The Myths of Zionism - Softcover

Rose, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745320554 ISBN 13: 9780745320557

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Ancient, medieval and modern, this book is a critical account of the historical, political and cultural roots of Zionism.

Scrutinising the roots of the myths of Zionism and mobilising recent scholarship, John Rose shows how many of these stories, as with other mythologies, have no basis in fact. However, because Zionism is a living political force and these myths have been used to justify very real and political ends - namely, the expulsion and continuing persecution of the Palestinians. John Rose separates fact from fiction presenting a detailed analysis of their origins and development. This includes a challenge to Zionism's biblical claims using very recent and very startling Israeli archaeological conclusions.

This book shows clearly how Zionism makes many false claims on Jewish religion and history.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Rose teaches Sociology at Southwark College and London Metropolitan University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Myths of Zionism

By John Rose

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2004 John Rose
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2055-7

Contents

Acknowledgements, viii, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 'The Bible is our Mandate', 7, 
2 'The Distinguishing Characteristic of the Jews has been their Exile', 26, 
3 '... Eighteen Centuries of Jewish Suffering', 43, 
4 'Us' Jews, 'Them' Arabs I: A Message from a Cairo Synagogue, a Thousand Years Ago, 63, 
5 'A Land without People ...', 80, 
6 '... for a People without Land', 98, 
7 Plucky Little Israel or Great Power Protégé? I: Britain and the Zionist Colony in Palestine, 117, 
8 'The Nazi Holocaust Proved the Urgency for a Jewish State', 135, 
9 Plucky Little Israel or Great Power Protégé? II: How Israel became the Strategic Asset for the United States, 154, 
10 'Us' Jews, 'Them' Arabs II: The Lost Jewish-Arab Symbiosis – In Search of the 'Spark of Hope in the Past', 174, 
Conclusion: Out of the Ashes, 201, 
Notes, 206, 
Bibliography, 216, 
Index, 222, 

CHAPTER 1

'The Bible is our Mandate'

When David Ben-Gurion warned the British authorities, via Lord Peel and the Royal Commission in 1936, that 'the Bible is our Mandate' (Ben-Gurion 1970: 107), the twentieth century's most famous Zionist politician, who would become Israel's first prime minister, was giving modern expression to an absolutely fundamental biblical myth, which lies at the core of Zionism. According to this Old Testament story, an ancient Jewish kingdom of Israel, usually referred to as 'Ancient Israel', and sometimes called the United Monarchy of David and Solomon, is said to have existed from about 1000 to 922 BCE. The United Monarchy was allegedly the most powerful and prosperous state in the eastern Mediterranean at this time, exercising sovereignty from the Euphrates in Syria to the brook of Egypt (Wadi el-Arish) in northern Sinai.

These borders coincide with those of the promise God is said to have made to the Patriarch Abraham and recorded in Genesis, the opening chapter of the Bible.

The Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, 'And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.' (Genesis 17.8)

This is the basis for the notorious visionary geographical concept of Zionism, Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, the bedrock of Zionist ideology, a potent mixture of ancient Judaism and modern nationalism, which hails the promise to Abraham and claims the United Monarchy as its political expression and modern legitimating model for itself.

It is at this point that the reader needs to be alerted to a rather startling characteristic about Ben-Gurion, something he shared with many other Zionist leaders. Ben-Gurion did not particularly believe in this Bible story, or for that matter any other. What mattered, according to him, was that many Jews did believe it. That was enough. It did not matter whether the belief was true or not. Making sense of this strange belief system, symptomatic in general of the peculiarities inherent in Zionist ideology, will form the basis of the first half of this chapter. We will then consider something even more surprising: Zionists are great archaeologists. It is a national obsession and for over 100 years they have been excavating in Palestine in search of 'Ancient Israel'. On many occasions, false and over-excited announcements of its discovery have been proclaimed, only to collapse in the face of intense scientific scrutiny. Then, in the 1990s, the realisation began to dawn that it just might not be there ...

Some of Israel's more far-sighted archaeologists then realised that what scientists sometimes call a 'paradigm shift' was necessary. In other words, the taken-for-granted framework for understanding how to make sense of archaeological discovery was itself the problem. To put it bluntly, the Old Testament stories, far from providing guidelines for archaeological discovery, were proving to be obstacles.

The chapter concludes by looking at how archaeologists are coming to terms with what amounts to an intellectual revolution in thinking about ancient Palestine, and how they have found themselves inadvertently challenging the Zionist myth at the core of modern Israeli identity.

BEN-GURION: ZIONIST PIONEER ...

David Ben-Gurion, born in Plonsk, in Poland, in 1886, was part of a generation of young Jews in the Tsarist Russian Empire shocked by the scale and excesses of the pogroms, the anti-Semitic riots and murderous attacks on Jewish communities. (This period, including the young Ben-Gurion's political activism in Poland, is explored in detail in Chapter 6.) Some of these young Jews became Zionists and a few, including Ben-Gurion, went to live in Palestine. There were already a few established Zionist agricultural settlements in Palestine, which at that time was part of the Ottoman Empire (discussed in Chapter 5). On arrival in Palestine in 1906 Ben-Gurion went in search of the agricultural settlements which he was already describing as 'Hebrew republics' (Teveth 1987: 40). At the time there were about 55,000 Jews in Palestine out of a total of 700,000 inhabitants. Only a small minority of the Jews were working on the settlements. Ben-Gurion was soon to discover that, although these settlements were built on land which had been purchased from absentee Arab landlords, an understandably resentful peasantry which had been subsequently evicted often returned to make armed incursions. As early as 1909 we find Ben-Gurion, gun in hand, ready to defend an agricultural settlement in the Galilee (Teveth 1987: 64).

Ben-Gurion made his mark on Zionist politics in Palestine almost immediately. He was at the founding conference of the Poale Zion (the Palestine Social Democratic Hebrew Workers Party; its politics are discussed in Chapter 6), and in 1906 and he was elected to its central committee (Teveth 1987: 45). Poale Zion would go on to become the decisive force in Zionist politics for most of the twentieth century, and Ben-Gurion was to become its most charismatic and successful leader.

... AND MYTH-MAKER

In this chapter we are concerned with trying to understand Ben-Gurion's belief system. It provides an unparalleled insight into Zionist myth-making. Ben-Gurion explains it himself very well:

It is not important whether the story is a true record of an event or not. What is of importance is that this is what the Jews believed as far back as the period of the First Temple. (Pearlman 1965: 227)

A writer called Yizhar, who much later became part of Ben-Gurion's inner circle, has recently tried to defend the Zionist leader from the accusation that, by mixing fact with belief-in-a-fact, he was deliberately manipulating the truth in favour of consciously shaping myths to suit the political expediency of the Zionist enterprise. In short, Yizhar tries to square the circle between myth and truth:

Myth is no less a truth than history, but it is an additional truth, a different truth, a truth that resides alongside the truth; a non objective human truth, but a truth that makes its way to the historical truth. (Wistrich and Ohana 1995: 61)

This appears to be clever, perhaps even profound, writing, but it is deeply flawed. It is true that by persuading people to act, and if necessary to act violently, in response to myth, historical fact can be created. But this does not validate the myth by somehow injecting truth into it...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745320554
• ISBN 13: 9780745320557
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland