[Marxism] Shattering a 'national mythology'

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect reprints for us an article by Ofri Ilani, which states in
part:

According to Sand, the description of the Jews as a wandering and 
self-isolating nation of exiles, "who wandered across seas and 
continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent 
of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned 
homeland," is nothing but "national mythology." Like other national 
movements in Europe, which sought out a splendid Golden Age, through 
which they invented a heroic past - for example, classical Greece or the 
Teutonic tribes - to prove they have existed since the beginnings of 
history, "so, too, the first buds of Jewish nationalism blossomed in the 
direction of the strong light that has its source in the mythical 
Kingdom of David."

Fred comments:
The thing that struck me about this article was the complete absence of
mention of anti-Semitism (from ghettoization to extermination and down to
mere institutional discrimination) as a source of the pan-national
solidarity of Jews as a people. 

Israel is primarily a result of expulsions,ghettoization, pogroms, and
institutionalized discrimination in Europe, extending (to a strikingly
lesser extent) to Jews in the United States. Repeated streams of population
flow into Israel from these sources. Israel is not a product of Jewish
national self-determination, but of the denial of this in country after
country. The anti-Semitic expulsionary policies of Arab governments,
helpless or complicit with Israel, were a massive reinforcement. And even
the flow of Ethiopian Black Jews stemmed from hostile policies by the
Ethiopian government.

Jews have never developed a big longing to not live in a "diaspora." For the
most part, they have been more than happy with the scattered condition of
being in a diaspora, despite "next year in Jerusalem" and all that, to the
extent that this condition has been livable, or at least survivable.

I quite agree with the idea that Jews are more the product of conversion
than dispersion. The exposure of this is not new. I learned about it quite a
few years ago in a book called The Myth of the Jewish Race, by two
pro-Israel writers who were challenging tendencies in Israel to narrowly
define "Jews" to exclude the Ethiopians and others. The Jews not only
converted actively, but at one point were reported to constitute about 20
percent of the population of the Roman empire. 

The rise of Christianity was a disaster for them -- nothing less, especially
as it came to revolve in part around the issue of Jewish guilt. It was the
Christian inheritance of the declining Romam empire and the later rise of
Islam that forced Jews to abandon the attempt to spread the revolution and
to accept existence as a  tight and restricted community. Conversion was
effectively, if not always officially, outlawed -- which extended into the
European Middle Ages.

It is to be expected that a restricted, yet mobile, and intermarrying
population will develop a few genetic common tendencies. Not many.

I think we should start thinking of the so-called diaspora, which Jews have
actually been forced out of kicking and screaming when not actually dead, as
a right of self-determination for the Jews who have tended historically, as
Trotsky put it, to be expelled from the pores of crisis-ridden world
imperialism. We have to resist the historic tendency toward expulsion and
concentration of the Jews from declining systems (Rome, feudalism, and
imperialism). 

I think we should come to view the founding of the state of Israel as a form
of expulsion from Europe, the completion of Hitler's work of the destruction
of European Jewry.

Note should be taken of the Christian Zionist, militant pro-Israel position
of the Christian Zionists that Jews of the world should all be gathered in
Palestine to prepare the war of anti-Christ (who will be Jewish and will
have a substantial Jewish following, the story goes).

I think it is more important to come to see the right to live in
"dispersion" around the world rather than being essentially forcibly
concentrated in a single "Jewish state" as a basic right of the Jews as a
people which must be energetically defended, rather than tormenting
ourselves over definitions of a "people" or a nation.

As for the idea that spending an hour each year commemorating the Nakba will
justify the existence of Israel, well, words fail me.



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