In this post, I continue my reflections on the morality of Jewish immigration to The Holy Land in the 19th and 20th centuries. I focus on the accusation that Israel is guilty of colonialism, and characterizations of Palestinians as the indigenous people of The Holy Land.
Many critics of Israel routinely describe it as a colonial entity, and characterize Palestinians as the--that is, the only--indigenous people of the Holy Land. In this post, I will dissect this way of presenting matters, and explain why I think it is misleading, offensive to Jews, and unhelpful for creating peace. I will make some positive suggestions as to how I think the situation might be better described.
Disclaimer: I'm not out to dismiss Palestinians' claim to the land, or their claim to be indigenous to the land. My problem is only with those who want to dismiss similar Jewish claims. COLONIALISM: To count as colonizing in the strict sense of the term, a group of people has to be acting on the behalf of some other autonomous polity-- some other government or organized society.[1] It's true that some Zionist leaders saw the Yishuv as an outpost of Europe and marketed it as such (especially to European would-be backers). This is an enduring Palestinian perception of Israeli Jews. But to endorse this description uncritically is to grossly oversimplify. For one thing, as I've stressed in other posts, people who make these kinds of claims routinely fail to distinguish between the Zionist leadership and the population of Jewish immigrants. There is an important difference between saying that the Zionist leadership conceived of the Yishuv as an outpost of Europe and saying this about the majority of the Jews who immigrated. Yet, whatever one might say about the Zionist leadership, the claim that Jewish immigrants to the Holy Land between 1850 and 1950 generally saw themselves as creating an outpost of Europe is an empirical claim that requires evidence to be credible. For another thing, even the Zionist leadership was not intentionally acting on Britain's behalf, nor in any direct or intentional way were they acting on behalf of any of the countries they left behind. Indeed, most Zionist leaders were not intentionally acting on behalf of European civilization, with which Zionist ideology anyway does not fully identify (see below). They were acting on behalf of the Jewish people. The most that one could say is that Jews who immigrated brought some aspects of European culture--foods, technologies, forms of government, clothing, languages, ways of life. But that does not make them colonizers; this is a thing that migrants of all kinds do. What is accurate about the charge of colonialism has nothing to do with who the Jewish immigrants were or what they did. It has to do with what the Palestinians experienced. The Palestinians were indeed colonized (by the British), and from their point of view the difference between what the British did and what the Jewish immigrants did during this period is irrelevant. But, it is not helpful to characterize the conflict in terms that completely erase the experience of one of the relevant parties-- in this case, Jews. [1] I'm aware that some theorists have more inclusive definitions of colonialism. We can discuss this, and what importance it may have, in the comments or in further updates. THE JEWISH CONNECTION: To unqualifiedly accuse the Yishuv of colonialism, or to deny that Jews are indigenous, is to ignore what is Middle Eastern--indigenous, even!--in Jewish culture. This is offensive and also completely ignorant about Jewish traditions. People often say, "Sure, the Jewish religion comes from the Middle East, but Ashkenazi Jews are culturally Europeans". But there are some serious problems with this statement. First, there is a tendency of those who think of Ashkenazi Jews as Europeans to focus only on the most Europeanized Ashkenazi Jews--the largely assimilated Jews that flourished in Western Europe before the Holocaust and made a significant contribution to Western civilization as scientists, artists, etc. But historically, the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews lived in Eastern Europe and (although these matters are always complex) tended to be much more religious, to practice a Judaism that was itself much more traditional, and to be much less assimilated to the surrounding European cultures than their Western European brethren were. A second huge problem with the claim that "Judaism is Middle Eastern but Ashkenazim are European" is that it ignores the fact that religion is part of culture. In particular the Jewish religion as practiced in the traditional way (which, again, it was by most Jews east of Germany, comprising most Ashkenazi Jews) governs every aspect of daily life down to the tiniest minutiae, such as which shoe one puts on first and in what order one ties them. Many of these minutiae connect Jews to the Holy Land in a quite visceral way. For example:
In addition to flying in the face of these empirical facts, the claim that Ashkenazi Jews are nothing but Europeans dismisses their deeply held, longstanding self-identification with the ancient Israelites and their Jewish descendants. Of course, these cultural narratives are never 100% accurate; there's always much more to the story. As strictly endogamous as Jews can be, they have always to some degree intermarried and borrowed culturally from their neighbors. But at least, one can't imply that there is no truth at all to the Jewish national self-conception without doing serious research and engaging with the supporting evidence. UPSHOTS: To be polished in an unfolding series of further updates... (*) The Jews (including Ashkenazi Jews) have a deep, historically legitimated connection to The Holy Land, if not amounting to indigeneity then to something similar; and because of this connection (to say nothing of pogroms and the Holocaust) there was a measure of historic justice in Jewish immigration to the region in the 19th century through the present. Note that, in principle, someone could grant (*) and then simply insist that this is merely pro tanto justice; there was also plenty of injustice received on the Arab side, which then renders the "all-things-considered" status of Jewish immigration as unjust. In response to this: I myself do not grant that Jewish immigration was all-things-considered unjust. But I'm willing to concede that there was an element of injustice in it. After all, no people has ever consented to become a minority in its own home. I can understand why, between the 1920s and 1948, Palestinians tried to stop the massive waves of Jewish immigration and land purchases, and rioted when their efforts proved futile. There were certainly elements of anti-Semitism in their movement at this time, but there was also a legitimate, reasonable fear of losing control of their homeland to the newcomers. Quite generally, there are simply limits to a host population's ability to absorb huge numbers of people who are very different from themselves, even when the immigrants in question are (a) refugees and (b) indigenous people returning home. ...At any rate, I don't think that the response to (*) that I just presented rises to the level of anti-Semitism. It's a view that, while I don't like it, I can be in conversation with. I'd be happy to see more of the kind of people who accuse Israel of colonialism take that view, rather than the horrible positions that they overwhelmingly do take. (See, e.g., the "Views" section on Omar Barghouti's wiki page. He is unfortunately not an outlier in Palestinian society.)
6 Comments
Horazio
5/31/2019 11:28:14 am
I have a question about the indigeneity/Europeanness/immigration issue: it's not clear to me what the connection is between the question of whether Ashkenazi Jews are "European in culture" and whether they had the right to immigrate to Land of Israel, *provided* that they originated from the Land of Israel. (When I say "originate", I roughly mean this: intermarriage and acculturation notwithstanding, there is an unbroken chain of adjacent generations between the Ancient Israelites and modern Ashkenazi Jews such that the latter are in some salient sense continuous with former. Compare: Palestinians claim to be in some salient sense continuous with the ancient Phoenicians and Canaanites, despite the fact that they speak a language and - for the most part - practice a religion whose origin is in the Arabian peninsula. For more on this, see below.)
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LiberalZionist
6/1/2019 06:23:15 pm
Hi Horazio! Thanks again for some very stimulating thoughts.
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Horazio
6/2/2019 02:28:59 am
Just a quick clarification: I'm sympathetic to your point that the relevant sense of continuity doesn't have to be genetic. I was trying to operate with the premises of a typical anti-Zionist, who does seem to assume that genetics plays an important factor in it. (Maybe someday you could write a post about the hypocrisy of self-titled leftists who, of all people, presuppose such a crude blood-and-soil notion of peoplehood when criticizing Zionism.)
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LiberalZionist
6/2/2019 03:58:58 pm
You write,
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Horazio
6/3/2019 12:03:28 pm
"re: blood-and-soil notion of peoplehood
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LiberalZionist
6/3/2019 02:11:27 pm
“The Khazar hypothesis about the origin of Ashkenazi Jews”
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