Suzanne Schneide : la disturbante alleanza tra sionisti e antisemiti
There
is no inherent contradiction between Zionism and anti-Semitism. The two
ideologies have in fact often worked in concert to achieve their shared
goal:…
forward.com
Sintesi personale
Tra
la seduta del Congresso per David Friedman, la visita di Benjamin
Netanyahu, e il rifiuto del Presidente Trump ad affrontare la crescente
ondata di antisemitismo, c' è stato un momento di tensione all'interno
della comunità ebraica americana.
Per quelli di destra l'abbandono di Trump della soluzione dei due
stati, la nomina di Friedman evidenziano che la nuova amministrazione sarà fermamente impegnata ad appoggiare
una forma espansionista del sionismo. La presenza di Jared Kushner nel cerchio interno del
presidente, mantenendo Friedman e Bibi dietro le quinte è considerata da molti come un segnale che Trump non è realmente un antisemita.
Secondo questa logica il forte impegno da parte di Trump e Steve
Bannon verso Israele mina qualsiasi sospetto che essi nutrano antipatia
nei confronti degli ebrei.
Eppure per molti centristi e liberali, l'idea che Jared Kushner e Steve
Bannon lavorino insieme provoca una confusione senza fine: Come
potrebbe il discendente dei sopravvissuti all'Olocausto trovare una causa
comune con il leader ideologico dell' organizzazione . " alt-destra"?
La risposta potrebbe trovarsi nella storia del movimento sionista, una
storia che dimostra che non vi è alcuna contraddizione intrinseca tra
sionismo e antisemitismo.
Le due ideologie hanno infatti lavorato spesso in concerto per
raggiungere il loro obiettivo comune: la concentrazione di ebrei in un
unico luogo .
Anche prima che il movimento sionista moderna sorgesse nel tardo 19 °
secolo, i filosofi e gli statisti cristiani hanno discusso che cosa fare con
la massa "orientale" degli ebrei in mezzo a loro.
Come lo studioso Jonathan Hess ha
notato, una "soluzione" popolare tra gli illuministi che nutrivano
sentimenti antisemiti era di deportare gli ebrei in un ambiente
coloniale per riformarli .
Johann Gottlieb Fichte aveva osservato nel 1793 che la protezione più efficace per gli europei contro la minaccia ebraica consisteva nel "conquistare la
terra santa per loro e mandarli tutti lì."
Per i pionieri sionisti come Leo Pinsker e Theodor Herzl
l'antisemitismo era un fenomeno inevitabile che si sarebbe verificato in
qualsiasi momento e luogo dove gli ebrei fossero una minoranza
considerevole.Normali relazioni con le altre nazioni avrebbero potuto essere stabilite solo
spostando gli ebrei in un luogo dove fossero la maggioranza.
Così, piuttosto che spingere gli stati contemporanei e le società a
escogitare nuovi modi per ospitare le differenze , pensatori sionisti della
generazione di Herzl ritenevano che il "problema" ebraico avrebbe potuto essere risolta solo rimuovendo gli ebrei dagli stati europei.
L'idea che gli ebrei non appartengono
al loro attuale luogo di residenza e di origine, ma alla Terra Santa, è
stata , naturalmente, non una posizione che tutti i sionisti appoggiavano o appoggiano
Eppure non è difficile vedere la logica molto problematica che collega
tali affermazioni al nazionalismo sangue-e-terra che ha portato
alla distruzione della vita ebraica europea. Il nazismo, naturalmente, nasce da questo contesto : gli ebrei non avrebbero mai potuto essere davvero tedeschi .
Anche se la portata della distruzione non era ancora conosciuta nel
1930 e nei primi anni 1940, molti tuttavia hanno trovato sorprendente che ci siano stati tentativi da parte della destra sionista in quegli anni per
stabilire legami con la Germania nazista.
Numerosi studiosi hanno notato le simpatie fasciste di alcuni membri
del campo sionista revisionista. David Ben-Gurion nel 1933 pubblicò un lavoro dove affermava che Ze'ev Jabotinsky , il fondatore del movimento revisionista, stava calcando le orme di Hitler.
Il flirt della destra sionista con il fascismo ha raggiunto il suo tragico
apice nel 1941, quando Lehi, gruppo scissionista paramilitare di Avraham
Stern, si avvicinò a Otto Von Hentig, un diplomatico tedesco, per proporre
una cooperazione tra il movimento ebraico radicato a livello nazionale
in Palestina e lo Stato tedesco.
La Germania nazista rifiutò la sua generosa offerta, avendo scelto in una "soluzione" del tutto diverso sulla questione
dell'esistenza ebraica.
Ricordando ciò mi avvicino ai dibattiti
contemporanei sulla presidenza di Donald Trump e l'alleanza
tra i membri della supremazia bianca "alt-destra", da un lato, e un
certo segmento di ebrei americani dall'altro ,secondo i quali è importante collaborare con chi si impegna per la Grande Israele . Quando Richard Spencer esprime la sua ammirazione per il sionismo non dobbiamo dimenticare il suo suggerimento che l'America potrebbe risultare migliore con
una pacifica pulizia etnica di quei segmenti della popolazione che non sono bianchi e di discendenza europea. Le svastiche e altri atti di intimidazione che sono stati così
abbondanti per la vittoria di Trump in realtà solo incentivi pacifici per
renderci conto che la nostra vera casa è in una terra lontana lontana?
La risposta deve essere un sonoro "no".
La vita ebraica fiorisce in società pluralistiche entro il quale la
differenza non è un "problema" da risolvere, ma un dato di fatto da esaltare . La tesi della destra che afferma che il mondo sarà sicuro quando ciascuno di noi ritornerà nel suo appezzamento ancestrale deve essere sconfitto per evitare nel ventunesimo secolo i danni prodotti nel XX secolo
Suzanne
Schneider è uno storico del conflitto israelo-palestinese e il
movimento sionista
etween the congressional hearing for David Friedman, the visit of
Benjamin Netanyahu, and President Trump’s refusal to address the rising
tide of anti-Semitism, it’s been a tense time within the American Jewish
community. For those on the right, Trump’s abandonment of the two-state
solution, much like Friedman’s nomination, comes as an assurance that
the new administration will firmly commit itself to an expansionist form
of Zionism. And along with the presence of Jared Kushner within the
President’s inner circle, keeping Friedman and Bibi in the wings is
taken by many as a signal that Trump is not really an anti-Semite,
despite surrounding himself with figures of questionable persuasion.
According to this logic, the strong commitment by Trump and Steve Bannon
to Israel undermines any suggestion that they harbor antipathy toward
Jews. Yet, for many centrists and liberals, the idea of Jared Kushner
and Steve Bannon working together causes endless confusion: How could
the descendent of Holocaust survivors find common cause with the
ideological leader of the alt-right?
The answer may lie in the history of the Zionist movement, a history which demonstrates that there is no inherent contradiction between Zionism and anti-Semitism. The two ideologies have in fact often worked in concert to achieve their shared goal: concentrating Jews in one place (so as to better avoid them in others). Even before the modern Zionist movement arose in the late 19th century, Christian philosophers and statesmen debated what to do with the “oriental” mass of Jewry in their midst. As the scholar Jonathan Hess of the University of North Carolina has noted, one “solution” popular among Enlightenment figures who harbored anti-Semitic feelings was to deport Jews to a colonial setting where they could be reformed. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, among the founders of German Idealism, noted in 1793 that the most effective protection Europeans could mount against the Jewish menace was to “conquer the holy land for them and send them all there.”
Indeed, Zionism crystallized as a political movement among European Jews explicitly to solve the problem of political anti-Semitism. For Zionist pioneers like Leo Pinsker and Theodor Herzl, anti-Semitism was an inevitable phenomenon that would occur at any time and place where Jews were a sizable minority. Normal relations with other nations could only be established by moving Jews to a place where they were a majority. Thus rather than pushing contemporary states and societies to devise new ways of accommodating difference, Zionist thinkers of Herzl’s generation ascribed to the logic that the Jewish “problem” could only be settled by removing Jews from European states.
he idea that Jews belong not in their actual place of residence and origin, but in the Holy Land, was of course not a position that all Zionists ascribed to, either then or now. Yet it is not hard to see the very problematic logic that links such assertions to the sort of blood-and-soil nationalism that led to the destruction of European Jewish life. Nazism of course grew out of this context and insisted that Jews could never really be German. The Nazis, however, took this conclusion to a radically new place: it was ultimately extermination, rather than resettlement, that drove the Nazi position.
Though the scope of destruction was not yet known in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, many nevertheless find it astounding that there were attempts by right-wing Zionists during these years to establish ties with Nazi Germany. Numerous scholars have noted the fascist sympathies of certain members of the Revisionist Zionist camp, who bitterly feuded with mainstream Zionists and denounced them as Bolsheviks. The antipathy was apparently mutual, as David Ben-Gurion in 1933 published a work that described Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist movement, as treading in the footsteps of Hitler. The Zionist Right’s flirtation with fascism reached its tragic peak in 1941 when Lehi, Avraham Stern’s paramilitary splinter group, approached Otto Von Hentig, a German diplomat, to propose cooperation between the nationally rooted Hebraic movement in Palestine and the German state. Nazi Germany declined his generous offer, having stumbled across quite a different “solution” to the question of Jewish existence.
It has been with this history in mind that I approach contemporary debates about Donald Trump’s presidency and the alliance it fosters between members of the white nationalist “alt-right” on one hand, and a certain segment of American Jews, on the other. The argument that the latter should work with the former because they all share a commitment to “Greater Israel” belies the fact that not all allies, or alliances, are created equal. When Richard Spencer voices his admiration of Zionism (because, in his understanding, the movement stands first and foremost for racial homogeneity), we should realize that this is not incidental to his suggestion that America might be better off with a peaceful ethnic cleansing of those population segments that are not of white, European descent. Do American Jews really believe that they will pass muster within such a state? And are the swastikas and other acts of intimidation that have been so abundant since Trump’s victory really just peaceful incentives to realize that our true home is in a land far, far away?
The answer must be a resounding “no.”
Jewish life flourishes in pluralistic societies within which difference is not a “problem” to be resolved, but a fact to be celebrated. The alliance of right-wing Zionists and the alt-right should not be viewed as an abnormality, but the meeting of quite compatible outlooks that assert — each in their own way—that the world will only be secure once we all retreat to our various plots of ancestral land. Nationalist thinking of this sort wrought more than its fair share of damage during the twentieth century. Let’s not enact a repeat performance in the twenty-first.
Suzanne Schneider is a historian of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Zionist movement, and a director and core faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
The answer may lie in the history of the Zionist movement, a history which demonstrates that there is no inherent contradiction between Zionism and anti-Semitism. The two ideologies have in fact often worked in concert to achieve their shared goal: concentrating Jews in one place (so as to better avoid them in others). Even before the modern Zionist movement arose in the late 19th century, Christian philosophers and statesmen debated what to do with the “oriental” mass of Jewry in their midst. As the scholar Jonathan Hess of the University of North Carolina has noted, one “solution” popular among Enlightenment figures who harbored anti-Semitic feelings was to deport Jews to a colonial setting where they could be reformed. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, among the founders of German Idealism, noted in 1793 that the most effective protection Europeans could mount against the Jewish menace was to “conquer the holy land for them and send them all there.”
Indeed, Zionism crystallized as a political movement among European Jews explicitly to solve the problem of political anti-Semitism. For Zionist pioneers like Leo Pinsker and Theodor Herzl, anti-Semitism was an inevitable phenomenon that would occur at any time and place where Jews were a sizable minority. Normal relations with other nations could only be established by moving Jews to a place where they were a majority. Thus rather than pushing contemporary states and societies to devise new ways of accommodating difference, Zionist thinkers of Herzl’s generation ascribed to the logic that the Jewish “problem” could only be settled by removing Jews from European states.
he idea that Jews belong not in their actual place of residence and origin, but in the Holy Land, was of course not a position that all Zionists ascribed to, either then or now. Yet it is not hard to see the very problematic logic that links such assertions to the sort of blood-and-soil nationalism that led to the destruction of European Jewish life. Nazism of course grew out of this context and insisted that Jews could never really be German. The Nazis, however, took this conclusion to a radically new place: it was ultimately extermination, rather than resettlement, that drove the Nazi position.
Though the scope of destruction was not yet known in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, many nevertheless find it astounding that there were attempts by right-wing Zionists during these years to establish ties with Nazi Germany. Numerous scholars have noted the fascist sympathies of certain members of the Revisionist Zionist camp, who bitterly feuded with mainstream Zionists and denounced them as Bolsheviks. The antipathy was apparently mutual, as David Ben-Gurion in 1933 published a work that described Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist movement, as treading in the footsteps of Hitler. The Zionist Right’s flirtation with fascism reached its tragic peak in 1941 when Lehi, Avraham Stern’s paramilitary splinter group, approached Otto Von Hentig, a German diplomat, to propose cooperation between the nationally rooted Hebraic movement in Palestine and the German state. Nazi Germany declined his generous offer, having stumbled across quite a different “solution” to the question of Jewish existence.
It has been with this history in mind that I approach contemporary debates about Donald Trump’s presidency and the alliance it fosters between members of the white nationalist “alt-right” on one hand, and a certain segment of American Jews, on the other. The argument that the latter should work with the former because they all share a commitment to “Greater Israel” belies the fact that not all allies, or alliances, are created equal. When Richard Spencer voices his admiration of Zionism (because, in his understanding, the movement stands first and foremost for racial homogeneity), we should realize that this is not incidental to his suggestion that America might be better off with a peaceful ethnic cleansing of those population segments that are not of white, European descent. Do American Jews really believe that they will pass muster within such a state? And are the swastikas and other acts of intimidation that have been so abundant since Trump’s victory really just peaceful incentives to realize that our true home is in a land far, far away?
The answer must be a resounding “no.”
Jewish life flourishes in pluralistic societies within which difference is not a “problem” to be resolved, but a fact to be celebrated. The alliance of right-wing Zionists and the alt-right should not be viewed as an abnormality, but the meeting of quite compatible outlooks that assert — each in their own way—that the world will only be secure once we all retreat to our various plots of ancestral land. Nationalist thinking of this sort wrought more than its fair share of damage during the twentieth century. Let’s not enact a repeat performance in the twenty-first.
Suzanne Schneider is a historian of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Zionist movement, and a director and core faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.
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