"Zionism: Of the Jews, or For the Jews?"

In February of last year, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute,
Rabbi Donniel Hartman, wrote, "In truth, we have no desire to share our
country with them [the Haredim] and prefer that their integration be
limited, all the while hoping for their religious assimilation." In
February of 2013 the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute published a
paper called "the Haredi challenge" which proposed several solutions,
including "integration of the Haredim by coercion."

March 7 saw the publication of Yuval Elizur and Lawrence Malkin's The War
Within: Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Threat to Democracy and the Nation.

The way Israeli society and its constituent Zionist supporters abroad talk
about the Haredi problem is reminiscent of the way Americans once spoke of
Manifest Destiny, or Europeans of the "White Man's Burden." This debate
about how best to win the "war" against this minority, which must be
"assimilated" and "integrated," goes to the heart of the definition of
Zionism itself. Is Zionism for the Jews, or of the Jews? If it is for the
Jews it is coercive and exclusive, if it is of the Jews then it is
inclusive, whether those Jews speak Arabic, Ladino or Yiddish.

To understand the roots of the current "war" elite society is encouraging
people to wage against the Haredim one has to look at the roots of Zionism.
In 1898 Max Nordau spoke at the Second Zionist Congress of the need for
Jews to embrace physical labor and strength: "Let us once more become
deepchested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men...For no other people will gymnastics
fulfill a more educational purpose than for us Jews. It shall straighten us
in body and in character...Our new, muscle Jews have not yet regained the
heroism of our forefathers who in large numbers eagerly entered the sports
arenas in order to take part in competition."

This call to his fellow Jews was not coercive, but rather based on
consensus building and the logic found in his language. However, the
Zionist call for the "Conquest of Labor" in Ottoman Palestine quickly
became coercive.

Haim Arlosoroff noted in 1927: "There is almost no example of an effort by
a people engaged in settlement (am mityashev) with a European standard of
needs to transform a country with a low wage level that is made even lower
by the immigration of cheap labor into a site for mass immigration and mass
settlement without using coercive means."

In only a quarter of a century part of the Zionist movement progressed from
seeking consensus to forcing a "coercive" paradigm on people. Most of this
was due to the shock of having to live in the Land of Israel. The Zionist
leaders from Europe sought to import a "European standard" into the
country. The models they found in the country, such as Rothschild's
plantation settlements, were unacceptable and had to be brushed aside.

This had catastrophic affects on the existing Jewish structures in the land.

Much of Palestine's economy at that time was dominated by important
Sephardic families, such as the Amzalaks, Abulafias, Navons, Bechars,
Valeros and others. Sephardic Jewish workers, such as the Yemenites who had
settled at Ben Shemen, were not welcome on the new "European" kibbutzim
that were established.

Strict "acceptance committees" were set up by the European Jewish
immigrants to weed out the wrong "human material." This was the beginning
of the imposition of Zionism for the Jews, and the abandonment of Zionism
of the Jews.

It is interesting that it is in this period that we see a vociferous
rejection of Zionism by Orthodox and Reform Jews. The Orthodox understood
that this new European model was not inclusive. Today the pundits speak of
the Orthodox not "assimilating into Israel," when in fact it was the
Zionist European immigrants who themselves never sought to integrate or
assimilate into the economy of Ottoman or British Palestine. An Orthodox or
Sephardic family resident in Palestine for 13 generations is today ordered
to "integrate" by those whose time in the Land of Israel might not stretch
back more than a decade.

A more tragic episode followed Israel's War of Independence. Despite the
government's desire to ingather the exiles, a deep-seated racism existed
against Jewish immigrants who came from Muslim countries. Vienneseborn
Labor Zionist elitist Amos Elon was sent by Haaretz to visit potential
Jewish immigrants in 1953, but "portrayed the mellah [Jewish quarter] of
Casablanca as a place of stench, degeneracy, disease and perversity."

According to scholar Orit Rozen, he worried about what effect "uncontrolled
fertility would have on the Jewish people's genetic robustness," and
another Israeli claimed the immigrants "could spread disease from transit
camps to kibbutzim."

Other European-born Zionists who had only become "Israelis" several years
prior claimed that the new immigrants were like a "foreign country."
Ironically, these Jewish immigrants spoke Arabic, which was the language of
the Middle East, rather than the German and Yiddish those like Elon spoke,
and yet they were the "foreigners" with "degenerate genetic material."

When the Yemenite Jews arrived author Anita Shapira relates how "the
teachers did not hesitate to tell students to cut off their [traditional]
sidelocks, throw away their hats and turn their backs on religious
tradition."


Where the Sephardic Chelouche family had once welcomed European moshavniks
into their home in Jaffa, now the Sephardim were subjected to the full
weight of a racist bureaucracy intended to destroy their culture.

Yemenite girls who wore long dresses were ordered to undress and wear
shorts – everything "native" had to go.

Sassoon Somekh, a Baghdadi Jew from an intellectual family who became a
scholar in Israel recalls arriving in Israel and being ordered by a
Yiddish-speaking Jewish Agency official into a barbed wire encircled
transit camp. He remembers it "created a feeling, for the first time among
many of the Iraqis, that they were second-class citizens."

Indeed, they were second class citizens.

They could never be admitted into kibbutzim by the "acceptance committees"
that Labor Zionism had set up. Their fate was to be sent to "development
towns" to work as cheap labor in the place of the Arabs who had fled the
country during the war.

There were many in the General Zionist and Herut parties who objected to
this mistreatment.

Revisionist Zionists had incorporated Sephardic Jews into the ranks. When
Menachem Begin – who the Labor Zionists called a "fascist" – toured the
transit camps, he brought along an Arabic-speaking Jew to translate. Who
were the real fascists, those like Elon who worried about "genetic
robustness," or those like Begin who sought to meet the Jewish immigrants
who he believed deserved an equal place in the state? While the kibbutzniks
were sealing the Mizrahim in transit camps and development towns another
group of zealots set out to defeat the Orthodox. Yitzhak Laor recalls, "in
the 1960s, when the ultra-Orthodox of Mea She'arim closed off its streets
on the Sabbath, kibbutzniks came to Jerusalem wielding sticks to fight 'the
sons of darkness.'" Thus, even though almost 10 percent of the country's
land had been distributed to the kibbutzim – that put up fences to keep the
rest of Israel's citizens off their property – the kibbutzniks still felt
they had to colonize through violence the remaining congested urban areas
where Haredim lived.

Not all Jewish immigrants were wanted by the elites, who believed that
Zionism was for the Jews, and not of the Jews. Although Yitzhak Ben-Zvi,
the second president of Israel, had written about the Ethiopian Jews, and
even though Ethiopian Jewish leaders had sought to provide shelter for
European Jews fleeing Nazism, the nascent state of Israel rejected
Ethiopian Jews who wanted to make aliyah. In 1959 Ma'ariv journalist Yuval
Elizur wrote that "it is an ostrich-like policy to ignore the skin color...
we must consider that bringing all the 'Falashas' in a short period of time
will create a racial problem in Israel."

Of course, bringing as many light-skinned European Jews to a Middle Eastern
country would not create a "racial problem." It was the Africans that had
to be kept out; they were not right for Israel. Is it a surprise that Mr.
Elizur is also the co-author of The War Within? There are post-Zionists who
have sought to dismantle Zionism. Amos Elon, the same journalist who
worried in 1953 that the Sephardim would bring "bad genetics" to pollute
Israel, became a post-Zionist in 2004 and moved to Italy, claiming
Sephardim had ruined "his" country. Ironically, some of the leaders of
post-Zionism were from kibbutzim and many initially preached an exclusivist
Zionism.

But for those who are Zionist, there remains the existential issue of
whether Zionism is for the Jews or of the Jews. When people start claiming
Jews must "assimilate" or "integrate" into Israel, it is important to ask
what that means. When people assert that "Boris is not an Israeli name," we
need to ask who defines what an "Israeli" name is. When they claim that
Israel has a "war within," we have to wonder: what kind of Zionism is it
that fights a "war" with other Jews? When textbooks produced in
Israeldescribe Ethiopian Jews as moving to
Israel "for the money," or, as Anita Shapira claimed, that Sephardim had to
be "compelled to get used to physical work," we need to demand an answer:
what kind of Zionism is it that views non-European Jews in such a bigoted
light? FOR SOME leaders and intellectuals, Zionism was never meant to be a
movement of all the Jews. The "bad genetics" meant the Moroccans had to be
kept out, the "darkness" meant the Orthodox could not be members, and the
lack of knowledge of "physical work" or prevalence of "diseases" meant
Iraqi, Yemenite and Indian Jews were not wanted.

But one cannot "integrate" into a Zionism predicated on the superiority of
one Jew over another.

Even today Israel is haunted by the discrimination of the 1950s; we have
never sufficiently confronted these statements because for many these
exclusivist intellectuals are still heroes of the state. Jews abroad still
buy into the rhetoric of the "war within", so that Zionism can triumph. But
Zionism cannot triumph over the Jews; it is either a movement of the Jews,
or it is a disgrace to its goals.



*From The **Jerusalem** Post, **April 24, 2013***