3. THE HIGHLY CONTINGENT EMERGENCE OF A ZIONIST STATE IN PALESTINE

This essay discusses the history leading up to the founding of the modern nation state of Israel. This really shouldn't be controversial. This history took place in the high modern period, after 1880 or so. There were telegraphs, newspapers, photography. There are countless libraries, foundations, and university collections full of historical documents.

Yet, it is controversial. The basic facts seem to have been pulverized and reshaped into a Manichaean cosmology of Jews and anti-Semites. Discussions of these facts have been turned into a free fire zone by the various fundamentalists just mentioned. This is despite the fact that these historical facts are documented on Wikipedia. They were completely uncontroversial fifty years ago, but have now been weaponized.

Controversy aside, this history is remarkable. In 1880, there was no Jewish nationalist movement named Zionism and no one outside of religious scholars spoke Hebrew. But, by 1947, there was a Hebrew-speaking Zionist Jewish state in Palestine. That this happened is down to a large pile of historical contingencies. Here is my short list of those contingencies:

Part one of the essay:
1. The rise of nationalism after the Dual Revolutions
2. The creation of Zionism as a nationalist movement
3. The anti-immigration law of Great Britain (1905)

Part two of the essay:
4. The Christian Zionist movement in Great Britain
5. World War 1 and the Balfour Declaration
6. The anti-immigration law of the United States (1924)
7. Naziism, World War 2 and the Holocaust
8. Conclusion

They form the sections of this essay, which is divided into two parts for reasons of length.

3.1 Nationalism - a cause that dominated the second half of the 19th century

The 19th century had gathered the materials for the inferno that zealous monotheists, both religious and secular, would ignite in the 20th century. The groundwork for this catastrophe was laid by the nationalist movements (which I already discussed in my February, 2018 review of The Age of Anger).

We are now so used to an ethnic-linguistic definition of nations that we forget that this was, essentially, invented in the later nineteenth century. Without going at length into the matter, it is enough to recall that the ideologists of the Irish movement did not begin to tie the cause of the Irish nation to the defence of the Gaelic language until some time after the foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893...As for the Zionist Jews, they went one better by identifying the Jewish nation with Hebrew, a language which no Jews had used for ordinary purposes since the days of the Babylonian captivity, if then. It had just (1880) been invented as a language for everyday use...by a man who began the process of providing it with a suitable vocabulary by inventing a Hebrew term for "nationalism", and it was learned as a badge of Zionist commitment rather than a means for communication.

The identification of nations with an exclusive territory created such problems over large areas of the world of mass migration...that an alternative definition of nationality was developed, notably in the Habsburg Empire and among the Jewish diaspora. It was here seen as inherent, not in a particular piece of the map to which a body of inhabitants were attached, but in the members of such bodies of men and women as considered themselves to belong to a nationality, wherever they happened to live. Supporters of the geographical and human theories of "the nation" were locked in embittered argument, notably..between Zionists and Bundists among the Jews...

As a matter of sociology, the non-territorialists were almost certainly right.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire

NOTE: Hobsbawm is Jewish.

The history is clear: Zionism was yet another nationalist movement inventing itself out of thin air.

The focal point of many of these nationalist controversies, much like today, was immigration. With the spread of railroads and steamships, it became possible for poor folks to simply walk away from bad situations in their home countries. Literally millions of people came to the US, before we finally closed off immigration in 1924 - due to a wave of xenophobia that is utterly consistent with the historical racism of America. We had no problem with German or Scandinavian immigrants, but we despised Chinese, Italian, Jewish, and even Irish immigrants as somehow inferior. A similar xenophobia had caused Great Britain to curtail immigration in 1905.

A large minority of those unwanted immigrants to the UK came from the various pieces of Poland and included many Jews of various religious orientations. Within Germany and Austria, the assimilating Jews were also viewed as somehow alien. The bottom line is that the newly emancipated Jews found themselves disliked in their new situations for reasons that were half prejudice and racism and half the adamant refusal of fundamentalist Jews to comply with the melting pot ideologies of the new nation states.

Bernard Gainer, in his classic study of the 1905 Aliens Act, points out that in the twenty years or so leading up to the passage of the Act (from about 1880 onwards),‘immigrant’ and ‘Jew’ ‘became synonymous terms’. The title of Gainer’s book, The Alien Invasion, reflects a phrase that was current in the anti-immigration rhetoric of the period.

http://www.balfourproject.org/the-other-arthur-balfour-protector-of-the-...

3.2 Zionism - yet another nationalist movement

Zionism arose in the late 19th century in reaction to anti-Semitic and exclusionary nationalist movements in Europe..Romantic nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe had helped to set off the Haskalah, or "Jewish Enlightenment", creating a split in the Jewish community between those who saw Judaism as their religion and those who saw it as their ethnicity or nation. The 1881–1884 anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire encouraged the growth of the latter identity, resulting in the formation of the Hovevei Zion pioneer organizations, the publication of Leon Pinsker's Autoemancipation, and the first major wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine – retrospectively named the "First Aliyah".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration

At this point, the essay enters dangerous waters. The word Zionism is on the Israeli/neocon list of banned words, a list akin to the Vatican's List of Banned Books (Index Liborum Prohibitorum). I have literally been banned from boards for using this term in a historical context to describe politics in the period between 1880 and 1948. The problem is that this term was proudly used by the people who started the ball rolling, for example, Theodore Herzl.

Theodore Herzl (1860-1904) was an Austro-Hungarian journalist, playwright, political activist, and writer who was the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state. Though he died before its establishment, he is known as the father of the State of Israel.

While Herzl is specifically mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence and is officially referred to as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State", i.e. the visionary who gave a concrete, practicable platform and framework to political Zionism, he was not the first Zionist theoretician or activist; scholars, many of them religious such as rabbis Yehuda Bibas, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer and Judah Alkalai, promoted a range of proto-Zionist ideas before him.

In 1897, at considerable personal expense, he founded the Zionist newspaper Die Welt in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, and planned the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. He was elected president of the Congress (a position he held until his death in 1904), and in 1898 he began a series of diplomatic initiatives to build support for a Jewish country. He was received by Wilhelm II on several occasions, one of them in Jerusalem, and attended the Hague Peace Conference, enjoying a warm reception from many statesmen there.

Wikipedia, Theodore Herzl

Those are just the names and places. When one talks about the policies of Zionism, one can begin to see why the state of Israel doesn't want to talk about it:

Zionism’s attitude toward anti-Semitism is more ambiguous than people realize.  Theodore Herzl, the Viennese journalist who founded modern Zionism, made this clear in the 1890s.  Rather than combatting anti-Semitism, he argued that Jews should accept it as an ineradicable fact of life.  Instead of opposing it, they should make use of it as a lever with which to pry their co-religionists loose from western society so that they would move to Palestine...

Herzl’s goal was twofold: to provide Jews with a homeland and to win over non-Jews by removing an irritant from their midst. Jews, he wrote, “continue to produce an abundance of mediocre intellects who find no outlet, and this endangers our social position as much as it does our increasing wealth. Educated Jews without means are now rapidly becoming Socialists.”  The more radical they become, the more Christian society would close ranks against them.  The solution was to provide them with a homeland of their own so they would cease subverting someone else’s.

- Daniel Lazare, Netanyahu’s Tolerance for Anti-Semitism Goes Back 120 Years

3.2.1 Zionism vs Bundism in Poland

In addition to being the age of nationalist melting pots, the era from 1880 until 1945 was the age of "scientific racism", the "white man's burden", and measuring skull shapes. And, at the time, Jews were considered another "race". So, the ball was rolling towards the Holocaust for half a century. The Dreyfuss Affair was an early indication of the ingrained anti-Semitism of Western Europe.

In this over-heated atmosphere, the urban Jews' successes were resented, while the rural Jews poverty and foreignness were feared and despised. Rural Jews, especially in Polish regions, remained unassimilated and in poverty. (Recall that the nation of Poland ceased to exist in 1795, when it had been partitioned among Prussia, Austria, and Russia.) They became part of the great wave of immigrations in the late 19th/early 20th century. Many settled in New York City, and a smaller number in London. At the time, the US welcomed all immigrants; but the UK was a different story, as we shall soon see.

At the same time, that rural Jews in Poland were retreating into isolation, urban Jews in Poland were organizing labor unions and flirting with Communism.

the Jewish Labour Bund, was a secular Jewish socialist party in the Russian Empire, active between 1897 and 1920. Remnants of the party continued to exist abroad. A member of the Bund is called a Bundist.

The Bund eventually came to strongly oppose Zionism, arguing that emigration to Palestine was a form of escapism. The Bund did not advocate separatism. Instead, it focused on culture, rather than a state or a place, as the glue of Jewish "nationalism." In this they borrowed extensively from the Austro-Marxist school, further alienating the Bolsheviks and Lenin. The Bund also promoted the use of Yiddish as a Jewish national language and to some extent opposed the Zionist project of reviving Hebrew.

The Bund won converts mainly among Jewish artisans and workers, but also among the growing Jewish intelligentsia. It led a trade union movement of its own. It joined with the Poalei Zion (Labour Zionists) and other groups to form self-defense organisations to protect Jewish communities against pogroms and government troops. During the Russian Revolution of 1905 the Bund headed the revolutionary movement in the Jewish towns, particularly in Belarus and Ukraine.

- Wikipedia, General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia

Thus begins the fateful association of Jewish people with Communism - a trope used by everyone from Hitler to Richard Nixon. In a typical irrational, tribalistic manner today's Russians associate Jewish people with the gangster-capitalist oligarchs who looted their country during the 1990s.

If you google for the Jewish Bund, you get a lot of hits calling them anti-Semitic, which is patent nonsense, since they were Jewish. They were anti-Zionist, and the Bund actually referred to the Zionists as anti-Semitic. Here is a non-judgemental reference.

3.3 Anti-immigration Laws

As mentioned above, Great Britain had a modest flood of Jewish immigrants. But, the country billed itself as a tolerant country. It had already had a Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Nevertheless, the racism was strong in the country that invented the "white man's burden". Also, emigration from the UK had provided a safety valve for a class-ridden, unequal society. Emigration dumped the poor and the troublesome (the Irish) into far away places like the penal colony of Australia, the U.S., and Canada. So, the general trend toward restricting immigration was no sudden surprise.

What is surprising to the historically uninformed (such as I was before I undertook this research) is who was the author of the restrictive legislation: Arthur Balfour, later to be the author of the Balfour Declaration. Also, deeply buried is his motivation: white supremacy - a motivation intertwined with Christian Zionism.

Here are two lengthy takes on Balfour's seemingly contradictory positions.

In 1905, while serving as Prime Minister, Balfour presided over the passage of the Aliens Act. This legislation put the first restrictions on immigration into Great Britain, and it was primarily aimed at restricting Jewish immigration. According to historians, Balfour had personally delivered passionate speeches about the imperative to restrict the wave of Jews fleeing the Russian Empire from entering Britain.

It may seem astonishing that Balfour, whose support of the Zionist cause has made him a hero among Jews, would have implemented anti-Jewish laws. But the truth is his support of Zionism stemmed from the exact same source as his desire to limit Jewish immigration to Britain.

Both can be traced back to his white supremacist beliefs. Balfour lived in an era of stirring nationalism, highly defined by ethno-religious identity. Because of these sentiments, the early 20th century was a time when ostensibly liberal Western nations struggled with the challenge of incorporating Jewish citizens. What the Zionists provided Balfour with was a solution to the challenges Jewish citizens posed to his ethno-nationalist vision, a solution that didn’t force him to reckon with them. Instead of insisting that societies accept all citizens as equals, regardless of racial or religious background, the Zionist movement offered a different answer: separation...

Remarkably, Balfour was unabashedly aware of the hypocrisy of his stance. “The weak point of our position of course is that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination,” he wrote in a letter to the British prime minister in 1919. “We do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country… the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

- The Jewish Forward, Its time to admit that Arthur Balfour was a white supremacist and an anti-Semite.

the government that introduced the Aliens Act also offered Theodor Herzl – in 1903 – the prospect of a Jewish homeland in British East Africa: the so-called Uganda proposal, which has been called ‘the first Balfour Declaration’. In the debate in Parliament over the Aliens Bill two years later, Balfour tried to make capital out of this offer. He used it to refute the charge of ‘inhumanity’ and to prove that he was not ‘indifferent to the interests’ of ‘the Jewish race’...

Jewish nationalism, for Balfour, was not only authentic, it was exemplary. It was also, he thought, vital – not only for Jews but also for the sake of Europe – that the Zionist movement should achieve its goal. For, as he saw it, the very virtue of Jews – their ‘intense national consciousness’ – was also the root of the ‘problem’ that they posed for the nations among whom they dwelt: the problem of refusing to blend into the general populace, of remaining ‘a people apart’...

He was, according to Colonel Edward House, President Woodrow Wilson’s chief aide, inclined to believe that nearly all Bolshevism and disorder of that sort is directly traceable to Jews. His ideas about Jews were rooted in the Old Testament brand of Christianity on which he was raised by his Evangelical mother. ((Much more on this in the next section. ))

Given his concept of nationhood, there were only two possible solutions to the problem that, as Balfour saw it, afflicted both the Jews and the countries where they lived. He put it succinctly to (Chaim) Weizmann when they met in London in December 1914. The ‘problem’, he said, ‘would not be solved until either the Jews became completely assimilated here or a normal Jewish society came into existence in Palestine’. (Significantly, Balfour ‘was thinking more of the West European Jews than of those of Eastern Europe’.) The third alternative – remaining in Europe as ‘a people apart’ – was not a possible solution; for, in his eyes as well as Weizmann’s, this was precisely the ‘Jewish problem’ that needed solving.

- The Balfour Project, The other Arthur Balfour

Here is a third reference about Balfour.

CONTINUE TO PART TWO.