The Politics of Anti-Semitism: Zionism, the Bund and Jewish Identity Politics

[Anonymous]

http://palestinethinktank.com/2007/11/28/the-politics-of-anti-semitism-zionism-the-bund-and-jewish-identity-politics/
http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/bund.htm

An interesting article by Gilad Atzmon.  Of particular interest was the following  excerpt:

Zionism - a 'success' story

As sad as it may be and as much pain as it may take to admit it, the Zionist project was there to make a change and it indeed succeeded in doing so. The first generation of Zionist ideologists was aiming at the formation of Jewish secular life and secular meaning. It is impossible not to admit that the first generations of Hebrew speaking Palestinians had managed to erect a substantial body of literature, poetry, plastic art and music in a very short period of time. Early Zionists, European thinkers such as Echad Ha'am who spoke about the revival of the Jewish culture, saw Zionism primarily as a spiritual project.

He believed that the creation in Eretz-Israel, of a Jewish cultural center would act to reinforce Jewish life in the Diaspora. His hope was that in this center, a new Jewish national identity based on Judaic ethics and values might resolve the crisis of Judaism. Being an ethical being, Echad Ha'am was one of the first to warn his fellow Zionists that Palestine is far from being a free land. He saw the obvious deception in the early Zionist slogan 'land without people for people without land'. He knew that Palestine was far from being uninhabited.

The revival of the Hebrew language pioneered by the Zionists was there to celebrate the emerging bond between the Jews, Eretz Israel and Jewish heritage. The revival of Hebrew was there to create a continuum between the new Israelites and their ancestors. It was there to turn the Bible into a 'land registry' and God into a 'real estate agent'. Within just a few decades this bond has matured into a new Jewish dynamic identity, namely the 'Israeli'. However, as much as we despise the crimes committed by the 'Israeli' for more than 6 decades, we must confront that which fuels him with such militant and spiritual zeal.

We would have as well to accept the fact that Zionism, at least in its early days, had more than just one face. German Jewish philosophers and thinkers who immigrated to Israel in the mid 1930's such as Gershon Scholem, Martin Buber and Hugo Bergman felt an urge to establish a Zionist ethical value system. Prof. Yeshayahu Leibovitch, a Zionist Orthodox Jew dedicated much of his intellectual life to criticising Zionist expansionism. In fact it was Leibovitch who was the first to label the Israeli military as 'Judeo Nazis'. Naively, these morally orientated Zionist thinkers believed that that an ethically enlightened Jewish nationalist project was within reach. This school of thought was so naïve that one of its last followers, the Israeli so-called philosopher Asa Kasher even spent some time writing the ?IDF ethical?code?. Clearly Kasher failed to understand Emmanuel Kant?s categorical imperative. Ethics could never be set into codes. Ethical judgment is rather a fluid dynamic process the must be revised continuously. However, for early Zionist thinkers and especially the humanists amongst them, the emerging Jewish state would be respectful towards the indigenous population of Palestine i.e. the Palestinians. The gloomy historical tale of Israel and the emerging of the current starvation in Gaza alongside a sinister apartheid Israeli legislation proves how wrong they were.

As far as the Jewish National project is concerned, the Bund had failed completely. In fact, by the end of WWII, there were hardly any Bundists left to sustain the Jewish (national) Socialist philosophy. Indeed, the Bund was involved with some fierce fighting against the Nazis during the war. Probably the most notable battle the Bund should be credited for was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. However, the majority of the Bundists who survived the Nazi Judeocide immigrated to Palestine, they settled in a few Kibbutzim and joined the Zionist left parties. The rest settled in Britain and the USA. Their followers still insist upon claiming that they know how to save the Diaspora Jews from their misery. The half a dozen contemporary Bundists operate mainly within Jewish segregated political cells from which they try to monitor the Palestinian solidarity discourse. They insist that as far as Palestinian solidarity discourse is concerned, 'fighting anti-Semitism is a primary issue'. Clearly, no one within the Palestinian solidarity movement can take such a stand seriously. The Bundists spread their message to the world via some minor sectarian, predominantly Jewish cyber cells that attract very little intellectual, political and ideological attention. The Yiddish that was supposed to be their cultural flag is rather non-existent amongst Jewish seculars. It has zero cultural impact on Jews or anyone else. As the Marxist Jewish thinker Abraham Leon predicted already in the 1930?s, Yiddish is now officially a dead language as far as secular Jews are concerned.

Interestingly enough, Hebrew has replaced Yiddish as a secular symbolic identifier of Jewish brotherhood and a representation of Jewish ethnicity as well as tribalism. Even when Jews do not speak Hebrew, they know enough to say 'Shalom', or 'Toda Raba' (Thank you). The usage of the reincarnated biblical language is there to assert their ethnic belonging. And this should not take us by surprise. Though modern Yiddish journalism and publication is literally non-existent, you can find more than a few Hebrew daily papers and not only in Israel, you can also find films in Hebrew, pop music in Hebrew and even porn in Hebrew (I am not aware of any porn in Yiddish unless the last Bundists, Roland Rance, Tony Greenstein, Michael Rosen and Lenni Brenner have something in the pipeline). Hebrew and Israeliness has been perceived by most Jews as the current symbolic identifier of their ethnicity.