Zionism was born not in the desert, as its advocates would like to suggest, but in the Café Centrum of Vienna, Theodor Herzl pulling it together over coffee and sachertorte. At other tables, Marxism, psychoanalysis and modern anti-Semitism were also being confected—intellectual reconstructions of the world made in a microcosmos of velvet and marble. They would all be projected outwards in the modern big bang of the First World War, finding in the places of the old empires their ‘natural’ soil, their sacred home.
In the decades since, the meaning and interpretation of the Middle East and Palestine have diverged absolutely, based on not merely a fundamental loyalty to one side or the other, but a most basic knowledge of the region’s history. As a movement Zionism has now, after decades of steady attrition, lost practically any real residual notion of reciprocity or a genuine deal with the Palestinians it might have had. The movement has always been colonialist, that is not in doubt; the Zionist settlers of the early 1900s arrived as a private venture, but so too did the Massachusetts Bay Company.
The small local Jewish population of the region was never interested in full independence, even when nationalism arose as a movement in the nineteenth century. Early Zionist views of the Arab population ranged from the disdainful to the naïve to the self-deluding, all trying to preserve the idea of Zionism as an objectively ethical and even consensual movement. Current histories of such preserve this by exaggerating the significance of the few genuine Zionist-Arab co-operative projects that arose.
That all changed with Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s creation of Revisionist Zionism in 1922. Amidst the new world of mass destruction, Bolshevism, fascism and Nietzsche-babble, Jabotinsky argued that Zionism could only succeed by abandoning its claim to collective moral reciprocity and universal benefit. The Jews needed a homeland. Non-Palestine suggestions were ridiculous, the Ord River scheme being the only one he seriously considered. A homeland would have to be taken, on both sides of the Jordan, and defended behind an ‘iron wall’. Revisionism marked the movement’s abandonment of claims to a morality of means—though not of ends—in favour of the strategic exercise of political will.
Though rejected initially, by the mid-1940s Revisionism was pretty much the whole of Zionism. The ‘will-expressive’ tactics of Jabotinsky’s followers in the Irgun and Lehi terrorist groups became those of the whole movement. Mass terror against the British was purely political. When it was turned against the Arabs, in campaigns of mass terror and execution, and ethnic cleansing, it acquired an additional degree of sadism. No one can read the stories of Deir Yassin, Plan D and the Lydda/Lod death march and not see revenge violence being transferred from the Holocaust to Arab civilians.
Zionists who are willing to look clear-eyed at this history thus celebrate the adoption of the necessary means as an expression of determination. After the Holocaust, they argue, Israel had to be brought into the world. Whatever it took. It is a more muscular defence than poking at Peel Commission partition maps or the 1940s UN plan, and one to which increasing numbers of Zionists—including those who would once have labelled themselves ‘liberal Zionists’—have resorted as every other possible defence of Israel’s actions since the commencement of the settlement projects in the 1980s has become impossible. This now-dominant argument rests on a claimed symmetry: the absolute annihilation of the Holocaust versus the ab nihilo bringing into being of a nation.
Yet like many such claims by movements of the twentieth century, it is at best half true. Zionism was from the start, of necessity, a client movement, first seeking the alliance and support of the Ottomans, then winning the Balfour Declaration from the British. In the 1930s and 1940s it made covert alliances with the French, who used it for political manoeuvring against the British. The French provided the arms for the 1948 uprising, and eventually the nuclear materials for the Dimona reactor, Israel’s path to nuclear arms; US money, raised chiefly by Meyer Lansky, the founder of modern Las Vegas, paid for them. In 1967, with the European empires departed, the United States and its allies began their close association.
Some of those who fought for Israel’s creation understood the adversarial pact they had made—a moral justification of terror as the ultimate means to an end extends the right to one’s enemy. Moralities of means can be compared; ends are, finally, incommensurable. When in the 1970s the Palestinian movement began using the targeted terror that the Irgun had perfected in the 1940s, they added to it the spectacular characters of the era of satellite TV and the conceptual-art ‘happening’. This won them the world’s attention, but at a cost. As Zionist terrorism in newspaper reports and newsreels faded into the sepia of history, the Palestinian movement became famous without context, attractive to some, nihilistic to others.
By the time of the October 7 attack, that historical forgetting had become near-total. Very few media sources were willing to tell the full history of the region, or speak of the uses of terror. By now, thirty years after the end of the Cold War, Anglo and European populations had lost such knowledge of the region’s history as they had had. Israel was, to many, a permanent presence. Gaza’s 2.3 million were there because they all wanted coastal apartments. The West Bank was invisible. By contrast, the now-large non-European sections of multicultural societies had greater knowledge of the history than ever. Thus a division has arisen, which our fanatically pro-Israel government has dubbed the fraying of ‘social cohesion’.
Completed, too, was the erasure of any notion of the dependence or clientelism, in either direction, of Israel. Among Western Zionist supporters an insouciant swagger has replaced moral pleading, trolley problems and like arguments. Prime Minister Netanyahu has encouraged this, as he shuttles back and forth to the United States to use pleading, rhetoric and political blackmail to ensure a flow of the relatively low-tech mass-made weapons Israel needs to pound Gaza into destruction.
Netanyahu, a deal-making US-raised politician, a McKinsey alumnus and the most fervent advocate of accommodation with, and tacit support of, Hamas for two decades, has unleashed a particular form of archaic rhetoric for his defence of Israel’s actions in the active pursuit of mass Palestinian casualties. Netanyahu has previously talked of Israel’s enemies as the ‘children of the dark’ and Israel as being ‘of the light’. After October 7, he drew on the story of Moses’s defeat and annihilation of the Amalekites. That story, parallel to the Commandments, affirmed an asymmetrical collective logic. Morality is an internal matter; one’s enemies can be annihilated. Nietzsche had drawn on such pre-‘Axial’ celebration narratives to dethrone Judeo-Christian-Athenian universal moralising and bring will back into the world; by drawing on it too, Netanyahu has thrown away all the internalised restraints that post-1948 Zionists established after tasting of the bitter fruit of unlimited terror. One does not need to sentimentalise Moshe Dayan and others to say that they understood and recognised the right to resist that the Palestinians claimed. Such recognition was paired with an acceptance of the potential necessity of annihilatory action—Dayan is said to have had לעולם לא שוב (‘never again’) welded to into the nose cones of Israel’s first nuclear weapon—at least among some of the 1948 veteran elite. When Likud won power in 1978, Israel’s new leaders were men willing to hide the character of their own acts from themselves, and to portray the Zionist-Palestinian struggle in racialist terms.
The final stage of this process has been the transformation of the character of Zionist society, and the absolute divergence of Zionist and Palestinian lifeworlds. In 1948, Zionism was an agrarian, religious-national socialist movement which placed strong emphasis on material equality, and on the power of social rebirth in simpler communities as a curative to decadent habits and personalities, an argument made by Herzl as an essential part of the Zionist project. Zionist and Palestinian confronted each other as two forms of agrarian life.
Israel’s subsequent development as first an urban and modernised, and now hypermodern, high-tech society has created a total separation between the two peoples, and changed the form of domination utterly. As Israel took the urbanised, high-tech route, abstract community replaced the real connection of collective life. Neoliberalism replaced socialism. Inequality among Jewish Israelis widened. As real solidarity dissolved, symbolic solidarity had to be injected, in the form of loyalty oaths and ‘Jewish state’ political kitsch. The tie-up of military tech development, start-ups and exports turned the now wholly dominated Palestinians into, as Antony Loewenstein has documented, a human test-bed for commodified systems of human population control.
Zionism now not only has no internal restraint in its everyday conduct, it is addicted to the heady rush of violent political will to remain intact as a movement. Its leaders would once have taken October 7 as a strategic atrocity—an attack in dinghies and Toyotas on a nuclear power, designed for maximum spectral force—to project what the Palestinian resistance no longer was and might never be again. Instead. Netanyahu committed his final act of conspiracy with Hamas in a shared regard for this very bloody symbolic act as a real one. This was a sort of ‘deployed hysteria’, convenient to both sides.
With this as its irrationale, Israel has justified mass civilian killing, the use of starvation as a weapon of conflict, the targeting of children, the mass killing of journalists and witnesses, and cultural and infrastructure destruction on a total scale. Its national service soldiers trash and loot homes and upload videos of such to TikTok. Ministers in its government speak of total extermination on a regular basis, and Western governments excuse this—the exception becoming the rule—while government inquiries are held into the use of the phrase ‘From the River to the Sea’. Diaspora Zionists have been drawn into the abyss too, willingly. Those once prominent as ‘liberal’ Zionists now speak of the potential killing of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Gazans, as potentially justified in the elimination of Hamas. Hundreds of thousands is potentially half the population of Gaza, which surely suggests that there would be no overwhelming moral barrier to eliminating the entire population in order to eliminate the terror group that Israel helped found within it.
Can this point Israel has reached—a mix of force-politics, claims to total exception and dehumanised dominance by drone and algorithm—be fairly said to represent the triumph of the will? Such politics has re-entered the world as legitimated precisely because of the exception that a colonial movement of European Jews represented after 1945. No other such movement had a persuasive claim; Rhodesia, making a similar bid for a late settlers’ homeland, lasted fifteen years. To have to view a post-Holocaust Jewish state this way is awful. It is glib kitsch not to recognise that. European Jews, based on a prior habitation in the region and the visibly exterminatory character of Europe, deserved, it could be said, consideration of their request. But only the Arabs could grant it. Its couching in terms of colonial domination ensured that they would not.
Now there is an absolute responsibility to name both what this movement has become and the way in which its opening as a portal onto the worst of modernity, all the way from the marble and velvet of the Café Centrum, is a product of the unique claims to action it has made. Mainstream news outlets will ban and censor such discussion; the state will be mobilised to protect Israel against such charges. The pop-up distasteful anti-Semitism at the margins of the pro-Palestine movement make it difficult to say. But it must be considered, and said, if one concludes that it is the only way for the full horror of what is still occurring to be recognised. Israel’s claim of moral impunity relies on the impunity of technology—the means of nuclear destruction. So the abyss may soon widen very much further, very fast. For the moment, across Gaza, the black milk of daybreak.
Comments
And in your wisdom, Arena, you think that it’s a sound editorial judgement to ask a writer and co-founder of this magazine, who rarely among Australian writers is willing and able to write about a still-unfolding and willed human catastrophe like this…to lay his pen down. Because of a dozen-word fucking text, which vaguely displeased a mediocre careerist hack, on a fucking radio talkback show.
We grown-ups will wait patiently until your pretty and unsettled little sensibilities still themselves.
Greetings Jack – late to the party but agree with your sentiments.
Heya JayBee. The public space for difficult but necessary writing is shrinking fast, alas. It might mostly be a function of aging impotent irracibility in my case, but I think that when a magazine of this calibre censors a thinker and writer of Rundle’s calibre – he only co-founded the damned thing – then we are in a pretty grim place.
Jack, thanks for your engagement and support of Guy, however, your claim that we censored him is incorrect. Just to clarify, Guy was in favour of putting out a statement and was indeed a co-author of it. The announcement noted that he would be pulling back from editorial duties for a period of time while discussions unfold, not that his writing would be banned in Arena. Indeed, the above article you are commenting on is written by Guy and was published after the whole text incident blew up.
Apologies for the belated reply, Timothy (and by extension, the Arena editorial team), I’ve only just caught up. It’s a generous intellectual act to engage publicly with a relative newcomer to your magazine as you have here … and especially one who is using your offered public space to chuck yonnies rudely at you all. I thank you for it.
It’s well beyond anachronistic to reprise the details of the Rundle text itself, and the subsequent over-reactions to it, including (in my view) yours here at Arena. We are all I think sufficiently literate by now in the helter-skelter rhythms of digital conversation to grasp that these ‘discursive controversies’ are by now as ephemeral as they are performative as they are contrived as they are trivial as they are, and almost immediately so … self-obliterating. Usefully ‘difficult’ contributions that disrupt complacent conversations usually open up wider new ground that then tends to render them near-invisible in retrospect. (I wish Arena genuine good luck with your touted special edition on gender issues: may it build on this minor fiasco, fearlessly).
It feels like only a few seconds ago that someone first said ‘fuck’ on TV, apparently threatening to implode the entire history of human abstract ideas publicly articulated. We survived. Then it was ‘c*nt’. (The asterix is pure decorum, as well as linguistic powder kept dry.) And we survived that, too. Then it was … well, what brain fart is left with which to turn church heads easily? What word? N*gger? F*ggot? K*ke? We both know what those words are: just cheap shouts for attention in a world jaded by an excess of words. The asterixes, again pure decorum. (If you can come up with a mere word that ‘harms’ anyone, I’d sure like to hear it. G*d, probably – the asterix knowing this time. You can’t say it out loud, but you can slaughter thousands in its unspoken name, apparently.)
So it’s ‘certain ideas’ now that we weaponise in the public domains, or so it would seem. Mere abstractions that humans can think up, as always, and do, as ever … but which we now choose to render too dangerously toxic to allow to be deployed materially and openly. We construct our tortuously sophisticated justifications for doing so, and we convince our articulate selves that in their studied un-utterance we are somehow preventing such ideas from compelling some mutually-assured descent into barbarity. Even as we … descend into linguistically sanitised barbarity. (Slaughter as many sand n*ggers as you like, just so long as you don’t call them ‘sand n*ggers’ as you do so.) We call this ‘civilised discourse’, but of course what it really is is self-censorship. The most regressive and destructive form of censorship there is, Timothy.
Can you think of an idea that you wouldn’t dare express publicly? If you can, then I put it to you – and your editorial colleagues, your contributors – that none of you are public intellectuals at all, mate. Not ones of much useful use, at least. To regard one idea as ‘too dangerous to express’ is to regard them all as such.
Guy Rundle doesn’t need my puny defending. The ideas that he expressed in that text don’t need my defending, either. What needs defending, and desperately so, is the civilised and civilising truth that no idea that is capable of being thought by a human can ever, simply in its expression, cause human material harm. Believing that, and prosecuting that notion in the public domain, especially by way of your editorial agency at times when that question is rendered awkwardly live and urgent by a thinker and writer who has earned the right to be taken in serious good faith, even if you need to extend them some slack, and no matter how much it costs … such is the definitive essence of the life of the mind, of Letters, of the Academy and of journals like Arena. If our best public intellectuals are not capable of and willing to go the barricades on that fundamental idea – every single time, no matter how vile the idea at transient hand or how awkwardly expressed – then the world is, indeed, surrendered to the barbarians.
This is, of course, a silly storm in a teacup. Rundle will go on thinking and writing (and editing), doubtless including here, eventually. Crikey, meanwhile, can in place of his truly uniquely placed contributions wallow instead in the ironic smug posturing of a B List TV celebrity who in his dotage has apparently become of a mind to mug to our political debates, rather than our taxpayer-funded cameras. (Which is just splendid, given that what the world most desperately needs just now is yet more microwaved political satire, right?) This kerfuffle doesn’t matter one bit. Until it does matter again, the next time Arena has to make an editorial decision on a supposedly awkward (for you) abstract idea, awkwardly (for you) expressed. Properly making your next choice demands of Arena two things only: firstly, that you don’t pretend you didn’t censor the ideas Rundle’s text placed into the public domain. And second, to recognise that to be ‘dismayed’ by that ridiculously trivial text was an intellectual choice: a choice made by ‘committee’ consensus. (Ugh. Roping Rundle into its endorsement was, of course, mere show trial flourish – double ugh.)
It’s not my magazine, Timothy, so it’s not my choice.
Many thanks again for extending me this space and the courtesy of your engagement. It is very, very much appreciated. That I regard Arena as one of Australia’s last redoubts of possible resistance to barbarianism is, I hope, self-evident. Warmest regards to you all.
Jack, thanks for the thoughts and engagement. A quick reply to some of the points in the third last paragraph. Again, I really don’t think we can be seriously charged with censoring Guy. If you re-read the statement, you’ll see we actually defend some of what he was saying as an “important point”, carefully separating this from the clumsy expression in the text message in question. Censors don’t do subtleties, they don’t offer deeper intellectual offerings, promise searching special issues, or any of that. They do what Crikey did.
Likewise, it is fair to feel ‘dismayed’ by this situation; we do not want to see our friend and comrade lose his job over this, or to have people thinking that he is a misogynist, or a sexual assault apologist. Guy’s text message was a mistake and we shouldn’t defend its crude expression. Rather, we need to do what we do best: put out deep, radical critiques and work to make them as impactful as they can be. That’s the aim anyway.
Thanks for your engagement and support …!
Thanks once more, Timothy. Perhaps we can safely disagree – much will pivot on how Arena expands on the ‘awkwardness’ in GR’s text. I would disagree vehemently on the idea of censorship not ‘doing subtlety’. On the contrary, the most effective forms of censorship are those which take care to render themselves invisible. One can jail an Assange, one can sack a Rundle, one can poison a Navalny. But these are botched censorships, advertising themselves and the taboo ideas they seek to suppress. It’s the ‘encouragement of the subsequent others’ that constitutes the true censorship.
The properly anti-censorship Arena response, of course, would have been to re-publish Guy’s text in thirty point boldface on the cover of your next hard copy issue. Again: for the (countering) encouragement of the subsequent others.
Go well, Arena, go boldly, and good luck with this and all other conversations. Thank you again.