Only 'Sort Of'?

"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu'a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." Moshe Dayan, Address to the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), Haifa (as quoted in Ha'aretz, 4 April 1969)

In this week's copy of The Australian Jewish News, there's a glossy magazine - Every Woman - a production of the Womens International Zionist Organisation NSW. It contains an interesting feature, Holiday in the past, on Israel's 9 "leading boutique hotels." Says the front cover blurb: "Israel reveals its unique history through its hotels." But dip into this feature and you find that 5 out of the 9 are Palestinian to their foundations:

The American Colony Hotel, Jerusalem: Originally belonged to "the Turkish Pasha and his 4 wives." PALESTINIAN

The Shirat Hayam Hotel, Tiberius: A renovated "1850 building." The hotel was renamed Star of the East in 1946 in honour of the great Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. PALESTINIAN

The Cinema Hotel, Tel Aviv: "The old Esther Cinema, one of the first movie theatres built in 1939." 

The Alegra Hotel, Jerusalem: "Alegra was the daughter of a Rabbi who lived in Ein Kerem at the beginning of last century. Jabara was the neighbouring son of a wealthy Christian merchant. The two fell in love, eloped and had 3 children." PALESTINIAN 

The Varsano Hotel, Neve Tzedek, Tel Aviv

The Colony Hotel, Haifa: Originally the Appinger Hotel, it belonged to the German Appinger family which fled to Germany in WW 2.

The Efendi Hotel, Acre: One of the "glorious palaces that served the Ottoman rulers in the 19th century." PALESTINIAN 

The Fauzi Azar Inn, Nazareth: A former "200-year-old Arab mansion." PALESTINIAN

And should you consider asking for Israeli cuisine in any of these establishments, keep in mind this little exchange:

Stefan Gates: But is humous originally Jewish or Arabic?

Gil Hovav, Israeli food writer: Of course it's Arabic. Humous is Arabic. Falafel, our national Israeli dish, is completely Arabic and this salad that we call an Israeli Salad, actually it's an Arab salad, Palestinian salad. So, we sort of robbed them of everything.

(From the BBC's Cooking in the Danger Zone: Israel & Palestinian Territories, 13/3/08)

Ersatz Israel 2

"Whereas the new immigrants and their leaders, Dr Weizmann and Mr Brandeis and all the rest, had nothing of their own, even to force. The leaders talked so much of the Jewish nation and of Jewish culture that it was not seen that they had neither of these things in their baggage. They brought culture with them, but it was not Jewish: they brought Jews with them who proceeded to regenerate Palestine in a way any Occidental might have employed.

"They made great play of their introduction of Hebrew, which they caused to be made into an official language. On the very postage-stamps of Palestine they had the words 'Eretz Israel' ('the land of Israel') placed. But it would have been nearer to truth if the inscription had been 'Ersatz Israel.' They might talk Hebrew, but there was not a Hebrew deed done by them; they had, in a sense, to translate all their acts into it. The Hebrew with which they covered the surface of the National Home was like one of those figures in eighteenth-century farthingales which some people use to cover their telephones. That appliance, in fact, might well serve as an illustration of what, under their veil of Hebrew letters, the political Zionists represented. They were as utilitarian, progressive and scientific as telephones, and not a whit more national. In those early 'twenties the immigrants no more brought to Palestine the first fruits of a distinctive culture and civilization than these would have been brought there by the imposition of 31,000 telephone instruments.

"Nor, during the years which have passed since then, have their successors contributed the overdue crop. Just the reverse. As their numbers and power in the country have increased, all they have done has been to suck more and more national life out of it. Their institutions have grown more and more extraneous, to culminate in their monstrous Tel-Aviv, a great false hump strapped on to the shrinking back of Palestine.

"There are over 100,000 Jews in Tel-Aviv and none but Jews in it, yet it is as much a Jewish city as is London by Aldgate, or any other 'Jewish Quarter' in any other Western metropolis. In these 'Jewish Quarters' who but the Jews have been assimilated? The Kosher notices, the shop signs in strange characters, all the emblems of the sort meeting the eye, are nothing to set against the anglicization of Aldgate's denizens. Jewish life in the 'Jewish Quarter' has no doubt its faithful core, but for ever-increasing thousands it becomes a matter of a few labels, a few dishes of food, a round of Saturday sabbaths approximating more and more each year to the dechristianized Sunday sabbaths of the enveloping multitudes.

"Tel-Aviv is the embodiment of these conditions. It is nothing but the largest of all 'Jewish Quarters,' and, since its inhabitants come from so many sources, possibly the least individual, least nationalist, most heteroclite of any.

"This is a staggering thought, when it is remembered that by their own title, falsified though it be, the political Zionists were imposed upon Palestine in order to install there a thoroughly Jewish national civilization. Despite all their ability they have been unable to produce anything of this save here and there some of its unwarranted outer symbols. The truth is that their ability has no Jewish character, and only aims at producing the common occidental type of public works and places of instruction and of entertainment. The university, the technical schools, the laboratories, the experimental farms, the friendly societies, the discussion-groups, the symphony orchestras - they have them all, and a host of like institutions.

"The National Home has even blossomed into 'lidos' in the Hyde Park manner, imitations of imitations. As an ingenuous British Jew said to an acquaintance of mine, to whom he was discoursing enrapturedly of developments on the Zionist rivieras, 'It's wonderful what they've done in a few years. It'll soon be like Ramsgate.' Precisely.

"Nothing but Ramsgate indeed in its least Kentish aspect or some Central European spa was ever to be expected. In trivial and minor things the National Home population always has had the mentality and the practices which have corresponded to those of its leaders in weighty and major things. The Zionist leaders summoning Mr Ormsby-Gore to heel, the Zionist scientist spending long vigils at his experimental bench, the Zionist schoolmasters in their classrooms, the Zionist industrialist popularizing some product, the Zionist shopkeeper arranging some spring or autumn sale, the Zionist builder, lawyer, or commercial agent - all are part of the familiar socio-political circle in which our Western world gyrates, and gyrates till its dingier rims appear. Thereabouts, in Palestine, overfleshed women, dowdily nude, sunning themselves in shorts, form a section of circumference accustomedly vulgar to ourselves, but impious and ever rankling to the Christians and Moslems of that land.

"In major matters or minor, in meritorious or meritless or indifferent things, these people, these political Zionists, have shown themselves in fine capable of establishing in Palestine an up-to-date community, but from the start incapable of establishing one that was Jewish.

"Like so many other things, this deficiency of theirs has remained hidden, or unmentioned. It may be that to mention it now will only provoke the retort that to condemn the political Zionists because they are not national is unfair. The one thing which they are trying to achieve, it will be said, is this very nationalism, and if they have not achieved it immediately that is because of the enormous handicap upon them. Dispersed about the world, they have not been in a position to acquire any form of culture except the non-Jewish culture of the particular place in which one group or another of them has lived. For whatever task they may undertake their equipment is un-Jewish, and it is unreasonable therefore to expect them to transform their holdings in Palestine into a centre in all aspects Jewish at once.

"The plea is plausible, but is no answer to the charge. Evidently enough the political Zionists could only bring with them to Palestine an un-Jewish equipment (considering this now, for argument's sake, as in involuntary act of theirs). But what they could have brought with them, what it was necessary they should have brought with them for any sort of self-justification, was the Jewish spirit. If they were what they said they were, Jews and nothing else, they were bound to possess this; it must be automatically in their keeping. With the Jewish spirit directing them, their practical handicap of un-Jewish education would not have mattered, for the spirit would have shone through in their own new, untrammelled surroundings. From those first days of 1920 it would have manifested itself in open compunction if this or that handicap forced them into developing their unique National Home in any commonplace international way. However fine the work they might accomplish in the international style, they would have been dissatisfied with working thus. They would have been trying continually to alter their manner of work. They would have given voice to their discontent too, for their natural feelings must have welled up in them altogether beyond containing.

"That was an acid test of their genuineness: would they show compunction? It was a test in which, them and since, they have failed. Not compunction but contentment has marked their attitude from the beginning. They have been self-satisfied to think that their National Home reproduced so exactly the chief institutions of the countries in which they were born or in which they made their way. They have been proud of their carbon-copies of all the latest gospels, and have said so. They have vaunted the perfect parallelism of their lectureships and of their statistical bureaus and of their board-rooms with those most recently established in the West.

"Besides, their attitude to the surviving Jewish culture was proof in itself of their lack of the Jewish spirit. They were determined to compel those rabbis and layfolk who clung to this culture to subject it now to the political Zionist doctrine. 'We are being compelled to making common cause with these false Zionists,' Chief Rabbi Zonnenfeld protested to me when I came to Jerusalem and met him. 'The Government aids and abets them by declaring that their must be a single Jewish Community in Palestine representing all Jews, and that one under the control of the so-called Zionist Organization. We are to sit with people who desecrate the Sabbath, we, who are the true moral foundation of Zionism. In Palestine alone we number four thousand fathers of families, the delegates of at least a million Orthodox of the Ashkenazi in the world.'

"This was the major compulsion, this driving of the Orthodox into the service of a profane ideal. In much the same way, the Hebrew tongue was driven into the service of political propaganda. The politicians scored a point by using Hebrew as the common tongue. Gentiles thought it a proof of their innate Judaism. But for the Orthodox, for the true Zionists, Hebrew was a tongue sacred to prayer, too sacred to be debased to ordinary uses. For common intercourse they mostly used Yiddish or such Western tongues as they knew. But now the immigrants were compelling the use of Hebrew for everything. They were like innovators devalorizing poetry by driving everyone to shop and to gossip in pseudo-Shelley or practical-Keats.

"But it was not the restored Hebrew of the immigrants which contained the Jewish spirit, it was the Hebrew of the altar and the Yiddish of the Orthodox. Their Yiddish had become the vehicle of Hebrew thought, which was the soul of Jewry. The Hebrew of the immigrants, the Hebrew of the politicians, the Hebrew of the Zionist Organization, was on the other hand full of Yiddish thought. That is to say that at its best it was used by them for the grafted ideas, the part-Germanic, part-British, part-American, part-Danubian theories which they professed. Their Hebrew was the dialect of professors and of publicists in all tongues, unnational.

"Thus, then, in outlook and in act, the new immigrants, the political Zionists, showed themselves not the heirs but the changelings of Israel. Far from being anything national to Palestine, they did not even know their own true nationalism when they encountered it there amidst their pre-War population. To them it seemed nothing but an archaic religiosity." (pp 413-17)

Ersatz Israel 1

Political Zionists like to present themselves as the true representatives of Judaism, and their creed, political Zionism, as a sort of vital ember that had for centuries been smouldering away within this ancient faith, waiting (improbably) only for the likes of Herzl, Weizmann, and Ben-Gurion to fan it into the flames of the toxic settler-colonial power trip we see wreaking havoc today in Palestine.

In fact, political Zionism, while paying lip service to, and exploiting at every turn, traditional Judaism, is nothing more than an aping of the ethno-national volkisch movements of 19th century Europe. As such it is the very antithesis of traditional Judaism.

Few outside the ranks of anti-Zionist religious Jews have so beautifully nailed the artificiality and inauthenticity of political Zionism quite as well as JMN Jeffries. Here, in two parts, is his polemic on this theme, taken from Chapter 24 of his majesterial analysis of the Palestine problem, Palestine: The Reality (1939). Chapter 24 is appropriately (and wickedly) titled Ersatz Israel:

"The 31,000 immigrants of 1919-23... restored the Jewish population to about its pre-War level. Therefore, as has been said, there was nothing so much in their numbers to alter the status of the Arabs. It was their new footing which altered that. It was this arrival of the Jewish immigrants 'by right and not by sufferance,' as Mr Churchill was to define it, which destroyed the status of the Arabs, who found themselves changed in a flick from being the owners of their home to being one of a pair of lodgers in it...

"Hitherto the Turks had been their landlords indeed, but the key of the house had been the Arabs' and the Arabs' only. Now the Arabs were presented with latchkeys to their own hearths, Zionist strangers were given identical latchkeys, and in a day or two were pointing out the rooms in which they had been born.

"There was this too. The immigrants of the early 'twenties brought with them ideas and schemes of life which were incompatible with their own pretensions. Later on, as their numbers grew, these ideas and schemes, developed and propagated, were to threaten the extinction of Arabism. For the moment what they signified was, of all things, the extinction of any Jewish national sense there might have been in Palestine, and of any basis of unity there might have been there between Jews and Arabs.

"The political Zionists often enough advise attention to the good terms on which the pre-War Zionists of Palestine had lived with the Arabs. They add that if it were not for the intrigues of various interested parties these good relations would have continued with themselves. The Arabs draw a different moral from the same fact. They point out that the pre-War Jews were on pretty good terms with the surrounding population primarily because they made no attack on the position of that population, and secondly because their ways and customs fitted in reasonably well with the ways and customs of the land itself. 

"What follows from this deserves every consideration. The ways and customs of the pre-War Jews, which thus fitted into the Arab scheme of things, were essentially Jewish. Therefore when Jews were real Jews and real Zionists, Zionists by devotion and not by 'right,' they were acceptable enough to the Arabs (the question of peril through mass migration not having arisen). When Jews, however, clamoured to enter the Holy Land as though it was theirs by title, yet the moment they were inside behaved as non-Jews and erased or hid the Scrolls of the Law beneath voters'-lists, by-laws of the G.F.J.L. (General Federation of Jewish Labour), agenda for Rutenberg company meetings and other such Occidental commonplaces - then the Arabs would have nothing to do with them. They could accept into their midst Jews who had some national character. They would not accept the new Zionist immigrants who had no national character at all, yet were full of bold and outrageous claims based upon something which they did not possess, and presented Trades-Union certificates and Directors' reports as the insignia of Moses.

"The pre-War Jews had held traces of cousinship with the Arabs, but they had never tried to make capital out of this fact, nor indeed had mentioned it at all. But cousinship had been pressed incongruously upon the suffering Feisal by Jews of the new type, such as Dr Weizmann and Professor Frankfurter and various gentlemen from New York and Boston, who had no trace of it. The Weizmanns and the Frankfurters were men of ability, but when they proffered themselves as 'cousins of the Arabs' they were ludicrous.

"The immigrants of the new 'mandatory' disposition, certainly all those younger ones who set the note for the attitude of the Zionist mass, were of this Frankfurter type, though they did not come from the United States. Mostly these young people came from Eastern Europe, but were hardly at all Eastern. They were European in a generalized way, without territorial connections but breathing the ideas in the European air. There had been indeed not so much physical side to their lives. Theirs was a disembodied existence, with no real home save in what was thought or spoken. They had grown up in books, and they lived in speeches.

"Jewish Palestine, as they found it, did not please them in the least. They thought of the old P.I.C.A. or Rothschild colonies, founded by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, parasitic. They found even such self-supporting farm-settlements as Zichron Jakob or Petach Tikvah not at all to their taste: I was to hear the latter called an 'agricultural ghetto.' As for the Jews of traditional type, the Jews of the 'Wailing Wall' and of the pockets of survival round Safad, they thoroughly despised them.

"The Jews of the 'Wailing Wall' were found good enough by them, it is true, as a means to an end, as living evidence for their claim of historic succession. But that was for the benefit of the outer world. Amongst themselves the newcomers hardly regarded their predecessors as alive. They looked on them as faded parchments employed as proof of pedigree, or as fossilized strata on which they had to gain a foothold ere rearing on the site their own brand-new, blue-print, political, lucus a non lucendo Zion. 

"Some of the apologists of this Zionism, aware of the deadly self-contradiction in its spurning of traditionalism, tried to mask this as a breaking-away from the subserviance and squalor of the ghetto. That excuse will not do. If the newcomers had but set their faces against dirt and overcrowding, there would have been no criticism to make of them, of course. But what they set their faces against was the distinctively Jewish life which lay beneath any superficial dirt and overcrowding.

"It was in squalid passages and peopled tenements and small dark synagogues that the Jewish ideal had persisted at its purist and most individual. This was the experience, not of the Jews only, but of all subjected clans or nations or races. Their national life continued in the houses of the poor and the conservative. The men afterwards called national liberators or revivers came respectfully and lovingly to the homes of the traditionalists, caught from them the vital breath, drew deep of it and exhaled it in power.

"It was not so in Palestine. The political youth who now began swaggering in by right wanted no feeble breaths from the chinks of the past mingling with their modern air-conditioning. They were Zion, or rather Zion was or would have to be what they were. It was take-it-or-leave-it for the spirit and the sanctuary. Once the ancestral deposit in Jerusalem had served its documentary purpose, they had no use any more for the bearded and ringleted Orthodox, who found themselves discarded and driven for self-preservation into violent dissensions with their very determined supplanters.

"So while the new Zionists, in the early 'twenties, outside of Palestine were making all possible capital out of Jewish tradition, inside Palestine, on the other hand, they were doing their utmost to relegate to limbo the pre-War Jews, the only Jews who represented tradition. These latter were appealing continually for redress against the politicians' endeavours to reduce their status, to contaminate their customs, to force them into politically-framed representative bodies. Petitions from them flowed to the Administration, to the Home Government, to the League of Nations, to private visitors of mark even, in a continuous stream.

"Their supersession betrayed the falsity of the whole political Zionist movement. If there was such a thing as the Jewish nation it was the traditional Jews who represented it. The other kind of Jews had, it is true, a vast deal of achievement to their credit. The history of Western civilization was alight with their names. As poets, musicians, thinkers and - in the material order - as men-of-business, they had been amidst the principal makes of of that civilization. There was no branch of it to which they had not contributed. But they paid the penalty of being whelmed by what they created. The Disraelis, Heines, Rubinsteins and Einsteins vanished as Jews in the Western world which they helped to construct.

"But the religious observances, the ways of life, the writings of the traditional Jews - that was something other men had not got, something the West had not absorbed, a separate culture. To have forced this on the Arabs would have been wrong, but at least it would have been something individual to force." (pp 410-13)

To be continued in the next post...