Shlomo Avineri*

Truth Lies in the Details
Comment on Natan Sznaider1

I have read Natan Sznajder’s “Israel: Ethnischer Staat und Pluralistische Gesellschaft” with interest, and agree with most of his analysis. There are however two points on which I would like to comment.

At the outset of his article Sznajder states: “Es gibt wenige Staaten, die ihre Existenz so sehr der internationalen Moralität verdanken wie Israel”. The reference is obviously to the 1947 decision of the General Assembly of the UN to propose the partition of the British mandate territory of Palestine into states, a Jewish and an Arab one - a decision at least partly motivated by the universal moral shock and feeling of guilt in the wake of the Shoa.

But this is only part of the story, and to leave it as that is a simplistic and a not very helpful. True, the 1947 UN recommendation added an important element of international morality to the Zionist movement. Yet international morality (im Klartext: the United Nations) proved itself totally impotent and incapable of implementing what it considered to be the right decision. When the Arabs of Palestine, as well as neighboring Arab states opposed this decision, they went to war against the Jewish community in Palestine in order to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state – and to undermine a decision of the UN representing “international morality”. The UN proved itself totally incapable then as now (think of Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo) to carry out its decision, or even help that party which was trying to implement it against the violent and armed opposition of the other party (which included UN member-states as Egypt, Syria and Iraq).

In the end Israel prevailed: but not because of “international morality” but because at a crucial moment, in the spring of 1948, when it appeared that the small and outgunned Jewish community in Palestine was about to be defeated, the Soviet Union under Stalin decided out of its raison d’etat considerations - not out of “international morality” – to supply the nascent Jewish army with arms, including machine guns and its first airplanes: this made it possible for Israel to survive. This Soviet support for Israel was done via Czechoslovakia, in which the Communists have just come to power, and the airplanes supplied to Israel were Czech-produced Messerschmitt fighter airplanes, produced during World War II in the Skoda-Werke under Nazi occupation.

That it was Stalin who saved Israel because at that time all Arab countries were allies or protectorates of British and French imperialism is one of the cruel ironies of history. It suggests that history is complex and sometimes morally much more ambivalent than theories of political correctness would like to imagine. It also recalls Machiavelli’s unpleasant dictum that even prophets have to be armed – otherwise they will fail in their moral mission: see Moses and Mohammed versus Savanarola.

The second point has to do with the problem of how Zionism and Israel dealt with the Arab issue, as well as with non-European Jews in Israel. Again, Sznaider is right when he says (p. 131) “Nun ist Israel ja in Europa gegründet worden – stammt sozusagen aus Europa”. Yet then he goes on and says “Im neuen Land gab es plötzlich Araber und orientalische Juden – so uneuropäisch, so unpassend.” – and in this he is totally wrong.

In 1903 Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, published his utopian novel Altneuland, modeled on Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopia News from Nowhere. Altneuland describes how a Jewish state, if it would be founded, would look in the year 1923: modern, technologically innovative, tolerant, based on what Herzl calls “Mutualism”, combining “the initiative of capitalism with the justice of socialism”. Far from being unaware of the existence of Arabs in the country, Herzl presents the Arabs as an integral part of the New Society (this is its official name) – equal citizens, participating in the economic and social development of the country, being grateful – naively one would say, but after all this is 1903! – for the economic prosperity brought by the Jews to what was then an underdeveloped province of the Ottoman Empire.

Moreover, one of the leaders of the New Society is an Arab engineer from Haifa, Reschid Bey (who had studied, of course, in Berlin and speaks perfect German, as does his cultured and emancipated wife). What is even more interesting is that the political action of the novel in 1923 takes place in a context of an election campaign in the country. In this election there appears for the first time a political party led by a recent immigrant, a fanatical rabbi named Dr Geyer (!), who advocates the disenfranchisement of the country Arab citizens; the country, he argues, “belongs solely to the Jews”. Altneuland describes the election campaign in which the liberal political establishment of the country – Jews and Arabs alike – fight and defeat the Jewish racist Geyer, who is portrayed by Herzl as the mirror-image of the Viennese anti-Czech and anti-Jewish populist racist Dr Karl Luëger. The only difference is that in Vienna the racists have won (Luëger was elected Buergermeister of Vienna), while in Zion they lose.

Naïve as such a typical 19^th century liberal vision may now seem, it certainly does not fit into the simplistic statement that “plötzlich gab es Araber”. Many more examples could be supplied.

The same applies to the issue of the non-European Jews. It is of course true that Zionism started in Europe – first because before 1939 90% of the world’s Jews either lived in Europe or were descendants of European Jews: only 10% were “Orientals”; secondly, it was first in Europe that the emergence of modern nationalism made the position of Jews precarious (when nationalism reached the Arab world in the mid-20^th century, the same processes developed in countries like Iraq, Egypt or Morocco). It is equally true that after 1948 the Israeli establishment, hailing from Europe, erred dramatically in its attempt to assimilate Near Eastern Jews into a Schmelztegel based on Western customs and norms: only later did a multi-cultural and more tolerant approach develop.

But, again, to maintain that “plötzlich gab es orientalische Juden” is totally wrong. To give once again an example from Herzl: very early on in his Zionist “awakening” he reports almost breathlessly about a meeting with a Jerusalem doctor, Dr Isaak d’Arbella, who report to him about the variety of Jews among the small Jewish community in Jerusalem. It is worth to quote this entry from his diary for 20 February 1897 just to get Herzl’s fascination – very fin-de-siècle romantic – about precisely the non-European Jews:

“[Dr d’Arbella] erzählte mir wunderbare Dinge aus Palästina…und von unseren Juden aus Asien. Kurdische, persische, indische Juden kommen zu seiner Consultation. Merkwürding: es gibt jüdische Neger, die aus Indien kommen. Sie sind die Nachkömmlinge der Sklaven, die bei den vertriebenen Juden dienten und den Glauben ihrer Herren annahmen. In Palästina sieht man…auch kriegirsch gefärbte Berg- und Steppenjuden.”

It was this awareness of the heterogeneous nature of Jewish communities the world over which also led Herzl to deny any racist or biological characterization of the Jews. “We are”, he always maintained,  “a people of varied anthological components” – and later, when meeting with the King of Italy, he was glad to hear from him about Ethiopian Jews living in the recently acquired Italian colony of Eritrea.

Again, a complex picture. Precisely because the challenges facing the self-identity of Israel are so complex  and sometimes contradictory – as so justly discussed by Sznaider – this complexity is not helped by a stereotypical presentation of the historical and intellectual background that brought Israel into existence – neither in the international context, nor in the internal discourse of the Zionist movement. Like much else, truth lies in the details, not in comfortable generalization.