We shall not perish[1] ……. Israel’s right to exist ……
Preface
This is the second article in the series covering key concepts of Zionism and my critical awareness of these ideas as I developed from being a Zionist Jewish South African to becoming an anti-Zionist Jewish South African. The first article in this series introduces who I am and what I have become by way of a background sketch. It is a useful introduction to the ideas and concepts that I will discuss in the present article.
The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has established itself as part of the Palestinian struggle for freedom from Israeli apartheid and colonialism. BDS’s three cardinal demands are an end to the occupation (including dismantling the apartheid wall), full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of Palestinian Refugees to return to their homes (as stipulated by United Nations Resolution 194).
The state of Israel regularly responds to its BDS critics and opponents by claiming that they deny its right to exist and are therefore antisemites (racists). However, none of the 193 sovereign states that are members of the United Nations has a right to exist.
This article attempts to answer two questions. What is meant by ‘right to exist’; and, what role did it play in the development of Zionism in my town and my own development as a young Zionist? In doing this it places the development of these concepts within a framework of ideological struggle. Closely linked to the right to exist are other concepts, which will form the substance of forthcoming articles. The next article will cover our critique of the right to exist and my journey towards clarifying the critique.
The core of political Zionism is a nation state for the Jewish people with a Jewish demographic majority. Raising critical awareness of key elements of Zionist and anti-Zionist ideologies can contribute to the struggle for Palestinian freedom and self-determination in a state (or states) where all have equal civil and national rights. Getting to this will require international solidarity with other struggles, like the current Black Lives Matter uprisings in the United States, in support of BDS.
The first section of this article describes a framework for making sense of the ideological struggles between Zionism and its opponents. The second section unpacks the meaning of the terms right to exist and right to exist as a Jewish state. The third section briefly describes the history of Zionism in my hometown Paarl and my interpellation as a young Zionist. The next article develops our critique of these two concepts, right to exist and right to exist as a Jewish state. The next article will also describe my own journey in the ideological struggle over Jewish and Palestinian rights to historic Palestine. Both these articles address important issues to lay the basis for forthcoming articles about the meaning of being Jewish and of antisemitism.
Ideology and ideological struggle
It is useful to see Zionist ideology as an objective, logical framework of ideas; and, following Antonio Gramsci, that political and civil organisations, driven by conflicting class interests, struggle to get their definitions of the state and
of the nation (that they claim to represent the interests of) legitimised, i.e. accepted as the popular view. These struggles take the form of class alliances, and in key historical moments there is the formation of blocs of class interests. Ideologies have elements, core concepts that logically reinforce each other to give a worldview (weltanschauung). When historical blocs succeed in getting a particular interpretation as the dominant view of society, the ideology is hegemonic. When no bloc has the upper hand, long periods can persist without hegemony.
For most of the first half of the 20th Century neither Zionism nor Palestinian nationalism was hegemonic, and this was true also in the sense that within each of these movements and formations there was no hegemonic position. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim argues that the 20th Zionist Congress in 1937 marked the emergence of a historical bloc within the Zionist movement that identified partition as a step towards a Jewish nation state, with a Jewish majority. Since the late-1960s Zionism has become a globally hegemonic ideology. Currently its key elements are accepted and internalised by the major global political and economic elites.
Nevertheless, in recent years Zionist ideology has lost legitimation in key constituencies. This has occurred concurrently with the counter hegemonic narrative of BDS. The BDS narrative explicitly challenges the notion that Israel has the right to exist as an apartheid regime, i.e. as a Jewish ethno-state, based on original and ongoing dispossession and subjugation of an indigenous people.
Meaning of the rights
A natural and legal right
The founding document of the state of Israel, its Declaration of Independence, claims that its right to exist arises from the Balfour Declaration, the mandate of the League of Nations as well as the 1947 United Nations General Assembly (UN GA) Resolution 181, which called for the establishment of a Jewish state. (UN GA R181 also called for the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state, and it is invoked as the basis in international law for what has become known as the two state solution). The key argument here is that UN GA R181 conferred the right of the state to exist by approving the partition plan of the earlier appointed United Nations Special Committee on Palestine . In Zionist ideology the right to exist concept is linked to another key concept, Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
Ethno-nationalism: internationally acceptable
During the 1990’s ‘Peace Process’ (Oslo Accords) Israel required the Palestine Liberation Organisation to acknowledge not simply Israel’s right to exist, but its right to exist as a Jewish state.[2] Following the PLO’s conceding in writing to both these points the demands kept appearing, i.e. in President George Bush’s ‘Roadmap’ peace plan as well as President Obama’s endorsement of this ‘right’ in his speech to the lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2011.
In South Africa local Zionist organisations, the South African (SA) Jewish Board of Deputies and SA Zionist Federation argue that Israel is the only Jewish State in the world, vis-à-vis several Muslim theocratic states, and many states where the majority are Christians, that cover far larger territory and population. The right to exist as a Jewish state is seen as embodying fair and equal treatment.
Interpellated as a Zionist
I grew up in the Boland town of Paarl (near Cape Town, in South Africa), where during the 1960s I joined a Zionist youth movement. This represented the start of my journey. Israel’s right to exist and its right to exist as a Jewish state were cardinal principles legitimizing my Zionist political practices in the Paarl community.
Introduction to the Paarl Jewish community
The first Jewish people living in Paarl, Western Cape, are recorded from 1850. In 1893 the Paarl Hebrew Congregation was founded.[3] So the community in Paarl had developed over a century before I was born and grew up there.
The Zionist movement developed internationally, in support of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine prior to the declaration of the state of Israel). Paarl was a centre that was particularly active in spreading Zionist ideology, recruiting supporters and raising funds and other forms of support for the Zionist colonization of Palestine — and for the state of Israel in its further judaisation project of the land, Eretz Yisrael. This is demonstrated by the following brief chronology[4] of Zionist organising and organisations in the history of Paarl.
- 1909: A Junior Zionist Society informally established.
- 1911: Paarl Young Maccabean Society (a Zionist youth movement) formally established.
- 1932: Chaim Weizmann, to be the first president of the state of Israel, hosted in Paarl at an event organised by the Paarl Lema’an Zion Society.
- 1934: Nahum Sokolov (a leading figure in the International Zionist Movement) and Leib Jaffe of Keren Hayesod (a major Zionist projects’ funding institution) address a mass meeting in Paarl.
- 1937: Paarl Junior Zionist Society renamed The Paarl Zionist Youth Society.
- 1938: Ze’ev Jabotinsky (revisionist Zionist leader and founder of the Jewish Defence Organisation, and later Beitar, Hatzohar and the Irgun Zwei Leumi [The National Military Organisation of the Land of Israel]) addressed a crowded meeting at Paarl.
- 1948: 16 May: Special service at the Paarl shul to pray for new Jewish State.
- 1950: Moshe Sharett, then Israeli Foreign Minister and a future Prime Minister of Israel, addressed a mass meeting at Paarl.
- 1950: 30th Anniversary of the Womens International Zionist Organisation, celebrated in Paarl.
- 1953: Menachem Begin (a disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky), and a future Prime Minister of Israel, addressed a mass meeting at Paarl.
- 1954: Josef Sapir, Israeli Transportation Minister, addressed a mass meeting at Paarl, regarding Israel’s response to Britain’s evacuation of the Suez Canal.
- 1955: Israeli Brigadier and Deputy-Prime Minister under David Ben-Gurion, Yigal Allon[5], addressed a meeting at Paarl.
- 1957: Colonel Avraham Yoffe, commander of the Ninth Brigade in the Sinai Campaign, addressed a country rally at Paarl, titled “Operation Sinai and after”; also, the community entertained the Minister for Israel in South Africa, Mr Bavly.
The one comprehensive history of Paarl’s Jewish community that I am aware of, by Charles Press, notes that in the years before the establishment of the state of Israel “only one Jew in Paarl is known to be anti-Zionist, two belong to the Mizrahi organisation, four are revisionists and the rest are evenly divided between Zionist Socialists and General Zionists”.[6]
This didn’t mean that other trends of Jewish identity were absent — they simply never took off, and Zionism became the hegemonic, arguably sole, identity. For example, prior to the 1930s Reverend Alfred P Bender (of Cape Town) (leader of the anglicized orthodox rabbinate) was anti-Zionist, preached loyalty to the Crown, and addressed a meeting at Paarl, but according to Press his approach received little support from the Paarl community.[7]
Then there was the Geserd Society, a left-wing Yiddish workers movement, which had a club in Paarl. In 1932 they hosted Gina Medem in a fund raiser for the Birobidzhan Project in Soviet Russia (Stalin’s project to settle Jews in
their own autonomous territory in the far eastern region of the Soviet Union). This was subaltern to the developing identity of the Jewish community as being synonymous with being Zionist.[8] Reflecting this subaltern Jewish identity was one Lazar Bach, who died in 1941 in a Stalin Gulag. Bach, from a well-known Paarl family, was a senior member of the Communist Party of South Africa and was set up by a rival faction that succeeded in getting him purged and jailed during the time of Stalin’s purges.[9]
We lived next door to the rabbi of the synagogue, Dr. Levine. As a young boy I found Dr Levine intimidating, authoritarian and extremely judgmental. Press also refers to Dr. Levine as being critical of the (South African) apartheid system.[10] At the same time Press’s book is replete with quotations that show Dr. Levine as being an ardent Zionist. There was at the time a disjuncture between the ways in which South African apartheid was viewed by Jewish Zionists, and the way in which they viewed Israeli apartheid. In the latter case it did not even enter their consciousness to contemplate that Zionism as ethno-nationalism, was a manifestation of apartheid in a different form and a different place, although at the same time as the National Party was starting to implement it in South Africa. I mention this because there is a deep disassociation of apartheid from Zionism in the minds of Zionists, a disassociation that permits no contradiction. This vehement denial persists to this day, in the face of the BDS movement.
The community as context for my interpellation as a Zionist
Ironically, I owe it to Zionism, and my particular insertion into the Zionist movement during the 1960s, that I found a route to Marx’s and Engels’ historical materialism. I mention this because it provides a context for explaining my use of the term ‘interpellation’ (in the above sub-heading).
My study of Western Marxism during the 1970s and 1980s was made on the assumption that I was educating myself about a scientific framework within the context of which scholars could interpret their research data and thereby advance scientific knowledge about societies, all societies, including Israeli society and Palestinian society. The Marxist/historical materialist tradition is also concerned with engaging with a dynamic society in order to influence and shape the way that it changes. The anti-apartheid student movement, in which I was involved during the 1970s and 1980s, increasingly drew on concepts from a Marxist perspective of political power and social classes to comprehend and strategise to challenge apartheid South Africa.[11]
Theoretical framework.
During the 1980s I came across the ideas of Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser, who has been criticized for being too focused on social structure and neglecting the contradictory processes (i.e. class struggle) that drive capitalist societies to change. Nevertheless, structuralism is a useful antidote to the current dominant ideology of neo-liberalism, that says that we are all isolated and free individuals, who can determine our own fates independently of one another. And so, I propose to use Althusser’s term ‘interpellate’ [12] to analyse my social determination during the 1960s in the areas of Zionism and political thought processes. In doing so I will draw on theoretical practices in the course of providing consulting advice to post-apartheid South African governments in respect of urban development and housing policies. While these issues appear to be far removed from the anti-Zionist struggle, the theories through which I have come to understand the conundrums of post-apartheid South African urban development are nevertheless the prism through which I have reengaged in anti-capitalist critique. My critique of Zionism is enriched within the context of a critique of capitalist urban development in post-apartheid South Africa.
In critiquing the neo-liberal way of seeing societies[13] we need to pose an alternate framework for understanding societies namely the combination of dominant state policies and strategies and a given regime of capital accumulation[14] that these policies and strategies function to reproduce. Social reproduction is used in the sense developed by Marxist structuralists[15] in the 1970s and 1980s, to refer to processes like the provision of policing, education, housing, transportation as well as ideological discourses that give meaning to societies, where the state has performed — and continues to perform — historical functions, although social reproduction functions also extend beyond the state to maintain social relations of production. Clearly the state of Israel in its structure and segregationist functions performs a crucial role in reproducing the system of political marginalistion of Palestinians and military rule over them in Gaza and the West Bank. Integral to these functions is the separate identities assigned to Palestinians and Jews, through the process of interpellation. In terms of this problematic the control and oppression of Palestinians happens under the watch of a state that reproduces the conditions for capital accumulation in a specific region, and at the same time firts into a global imperial framework that prioritses the interests of US, British and Western European capital.
Within this framework individuals and social groupings are assigned identities corresponding with their different roles and functions in an order of hierarchy and exploitation. Althusser used the term ‘interpellate’ to describe the insertion of classes into a conscious identification of their position within class divided societies. Through institutions like the family, school, churches, synagogues, as well as the traditions of faith, ethnic and nationalist communities, different classes are able to collectively identify their role and function in a society. The identification is coded in a framework of ideas called ideologies. Individuals get inserted into these functions and roles through the mental and psychological impact of the ideologies dominant in respect of the particular classes within which they are born and socialized. In addition, there is also an active and dynamic process that contradicts the meaning of these ideologies, arising within the context of class struggles.
I will refer to my contradictory development within the ideology of Zionism. For the individual these are not simply mental or intellectual states of awareness but often primarily affective. To understand how individuals are in a contradictory dynamic with a dominant ideological interpellation requires a psychological perspective and I referred to this in the first article in this series, insofar as my own feelings are concerned. But I think that it is important also to explore these within a particular psychological framework in order to draw more general conclusions about the psychology of individual identity.
Key interpellation ideas — holocaust, Israel and ethno-nationalism
I grew up and was part of the Jewish community in Paarl during the 1950s and the 1960s. At the time the community was approximately 250 families strong — today there are probably less than 20 Jewish families residing in Paarl.
There were many Jewish neighbours in our neighbourhood, and I often heard Yiddish being spoken[16]. That neighbourhood was clustered around the synagogue.[17] The community was large enough to justify having a reverend and a rabbi, all the Jewish festivals were celebrated, and we had Hebrew school lessons — cheder — every afternoon. My mother observed the Jewish dietary laws by keeping a strict division between crockery and cutlery for meat (fleishiche) and for milk (milchike) products. We only ate kosher meat, as I think was the case for most Jewish residents of Paarl at the time.
Beyond the strong sense that we were Jewish, I don’t think that we had a particularly religious community. The people who seriously prayed in the synagogue you could count on your one hand. There was usually always a quorum for Friday night services and after we had our barmitzvahs (confirmation) we were expected to attend Saturday morning services to ensure the necessary seven males to constitute a minyan (quorum). There were sufficiently religious elders in the community to have weekday services, but these and the sabbath (shabbat) services were sparsely attended. The High Holidays (Rosh Hannah [New Year]) and Yom Kippur [Day of Atonement]) were usually very well attended and then there was often little sitting space in the synagogue.
I was born in 1951, barely 10 years after the implementation of the Final Solution in the extermination camps of Europe. I mention this because this overshadowed our awareness as Jewish South Africans during those early days of the apartheid era. I was born three years after the establishment of the state of Israel. My earliest memories of the state of Israel are as a seeming miraculous phoenix rising from the ashes of the holocaust. I think this was also embedded in the collective consciousness of the Jewish community in Paarl. In reflecting back on my childhood and youth I am struck by the absence of an ecumenical spirit in our community, in its religious and educational institutions. We had no specific lessons or education in universal Jewish ethics. The closest I came to that was when my mother cut out a piece from the local Cape Times newspaper, sourced from the Talmud.[18] I later learnt that this was a saying from Rabbi Hillel, one of the earliest Jewish religious sages. In recent years, I read about well-known Jewish authors (like Judith Butler) who as children and teenagers had studied these universal ethics at Jewish seminaries. And have tried to develop a view of Jewish identity that is based on universal human values rather than Zionist nationalism.
Interpellation through the Zionist youth movement.
Press[19] notes that “with the movement of population from the smaller towns to the larger urban centres after the war and throughout the 1950s, the Zionist youth movement at Paarl, known since 1956 as The Paarl Young Israel Society — once one of the strongest of its kind in South Africa — began to shrink and falter. By the 1960s it had expired almost completely and Paarl like other towns in the Western Cape looked towards Cape Town for leadership and most Zionist activities and facilities became centralised there“.
I joined the Zionist Habonim Youth Movement in my teens. Prior to that I had been a Wolf Cub and thereafter briefly a Boy Scout. With respect to Habonim I became a madrich (leader) of a local gedud (branch, equivalent of a scout troop). I embraced the ideology of Zionism and convinced myself that I would go on aliyah to Israel after completing my schooling. I became identified as a committed young Zionist in the town, by the parents of the children I was recruiting to my gedud, some of whom were uncomfortable about their children’s future being manipulated towards living in Israel.[20]
Even before my teens I was strongly attracted to the ideology of liberalism and by the time of my teens identified myself as being at the very least critical of apartheid. Zionism articulated itself as a national liberation movement, and not comparable in any way to apartheid.[21] Habonim being the youth wing of labour Zionism meant that I found a space where I could safely articulate criticisms of apartheid as well as get access to left-wing writings about socialism. This was the time when I read about kibbutzim and I trace the roots of my intellectual critique of capitalism to these years. I was attracted to the ideology of Zionism and read voraciously.
Keep in mind that in the midst of this phase of my life, in June 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank, the Golan, East Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula. The Jewish community in Paarl met in hushed tones in the synagogue on the eve of the Six Day War, to provide support for what was felt to be a struggle against a second genocidal attempt.[22]
Notwithstanding my superficial ideological commitment to Zionism, I was already plagued by doubts about the veracity of the idea of “a land without people for a people without land”.[23] The seeds of the contradiction to my interpellation were starting to sprout. They grew haphazardly over the next 40 years until where I today identify myself as an anti-Zionist Jewish South African.
Conclusion
I have reflected on my identity as a Zionist in my teens, using the concept of interpellation. Interpellation means being hailed, or called as a something, and the calling is in terms of a state-assigned identity. I have also explained that I use the term interpellation within a political and economic context where the state plays a critical function in creating the conditions for social stability to enable the economic functionality of capitalism. I will also revert to interpellation as an explanatory concept when examining the incidence of racialisation of identities in post-apartheid South Africa and the meaning of the identities of being Jewish and antisemitism in later articles. The South African context is important for understanding some antisemitic discourses within the Zionist/anti-Zionist dialectic in the South African context.
The concept of interpellation does not remove personal, individual freedom of choice but rather is the context within which choices are made by individuals in their development throughout their lives. When examining the Zionist/anti-Zionist ideological struggle in South Africa, we will refer to the active participation by individuals in the process of their being interpellated by the state.
I was born into a strongly Zionist Jewish community at Paarl. My formative years happened in the context of a society undergoing rapid economic growth and at the same time racial suppression and class exploitation of the black working class that resulted in severe poverty and unemployment. (The latter conditions have persisted and even worsened under the post-apartheid regime). The historical memory of the genocide of the Jews in Europe as well as my experience of local racist policies and practices, helped to shape my identification as a young Zionist. Central to this identity is the notion of Israel’s right to exist and right to exist as a Jewish state.
While interpellation is a state-dominated and to that extent a dominant (hegemonic, in the Gramnscian sense) process for the identity being interpellated, it is also a contradictory process. The contradiction between the expressed universal right of existence and the denial of the self-same right to Palestinians, struck a chord within me early in the process of my political conscientisation. This happened at a time of my growing awareness of the same contradiction within the apartheid society where I was interpellated as a white person.
It took me some time before I had developed a conscious critique of the Zionist-claimed rights, and a still further period elapsed before I put that critical awareness into practice. This is addressed in the next article.
Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch South Africa, 31 December 2021.
[1] I remember in 1967 seeing a picture of Israeli Defence Force female soldiers in a photo journal recording the Six Day War — the caption read “we shall not perish….”, resonating with the holocaust.
[2] Abunimah, A 2015 The Battle for Justice in Palestine, Afro-Middle East centre, Johannesburg, pages 21–25.
[3] Press, Charles 1993 The Light of Israel — the Story of the Paarl Jewish Community, Jubilee Publications, Paarl, pages 9 -12.
[4] Cf. Press, Charles 1993 The Light of Israel — … op. cit., pages 45, 69, 72, 79, 80, 91, 103, 105, 106, 107 and 109.
[5] Allon served in the Haganah (underground ‘defence’), was commander of the Southern Front during the War of Independence (‘Nakba’ for Palestinians) (1948) and an experienced field commander in the Israeli army. The blurb of his book ‘The Making of Israel’s Army’ says it all: “Yigal Allon, Israel’s deputy Prime minister, is also one of the creators of her armed forces. He grew up in the Haganah, became commander of its striking force, the Palmach, at the age of 26, and emerged as Israel’s most able military leader in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948–9”. Cf. Allon, Yigal 1970 The Making of Israel’s Army, Sphere Books Limited.
[6] Press, Charles 1993 The Light of Israel — …. op. cit., page 91.
[7] Press, Charles 1993 The Light of Israel — …. op. cit., page 53.
[8] Press, Charles 1993 The Light of Israel — …. op. cit., page 70.
[9] Press, Charles 1993 The Light of Israel — …. op. cit., page 84. Bach’s niece, Judy Bach, was a contemporary of mine in Paarl. It is a commentary on the marginalization of left-wing, internationalist Jewish identity movements, that I never engaged politically with her in the Paarl context during the 1960s.
[10] Press, Charles 1993 The Light of Israel — …. op. cit., page 111.
[11] Cf. Moss, Glenn 2014 The New Radicals — A Generational Memoir of the 1970s, Jacana, Auckland Park.
[12] Althusser, Louis 1970 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes towards an investigation), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
[13] Cf. Hendler, Paul and Pillay, Arumugam 2015 The Urban Network Strategy — The Panacea for Urban and Developmental Ills?; this is a critique of neo-liberal urban development policies in South Africa, but it first articulates a philosophical basis that is congruent with the underlying assumptions of this paper.
[14] Accumulation is used in its Marxist derivation, to refer to a cycle of processes where money capital is invested in labour power and materials to produce new commodities, which are then exchanged for money — in this process the owners of capital are driven to maximise profits and workers to maximise wages; cf. Hendler, Paul 1993, Privatised Housing Delivery, Housing Markets and Housing Policy: Residential Land Development for Africans in the Pretoria/Witwatersrand/Vereeniging Region between 1975 and 1991, a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, pages 37 to 47 (unpublished).
[15] Like Althusser (see above) and also: Poulantzas Nikos 2000 State, Power, Socialism, Verso Classic, London; Castells, Manuel, et al 1990 The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome — Economic Development and Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore, Studies in Society and Space, Pion Limited, London.
[16] “By the First World War more than ninety percent of Paarl’s Jews were Litvaks (Lithuanian Jews with similar religious customs, folkloric traditions and literary interests). Yiddish was their common language, although the immigrants’ children were soon fluent in English and Afrikaans” — Press, Charles 1993 The Light of Israel — …. op. cit.
[17] Slowly, as the younger generation professionalized, they became upwardly mobile and relocated to the higher value properties on the slopes of Paarl Mountain. Needless to say, our family was not part of that class formation….
[18] “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?” Hillel also reportedly said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”
[19] Press, Charles 1993 The Light of Israel — op. cit., page 104.
[20] Many years later, when I was older and with critical distance, I reflected on the fact that even after the holocaust the significant majority of Jewish people chose not to live in Israel.
[21] Which is still the way that liberal Zionists currently articulate their views, although this has become increasingly difficult to justify in the light of the ApartheidWall and the Gaza concentration camp since 2006.
[22] There is strong historical evidence that this war was not forced on Israel but was indeed a war of choice to enable the conquest of more land, seen as vital for the security and expansion of the borders of the state. Cf. Miko Peled, The General’s Son — Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, Just World Books; Joseph L Ryan, the Myth of Annihilation and the Six Day War; and, Mondoweiss interview with Norman Finkelstein.
[23] I remember my mother responding to one of my nationalist tirades by saying that “maybe the simple fact is that we took their land from them…”.
