From: wmcguire@world.std.com (Wayne McGuire) To: talk.politics.mideast Subject: The End of Zionism (Yet Another Failed Messianic Movement) Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1993 21:17:49 GMT Lines: 239
With all due humility and modesty I want to announce that the post below is probably one of the most important posts you'll ever read in talk.politics.mideast. There, that should take care of the levity for the day.
It is a message I posted to someone on another network, and sums up a whole lot of reading and thinking I've been doing about the Mideast and Israel for a few years now. Previous discussions here in TPM, particularly interactions with ardent pro-Israel partisans, helped clarify my thoughts.
For a number of years now I've been noticing with increasing attention the remarkable resemblances between Zionism and earlier episodes of messianic (and always disastrous) outbursts in Jewish history, but wasn't quite prepared to make the leap that Zionism as a whole fit the model. I thought that the dangerous messianic elements were mostly on the religious right, and could be safely isolated. But the more I read, the more I realized that messianism permeated the Israeli left as much as the Israeli right, and that the entire Zionist enterprise is fundamentally messianic in its outlook and foundations.
The collapse of Communism (the 20th century's premier secular messianic movement), the failure of the Israeli kibbutz movement, the rush to proclaim Menachem Schneerson the Messiah, the rise of Kahanism, and an unceasing succession of blunders by the Israeli government starting in the 1973 war and continuing most recently in the Demjanjuk fiasco have all combined to lead me to the conclusion that something is so seriously awry with the Zionist experiment that it does in fact exhibit all the traits of previous failed messianic movements in Jewish history.
What really confirmed me in this conviction was reading five books one after the other, and digesting all the information interactively and seeing all the implications:
Golan, Matti. With Friends Like You: What Israelis Really Think About American Jews. New York: The Free Press, 1992. Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin.
Leibowitz, Yeshayahu. Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Roth, Philip. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Segev, Tom. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and The Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
Sicker, Martin. Judaism, Nationalism, and the Land of Israel. Boulder, CO. Westview Press, 1992.
Earlier here I tried to stimulate, without success, some serious discussion about four of the books. If you want to get an idea of how I reached my conclusions, try reading them and do some creative thinking about what you've read. Attached below the post is a longer list of books which collectively provide an articulate explanation of why Zionism's future is bleak indeed.
If you want the really short course, just read the Martin Sicker book. Surveying thousands of years of failed messianism in a few hundred pages is a real education, and puts mere decades of Zionism into perspective.
I can imagine the howls of outrage or mirth the assertion that Zionism is defunct will arouse, but that is entirely predictable and not interesting. I am not particularly motivated to debate the subject one way or the other, although I will read with curiosity valuable insights, as opposed to polemics, anyone might contribute to my, ahem, prophetic, shall we even say, messianic pronouncement. For me, the essential debate is over. All the angry back and forth that is going on here and elsewhere about who is right and wrong concerning this and that incident between Israel and its neighbors is just so much noise and is missing the big picture. Trying to figure out what is going on in the Mideast and the Israel-Arab conflict was for me an exercise in solving a knotty and fascinating intellectual problem. Once the problem is figured out, it no longer excites one's attention.
[Post to Mary Weiss]
I've radically changed my views about Israel and the Mideast conflict since we last chatted. Back then I was advocating positions, with my usual visionary foresight, that have been adopted by the current Israeli government. I was slightly ahead of my time. Now I believe--make that KNOW--that Zionism may well prove to be the greatest calamity for Jews in world history to date, and will most certainly fail as a movement and a physical state. Israel may not even last out the decade. Jews will come to regret the day that Israel was ever founded. It doesn't matter what policies Israel adopts--left, right, center, whatever. Jews will be weeping and gnashing their teeth over the fact that they foolishly saddled themselves with the need to support and defend a physical Jewish state in the middle of a region which hates that state. All the old anti-Zionist arguments that Jews themselves hashed over before the founding of Israel are going to come to the surface again, and the original Jewish anti-Zionists are going to look like prophets. Theodore Herzl will come to be seen as notorious a failed prophet as Karl Marx.
The reason? Zionism is a false messianic movement, a well-known phenomenon in Jewish history. It is built on air, fantasies, and intoxication, not solid ground. These messianic splurges always end up in catastrophes for Jews, and Zionism looks like it will be the granddaddy of all these fiascos, for hundreds of reasons which I could document for you at length. But you know the main reason yourself if you examine your heart: ask yourself why you don't live in Israel. Then you'll know why so many Jews want to leave Israel.
Trust me, Marty, it is over. Sometime during the last year or two, deep in the secret soul of Jews, of history, of the world, Zionism died, expired. Zionists will continue to go through the motions, engage in angry and self-destructive arguments with fellow Americans and others who criticize Israel: you know the whole drill. But at the core, the ball game is over. The more that Jews get locked into the position of defending a state they don't want to live in, and don't even believe in, the more pain and difficulty they are going to cause themselves.
The best advice anyone could give to Jews who really cares about them--not all of them, to be sure, but some of them--is to begin to make preparations now for dissolving the state of Israel that are maximally advantageous for Israelis and Jews in general. Once that is accomplished, then sit down and figure out why you keep getting suckered in by self-destructive messianic movements, and then fix the problem through some form of cultural self-analysis and psychotherapy. Then get on with doing what you do best in a modern pluralistic society like the U.S.--make art, make science, make products, make friends, be happy, be self-fulfilled, etc., and just generally get on with making productive lives free of the need to pursue a collective or ethnocentric messianic mission of any kind, divine or secular.
If this doesn't happen, it seems certain that Israel will be heading for a mess that is beyond your wildest dreams. Those who will be taking the deepest pleasure in Israel's continued existence will be the world's most virulent anti-Semites.
I know you won't believe a word I am saying, and will react defensively, but that's ok. I know what I know. And I only say something like this with the utmost gravity and care, after a tremendous amount of reading, thought, and conversation. I know what I am talking about, and I came to these conclusions very reluctantly, in fact resisted them with all my might, since they are so disturbing. I mainly want to get this statement down on the public record somewhere, in part for the ego gratification of being recognized as one of the first people to figure this out. Once you get a handle on the key features of false messianism, of any messianism for that matter, and do a match against all the developments that have been going on Israel virtually since it's founding, the truth becomes crystal clear. The coming collapse is visible in Israel's every action and word.
One important point to keep in mind is that people who have been bitten by the messianic bug NEVER know when the house is about to cave in: that is one of the key traits of messianism: it destroys your ability to read objective reality clearly. The mind of the messianist--whether that of one of the leaders of the revolt against Rome, or one of Sabbatai Sevi's followers, or one of Karl Marx's disciples, or Menachem Schneerson's, or David Koresh's, is clouded by a kind of drug which is able to ignore or distort every fact relevant to his or her true situation. All messianists are essentially mad, at least for the duration of their fever. After every messianic binge comes the vicious headache: what the hell were we up to?
What is the essence of messianism? Eventually your bullshit catches up with you.
It wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference, by the way, if the Arabs in the region had welcomed the state of Israel with open arms. In fact if that had been the case, Israel would have gone under much sooner. The Mideast wars, with their effect in uniting Israelis against a common external enemy, have served as a distraction to keep Israelis from dealing with their underlying internal problems, all of which revolve around the self-destructive tendencies inherent in all forms of messianism.
At some point the leaders of world Jewry are going to sit down and ask--if they haven't already--on the whole is the state of Israel a net positive or a net negative for the world's Jews? Is it improving our health, wealth, reputation, peace of mind, physical security, and good relations with our neighbors, or is it damaging them? If Israel has become a significant net negative, and there is no realistic prospect of improving the situation, is there any point in continuing to maintain it, or like a business gone permanently bad, should we just put it to rest and get on to more fruitful matters?
Zionism, just like Communism, and for much the same reasons, is intellectually, morally, spiritually, psychologically, ideologically, and economically bankrupt.
Zionism, like Communism, attempted to build a society in a top-down fashion by imposing a rigid ideology and theory on an unmalleable physical situation. Successful nations grow organically from the bottom up, emerging naturally from and cooperating with the facts on the ground.
All successful enterprises are fundamentally pragmatic and bottom-up. All messianic movements in the world are doomed to failure because they are top-down and over-ideological in their essential nature. The curse of messianism is the curse of ideology and theory on a megalomaniacal scale.
This ideology is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late ideology. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, its rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-ideology.
In any case, enjoy the laugh--I can't guarantee I'll find the time to participate in this conference at any length to provide the long version of these insights. But after you laugh, give a little serious thought to what I am saying. I just may be right.
Wayne
Reading List ************
Avineri, Shlomo. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism. New York and London: New York University Press, 1985.
Friedman, Robert I. the False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane: From FBI Informant to Knesset Member. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990.
Golan, Matti. With Friends Like You: What Israelis Really Think About American Jews. New York: The Free Press, 1992. Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin.
Harkabi, Yehoshafat. Israel's Fateful Hour. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Leibowitz, Yeshayahu. Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Leshem, Moshe. Balaam's Curse: How Israel Lost Its Way, and How It Can Find It Again. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Lustick, Ian S. for the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988.
Roth, Philip. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
Scholem, Gershom. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973. Translated by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky.
Segev, Tom. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and The Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
Sicker, Martin. Judaism, Nationalism, and the Land of Israel. Boulder, CO. Westview Press, 1992.