Kahn of California; Henry Morganthau,
Sr., ex-Ambassador to Turkey; Simon W. Rosendale, former Attorney General of
New York; Mayor L.H. Kampner of Galveston, Texas; E.M. Baker, president of
the New York Stock Exchange.; R.H. Macy’s Jesse L. Straus; New York Times
publisher Adolph Ochs; Judge M.C. Sloss of San Francisco; and professors
Edwin H. Seligman of Columbia University and Morris Jastrow of the
University or Pennsylvania. President Wilson brought the petition with him
to the peace conference. 

Segregating Jews 

The petition criticized Zionist efforts to segregate Jews "as a political
unit . . . in Palestine or elsewhere" and underlined the principle of equal
rights for all citizens of any state "irrespective of creed or ethnic
descent." It rejected Jewish nationalism as a general concept and held
against the founding of any state upon the basis of religion and/or race.
The petition asserted that the "overwhelming bulk of the Jews of America,
England, France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland and the other lands of freedom
have no thought whatever of surrendering their citizenship in those lands in
order to resort to a ‘Jewish homeland in Palestine.’" Moreover, those Jews
who were still being oppressed in certain nation-states, from which they
were unable to emigrate, would likely be put into an even more precarious
position by the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine that could be used
by malevolent rulers "as a new justification for additional repressive
legislation." The position, noting that most inhabitants of Palestine were
then non-Jews, suggested that conflict between Jews and non-Jews could erupt
if a Jewish state were created. 

The rejection of Jewish nationalism is reiterated in the petition. Point 5
makes this clear: "We object to the political segregation of the Jews
because it is an error to assume that the bond uniting them is of a national
character. They are bound by two factors: First, the bond of common
religious beliefs and aspirations and, secondly, the bonds of common
traditions, customs, and experiences largely, alas, of common trials and
sufferings. Nothing in their status suggests that they form in any real
sense a separate nationalistic unit." 

With regard to the future of Palestine, the petitioners state: "It is our
fervent hope that what was once a ‘promised land’ for the Jews may become ‘a
land of promise’ for all races and creeds, safeguarded by the League of
Nations which, it is expected, will be one of the fruits of the Peace
Conference . . . We ask that Palestine be constituted as a free and
independent state to be governed under a democratic form of government
recognizing no distinctions of creed or race or ethnic descent, and with
adequate power to protect the country against oppression of any kind. We do
not wish to see Palestine, either now or at any time in the future,
organized as a Jewish state." 

Declaring the political segregation of Jews in Palestine or elsewhere as
"necessarily reactionary in its tendency, undemocratic in spirit, and
totally contrary to the practices of free government," the petitioners
repudiated "every suspicion of a double allegiance, which is necessarily
implied in, and cannot by any logic be eliminated from the establishment of
a sovereign state for the Jews in Palestine." They observed that those who
favor a restoration of such a Jewish homeland in Palestine, "advocate it not
for themselves, but for others . . . those who act thus, and yet insist on
their patriotic attachment to the countries of which they are citizens, are
self-deceived in their profession of Zionism and under the spell of an
emotional romanticism or of a religious sentiment fostered through centuries
of gloom." 

Critics Within Zionist Ranks 

It was not only those Jews who rejected the entire notion of a Jewish state
who emerged as critics of the Zionist enterprise. Many who were sympathetic
to the creation of one form or another of a Jewish "homeland" were concerned
about the rights of the present inhabitants of Palestine, rights which they
saw being either ignored or violated. 

Unlike most of his fellow Zionists who persisted in fantasizing about "a
land without people for the people without a land," Ahad Ha’am, for example,
from the very beginning refused to ignore the presence of Arabs in
Palestine. This Russian Jewish writer and philosopher paid his first visit
to the new Jewish settlements in Palestine in 1891. In his essay "The Truth
>From The Land of Israel," he says that it is an illusion to think of
Palestine as an empty country: "We tend to believe abroad that Palestine is
nowadays almost completely deserted, a non-cultivated wilderness, and anyone
can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality
this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab
land which lies fallow . . ." 

The behavior of Jewish settlers toward the Arabs disturbed him. They had not
learned from experience as a minority within a wider population, but reacted
with the cruelty of slaves who had suddenly become kings, treating their
neighbors with contempt. The Arabs, he wrote, understood very well what
Zionist intentions were in the country and "if the time should come when the
lives of our people in Palestine should develop to the extent that, to a
smaller or greater degree they usurp the place of the local population, the
latter will not yield easily . . . We have to treat the local population
with love and respect, justly and rightly. And what do our brethren in the
land of Israel do? Exactly the opposite! Slaves they were in the country of
exile, and suddenly they find themselves in a boundless and anarchic
freedom, as is always the case with a slave that has become king; and they
behave toward the Arabs with hostility and cruelty." 

Jewish ethics were the heart and soul of Ahad Ha’am’s brand of nationalism,
and to the end of his life he denounced any compromise with political
expediency. In 1913, protesting against a Jewish boycott of Arab labor, he
wrote to a friend: ". . . 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 the thought comes to my mind: If this is so now, what will our
relations to the others be like if, at the end of time, we shall really
achieve power in Eretz Israel? And if this be the Messiah, I do not wish to
see his coming." 

Jews and Blood 

In 1922, young Jewish zealots killed an Arab boy. This brought a cry of rage
from Ahad Ha’am. "Jews and blood — are there two greater opposites than
these?" he asked in a letter to the Hebrew newspaper Ha’Aretz. "Is this the
goal for which our ancestors longed and for which they suffered all those
tribulations? Is this the dream of the return to Zion which our people
dreamt of for thousands of years; that we should come to Zion to pollute its
soil with the spilling of innocent blood?" 

Ahad Ha’am was hardly alone in voicing such misgivings about the emerging
Zionist enterprise. In an article published in Ha-Shiloah in 1907, Yitzhak
Epstein, a Russian-born teacher who had settled in Palestine in 1886, voiced
an anxiety that was brushed aside by Zionist contemporaries but came back to
haunt. He wrote: "Among the grave questions raised by the concept of our
people’s renaissance on its own soil there is one which is more weighty than
all the others put together. This is the question of our relations with the
Arabs. This question, on the correct solution of which our own national
aspirations depend, has not been forgotten, but rather has remained
completely hidden from the Zionists, and its true form found almost no
mention in the literature of our movement." 

Epstein criticized the settlers’ attitude toward the Arabs and criticized
the Zionist leadership who played at international politics "while the
question of the resident people, the (country’s) workers and actual owners,
has not yet been raised, either in practice or theory." It was a serious
error to minimize the loyalty of "a strong, resolute and zealous" people to
Palestine: "While we harbor fierce sentiments towards the land of our
fathers, we forget that the nation now living there is also endowed with a
sensitive heart and loving soul. The Arab, like all other men, is strongly
attached to his homeland." 

Yosef Luria, a Romanian-born journalist and teacher who settled in Palestine
in 1907, wrote in Ha-Olam in 1911: "During all the years of our labor in
Palestine we completely forgot that there were Arabs in the country. The
Arabs have been ‘discovered’ only during the past few years. We regarded all
European nations as opponents of our settlement, but failed to pay heed to
one people — the people residing in this country and attached to it." 

A Binational State 

In 1925, under the leadership of Arthur Ruppin, an association called Brit
Shalom (Covenant of Peace) was established in Palestine and proposed
binationalism as the proper solution to the conflict between Zionists and
Arabs, two peoples claiming the same land. In their credo, issued in
Jerusalem in 1927, Brit Shalom said it was intent on creating in Palestine
"a binational state, in which the two peoples will enjoy totally equal
rights as befits the two elements shaping the country’s destiny,
irrespective of which of the two is numerically superior at any given time."
Its spokesmen included such respected figures as Robert Weltsch, editor of
Judische Rundschau, the journal of the German Zionist Movement, Jacob Thon,
from the settlement department of the Jewish Agency, Judah Magnes,
chancellor and first president of the Hebrew University and such university
faculty members as Martin Buber, Hugo Germann, Ernst Simon and Gershon
Scholem. For these men, Zionism was a moral crusade or it was nothing. 

Brit Shalom’s leader, Arthur Ruppin, was saddened by the growing disparity
between universal moral values and narrow Jewish nationalism. "What
continually worries me, he wrote, is the relationship between Jews and Arabs
in Palestine . . . the two peoples have become more estranged in their
thinking. Neither has any understanding of the other, and yet I have no
doubt that Zionism will end in a catastrophe if we do not succeed in finding
a common platform." What Zionists were doing, he argued, "has no equal in
history. The aim is to bring the Jews as a second nation into a country
which already is settled as a nation — and fulfill this through peaceful
means. History has seen such penetration by one nation into a strange land
only by conquest, but it has never occurred that a nation will fully agree
that another nation should come and demand full equality of rights and
national autonomy at its side." 

Later, as World War II proceeded, the traditional opposition to Zionism on
the part of America’s Reform Jews found expression in the creation of the
American Council for Judaism in 1942. In his keynote address to the June,
1942 meeting in Atlantic City, Rabbi David Philipson declared that Reform
Judaism and Zionism were incompatible: "Reform Judaism is spiritual, Zionism
is political. The outlook of Reform Judaism is the world. The outlook of
Zionism is a corner of eastern Asia." Rabbi Louis Wolsey declared that the
group opposed "a Jewish state, a Jewish flag or a Jewish army" and
represented "the views of the vast majority of Jews in the United States." 

Emancipation Rediscovered 

At its first annual conference in Philadelphia in January 1945, Council
members heard an address by Rabbi Elmer Berger entitled "Emancipation — A
Rediscovered Ideal." According to Berger, then executive director of the
Council, the program of Jewish nationalism had never expressed the real
aspirations of Jews in America or elsewhere: "Spurious nationhood," he
argued, had been imposed on Jews by reactionary societies in the Middle Ages
and this could not provide a solution to reaction in the modern world. The
Jewish nationalists wanted to maintain a medieval type of control over a
so-called worldwide Jewish people and to prevent emancipation of individual
Jews. This process, he claimed, reached alarming proportions in 1897 at the
first Zionist congress, where 197 men "arrogated to themselves the title
‘the Jewish nation.’ Proceeding to create a worldwide political machine,
they proclaimed that the medieval collectivism of the ‘Jewish people’ wanted
to realize its political destiny by creating a sovereign state in
Palestine." 

Berger noted that Jewish emancipation had frequently been attacked during
the preceding century and a half by the "official Jews" who controlled the
community while it was imprisoned behind ghetto walls. With the collapse of
the ghetto, the functionaries of the Jewish community were weakened. 

Threatened by the process of integration and emancipation, they condemned it
as "assimilation" and "did their best to impede it." 

After the partition of Palestine by the U.N., the Council adopted a new
statement of principles on January 19, 1948. It stated, in part, that,
"Nationality and religion are separate and distinct. Our nationality is
American. Our religion is Judaism. Our homeland is the United States of
America. We reject any concept that Jews are at home only in Palestine." To
American Jews, the Council declared, Israel was neither the state nor the
homeland of "the Jewish people." The Council publicly objected to Zionist
calls on American Jewish youth to migrate to Israel, to displays of Israeli
national symbols in American synagogues, to the reference to the U.S. as a
"diaspora" or "exile," to the sale of Israeli bonds in synagogues and to the
suggestion that any group of Jews, including the representatives of Israel,
could speak for all Jews. The destiny of American Jews, the Council
maintained, was bound exclusively with the U.S. 

Predictions Came True 

In the book Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1948-49,
historian Thomas A. Kolsky points out that many of the Council’s warnings
about Zionism had been prophetic: ". . . many of its predictions about the
consequences of the establishment of a Jewish state did come true. As the
American Council for Judaism had foreseen, the birth of the state created
numerous problems — problems the Zionists had minimized. For example, Israel
became highly, if not unusually, dependent on support from American Jews.
Moreover, the formation of the state directly contributed to undermining
Jewish communities in Arab countries and to precipitating a protracted
conflict between Israel and the Arabs. Indeed, as the Council had often
warned and contrary to Zionist expectations, Israel did not become a truly
normal state. Nor did it become a light unto the nations. Ironically,
created presumably to free Jews from anti-Semitism and ghetto-like existence
as well as to provide them with abiding peace, Israel became, in effect, a
garrison state, a nation resembling a large territorial ghetto besieged by
hostile neighbors . . . The ominous predictions of the ACJ are still
haunting the Zionists." 

Throughout the world, Jewish criticism of Zionism has continued long after
Israel’s creation. When Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion called for
"complete solidarity with the State of Israel" on the part of all Jews,
Denmark’s chief rabbi, Marcus Melchior, responded: "We Danish Jews do not
usually air our patriotism. Why on earth should we shout ‘hurrah’ more
loudly than all the other Danes? But we take an opportunity like this to
state that no one, however big he may be or from wherever he may come, has
the right or is able to change even one jot of what for 150 years has been
the status of Danish Jews under which there has been established a
relationship in Denmark of which we are all just as happy on the Christian
side as on the Jewish side. If Premier Ben-Gurion really claimed that in
order to be a Jew every minute of one’s life, one has to live in Israel,
then according to my view two questions arise. The first is whether to be a
Jew every minute is of imperative necessity and whether Jewishness and being
a general human being did not equate each other so completely that one at
the same time could be Jewish and a human being in other places than in the
few square kilometers which form the territory of Israel." 

Majority Reject Zionism 

Now, in 1997, one hundred years after the first Zionist Congress, it is
clear that the vast majority of Jews in the United States, Western Europe
and other countries reject the Zionist understanding of Jewish identity,
just as the vast majority of Jews did one hundred years ago. 

Those who are now engaged in the celebration of this 100th anniversary would
do well to pause and consider how prophetic the Jewish critics of Zionism
have been. It is not too late to learn some of the lessons they attempted to
articulate. Judaism, they deeply believed, is a universal faith dedicated to
God, not a narrow nationalism or a tribal religion. That faith and its moral
and ethical teachings can indeed be a "light" to men and women of every race
and nation, a dream far larger and far different from the one which
motivated Theodor Herzl and his colleagues in Basel in 1897. 


Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and serves as
Associate Editor of The Lincoln Review and Editor of Issues. The author of
five books, he has served on the staff of the U.S. Senate, House of
Representatives and the Office of the Vice President. He is Executive
Director of the American Council of Judaism.