Post-Zionism exposed
IF you hadn’t yet heard of Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, you probably would have soon enough. His book, The Invention of the Jewish People, has tapped into the Zeitgeist, snatching the prestigious Aujourd’hui Award of the association of French journalists and hitting the bestseller lists.
Sand knows the value of ruffling feathers, especially among the sometimes defensive pro-Israel communities of the Diaspora. But sometimes outrage can cloud the mind. For while Sand wants to appear the trendy “post-Zionist”, he’s actually more a “postmodern Canaanite”, to quote literary essayist Hillel Halkin.
In other words, you could draw a snaky line from Sand’s thesis back to the radical extreme of revisionist Zionism that peaked in popularity in the 1930s and ’40s.
And in his eyes, that would be one big insult indeed.
As the title of his book suggests, Sand argues the idea that Jewish peoplehood — as opposed to religion — is an “invention” of 19th-century historians. The exile of 70 AD is myth, Sand insists, because most Jews weren’t actually expelled from biblical Israel at all. And of course, if Zionism is a myth, the entire rationale of the State of Israel, including the Law of Return, collapses. As many commentators have stated, such theories are routinely espoused in the universities of the Arab world, but when an Israeli jumps on the bandwagon, it’s suddenly news.
I’m not going to bother with any thorough demolition of Sand’s theory; that’s the easy bit. Most of us intuitively know it’s flawed. As Halkin elegantly argues in The New Republic, Jewish peoplehood has been taken for granted throughout history by both Jews and non-Jews alike.
You can’t read the Bible without acknowledging its nationalist themes, and whatever the truth about the Roman expulsion, the loss of Jewish sovereignty and political power was the real issue. Every nationalist movement requires a pinch of mythology, and the Jewish version has more zest and endurance than most.
What I found revealing was Sand’s recently published interview with Fairfax Middle East correspondent Jason Koutsoukis. This is where Sand elaborates on his brand of “post-Zionism”. He says he feels a greater connection to his Arab-Israeli neighbour, who grew up breathing the same air and speaking the same language as him, than to, say, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor in Melbourne. (Someone who projects her identity onto Israel but doesn’t necessarily want to live there.) He defines himself as Israeli on the basis of the Hebrew language, the food he eats and the football team he follows.
There’s no doubt that the imagined Israel of the Diaspora doesn’t always conform with the real, maddeningly complex state in the Middle East. But you can hear in Sand’s words echoes of the Canaanites of old, who were drawn mostly from the ranks of the Irgun and Lehi.
They also sought to erase the centuries of Jewish heritage from the Diaspora and rediscover themselves as “Hebrews”, descendent from the ancient inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent. They also clung to a notion of indigenous “solidarity” with the Arabs of Palestine and dreamt of merging with them.
And despite Sand’s fashionable snubbing of Diaspora Jews — insisting his only link with them is religious — the ghosts of Zionism still linger in him.
He rejects the notion of a one-state solution, preferring that an independent Palestinian state confederate with Israel — an idea that’s nowhere near as radical as it seems. (Quite a few mainstream Israelis see this as a logical, if very long-term, goal.) And he would still allow Jews fleeing persecution to settle in Israel — he just wouldn’t let the granddaughter-types turn up as a matter of right.
But Jews in real or anticipatory strife have accounted for the overwhelming majority of olim, so his distinction would make little practical difference.
The history of Israel’s birth was as much about the desperation of post-Holocaust refugees as it was about sentimental notions of exile and return. Sand isn’t quite prepared to rescind Israel as an insurance policy.
The irony is that no matter how much hummous Sand eats, his Arab neighbour will continue to see in him a European Jew, an intruder, an enemy nation. Try telling this neighbour it’s all an invention.
Julie Szego is a writer with The Age.