Marking the 60th Anniversary of the State of Israel - Background
May 11 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. On May 11, 1948 the civil war between Jewish paramilitaries and Palestinian Arabs ended with the establishment of the Israeli state. However, this really only marked a pause in what has been a virtually continuous war waged by Israel against the Palestinian people. In addition, Israel has waged frequent war with its northern neighbour Lebanon and occasional war with its Arab neighbours - Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
This constant warfare, that has been a feature of the Israeli state since long before its inception, results from the very nature of the Zionist project itself. Violence will always be a part of Zionism as its fundamental premise is the conquest and seizure of land along with the dispossession of the former owners and occupants of that land. In this, the Zionist philosophy does not limit itself to Palestine alone. Rather, its goal has always been the domination and control of the entire Middle East region, “from the Nile to the Euphrates” as then Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion declared at the end of 1948.
The Zionist movement began in the 1880s primarily among the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe. It made use of a Jewish religious tradition that yearns for the return to a biblical Israel (Eretz Yisrael) as well as the atmosphere of ethnic and nationalist ideology that pervaded Europe in the late nineteenth century. It was also presented as a response to the upsurge of anti-Semitism at the time in countries that were home to significant Jewish communities.
Although it is a matter of dispute whether an actual physical return to a biblical land of Israel is indeed part of Jewish religious tradition, this claim was used by early Zionist leaders to promote the idea of creating a Jewish nation state in Palestine. This Jewish nationalist dogma was aided by the fact that, at the time, a large number of the world’s Jews lived in the European part of the Russian Empire where the Czarist regime subjected them to extreme discrimination. Jews were denied such basic civil rights as freedom of movement, residence, occupation and worship. They were also denied the right to own land and thus were kept impoverished and socially isolated. During this period Jews were also subject to military conscription into the Czarist army sometimes for periods as long as 25 years.
At the end of the nineteenth century Czarist Russia was experiencing political upheaval as a result of the oppressive nature of the state, the semi-feudal condition of the countryside and the exploitation of workers in the developing capitalist economy of the cities. The unrest that accompanied these conditions was brutally suppressed by the Russian regime which, characteristically, blamed the violence and appalling conditions of the population on the usual scapegoats – in this case the Jewish population. In pursuit of this strategy, between 1881 and 1884 the Czarist government unleashed a series of pogroms against the Jews in Russia.
These conditions set the stage for birth of the Zionist movement. The Zionist leaders argued that Jews would never be allowed to live in peace and in possession of civil, social and economic rights while they continued to live in Czarist Russia. The solution they proposed was the wholesale emigration of Russian Jewry and the creation of a Jewish state in the so-called biblical home the Jewish people in the Middle East. The area they had in mind was then under the control of the Ottoman Empire which, like the Czarist Russian empire, was on its last legs and would fail to survive the First World War.
A significant portion of the Russian Jewish population did in fact emigrate during the last decade of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth century. However, the vast majority of them chose not go to the Middle East; rather they fled to countries in central and western Europe. Large numbers also went to Canada, the United States and other places further a field. In fact, relatively few Jews in that period chose to migrate to Palestine.
By and large the Jews who escaped the pogroms and anti-Semitism of Czarist Russia chose to cast their lot with western capitalist societies where they would have greater civil and social rights and greater economic opportunities. Although anti Semitism and social restrictions on Jews were common in most of the societies where they settled the levels of discrimination and oppression were, by comparison with conditions in the Russian Empire, an improvement. This did not mean, of course, that anti-Semitism and systematic discrimination against Jews did not continue to be a serous problem.
However, the Zionist leadership was not concerned with the well-being of Jews living elsewhere than their designated location for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In fact the struggle to end anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews in Europe and North America was not considered helpful for the project of establishing a Jewish national state. Rather, Zionist theory held that anti-Semitism could only be dealt with through the establishment of a state consisting of Jews alone. In this, the views of Zionists coincided entirely with those of anti-Semites – that is that Jews and non-Jews could not live together in one society. Like all racist ideologies Zionism holds that the races, religions or communities cannot coexist and must be separated from one another. Thus the ongoing existence and persistence anti-Semitism in Europe and North America was extremely useful for the Zionist cause.
Zionism was born out of particular conditions that existed in a decaying society at the end of the nineteenth century. It is ironic that the oppression and violence of the Czarist Empire can be credited not merely with fostering the Zionist movement but also with giving that movement its most salient ideological characteristics. Zionist ideology embodies the same chauvinism and bigotry that was employed by the Czarist regime against its Jewish citizens. It also serves the same imperialist purposes.