Debating Zionism at YIVO conference

A somewhat abridged and differently edited version of the following was published last week on the blog of Dissent magazine: 

YIVO, the prestigious Manhattan-based Jewish social research center, hosted a sell-out crowd at its “Jews and the Left” conference, May 6-7. A number of speakers were former activists, but it was a conference on the Left rather than of the Left.

Sparks flew only once, at a panel entitled “Israel, Zionism, and the Left: Past and Present,” with a presentation by Yoav Peled, a professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, on the debate over whether Zionism should be viewed as a form of colonialism or national liberation. Prof. Peled began respectfully, regretting that Anita Shapira—also a professor at Tel Aviv University—had to cancel her appearance. She is prominent among historians who defend Labor Zionism; he mentioned his debt to the late Baruch Kimmerling, an Israeli sociologist who advanced a critique of Zionism as colonialism.

Peled presented the arguments of pro-Zionist academics and then proceeded to rebut them point by point. For example, central to the Zionist case is that the olim, Zionist immigrants to Palestine, had no “mother country.” Peled pointed out
that Theodor Herzl sought a mother country, or rather what I'd call a “great-power patron,” courting the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the Kaiser of Germany. His successor as head of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann, succeeded with Great Britain, procuring the Balfour Declaration and Britain's creation of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

Peled noted that until World War I, Jewish settlements were referred to as “colonies” (moshavot) and that the Bank Leumi (the “National Bank”) was initially called the “Jewish Colonial Trust.” Peled likewise rejected Zionist arguments that Palestine was developed economically by the Zionists rather than exploiting its resources for a mother country, and that until resisting Arab attacks in the 1948 war, land was purchased rather than conquered. He indicated that land was bought from absentee Arab landlords, forcing the removal of thousands of Arab tenant farmers and their families; he further argued that the development of a separate Zionist economic infrastructure, with advanced cultivation and production techniques, made it impossible for native Palestinians to compete.

His presentation turned caustic when he ridiculed the old Mapam slogan, “For Zionism, Socialism and the Kinship of All Peoples,” pointing out that a number of its allied kibbutzim were built on abandoned Arab properties, taken in 1948.

Although factual, Peled’s analysis was overly tendentious and narrowly construed. The Zionist relationship with the British “mother country” turned bitter and deadly with Britain's closure of Palestine to Jewish refugees after issuing its 1939 White Paper. And, as fellow panelist Mitchell Cohen, a political theorist at Baruch College CUNY, countered, he left out any consideration of the Jews' perilous contemporary circumstances, from the pogroms in Czarist Russia through the Holocaust.

By way of contrast, Ronald Radosh's paper outlined the near-universal Left-wing support for Israel at its birth in 1948. Currently associated with the conservative Hudson Institute, this former Leftist spoke of the passionately pro-Israel writings of the left-liberal journalist I.F. Stone and the strenuous advocacy of the Zionist cause by the onetime owner and longtime Nation magazine editor and president, Freda Kirchwey. He also quoted pro-Zionist statements by Soviet UN Ambassador Andrei Gromyko and mentioned that the Communist Party organized a massive pro-Israel rally at New York's Polo Grounds, featuring such slogans as “Arms to the Hagannah” and “Save the Jewish State.”

What triggered the ire of Cohen and Radosh into a heated exchange with Peled after delivering their papers, was the latter's assertion that Israel's 1967 Six Day War was not defensive. He focused entirely on the technically correct fact that Israel had attacked first, neglecting to mention such key details as Egypt's expulsion of UN peacekeepers and its blockade of Eilat. When pressed by Prof. Cohen on what if any Israeli military actions he regarded as legitimate self-defense, Peled named only the 1948 and 1973 wars (including the cutting but accurate observation that the '73 war might have been avoided if Golda Meir had responded to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's earlier peace feelers).

Peled made a good case for explaining Arab opposition to Zionism, but it was one-dimensional. There are profoundly humanistic reasons to defend the Yishuv, and later Israel, as a place of refuge and redemption for an oppressed and downtrodden people. If not for virulent and ultimately genocidal anti-Semitism, there would have been no political Zionism. This is what motivated liberals like Stone and Kirchwey and provided the rhetorical rationale for the sudden about-face of the Soviets and their foreign supporters (the latter, based on Stalin's cynical and mistaken strategic calculation that Israel would serve Soviet interests, was soon to reverse but again). 

A comprehensive understanding of the conflict must combine the separate truths of what Peled and Radosh uncovered. As Amos Oz, the Israeli writer and activist observed years ago, it is not a clash of right against wrong but of right versus right.