I'm chagrined to look back half a century to acknowledge how off-base I may have been in interpreting the Zionist legitimation of the right to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. I had assumed that the modern state of Israel was viewed as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy of God’s promise to restore the descendants of the ancient people of Israel to the ancestral home of the patriarchs and prophets of the Hebrew scriptures.
Consequently, my rebuttal of Zionist claims to Palestine had to operate on religious premises. This might take the form of biblical criticism that called into question the alleged real estate claims in the Bible. Or, while conceding the Bible’s views, one could refute the authority of the Bible on this issue.
Diverse religions make all sorts of eccentric claims, but outsiders are under no obligation to accept them. Some presumptive divine revelations may be deemed preposterous – especially by modern secular critics. In a paper I circulated to a meeting of Christians and Jews in Toronto in the summer of 1967, I pointed out that it was not uncommon for a particular religious group to claim a unique ethnic tie to a territory because it is the navel of the universe that connects them to their sacred beings.
Just in the last few days, I talked to a colleague who had refused to join a group of tourists in climbing Uluru, in central Australia because this was, for the indigenous inhabitants, a sacred place that joined heaven and earth. But my informant adopted this restraint not because she accepted the claims of the local people as true but out of respect for their sensitivities.
But, acquiescence to the dispossession of the Palestinian occupants of Palestine in order to accommodate the sentiments of Zionists, whether religious or secular-sociological, presented a very different moral problem. Moral justice towards the existing Palestinian population trumped religious pieties or nationalistic politics of Zionist Jews.
To return to the original point of my self-rebuke at discovering I was wide of the mark in ascribing the motivations of political Zionist to the testimony of the Hebrew scriptures. What I came to see is that motivations of religious loyalty were not as prominent as I had previously thought.
But as I now reflect on the past, I think it likely that my primary theological disputants were not Jews but Christian Zionists of a fundamentalist sympathy who regarded the restoration of Israel as the necessary prelude to the second coming of Christ.
Among influential Jewish leaders of the drive for a Palestine in which Jewish sovereignty prevailed were Herzl in The Jewish State and Ben Gurion. It dawned on me that the dominant impulses were not God’s antique promises but modern European theories of the nation state, sometimes termed ethnic nationalism.
On this view, a nation is “a people” – a collectivity with a shared history, common language, and an aspirational destiny – typically occupying a territory together. The Jewish people, it was argued, possessed the criteria of political nationhood, except for the land. This the movement of political Zionism would complete by establishing Jewish sovereignty in Palestine in spite of the fact the Palestinian people lived there and had for a very long time.
There is debate regarding when the Zionist leadership concluded that a Jewish Israel required the expulsion (“transfer”) of the Palestinians out of Palestine. Ilan Pappé, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, deals with this question. Michael Neumann, professor of philosophy at Trent University, in The Case Against Israel, also assigns an early date to the Zionist strategy of “transferring” Palestinians out of Palestine.
During the last few weeks while I was struggling once again with old issues of Middle East politics, I came upon – sequestered in an obscure corner of my disorganized bookshelves – Simon Dubnow’s (1961) Nationalism and History. My marginalia still conveys the utility of this historical analysis of Jewish experience to my struggle to clarify Canadian nationalism sometime around 1968.
For my present purpose I stress Dubnow’s controversy with the Jewish “political Zionists” who worked for the establishment of the state of Israel. In distinction to them, Dubnow laboured for a “spiritual Zionism” or alternatively “cultural Zionism.”
He feared that the political ambition to create an Israeli state risked devaluing two thousand years of creative Jewish life in the Diaspora. Effectively, Dubnow lost the argument, resulting in the dispossession of eighty percent of the Palestinians from their homes (750,000 refugees in 1948).