Noam: Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and you’re listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. Today, it’s going to be a little bit different. These episodes are going to look a little bit different. Today, I have with me someone that you all know very well, someone who’s been a friend of this podcast and another podcast that I host, Wondering Jews with Mijal Bitton, Haviv Retig Gur.
I am incredibly excited to have Haviv with me to discuss Zionism. We’re going to go through the history of Zionism. We’re going to then go into a personal understanding of Zionism. And then we’re going to go into education and to ask kwhere have we failed and where do we go from here? Okay, Yalla, let’s do this.
Haviv, what’s up?
Haviv: I’m good. I’m good, Noam. How are you? How are things?
Noam: I’m doing well and I’m excited to have a deep dive conversation with you about Zionism. Do you think it’s important to talk about Zionism? Why does this matter?
Haviv: Well, the world’s attention seems to be focused on Israelis, Palestinians. There is a long running discourse in the Arab world on Jews and on Zionism and on the history of the Jews in the 20th century that has been adopted hook, line and sinker almost into Western elites and academia. And so they obsessively now talk about, you know, there may have been a quarter million people starved to death in Yemen, which is so horrifying. Academia and journalism in the West don’t think about it and don’t talk about it. They only think and talk about this place.
And so there’s this fascination. And I think that fascination has a lot more to do with the fact that we are a way for them to tell stories about themselves. As we fit into their stories about post colonialism, post imperialism, post this, post that, whether the West is good or bad, whether white people or black people are good or bad, and all of that discourse that is keeping them up nights, their deep anxieties about culture and history, we are a way to talk about it.
Noam: Yeah, I think that’s reason enough and I’m not gonna say something that different from you. I just think like it’s as simple as this. I think there is a lack of understanding of this term called Zionism, which either sparks a very intense emotional reaction like, did you just out loud call yourself a Zionist? Like you could call yourself Jewish, but calling yourself a Zionist is problematic.
And then on the other hand, it’s a very different perspective. It’s, I think a lot of Jewish people, when they talk about Zionism or when Christian people talk about themselves as Zionists, I’m not sure that we’re using the word in the same way. You know what I mean? Like, I’m just not sure that when we’re it’s a strange phenomenon that the purpose of language is to be able to communicate. That’s why we have a language and so we can communicate. But when we have words that mean such different things to different people, you’re Zionist, that’s a pejorative. But I am a Zionist. I’m a proud Zionist. And then we’re having a different conversation.
I want to read to you, this Wikipedia entry on Zionism. So Zionism, according to Wikipedia is, and there are citations here. So it makes it true, of course. Zionism is an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of land outside Europe. With the rejection of alternate proposals for a Jewish state, it eventually focused on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a region car–
Haviv: Okay, I’m sorry. Can we already stop and take a look at that?
Noam: Yeah, okay, go–
Haviv: You’re of course raising this because Wikipedia’s Zionism article has been rewritten by anti-Zionist ideologues, and Wikipedia can’t find a way to write an article about Zionism that a Zionist might identify with, and it still thinks it’s serving its function as Wikipedia, which it is not. is bigotry. Imagine Palestinian Life Society History article entirely written by the most right wing Israeli Jew. That’s basically what the Zionist article is. Zionists did not randomly talk about building a Jewish nation state in random places and then eventually get around to Palestine. That is simply ahistorical.
Noam: Meaning your point, Haviv, is like, that’s not a fair retelling of what took place in the early 20th century.
Haviv: I mean, so it’s an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside Europe. So first of all, it was not an ethno-cultural nationalist movement because those words are gobbledygook. They mean whatever you need them to mean.
Noam: But they don’t sound nice. They don’t sound nice.
Haviv: The point is that they don’t sound nice. In what sense is Palestinian nationalism not an ethno-cultural nationalist movement? But they’re okay because they’re allowed. It’s meaningless epithets.
And B, it wasn’t with the rejection of alternate proposals for a Jewish state it eventually focused on the establishment of a Jewish… That word “eventually,” as though, look, really, they could have gone anywhere. I mean, in the 12th century, Rabbi Judah Halevi, his last act as one of the great poets of Spain is to get on a boat to Jerusalem. And we don’t even know if he ever made it. Maimonides is buried in Tiberias, his last act. Jews talked about the land, thought about the land. There are rabbis from the early 19th century talking about moving. There’s a Yemeni Jewish aliyah in the 1880s. It wasn’t random. It’s just completely fake. But it’s a special kind of fake you can put a footnote to. And that’s how academics fake academia. And it’s tragic.
Noam: Well, so basically what happened, just to go over the history is, 1903, the Uganda plan was put forward by, was it Herzl and people like, not people in Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe. And this is what I always found interesting. There was a major pogrom that took place in 1903. There were many, many, other pogroms that took place before 1903, and pogroms are state sanctioned murders, rapes, looting of Jewish people. And it typically came in the form of Eastern European slash Russian control.
And what happened was in 1903, 49 Jews or so were killed by what’s known as Kishinev and someone by the name of Chaim Nachman Bialik, who was a tremendous poet, spent months, thinking through what the reaction should be. And he wrote a tragic and brilliant and beautiful and controversial and provocative poem called In the City of Slaughter, which describes the, what I think his language might be the pathetic nature of the Jewish people that they can’t stand up for themselves, which was such a departure from how poetry and eulogies and elegies were done throughout Jewish history until then.
And then there was the Zionist Congress that took place in which they voted for, they voted for the Uganda plan. They voted for the move to East Africa. But my understanding of that was that they voted for it as a temporary measure and in reaction to the severe antisemitism that took place that led to the desperation of East Africa. And then there were the Eastern Europeans who said, is not a reasonable thing. And they sang in protest against it. Is that right?
Haviv: Joe Chamberlain, the father of Neville Chamberlain who wanted a peace with Hitler, Joe Chamberlain was colonial secretary and he came to the Zionists in 1903 and he said to them, hey, go for it. Take this little strip of basically a plateau in what is today Western Kenya. And what do you say? And it was brought before the Zionist Congress on account of how the British Empire was the British freaking empire. Can we say that on this podcast?
Noam: You can, you can, absolutely.
Haviv: You don’t turn them down. You are still trying to negotiate with the leaders of Germany and the leaders of the slowly imploding Ottoman Empire and the leaders of the Russian Empire and the leaders of the British Empire. And somewhere among all these leaders, you are trying to build out a case for Jewish self-reliance and Jewish safety. And so they accept this. They accept the agree. They have a vote in the Zionist Congress. I think it’s the sixth Congress in Basel. They have a vote to agree to consider the motion. And they take two years, somebody goes to visit the place and they decide that it is a ridiculous idea.
By the way, you know why the Zionists decided it was a ridiculous idea? Turns out there’s people living there and they don’t want a bunch of Europeans showing up. And that’s the Uganda plan and it was never seriously considered. And the act of making it come up for the vote on whether to discuss it led all East European delegations from the Russian Empire to leave the room in anger. It was a reason that all kinds of others, and not only that, not only that, the Zionist movement’s rejection of the Uganda plan caused a schism in the Zionist movement, sort of. There was a little group called territorialism instead of Zionism, Jewish, building a state anywhere, doesn’t matter where, anywhere, that abandoned the Zionist movement. And it was made up of about four people all related to each other who disbanded in 1925. So the whole idea that Zionism ever considered this, it was a motion at a meeting. And if it wasn’t the British Empire asking us to colonize for it, it would never even have been raised as a serious thing.
There was never, you know, the much more successful alternative to settling in the land of Israel was Birobidzhan, the Soviet idea.
Noam: What was Birobidzhan? What was it?
Haviv: Birobidzhan was the USSR in the 20s, arguing that the Jews could have a Yiddish-speaking Jewish cultural, you know, country. It wasn’t as big as its own. It wasn’t its own republic within the republics of the USSR, but it was this little autonomous Jewish place and it was sort of Stalin’s answer to Zionism. Because, you know, everyone had this problem. The Jews were fleeing en masse in their millions and everyone was murdering them in the 30s and the 20s, long before the Holocaust. And so the Soviets said, no, you don’t need Zionism. You don’t need to learn Hebrew. You don’t need to have a Jewish collective. You can have an old fashioned Yiddish collective like the Pale of Settlement and can be communist and Soviet and over scattered in furthest, furthest Siberia on the border, not even Siberia on the border with China. And to this day, Yiddish is one of the official languages of this little Russian province called Birobidzhan. You can go there, there are street signs in Yiddish and it’s adorable.
Noam: Have you been?
Haviv: I’ve never actually been, no. I’ve been to Moscow three times, but I’ve actually been to Birobidzhan, which matters to me more, right? But so that was more successful in the sense that there are many Jews who actually went or were sent to that place.
Noam: Class field trip.
Haviv: It’s simply a lie that the Jews ever thought in any numbers that Zionism could ever go anywhere else. And it’s a lie propagated by ideologues who have not taken over the fifth biggest website in the world.
Noam: Right. And that’s why I think people are upset about it. I want to continue going on this because you don’t like their definition on their entry definition on Wikipedia. I don’t think it’s good either. One of the problems that I have with Zionism though is the definition of Zionism, the history of Zionism. Because if I were to say to you, okay, right now, Haviv, you, your job is to create the opening sentence of Wikipedia, because I have found that Zionism has meant and means different things to different people.
I was reading this book from, that Yehuda Mirsky wrote about, Rav Kook, the early 20th century, brilliant Zionist religious Zionist thinker. And we’ll get into what is religious Zionism. But he did this thing called the different Rs. He said, for Herzl Zionism is Rescue. For Ahad Ha’am, Zionism is Renewal. And we’ll talk about this. For Berdichevsky, Zionism is Revolution. For Ben Yehuda, Zionism is Resurrection. For Rav Kook, Zionism is Redemption.
You hear those five Rs, rescue, renewal, revolution, resurrection, redemption. what do you think about that? And do think that there’s a through line to them?
Haviv: Well, first of all, I’m unimpressed. I’m deeply impressed by Mirsky and his book. He’s a wonderful scholar and it’s a wonderful book. But I’m unimpressed by finding a lot of English words that begin with R-E because it’s just a function of English grammar. I’m just saying it’s like in Hebrew, because you conjugate the end of a word based on gender, rhyming is extremely easy.
Noam: Are you taking away from like Hadag Nachash and Subliminal and their ability to… Shrek DMC.
Haviv: It is easy to rhyme in Hebrew. I’m sorry if you wanted a language that was easy. By the way, it used to be easy to rhyme in English because English used to have gendered conjugation as well, but they lost it when the Vikings conquered England. Anyway, back to our topic. Look, I think first of all, Mirsky is exactly right in terms of the sort of fundamental summary of the idea of renewal that the people want to see a cultural renewal as absolutely true and beautiful and think if Adam would have signed off on it and redemption is is Rav Kook’s overarching theme and vision. But none of it really matters because it’s all a kind of a kind of, what do you call–
Noam: It’s like a distraction? A red herring?
Haviv: These… What the heck is renewal? What is the renewal of a culture? What does that mean? Red herring.
Noam: By the way, I just came up with another RE, red herring.
Haviv: Which zinus would that be? You know, Ahad Ha’am wants the renewal of a language. He wants the renewal of a culture, of a Hebrew. He thinks that things have gotten, you know, degraded in some sense that things have gotten, that we’ve lost a vigor, a cultural creative power. And he thinks that coming together in our ancient homeland with being inspired by that collectivism and the land itself and having all of these factors of our identity all come together will create a new culture.
What? What? I mean, look, he was talking about his own culture and he was saying beautiful things about it and he really wrote beautifully and respectfully and he had this grand vision, by the way, of peace with the Arabs, which he felt deeply, people who follow in his footsteps today are deeply committed to.
There’s a lot to like in Ahad Ha’am, except for the heart of it, which is culture is good, culture is bad. Let’s have a renewal of culture. I don’t even know what that means. The only one of those that matters.
I’ll just say it like this, Noam, do you think the Messiah is coming because Israel was founded? Because if you don’t, then redemption is also breathtaking, beautiful. Rav Kook wrote poetry that is astonishing. And also, what
There is one Zionism, and it is the only Zionism, and it is the Zionism of rescue, and all the rest is a bunch of elites writing beautiful books trying to interpret the thing itself, but really mostly just talking about themselves. There, he said it. And now half the Jews will be angry at him.
Noam: Okay, I’m playing a game right now.
Haviv: Okay.
Noam: Here’s the game. I’m going to say a few statements and you’re going to tell me what your reaction is to them pithily. I’m saying the statement, you react. Number one, I just wrote this down as you were speaking. Zionism is justified by virtue of the Holocaust.
Haviv: I don’t know what justified means. Zionism is necessary, became desperately absolutely necessary when there was no other way for Jews to survive in the Eastern Hemisphere in the 20th century.
Noam: So if there was no Holocaust, does that mean that Zionism is not necessary?
Haviv: Hundreds of thousands were killed and millions were fleeing before the Holocaust. And the 20th century is the bloodiest century in Jewish history without the Holocaust. So let’s just, instead of Holocaust, talk about the 20th century as a whole. If there wasn’t a 20th century, we’d be having a debate about Jewish rights and belonging and justification and the costs. But there was. And so there is no debate. The anti-Zionist view is that the Jews should have died.
And if you don’t realize that’s the anti-Zionist view, then you don’t know the history well enough and are ignorant. Most people are ignorant, most people are not genocidal, but it is literally, what’s the alternative? What’s the third option? There was no third place to go to, nobody would let the Jews go anywhere.
Noam: Number two, in the 19th century is when Zionism was created.
Haviv: A specific rescue operation launched at Basel, but foreshadowed by some of the writings of people like Pinsker 20 years earlier, was created in the 19th century. If Zionism is the Jewish sense of belonging to the land of Israel? A little older than that.
Noam: Right, that’s like where I get confused. I’m going to read you some verses. I’m going read you some scripture over here, Haviv. Bear with me.
Haviv: I can handle it. I’m the son of a rabbi.
Noam: Okay, you got this. Stay with me. Genesis 13:14-15. And God said to Abraham after Lot had parted from him, raise your eyes and look out from where you are to the north and south, to the east and west, for I give all the land that you see to you and your offspring forever.
Next source in the Sifre in Deuteronomy, which Sifre was, it’s midrash halacha, meaning it is from a few thousand years ago where the rabbis were like, this is Jewish law, pay close attention: “Dwelling in the land of Israel is equivalent to observing all of the Torah’s commandments.” And then Yehuda Halevi, who you quoted earlier, was a great poet. And he spoke about, he said: “my heart is in the East and I languish on the margins of the West.”
And throughout the Talmud, goes through the laws of the land of Israel. Throughout the Bible, it goes through the demand, the command for Jews to settle the land of Israel.
And the narrative is always where you start. The narrative is always where you start. So when people say Zionism started in the 19th century, I’m thrown off because on the one hand, as a movement, that’s true. But then why wasn’t it happening for 1800 years, for 1700 years? Like what’s the history that, if it is the case that the Jewish people have had a yearning to return to their land and it’s one in the same and it belongs to them and it is them. So for 1800 years, why weren’t they going back? It’s not like the Romans had dominion over the Jews for all these 1800 years. Why not go back in the 1500s? Why not go back in the 1200s? Why not go back in the 900s? Why did it not emerge until the late 19th century for the Jews to be like, yeah, we got to go back to our land?
Haviv: Even in the late 19th century, it was a small ideological movement. When did Zionism become a majority of Jews in terms of opinion and in terms of behavior? 1920s and 30s when the quotas came into force in the Western hemisphere and cut off the West for the Jews and the Jews had to flee growing persecution and only then did they go.
I would say that there two points. One, a lot of Jews moved to the land of Israel over the generations, but it was always an act of deep ideological, whether religious or spiritual or some other kind of, you know, historical consciousness would send them to the land of Israel. They were small.
They would form these religious communities in Tzfat, the mystical communities of Tzfat, for example, that produced what is today essentially modern Kabbalah, right? Kabbalah is this old mystical Jewish tradition that had many, many versions and what we basically understand today is Kabbalah was basically invented in Tzfat, by this group. The students of the Vilna Gaon and there are these other, there are these religious movements that went.
But two things were always lacking. One, the bigots around which Jews lived, the oppression in which they lived, their second tier status under Islam and under Christianity that would fairly regularly explode into some kind of violence and oppression was never bad enough to completely rebuild their existence. It was for short moments.
It was for, you know, the first crusade, the so-called people’s crusade before the first crusade that killed a third, a quarter or a third of the Jews of the Rhine River on its way to the Holy Land. That was bad, but it was still a limited area and it couldn’t expand and it couldn’t get all the Jews.
And then in the 19th century with trains and industrialization and urbanization and the rise of the bureaucratic modern nation-state, there was a bureaucratic technology to the new nation-state that for the first time could actually destroy all the Jews. It could destroy everything, it could cause catastrophes, that’s a word Herzl himself used, and at a scale that required self-reliance and self-defense and collectivism to survive. And so the Zionism that turned a group of, always marginal groups of various elite ideologues into a mass movement of the migration of millions was danger and desperation that was unique to the modern era.
And that’s why it never happened in the past. But if every Jew prays toward Jerusalem every time they pray, and if you can’t finish the Passover Seder without saying next year in Jerusalem, and if every synagogue is built facing Jerusalem for 2000 years, and if when the pogroms begin in the Southern Russian Empire, the Jewish press in the Russian Empire, in the Pale of settlement, calls it Storms In the Negev. And so this sense of connection to the land of Israel was deep and it was always there and it was permanently there. And you can never find Jews who, until the modern age, for ideological reasons, who tried to excise it from Judaism. You can’t excise it from Judaism.
I challenge any Jew and any non-Jew to pick up a Jewish prayer book, any traditional Jewish prayer book, and even most non-traditional Jewish prayer books, and try to pray without talking about Jerusalem. And you will fail.
Noam: That’s true. I think they would say that’s very different than Zionism though.
Haviv: Well, it doesn’t mean you have to be a modern political Zionist, in the sense of build a nation state now urgently. That you should be, because all the other Jews are dead. In the entire hemisphere.
Noam: Right. Okay, but I want to get back to my earlier question. I asked you, what would your Wikipedia entry of Zionism be? I want to read to you what Moshe Halbertal, who is a Jewish philosopher’s definition of Zionism is. This is what he wrote. Halbertal’s definition is, it’s a movement that aims to deliver the Jews from the historical disgrace of dependence on other entities to determine their own fate. It’s in this book, A Jewish State, 75 Perspectives.
Haviv: I have no idea what disgrace means. I’m sorry. I’m a very simple person.
Noam: So give me your simplicity.
Haviv: Most words used by fancy people I don’t understand, but otherwise I completely agree. Zionism, the heart of Zionism, the millions, and there are a hundred ideologies that accompany it and try to explain it from within, from without, anti-pro, but the actual thing itself is a rescue project undertaken at first by a small group of Jews and then by most Jews as they came to understand that Jewish life in the 20th century could not survive because of profound changes in identity, profound changes in politics, and that the Jews who would not be rescued by Zionism stood a risk of extermination. That is Zionism. And Herzl would have said, it’s rescue.
Noam: you’re a Herzlian. It’s rescue. So if it’s rescue for you, and I do think it’s important to make sure that we have the different approaches of Zionism that I keep coming back to, whether it’s Ahad Ha’am of renewal of Hebrew and renewal of Jewish culture–
Berdichevsky, by the way, I think one second. I am the nerdiest person you have ever met. I went to Israel recently. I didn’t say hi to you, Haviv, my apologies. And I purchased Berdichevsky’s, I’m the only one I was told to ever purchase this in the bookstore there, of his essays on all topics around Israel. He was, I mean, he’s a fascinating guy, Berdichevsky. I find him fascinating, but he was all about revolution. He was all about the removal of the Jew from Judaism, essentially, and saying Judaism was a thing of the past. I got to get away from that. I got to create something new and that something new is in contradistinction to what was. And so what that meant is I’m shedding my like to use like a Kabbalistic term, my klipa, my external frame of this like weak, pale Jew who is at the service of others, says, yes, master, yes, master, and I’m going to create my own identity. Yes, master, by the way, either being God or yes, master, either or being the government or whomever they were responding to or dealing with and submissive to. And he said, no, no, no, I’m going to revolutionize this whole thing. I’m going to create the new Jew, the tan Jew.
Haviv: The Tan Jew. The Tan Jew, yeah, I’m agreeing with you. Yeah, he said that.
Noam: The guy in the Life magazine back in the day who was like standing with his gun in his in his and his guns his biceps and he’s like out of the water and he’s got his he looks so good.
Haviv: That’s the first soldier in the Suez Canal.
Noam: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That picture, I’m like, that is what Berdichevsky had in mind. Boom. That’s it. Yeah.
Haviv: Yeah, it’s adorable. Truly, it’s adorable. That guy, by the way, would become the chief armor to armor officer of the IDF. It’s… What? You just confused me a lot. I have no idea what you just said.
Let me just clarify for people listening. I’m not ignorant. I do know what Berdichevsky said. I was forced to read some Berdichevsky in school. It’s adorable. It’s cute. He writes about Hegel a lot for some reason. It is big and it is pompous and it is silly. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s like people who believe in their religious world, who find deep meaning in it, who are anchored in it as a source of culture and language and are somehow subservient to something, but Berdichevsky is gonna liberate them all. How he’s gonna write some stuff in German. Look, I just don’t have that much respect for intellectuals. I’m sorry. Truly, I’m a street urchin. Tell me about the people. Tell me about the people. Okay?
And by the way, the anti-Zionists and the people who Wikipedia has allowed to take over in their deep bigotry, the Zionism article, you will not learn this in the Zionism article. The anti-Zionists are also these ideologues and they talk about these complex structure bull. Can we?
Noam: Okay. Say it. You got it.
Haviv: Shit! Totally bull- I’m trying to be polite. Total bullshit! It’s not a thing! Millions of people did not become Zionists except at great need. If you don’t understand their great need, you don’t understand Zionism. And if you do understand their great need, you will not give so much space to all this gobbledygook by intellectuals about other intellectuals talking about how intellectual they are. That is not what it is! It would never have succeeded!
If all the Zionists, okay, had ever been, had been the intellectual Zionists, so the Berdichevskys, of all the different camps, the Lillian Blumes and Hesses and other communists, all of the different camps, the religious ones, the Reines and Kook and all these, all the different camps had all, and all their followers and all their friends and all their buddies and everyone who moved with them for fun, had been in the land of Israel in 1948, they would have lost the war in about four hours.
It is the hundreds of thousands, it is the millions, it is the people who came because there was nowhere else on earth. And if you don’t know that, you don’t know anything. And you don’t just not know anything about now, about then, excuse me, you don’t know anything about now. There’s a reason Israeli left-wingers serve in the IDF at rates of 80%. The world that formed them was a world in which they could not live anywhere. They know.
Okay, the Arab world pretends to be anti-Zionist. It’s not anti-Zionist if you understand Zionism as a rescue project. Jews cannot live in Iraq. Jews cannot live in Yemen. Well, that makes Iraq and Yemen Zionist. I don’t know what to say about that. If you can’t, if Jews can’t live happily and for a thousand years in safety in your land, you’re a Zionist, mazel tov. So, you know, it’s this, there’s this language, there’s this discourse. Anyway, Berdichevsky, by the way, he actually made Aliyah, he actually helped Jews, he had this whole role in Hebrew. Love the guy, respect him. The intellectual projects around these people. I don’t know what to tell you. How relevant is he to you?
Now, you love him because you’re a nerd. By the way, I read about these people. I’m also a nerd. But is he relevant to you? You read him and say, aha, we have to now create a secular Jewish literature to free ourselves from the–-
Noam: I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why he is relevant to me, we could speak about Ahad Ha’am, we could speak about Haim Nahman Bialik, we could speak about Ben Yehuda. I’ll tell you why they’re relevant to me, I’m gonna defend the intellectual class right now, not that I’m part of it, as far as I know, but let me in, let me in.
Haviv: What’s the line, I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me?
Noam: Exactly. So, here’s, here’s what I think they do well. What I think they do well is they provide language for almost anthropologically describing something that is without people necessarily realizing that they are part of that thinking. So when you see a certain type of Jewish person, I live in South Florida and I live in a pretty, you know, bubble in South Florida. Okay. So, then you go to Tel Aviv and you see Jews who look nothing like the Jews who you’re surrounded by.
I don’t want to just insult my community too much here. But their Judaism looks very different. They are aesthetically different. Their language is different. What they care about religiously is radically different. And when I see that, and some of them have, just such a disdain for, you know, a Galut Jew, a Jew living outside of Israel, they’re just like, what are you? What are you? Are you in a museum? Do you eat bagels, cream cheese and lox? You really like deli, don’t you?
It’s kind of like the spies when they go to Israel, the way they perceive themselves as being seen. And I’m like, I’m going to do five more pushups. You know, I’m going to learn a little bit more Hebrew. I’m going to have a little bit more disdain for rabbis.
And then I am going to be like you kind of Zionist, right? Tel Aviv Zionist. And they don’t even necessarily call themselves a Zionist, but that’s, that’s why. And, you see this language, this resurrection that took place. And I feel like they have something that I don’t have that maybe I’m a little jealous of, but there’s this resurrection of Hebrew culture, of Jewish culture, which is directly tied to being in the land and living the land, activating culture and the land and technology and all of these sorts of things.
That is, I think in the language of Berdichevsky, a revolution. That’s why I find it interesting. Not that I think people are like reading Berdichevsky and then take, let me do the formula. I think that he is describing something that is almost prophetic at his time. But now when I look at it, I see it.
And then, Haviv, before you jump in, on the other hand, I then go to Yehuda V’shomron, I go to Judea and Samaria, I go to the West Bank, and I listen to them talk about their vision of Zionism and, you know, Rav Kook and, you know, understanding that they have a role to play in the redemption of the Jewish people and that we’re living in Messianic times and we have to make sure to protect the Messianic era. And that is a totally, totally different kind of Zionism also, but it’s imbued with so much meaning and depth and provocation. And so again, I’m not saying that they’re reading Rav Kook and therefore they’re coming up with their perspectives, but they are living a life that feels very different than my life as a self-described Zionist. And I’m wondering if we’re all saying the same thing or is it different and what the implication is.
Haviv: Look, here’s how I think of it. I like Jews.
Noam: That’s nice.
Haviv: Not too much. But I do like them, you know, somewhat.
Noam: But I’m saying, that’s so nice, that’s so nice. As a Jewish dude, that felt warm.
Haviv: Yeah. Yeah. Well, good. And I am a little sad. I am deeply sad that there are today maybe six kinds of Jews. Because it used to be 60. And my feeling is that the amazing strength of Israeli culture and of the resurrection of Hebrew, taking Hebrew out of the study hall, out of the synagogue, and Herzl said, we can’t make Hebrew the language of the new state because you can’t buy a train ticket in Hebrew.
Well, now you can build trains in Hebrew and you can design quantum physics experiments in Hebrew and that’s beautiful. But the reason Israelis can do that, a small group of ideologues gave them that modern Hebrew. But someone else had to take away from them a thousand year Yiddish civilization. And someone had to take away from them a fifteen hundred year, a 1,400 year Arabic Iraqi civilization that was built on top of the Jewish community of Iraq that had already been there 1,500 years by then. And so they are the shattered remnants that these elites that you’re talking about and whom I love passionately.
I read Rav Kook to be inspired by the poetry, by the mysticism, But Rav Kook didn’t save millions of Jews. What Rav Kook did do, and what Ben Gurion did do, and what Berdichevsky writing Jewish legends in Hebrew back in Germany in the 1910s or whatever it was. He writes Jewish legends books, right, to avoid making it religious, but he wants them to have that… The building of that culture to replace the shattering of so many Jewish cultures by a modernizing world that could not contain minorities. What happened to the Jews of Iraq happened to other minorities of Iraq. What happened to the Jews of Poland happened… Europe in World War II…we know the Holocaust, but Europe homogenized everywhere, against everyone, usually in ways that were much less violent because most people were deportable, the Jews were not deportable so they had to be destroyed. Hannah Arendt said something like that, and that’s how the Nazis themselves talked. And so the extermination of the Jews functionally was part of a larger European homogenization that destroyed these ancient civilizations and then you had these elites that rebuilt it with these 15 different Zionist movements that all have an adjective. The cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am and the religious Zionism of a Rav Kook and all of that.
And so I love them, that’s great, that’s fantastic. You will come to Israel, you will meet 16 kinds of Zionists and they will all have a different story. And by the way, you got a bunch of different Zionisms in Miami or wherever in South Florida you live. And that’s also great. And the fact that there are Haredim today is wonderful. They were saved in the Eastern Hemisphere by Zionism and nobody else. And thank God, there are old, but also very new, because they really innovated profoundly to sustain the old ways, kinds of Jewish life. So I say there was a bottleneck in the 20th century, in which most of the old kinds of Jews were destroyed.
And the new kinds of Jews who could survive, let’s build them out to be as many new kinds of Jews as possible. Let’s have as big of a diversity of Jews as possible. I basically think this about anti-Zionist Jews. I think they’re adorable. They only live in safe countries. That’s not an accident. That’s the only place you can be anti-Zionist and not notice the lie. But I welcome it. In other words, you’re a different kind of Jew. Great. Let’s be that weird kind of Jew. There used to be a Bundist communist until the communists did away with them. Well, great. That was a good thing. Let’s have as many kinds of Jews with different ideas, different cultures, different languages. Let’s have as much variety as possible in the Jewish world. But that’s ultimately a function of rescue. That’s all I’m saying.
Noam: Right. And so rescue. And I want to transition to another thing that I hear often about the story of Zionism. You view Zionism as a rescue project. I want to go back to the history and I want to quote from you different parts, different statements that were made. And I want to get your response because the typical thing that I hear when people criticize Zionism, broadly from the left, though, again, there’s critique from the right and from the religious world, but it goes something like this.
So here’s the argument: Zionism is colonialism. It’s colonialism and I could prove it to you from two different ways. Way number one is very simple, in, this is, thank you to our researcher, Alex Harris, who put this together for us.
In the year 1800 in the population of Ottoman Palestine, there were 7,000 Jews, 22,000 Christians, 246,000 Muslims. Almost 90% of the population Ottoman Palestine was Muslim.
In 1890, 43,000 were Jews, 57,000 were Christians, and 432,000 were Muslims. Now it went down from 90% to 81%.
1914, 94,000 Jews, 70,000 Christians, 525,000 Muslims, down to 76%.
And over the next, you know, let’s say 30 to 40 years, until the partition plan was decided in 1947 or voted upon in 1947, it was dwindling and dwindling.
What’s interesting about these numbers is that I’m going to give you different numbers on the population of Jerusalem that people don’t typically know. In the year 1806, 2,000 Jews live there, 2,700 Christians and 4,000 Muslims, 23% were Jewish of Jerusalem. In 1896, that, that population percentage becomes 62% of Jerusalem is Jewish, 28,000. 19% were Christian, 8,700. And 19% Muslim, 8,500. And then 1922, it goes down a little bit. 54% were Jewish, 34,000. 23% were Christian, 14,700. And 21% were Muslim, 13,000 with a total of 62,578.
And so it seems as though while Jerusalem is the outlier in the land of Israel, it seems as though it is the case that that over time, the fewer and fewer Muslims and more and more Jews were colonizing the land.
I’m going to complicate this, Haviv. The complication is that the argument goes that in the Zionists’ own language, they use the terms of colonialism. Jabotinsky in The Iron Wall, who was, he really should be viewed as a disciple of Herzl, but he had a revised approach to Zionism called revision of Zionism, which believed that the Jewish people should be settling the land, not just on the West bank of the Jordan River, but the East bank of the Jordan River as well. And for security purposes and for probably for, you know, national homeland of Jewish people purposes.
I’m reading this to you in The Iron Wall: The Zionists want only one thing, Jewish immigration. And this Jewish immigration is what the Arabs do not want. It does not matter at all which phraseology we employ in explaining our colonizing aims. Herzl’s or Sir Herbert Samuel’s. Colonization carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab. Colonization can have only one aim and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim.
And then Der Judenstaat from Herzl, your Rebbe, he says, In both countries, meaning he’s talking about Palestine and Argentine, in both countries, important experiments in colonization have been made, though on the mistaken principle of a gradual infiltration of Jews.
And then there were organizations like Jewish Colonization Association, Jewish Colonial Trust, Zionist Colonization Department.
Let’s interpret charitably for a second. I know your blood is probably either boiling or curdling, one or the other, something is happening here. When someone hears this, what I just described, is it possible that they could say, you what Zionists describe themselves as colonizers and like there were many more Muslims there than Jews. So whether or not you have a very good reason to need to leave the Eastern European, central European, Western European countries because they are rabidly and vociferously antisemitic. And let’s remember Iraq as well and other North African countries that weren’t just saying Jews, please, we have an equal seat at the table. That is not the case. But you know what, with due respect to what was going on in North Africa and Iraq and in Syria and other parts, that doesn’t mean that you coming to this land isn’t a form of colonialism, isn’t a form of imperialism?
I said a lot. What do think?
Haviv: Well, but you said imperialism at the end.
Noam: Okay, fine, I’ll stay with colonialism.
Haviv: Well, they argue also that it’s that we’re imperialism. Look, on the one hand, yeah, completely. Absolutely in every way. There’s a difference between colonizing and colonialism. Colonialism is an ism. It’s a theory. It’s a superstructure, an architecture of power, it’s an ideology, it’s many, many things that it was a great many different kinds of things over a great many different periods and parts of the world. It’s not just white people do it. It is a particular kind of argument that is usually viewed by scholars as something that is accompanied by supremacy, ideology, etc. That’s not the same as the word colonizing, which is just a description of people moving somewhere to settle down there.
The idea that the Zionists use the word to colonize to describe moving somewhere to settle down there is somehow a smoking gun that it is colonialism. I don’t know what to say about that. Yes, Zionism colonized. What else did it do? What other words should we give it? If we call it Zionism made orange juice, that’s the new term for what it did. Okay, so it made orange juice.
Noam: Well, how would you say it in Hebrew? It’s to colonize. So what do they use? Lehiiteyashiv? Right.
Haviv: It’s just the word for Le’Yashev, Le’Yashev, Le’Hityashev. It was called the Yeshuv, right? The Jewish polity. It wasn’t yet a state. It was under the British and before that under the Ottomans. It was called the Yishuv. I guess that would be translated settlement, but it didn’t mean a specific town or specific village. It meant the very extent, whether it was 30,000 people or 150,000 people, it was the Jewish living in, and that was colonizing. And so the, if you want to say colonizing and then you want to do a quick word search on the Zionist library, which is what people like Rashid Khalidi and the anti-Zionists always do, more power to them, why leave low-hanging fruit on the tree? And you want to do a word search for the word colonize, you’ll do it and you’ll discover that in fact, Zionism advocated, you’re not going to believe this, it advocated Jews moving to the land of Israel in large numbers and settling there. And you will first be shocked and dismayed and you’ll fall off your chair and then you’ll begin to realize that you haven’t discovered much. We have not yet accused Zionism of something.
Now then the question becomes colonialism. And colonialism is something that just by discovering that they’re colonizing doesn’t mean they’re colonializing. So then the question becomes, where is the ideological, right? And that’s why the takeover of Wikipedia by these people is really important because what they basically want to say is first the Jews decided to colonialize, not to colonize. It’s not just that they got up and moved. They got up and moved as refugees. It’s that they decided to implement and that’s why in the Wikipedia article, you’ll also see that long before you get to antisemitism, the deep driver that created the first Zionist thinkers and the deep driver that drove millions of Jews to actually move, there’s a whole section on some Zionist geneticists or some garbage silliness like that from the 19th century. And Wikipedia has succumbed to that by now deciding that Zionism is somehow some eugenic project.
So our enemies have argued about us, about Zionism, that we are colonialists. In other words, colonialism is not simple colonization.
Colonialism is a metropole, a country that’s powerful because it’s sending itself outward, that sends for usually economic gain, for imperial gain. The British took over many places to serve the empire. The French settled many places to serve the empire. It’s a kind of ideological expansionism, not by the weak, but by the powerful, not by refugees with no sending country and nowhere else to go. That is not what colonialism refers to, but that is what Zionism actually is, goes the argument.
And Zionism is also imperialism. Zionism, Palestinian thinkers have been arguing since the 1910s, is the arm of British imperialism or German imperialism or Russian imperialism. or even Soviet imperialism. Zionism is all these bad words. And why do they say Zionism is all these bad words? Because they are all defeatable.
You can defeat colonialism. The Algerians kicked the French out of Algeria. The Maomao rebellion in Kenya, we talked about Kenya. Well, thank God we didn’t take that British Kenya option, because then we would have been colonialist at the bayonet of an empire. We would have taken a place that then would have fallen in the Maomao rebellion. And that’s what happened to the British colonialist settlement in Kenya.
But I’ll tell you a dark secret, Noam, that please don’t share this with them, with our enemies. Please only keep this among us Zionist Jews. And if you’re an anti-Zionist Jew listening to this, you’ve got to have our back on this one. All these theories of Zionism that didn’t take into account the social reality of Zionism, the millions of desperate refugees, all those theories that are an attempt to actually avoid grappling with the social reality of what Zionism actually was, they have shattered the Palestinian cause for generations, for like six generations. They thought we were the arm of the British Empire and so when they rebelled against the British Empire in the 30s, 1936 to 39, the Arab Revolt, they thought that if they could kick the British out, they would kick the Jews out. The British left and the Jews stayed.
And the Jews stayed after the British to face down this revolt, crushed the Arab revolt brutally, and armed the Jews to help them crush the Arab revolt. All the powerful Jewish militias that are built out in the 1930s and that serve as the IDF of 1948 were built by the British as part of the attempt to crush the Arab revolt of the 30s.
In other words, the misunderstanding of who the enemy is, that view of us as imperialism, therefore if you attack imperialism, you attack us, the attack on imperialism left them unable to grapple with us. And you see this a thousand times in the course of their history and I could name all those times, just one other time, French colonialism in Algeria ended after an eight-year terror war by the FLN, the National Liberation Front in 1962.
The French just got up and left after 130 years. A real pivot of world history. And the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded by Palestinian activists. In response to that, they saw what the FLN did to the great, powerful French colonialist project, and they said, we can do that to the Jews. And then began this mass campaign of organized systematic anti-colonial terror.
What has that campaign done for Palestinians? It begins in 1964, the PLO was founded on the model of the 62 victory of the FLN, not in 67. It’s not about the West Bank. It’s not about Gaza. It’s about the success of the Algerians against the French colonialists. If the Palestinian cause had understood that the first Intifada created an Israeli left that wants peace because these children were throwing rocks at soldiers and the second Intifada destroyed that Israeli left because, after all, the Israeli soldiers had left all the Palestinian cities and they were negotiating shared sovereignty on the Temple Mount, 140 suicide bombings blow up in our cities. If they understand that terrorism meant to destroy us, to kick us out to some other imagined metropole that we don’t have, we’ll fail.
But that a moral argument might succeed, might shift our politics profoundly, completely reshaped Israeli politics, this first intifada demand for independence from military rule. If they stop understanding us as colonialists and imperialists and start to understand us, on our terms, with our own historical experience, what it actually was and not what they pretend and have now warped Wikipedia into claiming about us, they’ll stop failing. They will stop catastrophically failing. Their liberation might actually be possible.