The “nature versus nurture” debate over the relative influence of inherited traits versus environmental conditions on humans is older than many realize. It can be traced through different stages of the biblical narrative. Angry at the Israelites’ worship of the golden calf, God was ready to destroy them all and start anew with Moses. Nature was to blame, as God despaired that these “stiff-necked people” could be re-educated.

In another biblical story, however, the Israelites were sent to wander in the wilderness for forty years to be reformatted before being allowed to enter the Land of Canaan. In this case, the emphasis was on nurture over nature, with the hope that the experience of benefiting from boundless generosity—such as the manna and the protective clouds of glory—would change them. This may have been the first known attempt at social engineering, even though the success was only variable.

“Panel from an Ivory Casket with Scenes of the Story of Joshua,” 900–1000 AD, Byzantine, Made in Constantinople, Medium: Elephant ivory, traces of polychromy. Credit Line: Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917. Object Number: 17.190.135a-d. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

The contemporary history of the Jews presents a more daring case of such re-education. For centuries, Jewish ideals have stressed mercy, modesty, and beneficence. The abhorrence of violence is so ingrained that in many Jewish communities, knives, which could be tools of murder, must be removed from the table before reciting the grace after a meal. Blessing and violence are deemed incompatible.

After centuries of being educated to strive for moral perfection, some Jews — initially a tiny minority — adopted a unusual role as colonial settlers—a role historically associated with European Christian civilization.

They conveniently instrumentalized biblical commandments, such as  “You shall clear out the Land and settle in it, for I have given you the Land to occupy it.” The settlers embraced a literal and materialistic reading of the Bible abandoning the interpretative tradition developed in rabbinic Judaism. Jewish tradition reads the biblical verses that mention violence allegorically: the sword and the bow used by Jacob the Patriarch against his enemies become symbols of obedience to divine commandments and good deeds. Tradition locates Jewish heroism in the house of study, not on the battlefield. But Zionists rejected this tradition as that of “exilic weaklings.

Naturally, like in other locations such as India, America, or Algeria, most inhabitants of Palestine—Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—resented the Zionists who began colonizing Palestine in the late 19^th century. Resistance emerged, and generations of Israelis grew up fighting against it. Palestinians came to be perceived as a constant source of danger. Educated in the spirit of military courage, moral superiority, and self-righteousness, the Israeli came to disdain and replace the Jew. The murder of Jacob De Haan, a Jewish anti-Zionist lawyer, by members of a Zionist militia in 1924 marked not only the onset of organized political terrorism in Palestine but also the affirmation of a new national identity.

Ideals of martial valour were not only inculcated through the educational system but, more powerfully, were induced by the predicament of all colonial settlements: suppressing resistance from the colonized. Generation after generation of Israelis have participated in the violent “pacification of the natives,” forcing them to submit to discrimination, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing.

The daily news of brutalities perpetrated by the Israeli military in Gaza underscores the success of the Zionist transformation of the Jew. The massive support that these acts receive from Israeli society at large strongly confirms this. The recent debate in the Israeli parliament when some Knesset members asserted the legitimacy of gang raping Palestinian detainees by Israeli soldiers reveals profound dehumanization—that is, the denial of full humanity in others, along with the cruelty and suffering that accompany it. But this also threatens the humanity of the soldier.

To mitigate this, the soldier must keep a distance from his victim. This is achieved through the industrialization of murder, which began with gas chambers and carpet bombing and continued with targeted assassinations by missiles and kamikaze drones. World-renowned Israeli scientists and engineers, assisted by major American corporations, have made a qualitative advance in streamlining remote violence. In Gaza, artificial intelligence (AI) now determines targets and destroys them. This points to an abdication not only of their ancestors’ moral values but of humanity altogether.

The Israelis’ war on Gaza confirms a triumph of nurture over nature, all the while demonstrating that technological progress does not equate to progress in humanity. In fact, it normalizes amorality, which most Western governments accept because, in their view, it is Jews who commit these atrocities, whether qualified as mass murder, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. Few realize that a century of living by the sword has transformed the Jew into a ruthless Israeli. Thus, one can better understand Israel as a state and a society when it is no longer regarded as “the Jewish state”, a nebulous concept that only blurs our vision and obscures reality. Only then can the world judge Israel on merit like any other state.

Reprinted from Russia in Global Affairs with the author’s permission.

Jewish oral tradition, developed after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, often interprets allegorically the Biblical verses that mention the instruments of war. Thus, the sword and the bow used by Jacob the Patriarch against his enemies (Genesis 48:22) become prayer and supplication (Bereshit Rabbah 97:6); the victory of Benaiah over Moab (2 Samuel 23:20) now stands for Torah study (BT Berakhot, 18b). Tradition locates Jewish heroism in the house of study, not on the battlefield. This partly explains the refusal of thousands of observant Jews to enroll in Israel’s military.

Yet, Hanukkah, which, incidentally, is not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, but can be found in the Christian one, seems to be a story of war. A comparison of Hanukkah with another popular Jewish holiday – Purim – reveals something important about traditional Jewish attitudes to collective threats, spiritual and physical.

The holiday of Purim, related in the Book of Esther, provides a peaceful model for conflict resolution. The story is as simple as it is prophetic. Haman, the Persian vizier, has planned a total massacre: “to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day” (Esther 3:13). The response of the Jews was to proclaim a fast of repentance, but at the same time to find a way to influence the king and thereby circumventing the vizier and his decree. Queen Esther intervened, revealed to the king her Jewish origins, and convinced him to stop the planned genocide. But it did not occur to any of the Jews to organize self-defence units against Haman. And the violence of the Jews against their enemies mentioned in the finale has been explicitly authorized by the king who only recently acquiesced to his vizier’s idea of exterminating the Jews.

But the resolute recourse to force is central in the story of Hanukkah, which, like Purim, also celebrates deliverance from a collective threat. The difference between the two threats to the Jews explains the differing relationship to force expressed in the stories. Haman’s threats of physical destruction induced the Jews to fast and repent. However, when King Antiochus outlawed Judaic practice and forced the Jews into idolatry, he sought their spiritual destruction. Under such a threat the use of force becomes legitimate: a Jew is duty-bound to sacrifice his or her life rather than worship idols.

This history of the Maccabees is often used to draw political conclusions. According to a contemporary commentary, clearly at odds with the traditional vision of the event : “For any thinking Jew, Hanukkah is nothing more than the day of commemoration of the heroes of Jewish self-defence. No miracle fell from the sky…. But the sword had created one: a dead people had been resurrected. The Torah could not save from the fist; it was the fist that saved the Torah. The sword, and not the skullcap, will protect the Jew in the blood-soaked lands of his enemies.” Today, this lesson resonates with many Jews who believe in the primacy of might.

Ironically, such glorification of force reverses the significance of the holiday, which celebrates allegiance to the Torah against Hellenistic influence. What is the Judaic reference to Hanukkah? A passage from the daily prayer reveals its meaning:

“Maccabees,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024

“In the days of Mattisiahu, the son of Yochanan, the High Priest, the Hasmonean, and his sons — when the wicked Hellenistic kingdom rose up against Your people Israel to make them forget Your Torah and compel them to stray form the statutes of Your Will — You in your great mercy stood up for them in the time of their distress. You took up their grievance, judged their claim, and avenged their wrong. You delivered the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the impure into the hands righteous, and the wanton into the hands of the diligent students of Your Torah.” (Complete ArtScroll Siddur)

The war that the advocates of the use of force tend to invoke turns out to have been, in Jewish ritual, a victory of God and not of humans. Tradition emphasizes that the decisive factors were loyalty to the Torah and moral purity, rather than the number of soldiers and the fighting strength of the army. With regard to Hanukkah, the Talmud relegates the hostilities to a secondary position and emphasizes that the strong were the Hellenizers and the weak Jews loyal to their religion. Tradition focuses instead on the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days in the Temple that the Maccabees had liberated and purified. It links the purity of the oil untouched by the Hellenizers and the purity of heart all Jews must keep in order to fight idolatry.

Thus, even when violence is legitimate, as in the case of Hannukah, it is definitely downplayed in rabbinic Judaism. “Who is the mightiest of the mighty? One who turns an enemy into a friend.” (Avot de rabbi Nathan, 23) Conversely, new values, promoted by some followers of National Judaism (dati-leumi) as the Torah of the Land of Israel, encourage reliance on the use of force. The eight days of Hannukah should allow us to ponder the issue of recourse to violence, which has undergirded the Zionist settlement in the Holy Land for over a century. While it has led to death, dispossession and dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people, it has failed to ensure peace and tranquility.

Reprinted from The Times of israel with the author’s permission.

The “nature versus nurture” debate over the relative influence of inherited traits versus environmental conditions on humans is older than many realize. It can be traced through different stages of the biblical narrative. Angry at the Israelites’ worship of the golden calf, God was ready to destroy them all and start anew with Moses. Nature was to blame, as God despaired that these “stiff-necked people” could be re-educated.

In another biblical story, however, the Israelites were sent to wander in the wilderness for forty years to be reformatted before being allowed to enter the Land of Canaan. In this case, the emphasis was on nurture over nature, with the hope that the experience of benefiting from boundless generosity—such as the manna and the protective clouds of glory—would change them. This may have been the first known attempt at social engineering, even though the success was only variable.

The contemporary history of the Jews presents a more daring case of such re-education. For centuries, Jewish ideals have stressed mercy, modesty, and beneficence. The abhorrence of violence is so ingrained that in many Jewish communities, knives, which could be tools of murder, must be removed from the table before reciting the grace after a meal. Blessing and violence are deemed incompatible.

After centuries of being educated to strive for moral perfection, some Jews — initially a tiny minority — adopted a unusual role as colonial settlers—a role historically associated with European Christian civilization.

Mostly atheists and agnostics, Zionist pioneers in Palestine concluded that “God does not exist, but He promised us this land.”

They conveniently instrumentalized biblical commandments, such as  “You shall clear out the Land and settle in it, for I have given you the Land to occupy it.” The settlers embraced a literal and materialistic reading of the Bible abandoning the interpretative tradition developed in rabbinic Judaism. Jewish tradition reads the biblical verses that mention violence allegorically: the sword and the bow used by Jacob the Patriarch against his enemies become symbols of obedience to divine commandments and good deeds. Tradition locates Jewish heroism in the house of study, not on the battlefield. But Zionists rejected this tradition as that of “exilic weaklings.”

Photo by Emad El Byed on Unsplash. Nuseirat Camp, Gaza.

Naturally, like in other locations such as India, America, or Algeria, most inhabitants of Palestine—Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike—resented the Zionists who began colonizing Palestine in the late 19^th century. Resistance emerged, and generations of Israelis grew up fighting against it. Palestinians came to be perceived as a constant source of danger. Educated in the spirit of military courage, moral superiority, and self-righteousness, the Israeli came to disdain and replace the Jew. The murder of Jacob De Haan, a Jewish anti-Zionist lawyer, by members of a Zionist militia in 1924 marked not only the onset of organized political terrorism in Palestine but also the affirmation of a new national identity.

Ideals of martial valour were not only inculcated through the educational system but, more powerfully, were induced by the predicament of all colonial settlements: suppressing resistance from the colonized. Generation after generation of Israelis have participated in the violent “pacification of the natives,” forcing them to submit to discrimination, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing.

The daily news of brutalities perpetrated by the Israeli military in Gaza underscores the success of the Zionist transformation of the Jew. The massive support that these acts receive from Israeli society at large strongly confirms this. The recent debate in the Israeli parliament when some Knesset members asserted the legitimacy of gang raping Palestinian detainees by Israeli soldiers reveals profound dehumanization—that is, the denial of full humanity in others, along with the cruelty and suffering that accompany it. But this also threatens the humanity of the soldier.

To mitigate this, the soldier must keep a distance from his victim. This is achieved through the industrialization of murder, which began with gas chambers and carpet bombing and continued with targeted assassinations by missiles and kamikaze drones. World-renowned Israeli scientists and engineers, assisted by major American corporations, have made a qualitative advance in streamlining remote violence. In Gaza, artificial intelligence (AI) now determines targets and to destroys them. This points to an abdication not only of their ancestors’ moral values but of humanity altogether.

The Israelis’ war on Gaza confirms a triumph of nurture over nature, all the while demonstrating that technological progress does not equate to progress in humanity. In fact, it normalizes amorality, which most Western governments accept because, in their view, it is Jews who commit these atrocities, whether qualified as mass murder, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. Few realize that a century of living by the sword has transformed the Jew into a ruthless Israeli. Thus, one can better understand Israel as a state and a society when it is no longer regarded as “the Jewish state”, a nebulous concept that only blurs our vision and obscures reality. Only then can the world judge Israel on merit like any other state.

Reprinted from Russia in Global Affairs with the author’s permission.

Another central passage is a paraphrase of the Ten Commandments (5:6-21). Differences between the original formulation and the one we read this Sabbath constitute fertile ground for interpretation and commentary. This week, we read about the universal meaning of the commandments: “Observe them faithfully, for that will be proof of your wisdom and discernment to other peoples, who on hearing of all these laws will say, ‘Surely, that great nation is a wise and discerning people’” (4:6). This highlights a crucial obligation bestowed on the Jews with respect to the rest of humanity: to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy people” (Exodus 19:6). There is nothing genetic or innate in this; only proper values and behavior would be valued by others.

Conversely, those Jews who violate these values would be abhorred by non-Jews and Jews alike. These violations are particularly grievous if they occur in the Land of Holiness, which is the proper translation of ארץ הקודש, usually referred to as “the Holy Land.” There are degrees of holiness: Jerusalem has more of it, and the Temple Mount (or Haram Al-Sharif in Arabic) is endowed with even more (Mishnah Kelim, ch. 1). This is why halacha, Jewish legal tradition, forbids Jews to ascend the Temple Mount. While a place of holiness does not make humans holy, humans may indeed desecrate it, including the Land of Holiness.

Yet, some Israeli politicians make a point of ascending the Temple Mount; this is how Ariel Sharon provoked the Second Intifada in 2000. While Sharon was not an observant Jew, those who do it nowadays observe Jewish rituals and are graduates of religious schools. They have been roundly denounced by those who remain loyal to traditional Judaism, especially because such provocative acts often lead to bloodshed. Jewish tradition affirms that the First Temple was destroyed because of three transgressions committed by the Israelites, one of them being bloodshed.

One may wonder how outwardly religious Jews can engage in such explicitly forbidden acts. What explains this is that they follow a religion that is “new and improved”; they call it דתי לאמי, National Judaism. It combines traditional practices with a commitment to Zionism, even though our weekly reading reminds us: “You shall have no other gods beside Me” (5:7). Followers of the new religion have transformed this political movement, developed mostly by atheists and agnostics, into a religious belief, overriding quite a few fundamental commandments, including “You shall not murder” (5:17), repeated in this week’s reading. Talmudic rabbis give a sharp definition of such behavior: כל ת”ח שאין בו דעת נבלה טובה הימנו, “any Torah scholar who has not internalized what he learns is worse than a carcass” (Vayikra Rabbah 1:15).

According to Jewish tradition, bloodshed led not only to the destruction of the temple built by King Solomon but also to the first exile. Moreover, this outcome is made explicit in this week’s reading: “I call heaven and earth this day to witness against you that you shall soon perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess; you shall not long endure in it but shall be utterly wiped out” (Deuteronomy 4:26).

This week marks the end of a mourning period preceding the 9th of Av, which commemorates numerous tragedies experienced by Jews. These include the destruction of the two Jerusalem temples, the expulsion from Spain, and the beginning of the First World War, which eventually led to the Second World War and the Nazi genocide.

The passage from the Prophets (haftarah) read after the weekly portion of the Pentateuch reflects a sense of relief and hope, suggesting that the worst is behind us.* This haftarah is usually referred to as “Comfort, oh comfort My people,” which is the first verse of Chapter 40 in Isaiah. Further on, the text explains one of the reasons to hope for better times. Amid the distress many of us experience, appalled by the disasters brought about by political leaders, it is comforting to be reminded that God “brings potentates to naught, makes rulers of the earth as nothing” (Isaiah 40:23). Let us pray and work to bring this about soon in our times.

—–

* “On Shabbat and holiday mornings, after the Torah is read, another biblical selection is read. Called the haftarah (plural, haftarot), this reading traditionally comes from one of the Prophets. Haftarah comes from the Hebrew root meaning ‘to conclude.'” – Reform Judaism.

—

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Middle East Eye Video: “Israeli rabbis denounce Jewish prayers at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque”

Although anti-Jewish acts in Europe date back more than a thousand years, since the 19th century the term ‘antisemitism’ has been used to describe a hatred of Jews as a race, a concept that was instrumental in the expansion of colonialism. Racism was then considered legitimate, and even scientific. It asserted the inferiority of all Jews, Africans, Asians and others. This racism led to the massacres of millions of people in the Belgian Congo at the turn of the 20th century, the genocides that Germany committed at the same time in Southwest Africa (Namibia today), and then, barely thirty years later, in Europe, exterminating millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma and other ‘sub-humans’. antisemitism is therefore a form of racism.

Antizionism, on the other hand, is a rejection of Zionism, a political movement that emerged in Europe towards the end of the 19th century. Its founder, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), was concerned about antisemitism and aimed to create Der Judenstaat, a state for the Jews. Zionism, which emerged at a time when ethnic nationalism and the right of peoples to self-determination were in full swing (Greece, Germany, Italy, etc.), asserted that the Jews constituted a people or a race apart who, never being able to integrate into the European society, needed a state for themselves.

The movement encouraged colonisation of Palestine and set up institutions such as the Jewish Colonial Trust (1899) and the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association (1924). This settlement campaign, which created a separate economy and society under the British mandate, marginalised and even sought to replace the local population. It provoked resistance that would have arisen in the same way had the Palestinians been colonised and mistreated by the French or the Chinese. Opposition to Israel and Zionism, its founding ideology, is therefore political in origin.

From the outset, Zionism was a revolt against traditional (rabbinic) Judaism, which evolved around the world for nearly two thousand years. The new movement divided the Jews and fomented opposition, both religious and political. Moreover, it persists to this day. Ultra-Orthodox Jews can be seen at anti-Israel demonstrations alongside progressive activists from Jewish Voice for Peace or Independent Jewish Voices. One need only recall the Jewish demonstrations last November at the Statue of Liberty in New York calling for freedom for the Palestinians. 

It follows that Zionism, like all nationalism, divides the group in whose name it claims to act. Jews opposed to Zionism is as normal a phenomenon as Quebecers or Catalonians opposed to political independence. Many Jews welcomed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, others denounced it. Today, it is the tragedy of the Palestinians that makes this division among Jews even deeper.

Kaufmann Kohler, d. 1926, rabbi, president of Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, promoter of Reform Judaism, and prominent anti-Zionist. He co-authored the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform that proclaimed, “We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the 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.” Photo public domain.

What encourages antisemitism is the conflation of Jews with Israel, of Judaism with Zionism. This is regularly done by Israel and pro-Israel Jewish and Christian organisations. Israel promotes this association by declaring itself ‘The State of the Jewish People’, even though half the Jews do not live there, and more and more young Jews reject it. Moreover, Israel’s allies around the world use this amalgam to stifle criticism of Israel by labelling it antisemitic.

Those who declare their solidarity with Israel as Jews reinforce this amalgam and, no doubt in spite of themselves, fan the flames of antisemitism. It is true that Israel has become central to the identity of many Jews, who mistake their political choice – to support a state in West Asia – for a commitment inherent in Judaism (see the recent film Israelism). But it is essential to avoid the trap of racist generalisations by associating all Jews with Zionists, particularly since the vast majority of Zionists nowadays are Evangelical Christians.

—

NB A French version of this essay appeared in La Presse.

During my stay in Iran in 2016, I heard from several Muslims that Jews are good businessmen because they are trustworthy, and their word weighs more than a notarized contract. I recalled these comments when I read about Yusef, one of the protagonists of this book and the author’s father. A self-made man and a wealthy supplier of building materials, he earned a sterling reputation not only among his customers, but also among his employees, whose welfare, not only their productivity, he constantly cared about.

Yusef also embodies the concept of the Arab-Jew. Active in the Jewish community, sponsor of synagogues and various charities, he was respected and exercised influence. Unlike his wife, a British citizen, he spoke only Arabic and lived in the culture of his country, of which he was an indelible part. His Jewish affiliation was more cultural than religious. Yusef also embodies the gentle and harmonious modernization that is quite different from the often defiant and conflict-ridden modernization of European Jewry.

As usual, at the age of 13, his son Avi is “bar-mitzva ’ed” but there is apparently more emphasis on bar than on mitzva (Torah commandment) during this ceremony. When four years later, Avi arrives in the hostel of a Jewish school in London he is totally unaware that it is Yom Kippur, and surreptitiously eats the ham sandwich brought from the trip across the Channel. Any eating, let alone ham, is, of course, prohibited on Yom Kippur. Compare it with Isaac Deutscher, another Jewish intellectual immigrant to Britain, but this one from Austrian Galicia. Brought up in a deeply religious Hassidic home and considered a Talmud prodigy, he lost his faith and decided to “test God” on Yom Kippur. He went to the tomb of a prominent Hassidic rabbi and ate a ham sandwich. In this act of defiance, the young Deutscher cast away “the yoke of Heaven”. Foodwise, there was no difference, but the different significance of this act points at very dissimilar paths secularization took among Jews in Europe and in the world of Islam.

Embed from Getty Images
Bagdad , Iraq – Jewish family of Baghdad with child. Photo taken in 1920s after creation of Iraq. Baghdad. Census in 1917 showed 40% of Baghdad population were Jewish. ( from Baghdad, Camera Studio Iraq, A Kerim and Hasso Bros, 1925) D226 CD1750 D228 CD1761 (Photo by Culture Club/Bridgeman via Getty Images)

Like most Iraqi Jews, Yusef was indifferent to Zionism. In the family, this political ideology was considered “an Ashkenazi thing”. Events beyond his purview (about which more later) projected his family and then him, largely out of the sense of responsibility, in the fledgling Zionist state. Even though he was to live over two decades in Israel, he and his Arab-Jew identity were irrevocably broken. He felt like a fish out of water, remained alien, unemployed and unaccustomed to the Ashkenazi-dominated society. But he never compromised his sense of humility, self-respect, and decency, never complained or asked for favours. The fate of this noble man illustrates that of many non-Ashkenazi Jews brought to Israel unaware of what awaited them in “the Promised Land”. 

The uprooting of Iraq’s Jewish community is the leitmotif of the entire book. The Zionist colony, established by and for European Jews to solve Europe’s “Jewish problem”, needed Jews. The natural reservoir of “human material” (as Ben-Gurion used to repeat) was severely depleted due to the Nazi genocide. Zionist emissaries were sent to Muslim-majority countries to bring in living souls, even though these communities had played almost no role in the Zionist movement. The emissaries tried to convince, and, when this failed, cajoled and terrorized Jews. At the same time, arrangements were made, and bribes paid, to local officials who either facilitated emigration of Jews or looked the other way when they were smuggled out. The author, a witness, a victim, but also an eminent historian, painstakingly reconstructs the devastation of the Jewish community in Iraq, including Zionists’ acts of terror against Jews.

The author candidly recounts the intimate story of his family, profoundly traumatized by a fallout from Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence. It triggered a war since it was against the will of the majority in Palestine and all the Arab countries that the British ruled Zionist colony was turned into a state for the Jews. Albeit landed in Israel in relatively comfortable circumstances (thanks to his father’s illicit transfers of money from Iraq), Avi as a child experienced humiliation and discrimination like all Mizrahi population in Israel. His self-worth was severely undermined, he barely passed from one grade to the next, and the Zionist society saw in this underachievement a proof of his “primitive” background.

What saved him and turned him eventually into an Oxford don was departure from Israel and the warm welcome he enjoyed from Jews in England. It is striking that this articulated and nuanced memoir was written by someone who consistently failed in the English language at the Israeli school. No less striking is the contrast between the rough Zionist culture of the muscular New Hebrew Men forged to fight wars and the culture of genteel and caring British Jewish culture he encountered, which preserved, whatever its vicarious Zionism, the Judaic values of mercy, modesty and beneficence codified in the Mishna.    

Islam Channel Video: “Avi Shlaim on Arab-Jews, Zionism and Israel”

Growing up in Israel and serving in its military, Avi naturally imbibed nationalist myths and became an almost typical right-wing Mizrahi. He deftly depicts his personal evolution from a self-righteous partisan of Zionist ethnocracy to a thoughtful proponent of a democratic state for all the inhabitants between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. Moreover, the author hopes that the collective memory of the centuries-long Arab-Jewish social and cultural integration should enable such a project to come true. In this case, the heritage of Iraqi, Moroccan and other non-European Jews will be not only rehabilitated, but also put to good use to build a peaceful future.

It is hard to share this hope after months of unprecedented violence that has left tens of thousands dead and wounded. Yet, colonial regimes often become particularly violent before their demise. The Zionist ethnocracy, however unique, may face the same fate and open the way to a more equitable and therefore more humane political and social entity.

NB:

See also the earlier review at IC by Marc Martorell Jouyent.

Jewish tradition as shaped by Rabbinic Judaism abhors literal reading of the Torah all the while considering it the holiest object in existence. This, in fact, is what distinguishes the Jews from the Karaims, who remain attached to literalism. One may offer different reasons for the rabbis’ insistence on interpreting biblical verses. They consider the text timeless, so in order to make it meaningful for future generations they must explain and decode it. This dynamic view of the eternal is reflected in the very term used for Judaic law, the halakha, which is derived from the root “move.” It may well be that rabbis felt uneasy with the literal reading and so offered their own understanding of a biblical verse. This approach rejects anachronism and fundamentalism and tries to make the Torah a living source of inspiration.

Violence is not rare in biblical texts. The Pentateuch and several of the books of the prophets, such as Joshua and Judges, teem with violent images. From the genocidal command to wipe out seven nations inhabiting the Promised Land to the obligation to blot out the memory of Amalek, there are quite a few episodes that appear to promote massacre. Biblical Israel was conquered under conditions that could hardly be described as peaceful.

But far from glorifying war, Jewish tradition decisively deemphasizes military prowess as the principal reason for the victories mentioned in the Bible. After the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, Jewish life underwent a transformation. Viewed in the context of Judaism, the annihilation of Jerusalem defined the normative attitude toward force, resistance, and the Land of Israel for nearly two millennia.

Rather than promote revenge, Jewish tradition encourages self-examination. After a calamity or a misfortune occurs, one is advised to examine and correct one’s own misdeeds (lefashpesh bemaasaw). This approach suggests that the Temple was razed by the Romans because of gratuitous hatred among the Jews, and that the first exile to Babylonia occurred because of illicit sex, murder, and idolatry.

The Roman siege of Jerusalem in the first century, like the Israeli siege of Gaza, sharply divided the Jews. The scholars of the Law tended to favor negotiated compromise, while the zealots organized a forceful response. Classical exegetes — such as the Italian Ovadia Seforno (1470–1550) — condemned the advocates of armed struggle in particularly severe terms: “If the Zealots had heeded Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai [a prominent scholar opposed to violence], the Temple of Jerusalem would not be destroyed.” Considering the central position held by the Temple in Judaism, the accusation is indeed serious and serves as a warning against any collective temptation to use force. The Mishna defines a strong man as someone who succeeds in controlling his own inclinations, passions, and urges (Pirke Avot, 4:1).

But what does Jewish tradition do with explicit violence mentioned in the Torah? The oral tradition interprets it allegorically: the sword and the bow used by Jacob the Patriarch against his enemies (Genesis 48:22) become prayer and supplication (Bereshit Rabbah 97:6); the victory of Benaiah over Moab (2 Samuel 23:20) now stands for Torah study (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot, 18b).
To some, Purim provides a model for conflict resolution. The story is as simple as it is prophetic. Haman, the Persian vizier, has planned a total massacre: “to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day” (Esther 3:13). The response of the Jews was to proclaim a fast of repentance, but at the same time to find a way to influence the king and thereby circumvent the vizier and his decree. Queen Esther intervened, revealed to the king her Jewish origins, and convinced him to stop the planned genocide. “But it did not occur to any of the Jews to use physical means against Haman,” noted Rabbi Elhanan Wasserman in his commentary on the history of Purim written at the end of the 1930s (Jewish Guardian 1977, 8–9). Yet, the massacre of 75 000 people at the hand of the Jews that is mentioned in the final chapter, albeit explicitly authorized by the king, causes anguish and calls for interpretation.

Edward Armitage, “The Festival of Esther,” 1865, Royal Academy of Arts 03/1188

One such initiative was undertaken by the Shalom Center in Philadelphia. A range of people wrote their own versions of the final chapter. Many were inspired by classical Judaic sources aware that violence can only beget more violence and cycles of revenge. One commentary suggests that Jews offered gifts of food to their erstwhile enemies, which dovetails with the Purim custom of mishloah manot, sending each other edible items. Moreover, such behavior would be considered heroic. Avot de Rabbi Nathan, an 8th century source, defines a hero as someone who can turn an enemy into a friend (23:1).

Yet, quite a few followers of National Judaism (or, in Hebrew, dati-leumi), including members of the current Israeli government, revere a different kind of a hero. They erected a shrine to commemorate Dr Baruch Goldstein (1956–1994), a US-born physician, who massacred dozens of Muslims praying in Hebron on the day of Purim. He had apparently been influenced by the biblical readings associated with Purim, calling for the extermination of Amalek. He saw Amalek in Muslims and Palestinians, which inspired his murderous mission.

The association of the Palestinians with Amalek seems to have become so common in Israel that it encourages unbridled cruelty from IDF soldiers sent to Gaza. They chant with joy about how they are destroying Amalek. The direct link between the biblical texts and the challenges facing Israel encourages violence as has been graphically shown at the International Court of Justice in The Hague in January 2024.

Jews have long associated their enemies with Amalek. Among others, Zionists have been often portrayed as Amalekites by those Jews who oppose the Zionist colonization of Palestine. But they would never resort to violence in their struggle against the modern Amalek. Rather, some rabbis called on the faithful to resist the internal Amalek and fight off the emotion, in rabbinical parlance, the evil inclination (yetser har’a), which tempts some Jews to identify with Zionism and the state that embodies this ideology. The numerical value (gematria) of the letters constituting Amalek is equal to that of the letters in the word safeq, doubt. These rabbis argue that rejection of Zionism should brook no doubt.

Zionist settlement in Palestine and the unilateral declaration of independence by the state of Israel in 1948 challenged the tradition of non-literalism, certainly among the secularized settlers but only slightly less among those affiliated with National Judaism. From the beginning, Zionism has encouraged love of the land, a love that has taken political and ideological forms. The nature hikes with the Torah in the hand have been intended to impart an intimate knowledge of the terrain mentioned in biblical verses. This organic intimacy breeds literal rapport with the Torah recounting events that are believed to have happened mostly in that land.

But the events narrated in the Book of Esther are located elsewhere. Against the continuing massacres and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza we can celebrate Purim by transforming the violence it contains into a manifestation of empathy. We can write our own finales for the Book of Esther. After all, Purim is a holiday of radical transformation. Haman thought he would be the one to be honored by the king, but it was his worst enemy, Mordechai, whom Haman was forced to praise and parade. Jews were facing a genocide, but then the tables turned, transforming a day of anguish into festivity. The Torah is eternal precisely because it is not immutable and allows for time-sensitive interpretations, including those of the Book of Esther.

The siege was enforced by armies and navies which had come from Germany, Finland, Italy, Spain, and Norway. It was part of a war started by a coalition of forces from around Europe led by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941.

The goal of the war against the Soviet Union was different from the war Germany had waged in Western Europe. On the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler declared that “the empire in the east is ripe for dismemberment”. Germany sought new living space (Lebensraum) but did not need the people who lived on it. Most of them were despised as subhuman (Untermenschen) and destined to be killed, starved or enslaved. Their land was to be given to “Aryan” settlers. To make his point in racial terms familiar to the Europeans, Hitler referred to the Soviet population as “Asians”.

Indeed, the war against the Soviet Union had aspects of a colonial war: millions of Soviet civilians – Slavs, Jews, Gypsies (Roma) and others – were systematically put to death. This surpassed Germany’s genocide in Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) in 1904-1908 when it just as systematically massacred the local tribes of Herero and Namas. True, Germany was not exceptional: this was common practice among European colonial powers. 

The intentions of the Nazi invaders were summarized succinctly:

After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban center. […] Following the city’s encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations shall be denied, since the problem of relocating and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our very existence, we can have no interest in maintaining even a part of this very large urban population.

As one of the Nazi commanders enforcing the siege put it, “we shall put the Bolsheviks on a strict diet”.

British Movietone Video: “Siege of Leningrad – 1944 | Movietone Moment |

The last rail line linking the city with the rest of the Soviet Union was severed on August 30, 1941, a week later the last road was occupied by the invaders. The city was completely encircled, supplies of food and fuel dried up, and a severe winter set in. The little that the Soviet government succeeded in delivering to Leningrad was rationed. At one time, the daily ration was reduced to 125 grams of bread made as much of sawdust as of flour. Many did not get even that, and people were forced to eat cats, dogs, wallpaper glue, and there were a few cases of cannibalism. Dead bodies littered the streets as people were dying of hunger, disease, cold and bombardment.

Leningrad, a city of 3.4 million people, lost over one third of its population. This was the largest loss of life in a modern city. The former imperial capital famous for its magnificent palaces, elegant gardens and breathtaking vistas was methodically bombed and shelled. Over 10 000 buildings were either destroyed or damaged. This was part of the invaders’ drive to demodernize the Soviet Union, to throw it back in time. Leningrad had to be wiped out precisely because it was a major centre of science and engineering, home to writers and ballet dancers, the see of famous universities and art museums. None was to survive in the Nazi plans.

Sadly, neither sieges, nor colonial wars ended in 1945. Britain, France and the Netherlands waged brutal wars of “pacification” in their colonies long after Nazism was defeated. Racism was still official in the United States, another ally in the fight against Nazism. Twelve years after the war, it took the 101^st Airborne Division to enable nine black students to attend a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Today’s Western values of tolerance are recent and fragile. Overt racism is no longer acceptable, but its impact is still with us.

Human lives do not have the same value either in our media, or in our foreign policies. The death of an Israeli attracts more media attention that that of a Palestinian. Severe sanctions are imposed on Iran for its civilian nuclear enrichment program while none are imposed on Israel for its military nuclear arsenal. And, of course, Western powers continue to provide arms and political support for the siege of Gaza, where civilian population is not only bombed and shelled, but deliberately starved and let die of disease. The International Court of Justice confirmed “plausible genocide”, even though it failed to stop Israel.   

Commemoration of the siege of Leningrad should prompt us to put an end to all racism, to stop the siege of Gaza and to prevent such atrocities in the future. Otherwise, the accusation thrown in the face of the European citizen by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in 1955 would remain still valid:

.. what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

Palestinians in Gaza are being decimated. Over 20 000 have been killed, mostly women and children. Three times more have been wounded. Some experts qualify it as genocide, others as massacre. Two million people have been displaced, many more than during the entire history of displacement of the Palestinians since the start of the Zionist settlement at the turn of the 20th century. As Israel takes out hospitals and civilian infrastructure, infectious diseases and famine threaten to kill many more people. Several Israeli soldiers have been reported infected during the ground operations, one has died. General Giora Eiland suggests relying on the weapon of imminent epidemics in lieu of endangering the lives of Israeli soldiers in real warfare. Gaza is violently demodernized, bombed into stone age: hospitals, schools, power stations are bombed to rubble. What is happening appears unprecedented.

The number of victims is, indeed, unprecedented. Yet the unfolding tragedy follows the old script of the Zionist project, which is European in more than one sense. It is rooted in ethnic nationalisms of Eastern and Central Europe. Nations must live in their “natural” environment where those not of the titular nationality would be at best tolerated. According to an Iraqi journalist writing in 1945, the Zionists’ goal was “to expel the British and the Arabs from Palestine so that it will be a pure Zionist state. … Terrorism [was] the only means that can bring the Zionist aspirations to fruition.” Significantly, the journalist did not consider the future state Jewish but Zionist. He must have known that Jews from countries other than those of Europe and European colonization constituted a miniscule part of the Zionist movement.

Zionism is also European because it is a settler colonial project, the most recent of all. The Palestine Jewish Colonization Association was among several agencies devoted to turning the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Palestine into “the Jewish homeland”. The Jewish Colonial Trust, the predecessor of Bank Leumi, today Israel’s largest bank, financed the segregated economic development of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. In the usual colonial manner, the early Zionist settlers were eager to establish a separate colony rather than integrate in the existing Palestinian society.

Zionism is not only the most recent case of settler colonialism. Israel is unique in that, unlike Algeria or Kenya, it is not populated by migrants from the colonial metropolis. But this distinction matters little to the indigenous Palestinians who, just like in many other such situations, are being displaced, dispossessed, and massacred by the settlers. Displacement is enacted not only in Gaza, where it is massive and indiscriminate, but also in the West Bank where it is more focused.

Voice of America: “Drone Shows Airstrike Aftermath in Gaza | VOA News”

To attain its objectives Zionism has had to rely on major powers, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, France and, nowadays, the United States. The Zionists, committed to the success of their project, have been pragmatic and ideologically promiscuous. They would enjoy the support of the Socialist International during most of of the 20th century and then switch to become the darlings of White supremacists and the extreme-right.

Zionism is a nationalist response to anti-Jewish discrimination and violence in Europe. It deems antisemitism endemic and ineradicable, explicitly rejecting long-term viability of Jewish life anywhere except in “the Jewish state” in Palestine. The Nazi genocide in Europe reinforced this conviction and offered legitimacy to the fledgling colonial project while such projects were crumbling elsewhere in the world. The Zionist project, ignoring the opposition of the Palestinians and other Arabs, simply exported Europe’s “Jewish question” to Palestine.

Palestinians gradually understood that the Zionist project would deprive them of their land and resisted it. This is why the early Zionist settlers, most of them from the Russian Empire, formed militias to fight local population. They perfected their terrorist experience gained during the Russian revolution of 1905 with colonial counterinsurgency measures learned from the vast experience of the British. Established against the will of the entire Arab world, including the local Palestinians, the state of Israel has had to live by the sword. The army and the police have worked hard to keep the Palestinians down (the British used to call it “pacification of the natives”). Their task has been to conquer as much land as possible with as few Palestinians remaining on it as possible.

Many Palestinians now in Gaza had been expelled from the very area in what is now Israel that experienced the Hamas attack in October. They are mostly refugees or descendants of refugees. The high density of the population in an enclosed area (some called it “the largest open-air prison) makes them particularly vulnerable. When Israel did not like the election of Hamas in 2006, it laid siege to Gaza, limiting access to food, medicines, work etc. Israeli officials were openly admitting they were putting the Gazans “on a diet” while having to “mow the lawn” from time to time, subjecting the Gazans to violent “pacification”.

The 16 years of siege intensified anger, frustration and despair leading to the Hamas attack. In response, Israeli used drones, missiles, and aircraft to continue what used to be done with rifles and machine-guns. The death rate has increased, but the goal of terrorizing Palestinians into submission has remained the same. The name of the current onslaught on Gaza is “Iron Swords”, aptly reflects the Zionists’ century-old choice to live by the sword rather than coexist with the Palestinians on equal terms. Ein berera, “we have no choice”, the common Israeli excuse for unleashing violence, is therefore misleading.

Impunity and impotence

Israel has enjoyed a large degree of impunity, with dozens of UN resolutions simply ignored. Only once, in the wake of the 1956 Suez War, was Israel forced to give up territorial conquest. This happened under a threat coming from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Since then, Israel has relied on firm U.S. diplomatic and military support, which has become more brazen with the advent of America’s unipolar moment after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This support is now embodied in the supply of American munitions for the war on Gaza, in the presence of U.S. Navy vessels protecting Israel from third parties and in the U.S. vetoes at the Security Council. Israel and the United States are joined at the hip. Europe, while being more critical of Israel rhetorically, closely follows the U.S. line just as it does in the Ukraine conflict. In both conflicts, European chanceries appear to have abdicated independence and, possibly, ability of action.

Palestinians expelled by Zionist militias from their homeland to tent city near Damascus, 1948. H/t Wikimedia Commons.

Israel’s impunity also reflects impotence of the rest of the world. While Muslim and Arab governments decry and protest Israel’s assault on Gaza, none has imposed or even proposed economic, let alone military, sanctions. Fewer than a dozen of countries has suspended diplomatic relations or withdrawn diplomatic personnel from Israel. None has broken relations. Russia and China, along with most of the Global South, express their dismay at civilian casualties in Gaza but they too stop short of going beyond words.

The double standard of the Western reactions is obvious. Drastic economic sanctions imposed on Russia contrast with the generous supply of arms and at best verbal pleas for moderation in response to the Israeli actions in Gaza. In just a few months, the IDF surpassed Russia’s almost two-year record in the Ukraine with respect to the volume of explosives dropped, the number of people killed and wounded, and the civilian/military ratio among the casualties. Western sermons about inclusion and democracy are unlikely to carry much weight in the rest of the world. Palestinian lives do not really matter to Western governments.

This lackadaisical reaction to the massacres in Gaza contrasts with the indignation they provoke in the population in much of the world. Massive demonstrations call on governments to stop the violence. In response, most Western governments have strengthened measures to restrict freedom of speech. Opposition to Zionism has been declared antisemitic, the most recent such measure is the equivalence between anti-Zionism and antisemitism decided by the U.S. Congress in December 2023. Accusations of antisemitism are leveled at students, often Jewish, who organize pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Televised debates as to what constitutes “genocidal antisemitism” on elite university campuses divert attention from what looks like a real genocide in Gaza. Antisemitism serves as Israel’s Wunderwaffe, its ultimate weapon of mass distraction.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been banned in several European capitals where commercial or cultural boycott of Israel has been made illegal. This pressure from the ruling class, including courts, police, corporate media, employers, and university administrations, creates a powerful sense of frustration among the rank-and-file. Shortly after attacking Gaza in 2009, and over sharp criticism of its treatment of the Palestinians, Israel was unanimously accepted into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), made up of some 30 countries that boast democratic structures of governance. Former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, while still in office, placed solidarity with Israel above Canada’s interests to the point of claiming that his government would support Israel “whatever the cost.”

Support for Israel, tending to increase with income, has become a class issue. It serves as another reminder of the growing estrangement between the rulers and the ruled, the proverbial One Per Cent and the rest. It remains to be seen if popular frustration with the hypocrisy of governments in their support for the war on Gaza may one day result in political change that would begin to dent Israel’s impunity.

Israel is a state without borders. Geographically, it has expanded with military conquest or colonization. The Zionist movement and successive Israeli governments have taken great pains never to define the borders they envisage for their state. Israeli secret services and the army pay no heed to borders, striking targets in its neighboring countries at will. This borderless character is also embodied in Israel’s claim that it belongs to the world’s Jews rather than to its citizens. This leads to the overt transformation of Jewish organizations around the world into Israeli agents. This is particularly the case in the United States. Israeli agents, such AIPAC, ensure Israel’s interests in elections on all levels, from school boards to the White House. Israel has even played the legislative against the executive branch in Washington. Yet this unabashed political interference attracts a lot less criticism in mainstream media that the alleged meddling of China or Russia. Israel also intervenes in the political process of other countries.

Conflict between Jewish and Zionist values.

Zionism has provoked controversy among Jews from its very inception. The first Zionist congress in 1897 had to be moved from Germany to Switzerland because German Jewish organizations objected to holding a Zionist event in their country. The Zionists assert that the homeland of the Jews is not the countries where they have lived for centuries and for which many have spilled their blood in wars, but in a land in Western Asia. For many Jews, this message bears disconcerting resemblance to that of the antisemites who resent their social integration.

Initially irreligious, Zionism transforms spiritual terms into political ones. Thus, ‘am Israel, “the people of Israel”, defined by their relationship to the Torah, becomes ethnicity or nationality in the Zionist vocabulary. This prompted the prominent European rabbi Jechiel Weinberg (1884-1966) to emphasize that “Jewish nationality is different from that of all nations in the sense that it is uniquely spiritual, and that its spirituality is nothing but the Torah. […] In this respect we are different from all other nations, and whoever does not recognize it, denies the fundamental principle of Judaism.”

Another reason for Jewish opposition to Zionism has been moral and religious. While prayers for the return to the Holy Land is part of the daily Judaic ritual, it is not a political, let alone a military objective. Moreover, the Talmud spells out specific prohibitions of a mass move to Palestine before Messianic times, even “with the accord of the nations”. This is why the Zionist project with its addiction to armed violence continues to repel many Jews causing them embarrassment and even revulsion.

True, the Pentateuch and several of the books of the Prophets, such as Joshua and Judges, teem with violent images. But far from glorifying war, Jewish tradition identifies allegiance to God, and not military prowess, as the principal reason for the victories mentioned in the Bible. Jewish tradition abhors violence and reinterprets war episodes, plentiful in the Hebrew Bible, in a pacifist mode. Tradition clearly privileges compromise and accommodation. Albert Einstein was among the Jewish humanists who denounced Beitar, the paramilitary Zionist youth movement, today affiliated with the ruling Likud. He deemed it to be“ as much of a danger to our youth as Hitlerism is to German youth”.

Zionism vigorously rejects this “exilic” tradition, which it deems “consolation of the weak”. Generations of Israelis have been brought up on the values of martial courage, proud of serving in the military. Zionists regularly refer to their state as a continuation of biblical history. The idea of the Greater Israel is rooted in the literal reading of the Pentateuch. Zionism demands total commitment and brooks little opposition or criticism. The passion of the Zionist commitment has led to assassination of opponents, pitched fathers against sons, splitting Jewish families and communities. The historian Eli Barnavi, former Israeli ambassador in Paris, warns that “the dream of a ‘Third Kingdom of Israel’ could only lead to totalitarianism”. Indeed, many Jewish community leaders, undisturbed by the specter of “dual loyalty”, insist that allegiance to the state of Israel must prevail over all others, including allegiance toward their own country.

The Zionists, whether in Israel or elsewhere, have long claimed to be “the vanguard of the Jewish people” with Zionism replacing Judaism for quite a few Jews. Their identity, initially religious, has become political: they are supporters and patriots of Israel, “my country right or wrong” rather than adherents of Judaism.

Generationally, Israel appears an exception among the wealthy countries. With every generation Israelis become more combative and anti-Arab. While in other countries young Jews are usually less conservative than their parents and embrace ideas of social and political justice, young Israeli Jews defy this trend. Israeli education inculcates martial values and the belief that, had the state of Israel existed before World War II, the Nazi genocide would never have taken place. What sustains the fragile unity of the non-Arab majority is fear: a siege mentality that most frequently takes the self-image of a virtuous victim determined to prevent a repetition of the Nazi genocide. The memory of that European tragedy has become a tool of mobilizing Jews to the Zionist cause. Its political utility is still far from exhausted.

Use of the genocide to foster Israeli patriotism has been unflagging since the early 1960s. After an air show in Poland in 2008, three Israeli F-15 fighter jets bearing the Star of David and piloted by descendants of genocide survivors overflew the former Nazi extermination camp while two hundred Israeli soldiers observed the flyover from the Birkenau death camp adjacent to Auschwitz. The remarks of one of the Israeli pilots stressed confidence in the armed forces: “This is triumph for us. Sixty years ago, we had nothing. No country, no army, nothing.”

State schools promote the model of a fighter against “the Arabs” (the word “Palestinian” is usually avoided), glorifies military service turning it into an aspiration and a rite of passage to adulthood. No wonder that Hamas and, by extension, all the Gazans, are often referred to as Nazis. Dozens of Israeli officials and public figures have openly incited genocide of Palestinians: dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, flattening it into a parking lot, etc. Israeli political scientists have pointed out that civic religion provides no answers to questions of ultimate meaning, while at the same time it obliges its practitioners to accept the ultimate sacrifice. Civic space in Israel has become associated above all with “death for the fatherland.”

Elsewhere in the world, the Hamas attack has galvanized the Zionist commitment under the slogan “We stand with Israel!”. Massive and organized efforts are made to fight the information war. Israeli officials rely on a network of powerful supporters, including executives of high-tech companies, who make sure that the internet amplifies pro-Israel voices and muffles or cancels pro-Palestinian discourse. Censorship leads to self-censorship because pro-Palestinian involvement impedes job prospects and threatens careers.

However, unlike Israelis, diaspora Jews become less and less committed to Jewish nationalism with every generation. Growing numbers of young Jews refuse to be associated with Israel and choose to support the Palestinians. The systematic AI assisted massacre of Palestinians in Gaza has swollen their ranks, particularly in North America. Most spectacular protests against Israel’s ferocity have been organized by Jewish organizations, such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States, Independent Jewish Voices in Canada, and Union juive française pour la paix in France. Prominent Jewish intellectuals denounce Israel and are found among the most consistent opponents of Zionism.

Albeit incongruently, these Jews are accused of antisemitism. Even more incongruently, the same accusation is hurled at ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists. While Israel’s claim to be the state of all Jews exposes them to disgrace and danger, many Jews who support the Palestinians rehabilitate Judaism in the eyes of the world.

The Samson Option

Since its beginning, critics of Zionism have insisted that the Zionist state would become a death trap for both the colonizers and the colonized. In the wake of the ongoing tragedy triggered by the Hamas attack, these words of an ultra-Orthodox activist spoken decades ago sound prescient:

“Only blind dogmatism could present Israel as something positive for the Jewish people. Established as a so-called refuge, it has, unfailingly been the most dangerous place on the face of the earth for a Jew. It has been the cause of tens of thousands of Jewish deaths … it has left in its wake a trail of mourning widows, orphans and friends…. And let us not forget that to this account of the physical suffering of the Jews, must be added those of the Palestinian people, a nation condemned to indigence, persecution, to life without shelter, to overwhelming despair, and all too often to premature death.”

The fate of the colonized is, of course, incomparably more tragic than that of the colonizer. Palestinian citizens of Israel face systemic discrimination while their kin in the West Bank are subject to repression from both the Israeli military and their subcontractors in the Palestinian Authority. Arbitrary detention without trial, dispossession, checkpoints, segregated roads, house searches without warrant and more and more frequent death at the hands of soldiers and settler vigilantes have become routine on the West Bank. Palestinians in Gaza, even prior to the operation Iron Swords, lived isolated on a small territory, with their access to food and medicine strictly rationed by Israel. Even peaceful protest would be met by lethal fire from Israeli soldiers sitting on the other side of the barrier. There was little work and no prospects for the future. The pressure cooker was ready to explode as it did on October 7.

Since then, thousands of Gazans have been killed and wounded by one of the most sophisticated war machines in the world. This provokes more anger and hatred among the Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. Israelis find themselves in a vicious circle: chronic insecurity inevitable in a settler colony reinforces the Zionist postulate that a Jew must rely on force to survive, which in turn provokes hostility and creates insecurity.

Over two decades ago David Grossman, one of the best-known Israeli authors, addressed the then prime minister Ariel Sharon known for his bellicosity:

“We start to wonder whether, for the sake of your goals, you have made a strategic decision to move the battlefield not into enemy territory, as is normally done, but into a completely different dimension of reality — into the realm of utter absurdity, into the realm of utter self-obliteration, in which we will get nothing, and neither will they. A big fat zero….”

Critical voices within and particularly outside Israel call on the Israelis to recognize that “the Zionist experiment was a tragic error. The sooner it is put to rest, the better it will be for all mankind.” In practice this would mean ensuring equality for all the inhabitants between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and a transformation of the existing ethnocracy into a state of all its citizens. However, Israeli society is conditioned to see in such calls an existential threat and a rejection of “Israel’s right to exist”.

The settler colonial logic radicalizes society in the direction of ethnic cleansing and even genocide. No Israeli government would be capable of evacuating hundreds of thousands of settlers to free space for a separate Palestinian state; the chances of giving up Zionist supremacy in the entire land are even lower. Only strong-armed international pressure may make Israel consider such a reform.

More probably, however, Israel will resist such pressure and threat to resort to the Samson Option, i.e., a nuclear attack on the countries endangering “Israel’s right to exist”. In this worst-case scenario, Israel would be annihilated, but those who put pressure on it would also suffer enormous casualties. Obviously, no country in the world will run the risk of a nuclear attack to free the Palestinians.

Pressure is more likely to come from the public but largely misdirected at local Jewish communities, almost all of them associated in the public mind with Israel. While these Jews, even the most Zionist, have never influenced Israel’s policies towards the Arabs, they have become easy scapegoats for Israel’s misdeeds.

American politicians seem to agree. President Trump referred to Israel as “your state” when addressing a Jewish audience in the United States. President Biden said that “without Israel, no Jew anywhere is safe.” Israeli leaders appreciate such conflations between Judaism and Zionism, between Jews and Israelis. These conflations boost Zionism, feed antisemitism and push Jews to migrate to Israel. This is a welcome prospect for the country, which these new Israelis will strengthen with their intellectual, entrepreneurial, and financial resources as well as supply more soldiers for the IDF.

Despite the opprobrium and public denunciations, Israel appears immune to pressure from the rest of the world. Israeli disdain for international law, the United Nations and, a fortiori, to moral arguments is proverbial. “What matters is what the Jews do, not what the gentiles say”, was Ben-Gurion’s favorite quip. His successors, a lot more radical than Israel’s founding father, will make sure that the tragedy of Gaza does not lead to any compromise with the Palestinians. The Israeli mainstream mocks or simply ignores well-intentioned pleas of liberal Zionists, an endangered species, to “save Israel from itself”. However counterintuitive today, only changes within Israeli society may shake the usual hubris. In the meantime, Israel will continue to defy the world.