When Zionism imagined Jewish nationalism without supremacy (+972 Magazine)


David Ben Gurion seen in the Knesset, February 11, 1961. (Fritz Cohen/GPO)


In his recent book, Dr. Dmitry Shumsky shows that, contrary to popular belief, the forefathers of Zionism did not envision a state based on Jewish supremacy. And yet Zionism, he says, inevitably involves the oppression of Palestinians.

No one was surprised when the authors of the Jewish Nation-State Law decided to write, in its opening clauses, that "The State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people," and "the right to national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people." After all, this is precisely what every young Israeli is taught in school, whether they are Jewish or Arab. Israel, so it goes, is the "nation-state" of the Jewish people, and establishing a Jewish state was the goal of the Zionist movement since its inception.

Even those opposed to the Jewish Nation-State Law did not disagree with this line of thinking. There were those who argued that the law needs to include the principle of equality, as mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, as that would be "the real Zionist" thing to do. There were others who claimed that the law only proves that Zionism was and remains a racist movement. But neither group questioned the idea that a Jewish nation-state lies at the core of Zionism. Those who suggested Israel become a state of all its citizens, or, God forbid, a bi-national state, were perceived as traitors undermining Israel and the Zionist project.

In his book, Beyond the Nation-State, published last year by Yale University Press, Dr. Dmitry Shumsky, a historian of the Zionist movement at the Hebrew University, attempts to prove that this perception is historically incorrect.

With extensive quotes by Zionism's forefathers — Leon Pinsker, Ahad Ha'am, Theodore Herzl, Ze'ev Jabotinsy and David Ben-Gurion — he shows that over the course of Zionism's first five decades, from the late 19th century until the early 20th century, the movement didn't aim for establishing a "nation-state" the way it is commonly understood today, and as is reflected in the Jewish Nation-State Law. According to Shumsky, the Zionist leaders envisioned the Jewish state as a multi-national one, or even as an entity within a larger framework, similar to the federalist structure in the United States.

"The future of Palestine must be founded, legally speaking, as a 'bi-national state,'" Shumsky quotes from a 1926 article by Jabotinsky, the ideological leader of Revisionist Zionism. "And not just Palestine. Every land that has an ethnic minority, of even the smallest kind, would need, after all, according to our deeply held views, to adapt its legal regime to that fact and become a bi-tri-national or quadri-national state."

The Land of Israel, Ben-Gurion wrote in a 1930 article, "will be a federal state…in such a way that at no point in time will there be Arab rule over Jews or Jewish rule over Arabs." A year later, the text of that article became the platform for Mapai, Ben Gurion's party, which dominated Israeli politics from 1948 until 1977.
 
This multi-ethnic perspective, Shumsky shows, is rooted in the time and place from which Zionism's founders operated. Until 1918, he says, most European Jews had lived in two multi-ethnic empires – either under the Russian Tzar or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, which included significant Jewish populations as well. No less important than the Zionist idea, argues Shumsky, was the importance that Zionist leaders placed on ensuring Jewish existence in Europe. This, they believed, was only possible by turning this empires into multi-ethnic states.

And they believed it could happen. First in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where socialist thinkers in Austria created the "multi-national state," which deeply impacted Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion and others. Both Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion also wrote songs of praise to the Ottoman Empire, its tolerance toward ethnic minorities in general — and to Jews in particular — as well as to the democratic changes it was undergoing. As such, they viewed Jewish settlement in Palestine as a part of that empire. In Herzl's utopian novel, Altneuland, he images Palestine as a member of that empire.


Dr. Dmitry Shumsky. 'I can only think in bi-national or multi-national terms. In this there is no contradiction with Zionism.'

When those empires collapsed following the First World War, the problems Jews faced in the newly-established countries in Eastern and Central Europe did not disappear. In fact, they only got worse. The need for a multiethnic state, therefore, did not disappear either — not even after the British Mandate committed to establishing a national home for Jews in Palestine with the Balfour Declaration. Shumsky argues that a "package deal" was at play: national rights for Jews in Europe in return for national rights for Arabs in Palestine — after achieving a Jewish majority, of course.

In Altneuland, Herzl presents this equation very clearly. One of the protagonists in the book, which is structured as a journey into the future after the creation of a Jewish state, describes the positive changes in the status of Jews in Europe after some of them emigrated to Palestine. "The tolerance is based on mutual recognition," says the protagonist, "and only once Jews here [in Palestine – M.R.], where they are a majority, have shown tolerance, are they themselves enjoying tolerance everywhere else," meaning Europe.

The tragedy, says Shumsky, is that with the Holocaust and the systematic extermination of European Jewry, this "package deal" that the founders of Zionism believed in was emptied of all meaning, since there were no more Jews to protect. This is one of the central forces that pushed the Zionist movement toward the path it took in 1948, claims Shumsky.

That Shumsky weaves the Zionist story with that of Eastern European Jewry is perhaps connected to his biography. Born in 1975 in Kiev under Soviet rule, which was a multiethnic empire in its own way, Shumsky was a victim of "very, very intense" anti-Semitism, suffering both physical and verbal violence. His Jewish identity didn't mean much, besides a strong sense of pride in Jewish revolutionaries and Einstein, he says, but his Jewish identity was "very existential. Being Jewish wasn't a happy experience for me. On the other hand, since you're already Jewish, then this is yours, this is your destiny."

Shumsky arrived to Israel in 1990, not out of Zionist motivations ("We wanted to go to the United States," like other Jews at the beginning of the 20th century, he says), but with an aversion to ideologies and brainwashing. As such, he grew uncomfortable with what he was being taught about Jewish history and Zionism at school. It seemed one-dimensional to him.

To read more, click on the link : https://972mag.com/will-imagining-zionism-without-supremacy/142415/

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