The Jews in their Land: Zionism and its Jewish Detractors After Oct. 7
Soon after the Wye River Memorandum regarding the status of Hebron was approved by the Knesset by a vote of 75–19 in 1998 and signed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, I was invited to dinner at an archaeological conference with an official of the Palestinian Archaeological Authority. Having never met such a person, I was thrilled to attend. My memories of this meeting are reasonably clear, as it made a deep impression on me.
From our first encounter, I sensed uneasiness from my dinner partner, who threw small verbal darts at me, looking for my response. Was it my big knitted kippah that threw him off? I decided to swallow his comments and to be uncompromisingly friendly.
About halfway through the meal, my dinner partner couldn’t take it anymore and blurted out something about Zionist colonialism that I found most offensive. At that point, I responded.
“Look,” I said. “Three thousand years ago, my ancestor bought a cave in Hebron for 400 silver shekels to bury his dead wife. He bought it for good money. We stayed nearby for millennia. Our king, Herod the Great, built a huge tomb compound above the cave nearly 2,000 years ago. At some point, we were pushed out, and other people — you — came and squatted on our land. We never quite left, but were pushed to the side. In 1929, your ancestors massacred us.
“Now we are back and have no intention of leaving. That said, I don’t want your children dead, and I don’t want our children dead. So, until the end of days when this gets sorted out, you take Hebron, and we will take Tel Aviv — and let’s live together in peace.”
My interlocutor was taken aback. He was used to responses in the tone of many on the left. He instead received a sustained, moderate, and kind Zionist response that more or less reflected the then-highest hopes of the Israeli mainstream.
Understanding one another clearly, we continued our meal amicably, discussing archaeology, and imagining a better future.
Modernist thinkers tend to focus on the novelty — the modern — in Zionism. The political scientist Benedict Anderson famously referred to the many modern national organisms as “Imagined Communities.” For Anderson and his fellow travelers, this “imagined” status took away some of the luster, the power — and the reality — of modern national movements. Being both a good modernist and a socialist internationalist, he stressed the new and gave short shrift to age-old identities in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, which adopted modern nationalism as a tool in their age-old quests for community. In line with Anderson’s approach, Derek Penslar, a left-leaning historian of modern Israel at Harvard University, argues that “Jews did not constitute or define themselves as a people in the modern sense of the word.” I would suggest, however, that by definition, no other group (for lack of a noun) could possibly define itself “as a people in the modern sense of the word” before the modern period. The “modern sense of the word” is, after all, modern.
Some within the nascent “Zionist revolution” indeed made similar claims regarding the new nation that they imagined. It was, they thought, “secular” and Jewish, tied to the Jewish past, yet utterly new. They were “New Jews,” then “Israelis.” Some even claimed to be pre-biblical “Caananites”! To my mind, this newness, however, was often more rhetorical than real. Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin aptly framed the belief of many within this distinctly Jewish “secular” frame when he titled his 2005 article, “There is no God, but He gave us the Land.” Early Zionists engaged in a distinctly Jewish form of secularism. As the old joke goes, they may have been secular, but they weren’t goyim. Whatever intellectual calisthenics Zionist thinkers engaged in, the traditionally-minded Jewish masses — from Yemen and Buchara to Lithuania and New York — largely adopted Zionism as a modern expression of Judaism, and not as a foreign implant.
Is Zionism altogether new? Is it a “product of [Jewish] history,” as the eminent American historian Henry Steele Commager has written? Is Israel in essence a modern “settler-colonial enterprise,” as some would have it, or is it a modern expression of the Jewish attachment to the land of Israel? Is Jewish nationalism more akin to the British in South Africa and the French in Algeria — or is it more like the Serbs creating Serbia; Armenians, Armenia; or Indians, India — each context with its own complexities?
My conversation with my Palestinian interlocutor clearly shows that I am in the latter camp, situated among those who see Zionism as an integral part of Jewish culture, a movement that even at its most secular comes out of and returns to Jewish culture in complex and interesting ways. The same can be said, of course, of much of the Jewish left. I would not call most “Jewish apostates,” as Boston College’s Maxim Shrayer might, speaking from his own experience as a political Jewish refusenik in the Soviet Union. The danger is not these Jews. What scares me is what true enemies of Zionism, the State of Israel and all Jews do with their essentially insider writing, and how they may be co-opted for the sake of delegitimizing Zionism and the State of Israel and denying Jewish indigeneity.
Many who embrace a “settler-colonial” narrative to delocalize Zionism or decouple it from Judaism underplay the deep Jewish connection to the Land of Israel and even laugh out loud at Jewish claims to indigenous status. Even Penslar, a moderate interpreter, underestimates the breadth of the Jewish theological relationship, citing premodern primary sources selectively. The Jewish connection to Eretz Israel is not a modern construction, not a recently “imagined” tie — nothing like the connection of Americans to America, Canadians to Canada or Boers to South Africa. Jews never had any other land, nor wished for any other land. The Jewish “right of return” has no built-in statute of limitations. Jews — together with their Samaritan brethren — lived “between the river and the sea” long before this horrendous slogan was imagined.
Archaeological evidence of Jewish presence is deep and wide. Jews fought against numerous foreign invaders and ran a massive insurrection of their own against the emperor Hadrian, complete with Bar Kochba’s many underground tunnels and skill in asymmetrical warfare that so irritated the Romans. The many ancient synagogues and villages, tombs, and agricultural installations discovered since the mid-nineteenth century reach from the northern panhandle to the Dead Sea region, the coastal plain to the southern Judean Hills. Nearly 150 late antique synagogues have been discovered, from the far northern Galilee to Masada in the south. I especially note that the largest purpose-built synagogue discovered to date was uncovered in the port of Gaza, and an exquisite synagogue mosaic was found in the fields of Kibbutz Nirim. The list goes on. Talmudic sources suggest that Jews fought tooth and nail for every inch of Eretz Israel.
From Hellenistic times to the coming of Islam in 638 C.E., Jews and Samaritans — the two Israelite nations — were together the vast majority. Only mass, often forced, conversions changed this status. Many Muslims in Nablus and beyond trace their ancestry to the Samaritans, and Arabs in the southern Hebron Hills trace their descent to Jews from Khaybar in Arabia. I focus on this period only because I know it best, though I could easily provide evidence for earlier and later periods. The Jewish presence slackened only when Jews were butchered by the Crusaders, but it quickly bounced back.
In 1966, David Ben-Gurion “conceived and edited” a beautifully illustrated book that my mother kept on our living room coffee table. It was called “The Jews in Their Land.” It contains a chronological set of essays that leads from the Bible to modern Israel, period after period. It describes both Jewish presence and attachment to the Land, and for me as a child was a primer of Zionist and Jewish history. Looking back on this impressively illustrated volume, I must say that the eminent group of historians assembled made their point with clarity. Zionism, this volume argues by example, is a modern expression of a long Jewish attachment to this one place, over millennia. Modern Zionism opened a floodgate of Jewish return to a land that even the godless believed, sensed or simply felt, was home. It was a modern formulation of religious and national destiny that made sense to many Jews, and to most, still does.
In this short essay, I have argued that viewing Jewish history from the present “backward” reinforces the uniqueness of the present, and hence takes for granted the foreignness of previous epochs. When history is read in the other direction, however, from antiquity “forward” toward the present, the picture becomes more nuanced. Continuities over time become more evident, and the “new” somehow doesn’t appear quite so new. Reading Zionism this way, the stark discontinuities identified by its malcontents become far less discontinuous.
Let us return to my Palestinian dinner partner. Yes, the conflict between Jewish nationalism and Palestinian nationalism is intractable. To the surprise of all, the Jews won the wars. The Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, and the Israeli response are the most recent manifestations of the conflict, and at this moment, color all discussions. Without a workable arrangement that allows dignity for all — without tunnels, programmatic rape, apocalyptic nihilism and calls for the end of Israel as the Jewish nation-state — the future looks grim. As I said nearly three decades ago, and still believe, “I don’t want your children dead, and I don’t want our children dead. So, until the end of days when this gets sorted out, you take Hebron, and we will take Tel Aviv — and let’s live together in peace.” Am I naive? Perhaps, but so was Herzl. כן יהי רצון.
This article is based upon my more extensive discussion in “The Shofar Anti-Zionism Issue – After October 7,” Shofar 42.1 (2024).
Steven Fine is the Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University and director of the YU Center for Israel Studies, yu.edu/cis
Photo caption: Prof. Fine at the Arch of Titus with YU students, July 2024.
Photo credit: Ronnie Perelis
