For the first half century of zionism’s existence as a movement, its greatest enemy was the official leadership of the Jewish communities in the West. Having made decades of slow but steady progress from emancipation to acceptance and tolerance, bearing slights and reversals along the way, such communities were faced with the rise of a movement whose audacity and ambition was born of a refusal to accept such gradualism. Viennese anti-semitism, the Dreyfus affair, the new pogroms in the East, all told the zionists that Jewish assimilationists were on the wrong track. Any advances were provisional and merely called out new opposition, which would eventually lead to the ultimate reaction.
Such conviction, vindicated by the horrors of the Nazis, emboldened the zionists to audacious and paradoxical actions. From an early stage, its leaders recognised that their ‘allies’ in gaining a land to go to from Europe would be the anti-semites. Zionism has so become the dominant movement in Jewish community groups that it is very hard to for people to imagine the degree to which its very existence was held to be undermining all that had been achieved, and to thus understand how willing zionism became to think the unthinkable in its politics. Orthodox Jewish groups, assimilationist secular groups, all saw the zionists as playing with fire, and the audacity that zionism valorised has had more than its share of own goals. Zionism’s freewheeling clinentalism – trying to find power partners from the Ottomans, the British, the French and the Americans – was one example of this, conducted as the movement presented a myth of independence. The decision by Shin Bet and Mossad in 1988 to fully arm the self-defence wing of the Islamist social movement, Hamas, might be another. The attraction that zionism had to Nazism in the 1920s and 30s is a another, the strangest yet.
The politics of this are complicated, because the zionist movement in Nazi Germany had to try and deal with the regime as it was – leading to recent bizarre and false suggestions that Nazism was ‘zionist’. They were not. Yet, simultaneously, zionism, in its ‘revisionist’ form, had been drawn towards authoritarian politics, seeing Turkism Attaturkism and Italian fascism as possible models. Hitler was not excluded from this search for models, with the ‘maximalist zionist’ Abba Ahimeir praising him in a series of articles in the 1920s. Further zionist dealings with Nazis often sometimes had a degree of excess regard, as in the terrorist Lehi group’s (aka the Stern gang)’s attempt to form a WW2 alliance with the Nazis against the British. All this would be political exotica now, were it not for the fact that the Lehi was led by Yitzhak Shamir, later prime minister presiding over the West Bank settlement programme, and that Ahimeir’s proteges included activist Yossi Netanyahu, and his son Benjamin. These minority traditions expressed zionism’s other side, a response to the annihilating horror of the Holocaust, not with transcendence, but with a desire for its grandeur, the freedom that the embrace of radical evil allows.
With the ongoing military starvation of the people of Gaza the spirit of Nazism has entered the movement of zionism. This must be said, must be acknowledged, and the awareness of such not be shirked from, or ignored. It is no longer a perverse minority tradition, but a popular opinion. 65% of Israelis now believe that the people of Gaza are a present-day incarnation of ‘Amalek’ and should be forcibly expelled or exterminated. Such an opinion appears to have developed not as a reaction to Hamas’s October 7 atrocity, but to the subsequent destruction of Gaza. It appears that it is not fear of a genuinely large-scale attack that has called out this desire, but the powerlessness and pathos of the Gazans in the face of high-tech slaughter. Such escalation of feeling is sometimes framed psychologistically, as victims taking on their oppressors’ strength and impunity. But such a trauma narrative would scarcely be sufficient to explain the totality of zionist desire for an annihilation beyond all revenge, for a genocide of the Palestinian people. The pure politics of will, lurking within an earlier audacity of method, has come to full flower in the desert concentration camp of Gaza, in twisted metal and skin-on-bones. The Western leaders who did not recognise that this was occurring failed the one test they set themselves, in their pious mouthing of ‘never again’. So too have the ‘worried/liberal/concerned/questioning’ zionists, if they have not looked full-face at the fate of their movement. Those of us who wish it had all been otherwise must not flinch either, before the dark mirror of the century.