‘Anti-Zionism’ writes Alex Ryvchin, ‘has spawned White Papers that locked Jews in a Europe intent on killing them, Grand Muftis who skilfully fused religious zealotry with Arab nation­al­ism, UN res­ol­u­tions labelling Jewish eman­cip­a­tion as racist, and an assort­ment of unsavoury elements such as venal US oil exec­ut­ives and state depart­ment desk officers fearful of Arab ant­ag­on­ism, Communist Party henchmen and Islamic suprem­acists.’ However, Zionism itself, having mira­cu­lously created a Jewish homeland, and an economic and military power to boot, and remaining essential to Jewish survival and flour­ish­ing, is being ques­tioned by many diaspora Jews today. Ryvchin believes the renewal of Zionism’s appeal is imper­at­ive and offers a new framework he thinks can secure its future.

THE ZIONIST ACHIEVEMENT

When the French essayist and play­wright Edmond Fleg attended Herzl’s Third Zionist Congress in Basel in 1899, he marvelled at the scene. It wasn’t merely the dynamism of the convenor that moved Fleg but the diversity of the delegates. ‘I looked about me. What Jewish contrasts! A pale-faced Pole with high cheekbones, a German in spec­tacles, a Russian looking like an angel, a bearded Persian, a clean-shaven American, an Egyptian in a fez, and over there, that black phantom, towering up in his immense caftan, with his fur cap and pale curls falling from his temples.’ Fleg saw the sum of Jewish exile in that room. Jews of east and west, religious and secular, wealthy and poor, radical and con­ser­vat­ive. A people dispersed by empire to every corner of the globe, tossed hither and thither from continent to continent, just melting a little into their surrounds, adopting local language, custom, dress, before being rudely plucked out and flicked onward by Kings and Empresses, warlords and clerics, to new frontiers and new priva­tions.

The mere staging of a Zionist assembly in Europe had been an eye-catching achieve­ment. To bring together Jews of different colours, nation­al­it­ies, classes, religious streams and political per­sua­sions under the banner of a single idea was impress­ive indeed. It had taken a mix of grandeur and old-fashioned community organ­ising. At the First Zionist Congress, also held in Basel in 1897, Herzl appeared at the Stadtcasino metic­u­lously groomed with his deep black Viennese beard and dressed in black trousers, tails and a white tie, really more befitting a matinee of La traviata than a Jewish communal event. In the days leading up to the event, Herzl had sat up with students address­ing envelopes long into the night.

At that First Congress, a manifesto had been adopted which suc­cinctly artic­u­lated the aim of Zionism. It was to establish a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel secured under public law. Within this simple declar­a­tion stood an almighty mission. The Jews hadn’t had a national home for two millennia. The Land of Israel had since 135 CE been known by another name, had seen multiple empires fall upon it, and at that time, had a Jewish pop­u­la­tion of roughly 25,000.

While the expansion of Jewish set­tle­ment and property rights in Palestine through migration and the private acquis­i­tion of land was con­ceiv­able though chal­len­ging under Ottoman pro­hib­i­tions, obtaining recog­ni­tion under public inter­na­tion­al law of the territory as a restored Jewish homeland seemed fanciful bordering on delu­sion­al. It would require the support of the Great Powers and the acqui­es­cence of the Ottoman Empire and sig­ni­fic­ant parts of the Arab world, not least the Arabs who lived in Palestine. Moreover, the very idea of an ancient people who were now scattered and accul­tur­ated, phys­ic­ally returning en masse to long van­quished ancestral lands, was something that had never been achieved in human history.

It was this dreamy, mystical idealism that gave Zionism a magnetic quality. It animated Jewish youths to throw them­selves into the community organ­ising and intel­lec­tu­al rumbles out of which organised Zionism grew. It led to the founding of a myriad of grass-roots Zionist groups like Bilu (an acronym for ‘House of Jacob, come ye and let us go’), whose members actually travelled from Tsarist Russia to Palestine and estab­lished agri­cul­tur­al set­tle­ments there. It drew Jews like Moshe Lili­en­blum and Leon Pinsker to another Zionist group, Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), and brought Chaim Weizmann to spend his student days in Germany as a member of yet another Zionist group, the Verein, throwing his meagre stipend into sausages and beer while raucously debating Zionism, socialism, nation­al­ism and inter­na­tion­al­ism in cafes until the wee hours.

This sense of mission, the daring and purpose of early Zionism is what mobilised the writer Israel Zangwill to lambast the Jewish estab­lish­ment for their con­ser­vat­ism and stuffi­ness in seemingly holding back the progress of Zionism to the detriment of the embattled Jewish masses. Zangwill thundered to a gathering of the Jewish poor in London’s East End, ‘we are supposed to pray three times a day for the return of Jerusalem, but, as soon as we say we want to go back, we are accused of blasphemy!’

When this gen­er­a­tion of Jewish activists encountered the pamphlets of thinkers like Leon Pinsker and Herzl their minds were instantly seared and per­man­ently changed. How could a vigorous, determ­ined young Jew coming of age in a time of unsparing brutality towards Jews, be unmoved by Pinsker’s illus­tra­tion of their stateless people wandering the earth as ‘a ghost-like appar­i­tion of a living corpse … living every­where but nowhere in the correct place?’ Or Herzl’s func­tion­al oratory that promised that ‘the Jews who wish for a state will have it. We shall live at last as free people on our own soil and die peace­fully in our own homes.’

Not only was Zionism exciting and radical, world events conspired to make it seem a matter of life and death. The treatment of the Jews in Europe and the Middle East at the time ranged from the inhos­pit­able (Jews were forbidden from walking in the rain in Iran for fear that their unclean­li­ness would wash off to sully Muslim shoes) through to the barbaric (they were looted, raped and slaughtered across in Russian in 1881 and 1905, in Fez in 1912 and in Shiraz in 1910). This turned Zionism from a rising ideal into an urgent human­it­ari­an mission.

The Kishinev pogrom of 1903, while com­par­at­ively less bloody than some of the others of the time, was chron­icled so graph­ic­ally that it caused not only mass grief but a deep shame in the Jewish world. The poet Hayim Bialik wrote that ‘in the dark corners of Kishinev, crouching husbands, bride­grooms and brothers peering through the cracks of their shelters, watching their wives, sisters, daughters writhing beneath their bestial defilers, suf­foc­at­ing in their own blood, their flesh portioned out as booty.’ The New York Times ran arresting images from Kishinev and reported that ‘the scenes of horror were beyond descrip­tion … [as] the streets were piled with corpses and wounded.’ After Kishinev, an editorial of The American Hebrew noted that ‘American Zionism had come of age,’ while a Christian speaker at a Zionist meeting at Cooper Union declared that in the wake of Kishinev, ‘all efforts must be made to establish a Jewish com­mon­wealth.’ Zionism now offered Jews an escape from Kishinev, both psych­ic­ally and psy­cho­lo­gic­ally.

Whatever lingering doubt about the necessity and urgency of Zionism rapidly dis­sip­ated as the Holocaust descended on Europe. As David Ben-Gurion noted, ‘what Zionist pro­pa­ganda for years could not do,’ being to reveal Jewish self-delusion and total vul­ner­ab­il­ity, ‘disaster has done overnight.’ The surviving Jews, absurdly ware­housed in displaced persons camps in Europe several years after the defeat of Nazism, sometimes still wearing their death camp garb and alongside their Nazi tor­ment­ors, craved for nothing other than to locate the ruins of their families and try to build new lives away from European antisemitism. ‘Palestine is def­in­itely and pre-eminently the first choice’ for reset­tle­ment, Earl Harrison, President Truman’s envoy for refugees, reported.

The creation of Israel in May 1948, with its ensuing euphoria and peril, did nothing to dim Jewish interest in Zionism. The estab­lish­ment of the state may have been the practical ful­fil­ment of the vision expressed at Basel in 1897 but much work remained to be done. There was the immediate defence of the nascent state from civil war and invasion, the ingath­er­ing of exiles, rescue missions for imper­illed Jewish com­munit­ies in the Middle East, the upbuild­ing of a society, and the pursuit of peace with Arab neigh­bours once war subsided, a noble goal enshrined in Israel’s Declar­a­tion of Inde­pend­ence. In a sense, the Zionist project had become even more important as the Jewish world unified behind the goal of creating a society worthy of the two millennia inter­mis­sion and the incal­cul­able sac­ri­fices made in the achieve­ment of the state.

For diaspora com­munit­ies, there were gov­ern­ments to be lobbied to help achieve recog­ni­tion of Israel and the estab­lish­ment of friendly relations with gov­ern­ments and oppos­i­tion parties, public opinion to shape in favour of Israel, and human­it­ari­an aid to raise. Zionist organ­isa­tions like the Jewish National Fund, Women’s Inter­na­tion­al Zionist Organ­iz­a­tion, United Israel Appeal and a kal­eido­scope of others weren’t simply folded into the Jewish State in 1948, they redoubled their efforts. There were trees to plant to reclaim and cultivate the land, uni­ver­sity faculties and research insti­tutes to endow, lone soldiers to support, victims of terror to assist, millions of Soviet, African and Middle Eastern Jews to rescue and absorb. All of this con­trib­uted to deepen the invest­ment of diaspora Jews in the Zionist project. No one wanted to miss out on history in the making and if Aliyah was imprac­tic­able, mem­ber­ship of Zionist organ­isa­tions, political activism, fun­drais­ing, community organ­ising created a sense of national unity and belonging enabling diaspora Jews to feel like active players in the extraordin­ary story of Jewish rehab­il­it­a­tion and national rebirth.

For the increas­ing number of Jews who had either lapsed in their religious observ­ance or, like the vast majority of Soviet emigres, were never religious to begin with, Zionism offered the same Jewish communal and cultural pride, feelings of belonging, and oppor­tun­it­ies for rigorous learning and debate, pre­vi­ously only to be found in religion.

A senior Israeli diplomat once told me that Zionism was his religion. It is the sort of comment that would instantly be mis­con­strued as amounting to worship of set­tle­ments or prayers at the altar of Bibi. But I imme­di­ately under­stood what he meant. He was immersed in the story of Zionism, believed with perfect con­vic­tion in its justness and necessity, was inspired by it, and compelled to act civically, pos­it­ively and humanely by his inter­pret­a­tion of its teachings. He wished to convey the wondrous stories of Zionism to his children –  Weizmann’s exper­i­ments with acetone, Herzl’s awakening at the Dreyfus Trial, the raid on Entebbe, the capture of Eichmann, the magical moment on 29 November, 1947 when Jews worldwide realised they would get their state. This diplomat wanted his children to imbibe these stories as he had, so that they too would grow up connected to their Jew­ish­ness, know who they are, remain strong in the face of aggressors, and proud in the knowledge that they belong to a people of vision and fortitude.

Zionism as a movement and a belief system survived 1948 and indeed witnessed some of its greatest chapters in the 1960s and 1970s. The legacy of that is that today Israel is part of the global economic elite (It has been a member of the Organ­iz­a­tion for Economic Cooper­a­tion and Devel­op­ment since 2010), it maintains a military superi­or­ity over all of its foes combined, and it is highly assertive on the world stage. All extraordin­ary achieve­ments for a state with a tiny pop­u­la­tion and territory and barely 70 tumul­tu­ous years of existence.

And yet for all this success, with the imper­at­ives of state-building, rescue of Jewish com­munit­ies and urgent defence now seemingly gone, what is there to make a young Jew of Johan­nes­burg, Sydney or Toronto feel connected to a national project playing out on the edge of the Medi­ter­ranean Sea, and currently devoid of towering figures and spell­bind­ing moments?

THE POVERTY OF ‘ANTI-ZIONISM’

Whereas Israel was created through a true unity of purpose between Jews of the diaspora and those who lived in Palestine, inter­ven­tions by diaspora Jews today are generally viewed not as an expres­sion of diaspora Jewry’s stake in Zionism, but as intru­sions. They are often dismissed as the unwanted pon­ti­fic­a­tions of priv­ileged Jews with no kids in the military, no bomb shelters in their condo blocks, no skin in the game, and therefore no right of par­ti­cip­a­tion beyond pro-Israel tweets and deposited cheques.

Anything that could push Jews away from Zionism is deeply lam­ent­able. Given that Zionism is a power­fully binding, inspiring and uniquely Jewish movement, any loss of con­nec­tion to Zionism would be felt in terms of Jewish con­tinu­ity and par­ti­cip­a­tion in communal life. What is drawing one Jew to another in the absence of a religious or national con­nec­tion?

Any with­draw­al of Jews from Zionism will inev­it­ably see the com­men­sur­ate advance of anti-Zionist forces, both within the Jewish world and outside it. Indeed, anti-Zionist groups possess a distinct advantage in that they claim to represent something beyond the teetering two-state paradigm and can clearly artic­u­late what it is they stand for, being the defence of the stateless Palestini­ans and the collapse of a Jewish state in order to achieve a one-state dystopia.

On the other hand, tra­di­tion­al Zionist groups can readily assert what they oppose – BDS, antisemitism posing as anti-Zionism, Palestini­an cor­rup­tion and violence, Iranian terrorism and so forth, but struggle to demon­strate what they clearly support beyond main­tain­ing the status quo.

As Zionism has settled into a com­fort­able position in main­stream Jewish life and thought, long stripped of the sort of rad­ic­al­ism and scorching oratory that animated it in the early 20^th century, it is anti-Zionism that can now claim to be radical, revolu­tion­ary, anti-estab­lish­ment and therefore naturally appealing to the young.

Of course, when analysed deeper, it becomes apparent that the anti-Zionist position is neither novel nor radical. It is mani­festly unjust, ret­ro­grade and deeply dangerous. Far from offering anything new, it continues the counter-movement to Zionism that has run alongside it like a con­tam­in­ated stream since at least the Nebi Musa riots of 1920. Anti-Zionism has spawned White Papers that locked Jews in a Europe intent on killing them, Grand Muftis who skilfully fused religious zealotry with Arab nation­al­ism, UN res­ol­u­tions labelling Jewish eman­cip­a­tion as racist, and an assort­ment of unsavoury elements such as venal US oil exec­ut­ives and state depart­ment desk officers fearful of Arab ant­ag­on­ism, Communist Party henchmen and Islamic suprem­acists. Anti-Zionists are mere his­tor­ic­al revi­sion­ists who want to re-prosecute lost cases and reimagine failed invasions.

Meanwhile, the notion of a bin­a­tion­al state which has been recently exhumed by anti-Zionists and laundered into respect­ab­il­ity by supine Jewish liberals, has also been visited numerous times and suitably rejected. The United Nations General Assembly Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) con­sidered it intensely and rejected it in favour of two states for two peoples. As the UNSCOP report recom­mend­ing partition observed: ‘regard­less of the his­tor­ic­al origins of the conflict and the rights and wrongs, there are [two distinct peoples now in the land] who are dis­sim­il­ar in their ways of living and separated by political interests. Only by means of partition can these con­flict­ing national aspir­a­tions find sub­stan­tial expres­sion and qualify both peoples to take their place as inde­pend­ent nations.’ At the time, Ben-Gurion saw through the intent of the bin­a­tion­al state and dismissed the idea as a ‘denial of our age-old con­nec­tion with Palestine’ that would result in ‘Arab pre­ced­ence in all things’ and ‘an Arab State in the false feathers of bi-nation­al­ism.’

If Zionism loses a clear purpose and direction it also creates an oppor­tun­ity for those on the hard-right to fill the void and assert that the ful­fil­ment of Zionism is bound up in the redemp­tion of biblical lands and requires per­man­ently holding onto territory in the West Bank. Zionism of course never demanded specific borders and the ter­rit­ori­al needs of the state were determ­ined by questions of absorpt­ive capacity and security, not by religion. Max Nordau made this point, though perhaps too bluntly: ‘Zionism has nothing to do with theology; and if a desire has been kindled in Jewish hearts to establish a new com­mon­wealth in Zion, it is not the Torah or the Mishnah that inspire them, but hard times.’

Unless Zionism can assert why it still matters, it will be swept away by more emo­tion­ally grat­i­fy­ing offerings, which have the capacity to deliver only absolute ruin.

THE RENEWAL OF ZIONISM TODAY

The solution is a deeper under­stand­ing of what Zionism is and what it truly rep­res­ents. Zionism, at its core, has always been about rights. Yes, Zionism sought a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel secured under inter­na­tion­al law. But why? To protect the most fun­da­ment­al right of all, the right to live. Zionism remains, both through its support for a strong Jewish state and its ethos of Jewish resi­li­ence and self-help, the greatest bulwark against antisemitism, an evil which has accom­pan­ied and tormented the Jews all of their days. Zionism sought to attain recog­ni­tion that the Jews are a people and thus possess the right to live in their own land. As Churchill asserted in 1922, ‘the Jewish people should know that they are in Palestine as of right and not of suf­fer­ance.’

The most basic and self-evident rights extended to other peoples, have to be boldly asserted, hard won and fiercely defended when it comes to the Jews. The right to live in a country of one’s choosing without expulsion. The right to practise one’s faith without forcible con­ver­sion. The right even to live. If the United Nations General Assembly could assert that Zionism is a form of racism a mere 28 years after the same chamber endorsed the aims of Zionism through the Partition Plan, it should remind us that the right to a national home is equally pre­cari­ous.

Zionism rep­res­ents that bundle of rights that the Jews have secured and are unpre­pared to ever relin­quish. The right to a place of refuge and shelter from murderous hatred. The right to a national centre for the pre­ser­va­tion and enlarge­ment of Jewish cultural, scholarly and sci­entif­ic achieve­ments. The right for Jews to freely determine their own political status. When expressed as the embod­i­ment of Jewish rights, Zionism soars above party politics and the minutiae of poli­cy­mak­ing in modern Israel, and it correctly presents anti-Zionism as a campaign to strip Jews of their rights.

The creation of Israel as the fruit of Zionism, a wildly ambitious movement of eman­cip­a­tion, ingath­er­ing and rehab­il­it­a­tion, should be a source of pride and admir­a­tion. But to penetrate deeper into the Jewish con­scious­ness, maintain its relevance, and reclaim its capacity to unite Jews of the left and of the right, religious and secular, and in Israel and the diaspora, Zionism can no longer be seen through the prism of Basel and a time when the Jews were stateless. Framing Zionism as mere support for the existence of a Jewish State, something that is both self-evident and complete, will neither inspire nor unite. Instead, Zionism should be seen for its under­pin­nings in Jewish people­hood and con­nec­tion to land, and for its defining purpose, which is to win and safeguard the equal rights of the Jewish people. While the diasporic con­nec­tion to the state itself may be tenuous due to practical dif­fer­ences of language, culture and distance, the con­nec­tion to its found­a­tions and its guiding purpose should be unwaver­ing. It merely needs to be framed and under­stood in this way. Zionism created Israel and yet Zionism survives Israel because the struggle for equality and security for the Jewish people is perpetual.