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Jacqueline
Rose
The Question of Zion
MUP, $24.95 pb, 232 pp, 052285219X
THE
TRAGEDY OF ISRAEL is that it wishes,
simul-taneously, to be a liberal democratic
nation, one whose citizenship is defined
by universal norms, and at the same
time a Jewish state, where even Palestinians
born within the borders of the country
are denied full equality. I still remember
my unease when I visited Israel many
years ago at being asked when I, a secular
Jew, intended to ‘come home’.
Jacqueline Rose would share this disquiet.
Indeed, she quotes one of the most famous
anti-Zionist Jews, Hannah Arendt, who
wrote of Zionism’s founder, Theodor
Herzl, that: ‘He did not realise
… that there was no place on earth
where a people could live like the organic
national body that he had in mind.’
Israel was founded on the basis of a
romantic nineteenth-century notion of
nationalism, the very version of nationhood,
Rose points out, that Jews had to flee.
The strength of Rose’s book is
that she uses psycho-analytic tools
to probe the deep inconsistencies and
unquestioned assumptions of Zionism.
In this she draws on a thorough knowledge
of the founders of Israel and their
early critics, who, in ways that were
remarkably prescient, foresaw the conflicts
a Jewish occupation of Pales-tine would
unleash. Those who note a frightening
lack of reality in the Israeli perception
of the world will find Rose’s careful
analysis particularly useful, and her
intro-duction to figures such as Hans
Kohn and Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg)
an important corrective to the simplistic
picture most of us, Jews and non-Jews,
have of Zionism. That she complements
this with interviews with contemporary
Israelis adds a particular concreteness
to her argument.
Zionism is itself a complex ideology,
child of both European anti-Semitism
and the national romanticisms of the
nineteenth century. ‘How,’
asks Rose, ‘did one of the most
persecuted people of the world come
to embody some of the worst cruelties
of the modern nation-state?’ The
Jews who settled in Palestine, and then
supported the establishment of the state
of Israel, knew this was no terra nullius,
that they would displace large numbers
of Palestinians. They were not unaware
of the irony that in the name of justice
for the Jews they were perpetuating
injustice against the Palestinians.
Yet even to write this is to risk being
attacked as anti-Israeli, even anti-Semitic.
For many Jews, any attack on Israel
is an attack on all Jews, and thus political
criticism of Ariel Sharon becomes conflated
with anti-Semitism, even when, as in
the case of someone like Noam Chomsky,
the critics themselves are Jewish. Rose
explains this in terms of the shame
around the Holocaust felt by many Jews.
Shame seems an odd term — is it
not, rather, the Germans and their collaborators
who should feel it? — but it is
a shame felt both by those who survived
and by those who did not do enough to
save the victims of Nazi policies. For
Rose, the humiliations acted out daily
against the Palestinians represent the
classic psychoanalytic principle of
repetition, where this shame is denied
through aggression against others.
Most of today’s Israelis are born
in Israel, and their claim to nationality
is that of all of us who claim identifi-cation
with the country of our birth. For Israel
to become a ‘normal’ state,
it will need not only to come to a genuine
understanding with a Palestinian state,
but also to accept that non-Jews born
in Israel are equally Israelis, and
that Jews (the majority) who continue
to live in the Diaspora should not be
expected to view Israel as other than
another country. The messianic claims
for a greater Israel, expressed by the
fundamentalist settlers on the West
Bank and Gaza (speaking all too often
with American accents), are as destructive
of Israel’s chance of survival
as are Palestinian suicide bombers.
Perhaps messianism was an inevitable
part of the Zionist project, even though
many of the original Zionists were determinedly
secular. Without the belief that they
were fulfilling a divine mission, could
a small number of settlers simultaneously
have built a modern industrial state
and created a military powerful enough
to hold off far larger forces? After
all, Chaim Weizmann, who would become
Israel’s first president, declared
in 1914: ‘If we were normal, we
would not consider going to Palestine,
but stay put like all normal people.’
This, of course, was long before the
Holocaust, which gave the emotional
and political support needed to win
international, but particularly American,
support for the establishment of Israel.
Rose is interested, however, in the
internal contradictions of Zionism rather
than larger geopolitics, and she demonstrates
that the ap-parent divide between secular
and religious Zionists is not simple,
further confused by those Orthodox Jews
who reject Zionism as a political principle
altogether.
This is a powerful book, written by
someone who shares with many other Jews
a sense of outrage ‘at what the
Israeli nation perpetrates in my name’.
One gets an insight into Rose’s
feelings from her characterisation of
the three chapters of her book as ‘vision’,
‘critique’ and ‘violence’.
The Question of Zion is not an
easy book to read; it requires some
pre-existing knowledge of the history
of Israel and it is written in an overly
academic language that will keep it
from those who most need to read it.
Rose might retort that such language
is inevitable if one deploys a psycho-analytic
reading, but it is worth remembering
that Freud at his best was capable of
simple and elegant prose.
In the 1930s there was a tentative move
to establish a Jewish homeland in the
Kimberleys, a move supported by the
state government but opposed by many
Australian Jews. There were other suggestions
for a Jewish state in Uganda. Had either
of these eventuated, the claims for
a land based on biblical prophecies
would have collapsed, and Israel might
have indeed become a nation like all
others. For Australia, there is a fascinating
utopian novel to be written of what
such a settlement might have meant.
As the promoter of the scheme, former
Bolshevik Isaac Steinberg, recognised,
it would have avoided the pitfalls of
nationalist fervour, and what he referred
to as the ‘fanatical love’
of Zionism (see Leon Gettler’s
An Unpromised Land, 1993).
Most Australian Jews are unconsciously
cosmopolitan, recognising that there
is no conflict between a Jewish ethnic
or religious identity and Australian
citizenship. But some go beyond this
to an assertion that any attack on,
or criticism of, Israel is an attack
on all Jews. Perhaps they need to be
reminded of the comment by the South
African satirist, Pieter-Dirk Uys, that
a patriot is someone who protects his
country from its government. And perhaps
they should read Rose’s book.
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