Agamben on Zionism

Zionism constitutes a double negation of the historical reality of Judaism.

The End of Judaism

One cannot understand the meaning of what is happening in Israel today if one does not understand that Zionism constitutes a double negation of the historical reality of Judaism. Not only does Zionism represent the culmination of that process of assimilation which, starting from the end of the 18th century, has progressively erased Jewish identity, in fact, in that it transfers the Christian nation-state to the Jews. What is decisive is that, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has shown in an exemplary study, the foundation of Zionist consciousness is another negation, the negation of Galut, that is, of exile as a principle common to all historical forms of Judaism as we know it. The premises of the concept of exile are prior to the destruction of the Second Temple and are already present in biblical literature. Exile is the very form of the existence of the Jews on earth and the entire Jewish tradition, from the Mishnah to the Talmud, from the architecture of the synagogue to the memory of biblical events, was conceived and lived in the perspective of exile. For an Orthodox Jew, even the Jews who live in the state of Israel are in exile. And the State according to the Torah, which the Jews await with the coming of the Messiah, has nothing to do with a modern national state, so much so that at its center are precisely the reconstruction of the Temple and the restoration of the sacrifices, which the state of Israel does not even want to hear about. And it is good not to forget that exile according to Judaism is not only the condition of the Jews, but concerns the defective condition of the world in its integrity. According to some Kabbalists, including Luria, exile defines the very situation of the divinity, which created the world by exiling itself from itself and this exile will last until the advent of the Tiqqun, that is, the restoration of the original order.
It is precisely this unreserved acceptance of exile, with the rejection it entails of every present form of statehood, that establishes the superiority of the Jews over the religions and peoples that have compromised themselves with the State. The Jews are, together with the Gypsies, the only people who have rejected the state form, have not waged wars and have never stained themselves with the blood of other peoples.
By denying exile and diaspora at their roots in the name of a national state, Zionism has therefore betrayed the very essence of Judaism. We should not be surprised then if this removal has produced another exile, that of the Palestinians and has led the state of Israel to identify itself with the most extreme and ruthless forms of the modern nation-state. The tenacious claim of history, from which the diaspora, according to the Zionists, would have excluded the Jews, goes in the same direction. But this could mean that Judaism, which did not die in Auschwitz, perhaps knows its end today.

September 30, 2024

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Ralph Schoenman-The Hidden History of Zionism

Zionism and Fascism

The history of Zionism – largely suppressed – is sordid.

Mussolini set up squadrons of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement, Betar, in black shirts in emulation of his own Fascist bands.

When Menachem Begin became chief of Betar, he preferred the brown shirts of the Hitler gangs, a uniform Begin and Betar members wore to all meetings and rallies – at which they greeted each other and opened and closed meetings with the fascist salute.

Simon Petilura was a Ukrainian fascist who personally directed pogroms which killed 28,000 Jews in 897 separate pogroms. Jabotinsky negotiated an alliance with Petilura, proposing a Jewish police force to accompany Petilura’s forces in their counter-revolutionary fight against the Red Army and the Bolshevik Revolution – a process involving the murder of peasant, worker and intellectual supporters of the revolution.
 

Collaborating with the Nazis

This strategy of enlisting Europe’s virulent Jew-haters, and of aligning with the most vicious movements and regimes as financial and military patrons of a Zionist colony in Palestine, did not exclude the Nazis.

The Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum of support to the Nazi Party on June 21, 1933. In it the Federation noted:

... a rebirth of national life such as is occurring in German life ... must also take place in the Jewish national group.

On the foundation of the new [Nazi] state which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us, too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible ... [81]

Far from repudiating this policy, the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933 defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43.

During this very Congress, Hitler announced a trade agreement with the WZO’s Anglo-Palestine Bank, breaking, thereby, the Jewish boycott of the Nazi regime at a time when the German economy was extremely vulnerable. It was the height of the Depression and people were wheeling barrels full of worthless German Marks. The World Zionist Organization broke the Jewish boycott and became the principal distributor of Nazi goods throughout the Middle East and Northern Europe. They established the Ha’avara, which was a bank in Palestine designed to receive monies from the German-Jewish bourgeoisie, with which sums Nazi goods were purchased in very substantial quantity.
 

Embracing the SS

Consequently, the Zionists brought Baron Von Mildenstein of the SS Security Service to Palestine for a six-month visit in support of Zionism. This visit led to a twelve-part report by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, in Der Angriff (The Assault) in 1934 praising Zionism. Goebbels ordered a medallion struck with the Swastika on one side, and on the other, the Zionist Star of David. In May 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich, the chief of the SS Security Service, wrote an article in which he separated Jews into “two categories.” The Jews he favored were the Zionists: “Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.“ [82] In 1937, the Labor “socialist” Zionist militia, the Haganah (founded by Jabotinsky) sent an agent (Feivel Polkes) to Berlin offering to spy for the SS Security Service in exchange for the release of Jewish wealth for Zionist colonization. Adolf Eichmann was invited to Palestine as the guest of the Haganah.

Feivel Polkes informed Eichmann:

Jewish nationalist circles were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs. [83]

The list of acts of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis goes on and on. What can account for this incredible willingness of Zionist leaders to betray the Jews of Europe? The entire rationale for the state of Israel offered by its apologists has been that it was intended to be the refuge of Jews facing persecution.

The Zionists, to the contrary, saw any effort to rescue Europe’s Jews not as the fulfilment of their political purpose but as a threat to their entire movement. If Europe’s Jews were saved, they would wish to go elsewhere and the rescue operation would have nothing to do with the Zionist project of conquering Palestine. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/hidden/ch06.htm

Jewish Alternatives to Zionism: A Partial History

By Ben Lorber

For over a century, Jews around the world have maintained a robust critique of Zionism and the state of Israel.

The tradition of Jewish dissent against Zionism has taken many forms. From the moment Theodore Herzl strode upon the world stage, many of us have insisted that leaving the diaspora for a Jewish nation-state is the wrong way to achieve safety, fight antisemitism, actualize Jewish identity, and work for justice in the world. Many have claimed that our peoples’ relationship to the land of Israel is far more complicated than a narrow nationalist vision can allow, or that we are religiously forbidden, at this time, from setting up a Jewish state in the holy land. And many have protested Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians indigenous to the land of Israel.

Though these arguments, and many others, animated Jewish life and discourse for generations, they are too often forgotten in today’s mainstream discourse, buried under the mistaken assumption that all Jews have always supported Zionism.

But today, as more Jews are awakening to the depth of Israel’s unjust oppression of Palestinians, there is a real thirst for new Jewish identities, to guide us through these troubled times. In order to dream the Jewish future beyond Zionism, we need to trace the Jewish past beyond Zionism. https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2019/01/12/a-partial-history-of-jewish-alternatives/

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity