"Jacqueline Rose proposes a suggestive analysis of a communal neurosis gripping Israel. Her examination . . . is topical and important."--Amos Elon, author of The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933.

"I never thought it would be possible to articulate the psyche of Zionism without descending into superlatives or foul language. Jacqueline Rose has succeeded admirably where others have failed."--Ilan Pappe, Haifa University, author of A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples

"Jacqueline Rose speaks as a Jewish woman who deeply feels the traumatic pain of her people and because of that pain is anguished by the violence towards another people entailed in the Zionist project. While one may dispute her thesis that the source of this violence lies within the inner logic of the Zionist vision, one cannot ignore the moral urgency of the questions she raises with trenchant intelligence and a probing psychological insight."--Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divinity School, University of Chicago, and Director, The Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"This is a brilliant and highly original book on the mindset of modern Zionism and its principal progeny--the State of Israel. Jacqueline Rose is a formidable scholar with a writing style that is at once forceful and subtle. She offers--with intellectual honesty and fair-mindedness--new and very compelling explanations of the gap between the theory and practice of Zionism."--Avi Shlaim, Oxford University

The Question of Zion

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

There is a cosmic element in nationality which is its basic ingredient. -Aaron David Gordon, "Our Tasks Ahead" (1920)

We shall discharge the great and difficult task that is laid upon us only if we are true to the great vision of the Latter Days which Israel's Prophet's foresaw and which will surely come to pass. -David Ben-Gurion, "Science and Ethics: The Contributions of Greece, India and Israel" (1960)

Terror drives much theorisation Into a tumult of totalisation. Whatever the problem, Death or Passion, One solves it in transcendental fashion. -Gershom Scholem, "The Official Abecedarium" (to Walter Benjamin, December 5, 1927)

We have nationalised God. -Christian Gauss, "The End of Nationalism" (1934)

On December 12, 1665, Shabtai Zvi, mystical messiah, advanced on the Portuguese Synagogue in Smyrna accompanied by a motley gathering of "everyone who was in distress and trouble and all vain and light persons." The rabbis, who did not believe in him, had locked the entrance, whereupon Zvi asked for an axe and hacked down the door. Once inside, he preached a blasphemous sermon, exempted the congregation from the duty of prayer, and announced that the Pentateuch was holier than the Torah; he then proceeded to appoint his first brother king of Turkey and his second emperor of Rome, and to distribute kingdoms to the various members, men and women, of the congregation.

On the following Monday, there was "great rejoicing as the Scroll of the Law was taken from the Ark"; Zvi sang songs including impure ones (Christian songs in the vernacular), declared the day his own personal Sabbath, and at night held a banquet where he distributed "money and candies" and forced all, Jews and Gentiles alike, to utter the ineffable Name. This was, according to Gershom Scholem, from whose magisterial study of Zvi I take these details, the scandal that inaugurated his rule over the Jewish community of Smyrna. From the moment Shabtai Zvi was declared by Nathan of Gaza, his spiritual counselor and companion, fit to be the king of Israel, his reputation spread like wildfire across Arabia and to Europe. "Jews in Holland, England and Venice-hard-headed business men, bankers and traders," observed Chaim Weizmann-who would become Israel's first president-to the Palestine Royal Commission in Jerusalem in 1936, "gathered round this man." A monstrous figure-Scholem describes him as the most hideous and uncanny figure in the whole history of Jewish messianism-Zvi fired the imaginations of the worldwide Jewish community by scandalizing supporters and opponents alike. Performance artist of the forbidden, Zvi presented a paradox-not that of a saint who suffers and whose suffering is mysteriously bound to God, but that of a saint who is outrageous, a saint who sins. For Scholem, who runs a line directly from Shabtai Zvi to the Zionism that is the focus of this study, this paradox is key: "A faith based on this destructive paradox has lost its innocence." Destruction or even wantonness lay at the root of Zvi's capacity to inspire. The Messiah brushes, consorts with evil as much as he defeats it. Zvi exhorted his followers to blasphemy. His power rested at least partially in the relish and agony with which he appeared to violate sacred law.

As our Smyrna story tells us, Zvi also arrogated to himself the power to distribute the kingdoms of the world among women and men. He may have been divinely inspired (more later), but his reign was also firmly over this earth. Proto-Zionist, his historic task was to return the Jews to Palestine. According to Weizmann, not only did Cromwell believe in Zvi's mission, but it was this belief that lay behind his historic decision to invite the Jews to return to England (there were then no Jews in England, and it was apparently believed that the Messiah could come only when the Dispersion was complete). It is central to Jewish messianism-to the consternation of official Christianity-that messianic hope is material and carnal as well as spiritual, fully embodied in political time. It must be visible, not unseen. The Jews, writes Scholem, "tended to pride themselves on this alleged shortcoming," seeing no spiritual progress in a messianic conception that announced its abdication from the sphere of history. "Of the wondrous certainty of pure inwardness," characteristic of Christian belief, the Jews thought nothing: "I do not say: thought little, but thought nothing at all."

In Jewish belief, history was still hovering, expectant. Redemption was public and historic, a grandiose act to be dramatized on the world's stage. Zvi's proclaimed kingship of Israel became a literally self-fulfilling prophecy. In the same year as the Smyrna scandal, reports started to spread of the arrival of the lost tribes of Israel. From Tunis it was claimed that the 1665 caravan from Mecca could not leave, as the city was besieged by the children of Israel. There is an uncanny anticipation here of Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, who expended much of his energies in futile diplomatic attempts to negotiate with the Turkish sultan. During the 1665 siege, it was reported that the sultan offered up Alexandria and Tunis to the conquerors on condition that they give up Mecca, "but they have demanded the entire Holy Land." From Sale in Morocco, the Ten Tribes of Israel were reported as appearing daily in greater and greater multitudes, about eight thousand troops covering a vast tract of ground-strangers, an unknown People whose language those who went to inquire of them "understood not." An army of mythic potency, although they carry no guns-"their Arms are swords, bows, arrows and lances"-"whosoever goeth to contend with this People in Battel, are presently vanquished and slain." At their head, their "Chief Leader," was a "Holy Man" who "marcheth before them, doing miracles." These reports spread. Letters from Egypt referring to the appearance of the lost tribes in Arabia arrived in Amsterdam and were carried from there across Europe. When the reports from Arabia and Morocco merged, the "Arabian" army became the vanguard of an even larger Jewish army advancing from Africa. With every report the numbers grew, from tens of thousands, to three hundred thousand, to millions.

What interests me in this uncanny story-the reason why I start here-is its strange inmixing of visionary and political power. Zvi reads like an extravagant parody of inspirational man and deadly political chief. He communes deliriously with the Godhead, while hacking down the synagogue with one hand and distributing kingdoms with the other. His catastrophic radiance transmutes, almost instantaneously, into worldly authority. In a flash it empowers itself. Zvi creates a nation of multitudes out of thin air. The Ten Tribes of Israel are conquerors, invested messianically with unconditional, absolute might: "none are able to stand up against them"; "He shall cry, yea, roar, he shall prevail against his enemies." When I interviewed Tamara and Aaron Deutsch at the Allon Shvut settlement outside Jerusalem in the summer of 2002 for a documentary I was presenting for Channel 4 Television in England, they told me that, although the situation in Israel had deteriorated sharply since they had arrived from Staten Island only a short eighteen months before, they nonetheless felt "invincible." I found in their dialogue the same medley of comfort and horror (comfort in horror) that Scholem places at the heart of one strand of apocalyptic messianism. According to messianic legend, Israel-although it will ultimately be led through all tribulations to national redemption-will have to bear its share of suffering in the final cataclysm. Redemption will not be realized without ruin and dread. For the vision to hold, there must be slaying and being slain. "We went to visit the hospitals," the Deutsches explained; "they told us that due to this intifada ... by blowing us up in buses and in crowded malls and wherever they might be, the birthrate has gone up dramatically." This is horror in the service of national increase (the idea of a surfeit of horror acquires a new meaning). In 1929 and 1936-39, the years of the worst Arab-Jewish confrontations in Palestine, the number of olim, or pioneers, among emigrants climbed, only to fall during periods of relative calm; the rate of emigration from Britain rose from 760 to 832 in the year after the Yom Kippur War, increased with the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, and continued to climb up to 2002 (although by 2003 immigration was at its lowest level since 1989). "We are," insisted the Deutsches, "happier than ever"-even though there are nights when they are "spooked" in their own homes: "You are just part of the destiny and the mystery and life." Not quite exultant, certainly exhilarated. Danger, they acknowledged, was a pull: "People love reading and hearing about destruction and terror. They lap it up like there's no tomorrow." Note how the vision of the apocalypse-"like there's no tomorrow"-has slipped into the common verbal coinage of the day.

Two years later, this language has in many ways become even louder and more and fervent than before. In May 2004 Ariel Sharon's plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip and take out the settlements was defeated in a poll of his party, Likud. "If, God forbid, there is a disengagement," states Nissim Bracha of Gush Katif, one of the key settlements in Gaza designated by the plan, "I am going to destroy everything." For Hagi Ben Artzi, religious Zionist and member of Gush Emunim (the Block of the Faithful), a national disaster is approaching: "And not an ordinary disaster, but in monstrous proportions-the collapse of the process of Jewish redemption." To remove one settlement is to destroy not just the spiritual foundations of Zionism, not just the State of Israel, but the whole world. A minimal return of land-enacted unilaterally, without negotiation with the Palestinians, and promising nothing even vaguely close to a viable Palestinian statehood-is a violation of the Torah. Ben Artzi will commit himself to mesirut nevesh, or total devotion (when asked, he does not object to the analogy with the Islamic concept of martyrdom).

Catastrophe will be met with catastrophe. The word of God transcends the laws of state. "We have another partner in these decisions," Effi Eitam of the National Religious Party explained, as he threatened to withdraw from the coalition in response to Sharon's plan, "the master of the universe. We must show the master of the universe that we are willing to sacrifice our souls for the land." According to one strand of Jewish thought, God's personal dignity requires the redemption of Israel. Without it, his name is profaned. Ariel Sharon is guilty of defilement. Behind the rhetoric we can recognize the signs of more prosaic forms of disgust. "That this beautiful place will become the home of Arabs," states Ofra Shoat of Bdolah (another threatened settlement in Gaza), "This is something I can't digest." These voices are not representative of the whole of Israel-far from it; more than half of the nation supported Sharon's disengagement plan. But today in Israel, catastrophe has become an identity. Ha'aretz feature writer Doron Rosenblum entitles a recent article "Cashing In on Catastrophe," or "how it comes about that every event and/or terrorist attack 'only proves', and even reinforces, what we already thought anyway." In a cruel twist, horror, however genuinely feared, redeems Israel's view of itself.

For contemporary Jewish thinker David Hartman, founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, messianism poses the greatest threat to Israel today. The nation must be brought back to earth, to the slow accommodations and political work of nonredemptive time, if it is not to destroy itself. God must be lifted out of history. With the birth of Israel, nationalism became the new messianism-the aura of the sacred, with all its glory and tribulations, passed to the state. Israel is not the only nation to believe its mandate is holy. Nor do all its citizens believe in the nation's divine sanction. For that very reason, I suggest, Israel offers us something of dramatic resonance for thinking about nationalism in the modern world: a nation vested in, at times struggling with-but repeatedly failing to discard-the mantle of God. Throughout the slow growth of Zionism as spirit and idea, messianism has cast its supernal light over the birth of Israel, "licking at the edges of its thought." According to Scholem, a line can be run from acute messianism to Zionism, but Shabtai Zvi's revolutionary messianism, and indeed the whole strand of apocalyptic messianism, have been more or less suppressed, a suppression that has robbed Judaism of one of its most creative and destructive components. In the process, a key component of Zionist self-imagining has been pushed to one side, represented as extreme only, as if being in extremis, politically and cosmically, had not always been a central part of the inner formation, if not quite rationale, of the Jewish state. Part of the purpose of this first chapter will therefore be to revive the line from messianism to Zionism and carry it over to some of the secular founders of the nation who, historians of Zionism mostly insist, have nothing to do with it. In fact for Scholem, without Shabtai Zvi, there would have been no Zionist secularism, whose break with Orthodoxy was made possible only by Shabtaism's iconoclastic and anarchic "breeze"; the doctrine of the holiness of sin paved the way for indifference to all traditional Jewish law. Certainly the Orthodox opponents of early Zionism, responding to the first stirrings of the Hibbat Zion movement in the early nineteenth century, did not hesitate to make the link: "They are a new sect like that of Shabatai Zevi," pronounced the rabbi of Brisk in 1889, "may the names of evil-doers rot."

At its most simple, Zionism can be understood as the first Jewish messianic movement after Zvi. This was certainly the view of Hannah Arendt, who saw Shabtaism as the "last great Jewish political activity," and the Jewish people, once the messianic hope of Shabtaism had been dashed, as essentially adrift in a world whose course no longer made sense. Once it collapsed, the Jews lost, not only their faith in "a divine beginning and divine culmination of history," but also their guide "through the wilderness of bare facts." Zionism can then be seen as the first movement to pick up-even more, to revive from the dead-this forsaken strain. In Rome and Jerusalem, which predates Herzl's epoch-making pamphlet Der Judenstaat-The Jewish State or The Jews' State-by more than thirty years, Moses Hess, socialist, early Zionist, claims messianism as the specific Jewish contribution to world culture: "the moment of the eternal quest, the element of permanent ferment" without which the Jews are "ghostlike," "unable to live or be revived alike." But in tracing this path, I also hope to get closer to what I see as one of the peculiarities of Zionism as a movement, a characteristic that might explain something of its compelling inner force. Horror can reside at the heart of divinity. It can give comfort, be a form of solace in an unkind, at times horrendous, world. Jewish dereliction and messianism could be seen as the two sources of Zionist discourse; or "terror" and "exultation," to use Edward Said's terms (he is discussing the need for Arab understanding of the "internal cohesion and solidity" of Israel for the Jewish people). There is perhaps no more dangerous mixture for a political movement than that of being at once horrified by history and divinely inspired. From the beginning, Zionism sets out its stall on this fantasmatic terrain. "I believe," wrote J. L. Talmon-early lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in The Nature of Jewish History-"that Jews are to be defined as a community of fate." Why is it that whatever happens, however bloody and dire, Israel always appears-at once fervently and tragically-to be somehow fulfilling itself? I include in that claim the possibility voiced recently by Daniel Barenboim and David Grossman, as well as Yaakov Perry, head of Shin Bet from 1988 to 1995, among others, that for the first time since its creation Israel might cease to exist. Zionism has always felt itself under threat and often for good reason-the Arabs did not want, and many still do not want, a Jewish state in their midst. But things become more complicated if disaster is not only feared but also anticipated as part of God's plan. In the messianic view of world history, it is part of the cosmic order of things that the nation must live on a knife's edge.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Question of Zionby Jacqueline Rose Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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