Aw shit! Roger Garaudy, ex-PCF intellectual again, on the Holocaust Revisionist website!
http://codoh.com/zionweb/zionmythgar.html Was looking for Zeev Sternhill (... The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State. Zeev Sternhell. www.princeton.edu/titles/6183.html Right-Wing Politics, and the Cultures of Cruelty ... of Leninism as the dominant trend in international socialism. See, for instance, Zeev Sternhill (with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri), The Birth of Fascist ... www.mnet.fr/aiindex/aahmad.html Professor Zeev Sternhell Contact information: e-mail: mszeevst at mscc.huji.ac.il Telephone: 972-2-588-3163 Room: 5318, ... www.politics.huji.ac.il/faculty/Sternhell/Sternhell.html ... Le phénomène fasciste Entretien avec Zeev Sternhell. Zeev Sternhell a consacré de nombreux travaux au fascisme qui ont suscité de violentes polémiques en ... www.antifa.net/resistances/sternhell ) Here 'tis, http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sternhell-israel.html CHAPTER ONE The Founding Myths of Israel Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- By ZEEV STERNHELL Translated by DAVID MAISEL Princeton University Press
Read the Review
The Primacy of the Nation: Aaron David Gordon and the Ethos of Nation-Building THE NEGATION OF THE DIASPORA
Most national movements and parties that managed to translate their historical and cultural aspirations into political terms in the late 1800s and early 1900s viewed themselves as fighting not only for their nation's liberation from a foreign yoke, for its unification, or for the return of its separated brethren but also for protection from assimilation, loss of identity, and cultural annihilation. Zionism was also of this nature. Physical danger, which was a real threat to Eastern European Jews, was not the only peril. The danger of a loss of identity--the result of a modernization process that had begun to spread to Eastern Europe as well--was even more serious. A seemingly paradoxical situation had arisen. Although liberalism had suffered serious setbacks in Germany, Austria, and France--as a result it appeared that the Jews' emancipation was in jeopardy--the assimilation process continued at full strength. Most Jews continued willingly to pay the price for emancipation and gave up their national identity without difficulty, even when it was perfectly clear that this provided no solution to anti-Semitism. Despite the fact that society as a whole increasingly opposed their absorption even as individuals, cultural assimilation continued. The process of loss of identity was very rapid in Central and Western Europe, but signs of it also began to appear in the east, in the Russian empire. It could easily be supposed that in a short time assimilation would gain as much ground there as it had in Western Europe.
A concern for the fate of the nation, which for the first time in its history found itself in a situation in which the traditional frameworks that had held it together for so long were disintegrating, and whose destiny had begun to depend on the personal decision of each member, was accompanied by another, no less important phenomenon: a loathing of the diaspora. No one was more disgusted with their people, more contemptuous of its weaknesses and its way of life, than the founders. These stern individuals, who permitted no self-indulgence, described exiled Jews in terms that at times resembled those of the most rabid anti-Semites. Aaron David Gordon, for instance, wrote that the Jewish people was "broken and crushed ... sick and diseased in body and soul." This great disability, he said, was due to the fact that
we are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil; there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues, our ideals, our higher human aspirations. Every alien movement sweeps us along, every wind in the world carries us. We in ourselves are almost nonexistent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other peoples either. Indeed, said Gordon, "It is not our fault that we have reached this point, but that is the fact: that is what exile is like." This destructive criticism was very widespread at the time of the Second Aliyah and, no less than the danger of pogroms in Russia, was fundamental to Zionism.
>From the beginning, Zionism faced stiff competition from two factors that
played a powerful role in Jewish life: on one hand the instinctive urge to
save one's skin and ensure one's economic existence by leaving Eastern
Europe for the New World, and on the other hand the attraction of movements
with a strong universal and humanistic component, bringing the promise of
full emancipation: socialism and liberalism. Emigration to America was a
response to the blows anti-Semitism inflicted, a consequence of
modernization. The only barrier Zionism could place before this mass exodus
was a rejection of the diaspora as such: not merely a rejection of the
European diaspora, where the Jewish ability to survive had disappeared, but
a total opposition to the concept of life in the diaspora. It was therefore
necessary to demonstrate that Jewish life outside Eretz Israel was in its
death throes. The Jews, wrote Gordon, were "a people hovering between life
and death," and if they had not yet vanished from the face of the earth, it
was only because "the body of the people of Israel existed in a mummified
state." But now that "the walls of the pyramid have been breached ... the
body has begun to crumble, and the fragments are dispersed in all
directions." Thus, "In exile, we do not and cannot have a living culture,
rooted in real life and developing within itself. We have no culture because
we have no life, because the life that exists in exile is not our life."
This concept of the diaspora was quite common among the leadership of the Second Aliyah. In 1915 Ben-Gurion repeated Gordon's statement almost word for word: "We cannot develop a normal and comprehensive culture in exile, not because we do not have the right but because we are physically and spiritually dependent on the alien environment that consciously or unconsciously imposes its culture and way of life upon us." Thus, from the point of view of Zionist activism, there could be no compromise with exile. "Not to condemn exile means to perpetuate it," wrote Berl Katznelson at the height of the Second World War. In this connection he mentioned an article by Yosef Aharonowitz, one of Hapo'el Hatza'ir's founders, written a few years earlier. Aharonowitz, wrote Katznelson in December 1940, "contrasted Eretz Israel with the diaspora, not because he thought Eretz Israel could rescue all the Jews of the diaspora but because he saw that destruction was coming over the diaspora, and only the remnant of Israel in Eretz Israel would be rescued, and that would become the Jewish people." A hatred of the diaspora and a rejection of Jewish life there were a kind of methodological necessity for Zionism.
This had two consequences. First, the explanation of anti-Semitism given by Jew haters of the school of social anti-Semitism fell on fertile soil here. Typical of this way of thinking was an article that appeared in Ha'ahdut in 1912.
Modern anti-Semitism, which the Jews have suffered from during this last century, in politically free countries as well, is largely a consequence of the abnormal economic positions that the Jews have occupied in the diaspora.... Today, the Jewish people has many more shopkeepers, businessmen, teachers, doctors, etc., .. than the small and impoverished masses of Jewish workers is able to support. Thus, our shopkeepers, businessmen, and members of the liberal professions are obliged to gain their livelihood at the expense of the hard toil of the non-Jewish workers. Similar ideas may be found in abundance in all modern European anti-Semitic literature, and they underlie the claim that modern anti-Semitism is not an expression of religious or racial hatred but an attempt to root out parasitic elements that prevent the proper functioning of social systems. Thus, anti-Semitism has been represented as a defense of the working masses against their exploiters, and hence as a legitimate political phenomenon. It has been seen by many as a manifestation that does not necessarily contradict universal, humanistic, or egalitarian values. At the beginning of the century, the views of those who sought Jewish political independence and those who sought to purge their countries of the Jewish presence were often quite similar.
The second and most important consequence of the rejection of the diaspora, however, was that all hopes and efforts focused on Palestine. The country was regarded as the sole center of not only Jewish existence but also Jewish history, the source of inspiration and the elixir of life. As with all national movements, history played a decisive role in Zionism. As with all national movements, Zionist interpretations were very selective: not only was the favorite period always that of the kings and Maccabees, but it sometimes seemed that between the far-off days of independence and the beginning of the return to the land at the end of the nineteenth century, very few events worthy of mention had taken place in the nation's life. Not only was Jewish history in exile deemed to be unimportant, but the value of living Jews, Jews of flesh and blood, depended entirely on their use as raw material for national revival. The Jewish communities scattered across Central and Eastern Europe were important to the founders chiefly as a source of pioneers. They were considered to have no value in themselves.
Thus, even at the height of the Second World War, there was no change in the order of priorities: it was not the rescue of Jews as such that topped Berl Katznelson's order of priorities but the organization of the Zionist movement in Europe. In December 1940 Katznelson lashed out at Polish Jewry in areas conquered by the Soviet Union because they were unable to cope with the situation and "unable to fight even for a few days for small things like Hebrew schools. In my opinion," wrote Katznelson, "that is a terrible tragedy, no less than the trampling of Jewry by Hitler's jackboots." Indeed, this was the founders' order of priorities from the beginning, and the tragedy of the Jews in the Second World War could not change it. Zionism was an act of rebirth in the most literal sense of the term. Thus, every event in the nation's life was evaluated according to a single criterion: the degree to which it contributed to Zionism.
This concept of Jewish history explains what, in itself, is quite astounding. On the eve of his death, the Kishinev pogroms of 1903 held a more important place in Katznelson's thinking than the Holocaust. In a famous series of lectures on the history of the labor movement in Palestine, given in the summer of 1944, Katznelson dwelled at length on the pogroms at Kishinev on the reactions of Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), the national poet, on the historian Simon Dubnow (1860 1941), on Ahad Ha'am (pseudonym of Asher Zvi Ginzberg, 1856-1927), the father of "spiritual Zionism," and on the heroic action of the youth Pinhas Dashevsky, who attacked one of the main instigators of the pogroms. Katznelson equated Dashevsky with Yosef Trumpeldor, the legendary hero killed by Arab guerrillas in 1920 during the battle for Tel Hai, the Jewish settlement on the Lebanese border. Dashevsky's deed, he said, was "the first revolutionary manifestation of Jewish national consciousness." This youth was particularly exemplary because "he understood the true nature of Zionism and adhered to it throughout his life." Judging from volume 11 of Katznelson's Writings, the story of Pinhas Dashevsky had far greater importance for the ideologist of the labor movement than the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In June 1944 one could not yet know the place the revolt would have in the history of Zionism, but at that time--a whole year after the destruction of Polish Jewry--every child in Jewish Palestine knew about the effect of the Kishinev pogroms on national revival; the Kishinev pogroms had released the mechanism of the Second Aliyah. "Nevertheless," said Katznelson, "this event of Kishinev was central in Jewish history. It was decisive for Zionism." Thus, one is hardly surprised to learn that in 1944, as in 1924 or 1914, the main problems on the movement's agenda remained the same: immigration and maintaining the movement's solidarity. When Katznelson spoke of a "disaster," he meant the internal difficulties of the labor movement, the "disaster of the Gdud Ha'avoda" or the "disaster of defection that befell Hashomer Hatza'ir," not the events taking place in Europe under Nazi rule.
For the people of the Second Aliyah, Zionism was not only an answer to the Jews' distress, and Eretz Israel was more than one night's shelter. In this matter, there were always two schools of thought in Zionism. The first, which can be described as the liberal or utilitarian school, viewed the Jews' gathering in Eretz Israel as a solution to physical and economic insecurity in Eastern Europe on one hand and as a response to liberalism's failure in Western Europe on the other. The second school viewed immigration to Eretz Israel as the culmination of Jewish history and the rescue of the nation as a historical entity. From the point of view of the first school, a Jew who clung to exile endangered his property or his person. The Jew--this was the logical conclusion to be drawn from the outbreak of anti-Semitism in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair--carried anti-Semitism about with him like a piece of personal luggage. Jew hatred was an inseparable part of Jewish existence, and now there was no longer any reason to assume it would disappear with emigration to America. If emancipation had failed in France, there was no reason to suppose that it would succeed on the other side of the ocean. Thus, a concern for the safety of each individual made it imperative to find a territorial solution to the Jewish problem, which would ensure the nation first self-rule and later political independence. Zionism was the most rational solution, an empirical solution suited to the thinking of liberals steeped in Western culture such as Herzl and Nordau.
But Herzl and Nordau never reached Palestine, and liberal values never took
root in the founders' ideology; this was not the thinking of groups of young
activists who came from areas where tribal nationalism ruled unchallenged.
>From their point of view, Zionism's justification was not that it provided
the most rational or effective solution to the Jews' need for security. The
question of security, apart from their sense of shame at Jews' inability to
defend their lives and honor during pogroms, was not central to their
thinking. As they saw it, Zionism was an operation to rescue the nation and
not an operation to rescue Jews as individuals. For them, the quantitative
aspect was always secondary, and the founders knew from the beginning that
only a few would be attracted to the task of building the nation. Thus, all
efforts were directed toward the few thousand (toward the end of the 1930s
there were tens of thousands already) who were organized in the Halutz
(Pioneer) movement and in various youth movements. All their hopes were
centered on this pioneering minority. To them, the masses of Jews who were
not Zionists or who were not organized for immigration to Eretz Israel were
of minor importance.
WHAT IS A NATION? <snip> Michael, imitating Yoshie in bandwidthery...will shut up now...