Gabriel Piterberg on Zionism and Anti-Zionism

Delegates at the first Zionist congress in 1897. Image from Wikimedia Commons

An Israeli historian, who rejects Zionism, tells us about works of scholarship that have challenged the Zionist Israeli narrative of modern history

Zionism is the national political movement dedicated to the establishment and preservation of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. You’re an Israeli historian but you are not a Zionist. Perhaps you could tell us about your background and how your views on Israel and the conflict with the Palestinians have evolved and developed.

I was born in Buenos Aires in Argentina. My parents were communists and we emigrated to Israel in 1963, when I was seven years old. We went to a Marxist kibbutz, where I grew up for the first few years, and then we moved to another cooperative settlement of the Labour Movement, a moshav. That was where I spent most of my life in Israel.

I always belonged to the Zionist left in Israel. My views began to change and radicalise around the time of the Lebanon war in 1982, which is something that happened to a number of people of my generation and social background. It wasn’t only the war that changed my perspective, but it was the massacres at [the Palestinian refugee camps of] Sabra and Shatila and the hand grenade that was thrown by a [Jewish] settler at a demonstration in front of the Israeli prime minister’s office which killed one of the leaders of the Peace Now movement.

You served in the Israeli army in Lebanon, didn’t you?

Although I knew there was going to be a war and I knew why, to my shame when I was called to serve and participate in the operation against the Syrian surface-to-air missiles in the Bekaa Valley, I went without having too many hesitations. When I was demobilised it dawned on me that I had really obeyed orders that were given by a state of which I was part and I had not questioned them, even though I knew the war was a bad idea. The whole experience made me start doubting many other things.

Anyway, after the war I completed my BA degree and then an MA at the School of History at Tel Aviv University. And then in 1986 I went to Oxford University to do my doctorate. I was already doubting the whole notion of Zionism and the Jewish State as I was going to Oxford. My stay there really tipped the balance and I became not only a non-Zionist, but in certain ways also anti-Zionist.

You’ve selected five books on the history of Zionism. Can you tell us what ties them together?

In different ways they do not accept either the grand Zionist Israeli narrative of the modern history of Israel/Palestine or of Jewish history. Some of them take on the entire story, others take part of the story and dissect it and reject it. So what I’d say underlies all of the books here is the non-acceptance of the Zionist narrative on a variety of topics but especially the grand narrative of Jewish history and of the Israel/Palestine history since 1882. Kornberg is a bit of an odd one out in this list, because although his work is critical I am not sure whether this is matched by his politics.

Theodor Herzl

By Jacques Kornberg

Buy

Theodor Herzl is widely regarded as the father of modern political Zionism. Although there was Jewish settlement in Palestine before he wrote his seminal work Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1895, he is credited with transforming Zionism into a coherent national political movement. Why did you choose Kornberg’s biography of him?

I think this is the best biography of Herzl I have seen. The first reason that it’s so good is that it is based on meticulous research and it also unearths documents, letters and diary entries that were either unseen by others or seen but not commented upon or their significance not illuminated. Secondly, I think that this book shows a remarkably deep understanding of Herzl’s personality. It’s not a psycho-biography, but it’s the best understanding of his emotional, mental, intellectual and political make up, which is accompanied by a subtle awareness of the historical context.

Can you tell us about Theodor Herzl?

Herzl was a Hungarian Jew born in 1864 in Budapest to wealthy parents who were not completely alienated from Judaism nor completely assimilated. One could call them secular, bourgeois Jews with an attachment to Judaism. They moved to Vienna, the centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when Herzl was just finishing high school. After school Herzl enrolled at the university to study law. He also joined fraternities while he was there, the most significant of which, Alba, was extremely right-wing German nationalist, and anti-Semitic. He was also obsessed in this period with duelling, something which Kornberg analyses with much insight in his book, and which was palpable in Herzl’s conversion to Zionism.

Herzl was not really a successful or active lawyer. His ambition was to become a literary figure whose plays would be performed in Vienna’s most famous theatre and in the wider German-speaking world. He also wanted to write novels that would bring him fame and status. He eventually became a journalist, where he was more successful, because as a playwright or as a literary writer in general he was not that successful at the time.

As a journalist, he was a correspondent for the very prestigious Neue Freie Presse and became its correspondent in Paris, where in 1894-1897 his conversion to Zionism occurred. That’s when he wrote many of the texts for which he became famous and, of course, from there he proceeded to establish the World Zionist Organisation and really transformed it into an organisation with clear political aims and global ambitions. He died relatively young, aged 44, in 1904.

What makes Kornberg’s biography so special and what conclusions does he draw?

Kornberg refutes thoroughly the view of Herzl as someone who offered a progressive universal vision of the liberation of the Jews. He puts much more emphasis on the arrival of Herzl to Zionism through the rejection of the possibility of the Jews participating in the betterment of European society so that it would include them, and through alienation from his own Jewishness and his deep underlying desire to be a Gentile himself. Kornberg shows how Herzl really wanted to be accepted as a white Christian man and how he came, because of this alienation, to think that those who stood in his way were the exilic Jews, or the unmodernised Jews. He was thinking of ways in which he could “normalise” the Jews so they wouldn’t stand in his way of becoming a proper white man. I think this is a very interesting underlying thesis, which he supports with ample documentation. The book is really structured around a series of answers that Herzl was looking for, to apply to the Jews so they would normalise. Zionism was only the last of a series of attempts that went from conversion to Christianity, to socialism and ultimately to Zionism.

What Kornberg also shows is how Herzl understood the so-called Jewish problem very much in the same way as anti-Semites, by accepting that there was something wrong with the Jews and they were uncorrectable as long as they stayed within Europe as an exiled nation. And therefore, he concluded, they had to leave Europe and create their own colony in the east, which would normalise them. Along the way, Kornberg makes some specific discoveries, which were a revelation to me. Through very meticulous philological research, he puts to rest the myth that Herzl’s metamorphosis occurred as a result of witnessing the Dreyfus affair in Paris. With marvellous research, he shows that this could not have been the case. What Herzl did as a shrewd politician was to retrospectively concoct the story that he converted to Zionism while witnessing the humiliation of the Jewish officer Dreyfus. This became conventional wisdom but it is not factually and empirically true.