Back when "Jewish" meant "anti-Zionist" - a conversation
A conversation about nationalism, the surprising origins of "antisemitism", and how it all went wrong for the Jewish people
A former Zionist youth leader and I got together to discuss how “the Jewish state” arose from a community that had been opposed to statehood for thousands of years.
We talked about:
Rabbi Yehoshua Leib Diskin, my grandfather’s great-uncle and one of the highest Jewish authorities in the 1880s, and his horror at the Zionist “threat”.
Traditional Jewish prohibitions on founding a state and raising an army.
How a German antisemite coined the term “antisemitism”, and how it has been politicised.
How the emergence of the nation state and “scientific” racial theory led to both a spike in Jew-hating and the birth of Zionism.
How a lunatic like Theodor Herzl came to be the father of Zionism.
Regarding the last point, taking issue with someone most people think is a hero requires good evidence, so next week I’ll be publishing another half hour on Herzl - particularly his charactierization of subhuman Jews (as opposed to cultured Jews like him), and on the links between Zionism and the Nazi movement.
I’ve also written a series called “An unkosher state”, on my ancestor and his resistance to Zionism. It also touches on the politicisation of antisemitism and the place of autistic thinking in Jewish scholarship and leadership.
Transcript:
We decided we were going to record an interview mainly for people who have an opinion on what's going on in Israel or on Zionism, and we want to fill in a little bit of the background of both the historical roots of Zionism.
Do you want to introduce yourself?
Yeah, I'm Oli Genbash, and I've been involved in Jewish youth organizations, Zionist youth organizations, from quite a young age, probably from about the age of eight, going on weekends away with different groups. It was all quite closely linked to the synagogue and Sunday school. It sort of just became what you did really as a North London Jew. I didn't necessarily have many friends at school. I was quite different. It was me and my sister and probably a teacher who were the only Jews in this school. So for me, it became difficult to find affinity with people my own age. And my parents, even though they were historically left-wing and probably quite anti-Zionist, sent me, my brother, and sister all to this summer camp, to this Zionist youth organization, because that's what you did. That's where you found friends in the Jewish community.
And I really did find a lot of friends. I had a lot of positive experiences. I had both as going there as an attendee on summer camps, being a leader on summer camps. I genuinely had a great time. I genuinely had some amazing bonding experiences, and I was quite...
You belonged to something?
Yeah. And I felt an affinity with the Zionist sentiment. It was a very left-wing, hippie organization that was speaking about ideas of collective movements and engaging with social justice issues. That was my assumption as a young person. It was quite left-leaning, and then a bit offensive.
Yeah, and I mean...
Absolutely.
But it was still Zionist. And so, even as a teenager, I started to get some inkling, some discomfort. But I still went on my gap year to Israel. That was a thing that you did as a leader: you would go to Israel to increase your knowledge about Zionism, find new ways, creative ways, that you could disseminate this information to the people attending the summer camp. And it was very intense. We lived in Jerusalem for four months, right next to the Old City. I lived on a kibbutz. I was doing hiking up and down Israel. It was very impactful, in positive and negative ways. So I saw a lot of the negative side being there. It's a tiny country; you can't avoid seeing... if you're living in Jerusalem for four months, you can't avoid seeing the massive wall around the West Bank if you travel out of Jerusalem.
So, was that a real shock to you then to see the reality of...
It wasn't necessarily a shock because I knew about it. I knew that these things were going on. It was just depressing. It just cemented it. It was uneasy. It made me feel like something's not right here. It's all too weird going to these places in bulletproof buses with an armored guard. Having that normalized is just not right. It didn't sit well with me.
And then I came back to the UK after that gap year, and I continued to lead on summer camps for a little bit. And then it just got to the point where I was bringing up issues that were a bit uncomfortable. Not necessarily in too much of an inflammatory way, just in a slightly critical, thought-based way. And that became too uncomfortable for the people who were the head leaders of the camp.
You wanted a conversation about it.
And so I was pulled up on that on a few occasions. Going to university was really impactful. Just making friends with people who weren't all North London Jews was really influential in terms of having my mind opened up to different experiences, different ways of thinking about things. The university I went to was historically quite left-wing and revolutionary. I was studying politics and international relations. So that, I thought that my eyes really opened to everything that was going on in the world when it came to things like US and UK foreign policy.
And truth be told, I went through that experience, and just kind of went, 'Well, I've gone through that experience,' and that was difficult, and I regret going on my gap year to Israel. And I guess I've kind of been a bit weak in my position, a bit silent, and unfortunately and sadly, it has taken a genocide to really make me feel it viscerally, not to be able to just stand by, because now there's all the UK Jewry who are so associated with Israel, forcing other Jews who don't necessarily want to be associated with Israel to be associated with it.
And it often feels like they're just parroting what they read in media. So then my response is: How can you possibly not be against what is going on? How can you possibly not be wanting to speak out when we're seeing all this stuff we're hearing about? The first genocide that's been live-streamed on TikTok. It's insane. And I feel like we've been gaslit and being told, "No, you're a self-hating Jew because you don't wish to see destruction of people and all this horrendous violence."
I guess personally, doing a lot of work myself, getting in touch with myself, self-reflective practice, and having that time to sit and reflect. Maybe that's a luxury other people don't have. You know, they've got lives filled with jobs and kids, and my life isn't necessarily that full in that sense. So I have more scope to think about stuff. So I don't necessarily want to judge people for not coming to the same conclusions as me, but it does feel insane that you can't just come to that conclusion on your own: that we need to stop this.
Well, you can't talk about it.
Yeah.
It's like there's only one opinion. It seems to me as a non-Jewish person who's, you know, just, it's all filtered through the media. The idea that being Jewish is just this monolithic kind of position, isn't it? The idea that there are different views about policy towards Gaza, and that is it?
So that's a very new thing. For thousands of years, really, since the exile, since the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, there have been strict laws in place in the holy books, in the Talmud, about not going up to Israel en masse, not raising armies against the other nations, and not founding a state until the Messiah has come. And that may feel like a kind of religious sentiment and rather outdated. I guess the point I'm getting at is that Judaism was monolithic for a very long time in the sense that the Jews were in exile. They weren't meant to found a state. That's the idea of the wandering Jew, a concept many are familiar with. So they lived in various different places, all over the world. They were forbidden to go back en masse, but there's been a Jewish community in Palestine for thousands of years.
There's always been a remnant of Jewish community, but the people who were going back were what's called religious Zionists. So, for example, my grandfather's great uncle, who was Rabbi Joshua Lieb Diskin. He went as a religious Zionist, and he lived there in a time when the Jews and the Arabs and the Christians and the Muslims who were living there were living in relative peace, especially compared to what was going on in Europe, where the Jews were subject to all kinds of antisemitism, pogroms, getting expelled from various different places, and then trying to seek refuge and being turned away as well. So it was pretty tough for Jewish communities all around Europe, but up until the late 19th century, when the Zionist Manifesto was first published, the Jews had a pretty good time in Palestine, and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't rosy all the time. That would be going too far, but it was nothing like they were facing in Europe. The Jewish people, the Jewish Palestinians, the Christian Palestinians, and the Muslim Palestinians were of a similar culture.
So what happened with the later wave of Zionism: you have these new types of Jews who are coming in. So first you have the labor Zionists. The labor Zionists were generally communist anarchists. They were often atheists, yeah, and they wanted to live in peace away from the excesses of capitalism and grow stuff in the Levant, grow stuff in Palestine. So they weren't driven by a religious...
Oh, it's a farm in the Levant. Was that the foundation of the Kibbutz movement?
Yeah, exactly. So you have these collective communities called Kibbutzim, where they eat together, they raise their children together, and they made a very natural association with the USSR at that time. In the early days of this new wave of Jews in Palestine, exactly which way they were going to go in terms of deciding with superpowers was complex, because they had this very collective, I mean, they're literally communes, and communism made sense to them; a lot of them were communists. My grandfather, for example, was a Lithuanian Jew, and he was a communist, and he remained a communist until he died.
One would talk, and then they went, which favors this.
So he left Lithuania, and I think it was the 1910s. His father, so my great-grandfather, and my grandfather settled in South Africa, and then my dad was born in South Africa, and he was born in the '40s. So before that, my line is a long line of rabbis, and there's lots of Rabbi Diskins, and one in particular was a really interesting character. Joshua Lieb Diskin was born in Poland, and he was something of a prodigy in terms of Jewish law. He stunned people wherever he went with his detailed knowledge of Torah and the Jewish law generally. And he was also what we might call a savant today, so he could look at a tree and count the leaves at a single glance, or he could look at a wall and tell you how many bricks were in it. And he had quite a lot of autistic traits, basically. He was described as fanatical, uncompromising, and extremely pedantic, and he flipped out when he saw things that didn't fit into that system.
Yeah.
And the system that he was into was Jewish law; he was really, really into it. So he got into the detail, right?
Yeah. Jewish law covers everything from the best way to cut your fingernails to what happens if you fall off a roof and injure someone who isn't your wife, to can you pick something up in the street, if you find an orange in the street? If they're arranged together, there's different laws of whether it's a found object or somebody else's object. It's incredibly detailed at every level, and there's 5,000 pages of Talmud. It's rabbis from hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago, commenting on bits of Torah, and then rabbis commenting on previous rabbis. And then the way it's normally pursued as a Jewish pastime (and Jews were obliged to do this) is two men would argue over the text, over these interpretations of law. So it's in many ways extremely... it's an extremely autistic way of pursuing religion. Let's say that as a person with a lot of love for what autistics bring to the world.
So this guy, Rabbi Diskin, by the time he was 25, he was already a rabbi in his native Lomza, and then he kept on causing trouble wherever he went. So he heard about somebody who was going to be breaking the Sabbath by opening a shop on a Saturday. So he ran around to his house and started berating this guy, as a young man, 25. And this went on for a few years; he actually got kicked out of there, and then he got kicked out of a series of Jewish communities, spending about 6-7 years in each. I think it was five communities, and each of these places, when people met him, they're like, "This guy's amazing; his Torah's fantastic." And they made him a rabbi, and he kind of rose through the ranks, but just got kicked out of everywhere.
And eventually, he had criminal charges brought against him in Brisk, and when he went to see his lawyer, he spoke to his lawyer for two hours, and he didn't look at him once. He either had his eyes closed, or he was averting his eyes, and the lawyer was like, "What's going on? Why aren't you looking at me?" And at the end of it, he says, "It is forbidden to look into the face of an evildoer. And you have told me that you don't keep the mitzvot; you don't keep the commandments." And then the lawyer concluded that this guy has clearly got a very strong moral code. If he's prepared to, like, potentially get himself into prison (which is what he's facing) because he's not prepared to relax it, even in front of his lawyer, then he can't... you know, these accusations against him must be false. He still got kicked out of the country, and he went to settle in Palestine, where he became one of the biggest authorities in the whole Jewish world. And this was in the 1880s, 1890s.
And in 1896, when Der Judenstaat was written—that's The Jewish State, which was a manifesto written by Theodor Herzl—he looked at it, and he was absolutely horrified. He said, "This is a massive threat to the Jewish people." He said, "We should excommunicate these people. We shouldn't let them sit at our tables to eat; we shouldn't let them marry our daughters. And if we don't do something about this terrible threat, then I am sure we're going to come to regret it." So he wanted to send out a letter to all the big rabbis across Europe and the whole Jewish diaspora, to say to them that we can't let this continue because Zionism was a complete negation of Jewish thought from the destruction of the temple, all the way through to the 1880s. But Zionism had been a tiny, little, progressive, and pretty much hated strand of Jewish thinking.
And why was it hated? What was the... what was radical about that then?
Yeah. Right. If you go back to Theodor Herzl, Theodor Herzl was the guy who published The Jewish State. And he was... he wanted to assimilate throughout his whole life. So he mixed with the cultured Jews and the cultured people of his native Hungary. He wrote reviews in magazines of operas, and he, for example, he didn't circumcise his son because he thought this was a barbaric custom. And he talked about the Jews with their stunted jargons and their awful customs, stuff like this. He was very, very critical of a certain type of Jew. He said there were two types of Jew, and one of them is like almost a different species. And he talks about the Jews in his local synagogues with their furtive and shifty eyes.
Yeah, so Herzl has a real problem with Judaism. And the problem is the problem that Europe had with Judaism. It's called the "Jewish question." The question is, what do you do with the people who won't assimilate? And the reason that's a problem is because around Europe, you've got two things going on. You've got these countries which have defined themselves as countries. It starts with, after the French Revolution, what's that, 1799? You have the rise of the Republic. And then it's like, "Okay, this is France." Okay, what's France? It's people who wear berets, eat croissants. They don't eat bratwurst like they're Germans. They don't speak German. They don't eat German Schwarzbrot. So they're not them. They're also not gypsies, who are the people who live inside, and they're also not Jews. So you get this kind of rising antisemitism across Europe. It rises with the rise of a nation-state.
Yeah, exactly. So you've got that in Italy. You've got that going on in Germany. So as these linguistic states, the various German regions, coagulate to something which is a bit like modern Germany. So that's one strand of what's going on. So that's the question: what are you going to do with the Jews who are clearly not French? They're clearly not German. They've got their own laws. They've got their own customs. They've got their own outfits. And then the other thing is you've got racial theory, which arises around the same time, and you've got the idea of these different races of man, and how the white race is the most advanced of all the races, and all the other ones are primitive in various different ways. So those two things come together.
And Herzl's initial idea is that the Jews should be converted en masse on a Sunday, with music at a cathedral. And that would be the solution to the Jewish problem. The Jews should just be converted to Catholicism. And then he changes his mind. But even after he changes his mind, The Jewish State, his book, which says, "Actually, what we need to do is found a state in Palestine, regardless of the fact that there's already Jews there doing their thing, regardless of the fact that there's already Palestinians living there." But that's the solution. But three months before he publishes that, he's putting up his Christmas tree. And the rabbi of Vienna comes 'round and is horrified by the fact that he's got this Christmas tree. So he got asked, like, what kind of Jew was Herzl, who wouldn't circumcise his son, who had a Christmas tree, and who had such disdainful language for other Jewish people, and who thought that the Jews should be converted en masse to Catholicism until he changes his mind and said, "Yeah, let's found the state of Israel."
So it's a total reversal then, on an idea of racial purity rather than a religious idea of that. Was that the common view?
Yeah, exactly. So he believed that the Jews were an advanced race. You had this all over Europe. So, for example, you had this rising movement in Germany about the German people, the Volk. The Aryans. This comes to fruition with the Nazi movement. But it's there before that. So, for example, the word antisemite was first coined by Wilhelm Marr. And he's the founder of the Antisemite League. And this is in the late 1800s. And it's an organization dedicated to preserving the racial purity of the Germans against the Jews, against what he thought were degenerate Jews. And the Antisemite League flounders, and it's only around for about four years. But the term antisemite and the whole racial theory that's implicit inside it gets picked up, and the Jews... mostly today, when you hear antisemite, it's in the mouth of a Jewish person, or it's in the mouth of a politician who claims to be protecting Jewish people.
I mean, that's a really interesting story about Herzl. It is one of the, for me, the key point in your Substack, actually, because from being in a Zionist youth organization, Theodor Herzl is the figurehead. It's sort of a lie. You know, having loads of sessions where you would read all this beautiful poetry from Herzl about Israel. And this idea of, they're already being Jews there, so why did anyone need to go over? And then when it's spoken about in the historical context, the first wave of Aliyah occurred in the late 1800s. And then the second wave of Aliyah, after 1948. So it gets framed very much in this religious way. And then reading more about that, reading the actual opinions and why this project was started... and it all seems really weird and totally devoid of anything to do with a religious sentiment about going over to the Holy Land, you know, makes no sense.
Aliya means going up. So when you leave Israel, it's going down.
Interesting. So it's not even a going over and just prospering. It's actually about ascending.
And it is a weird... when, being in Israel for a year on my gap year and having other Jewish people talk about Aliya, it's this really intoxicating feeling. It's like people are on drugs. "You're going to make Aliya! You're going to come over! Oh yeah! Come on!" And it's like, "Well, just steady on." It does seem like it's more than just, "You're moving over to a country where you, as a Jew, are going to be protected." It's like this moral statement: "I've made Aliya." I know lots of British Jews who have made Aliya, and it becomes a status thing. There's also a program called Birthright, in the US, that takes young people over. Yeah. So it's maybe more like an honor. Yeah. Yeah.
And I was speaking to a guy I really liked the other day who moved just a few months before October 7th with his whole family. He grew up in the UK. And he got there, and then all of this crazy went down. And he sent me a message the other day, and he's like, "Yeah, I'm just painting my bomb shelter." But it's really good here. He says, "It feels different. It feels like you're part of something. It feels like your home." I've had other Jews say that to me who I knew, an Australian Jewish person who was half Israeli, half Australian, and made the big decision, growing up in Australia, but then made the decision to move back to Israel. And afterwards, saying the messages about Israel, saying, "Come on, brother, this is where you need to be. This is home. You know that when you're in Israel, it feels different. You sense the energy, and you don't feel that anywhere else, because anywhere else that you are, you're always going to feel this lacking." And that I found really strange.
That feeling of being part of something and having a bigger picture can cloud your judgment, can't it?
Yeah, part of the interesting thing about RSI, which is the youth organization we're talking about here, is that it's your summer when you're a teenager and preteen. Right. So think about all of the formative experiences that you have on your summer holiday, or you go to Israel when you're 18 for a year, and there are all these soldiers around, and they're all hot and beautiful, and they're carrying machine guns and their army outfits. Right. Of course, you're going to fall in love with the place. You might have your first sexual experiences. You might have your first religious experiences. Yeah. It is really intoxicating. And, you know, it's funny as well. I think an interesting thing, which doesn't necessarily get spoken about, is that Israeli society is not homogenous. You know, when we talk about Judaism being not monolithic, actually, if you go into Israeli society, there is this weird separation between people who live in a kibbutz in the desert, who live in Tel Aviv, and people who live in Jerusalem.
And I remember when I was on a kibbutz in the south, next to the border with Jordan, and then I was dating a woman who lived in Jerusalem. And then I was waiting at the bus stop. I saw someone there that I knew, and he was like, "Oh, where are you going?" I said, "I'm off to Jerusalem." "Why are you going to Jerusalem? You're going to pray?" So it's just this real kind of incongruous society where there are extremists who are living in a place like Jerusalem. I mean, I had family who lived in East Jerusalem, technically occupied land. And there are people who are quite kind of open to a certain degree, but it is like it's a strange society, you know.
I only went to East Jerusalem once, and it was by mistake. I was probably around eight or something, and my dad was driving a hire car with American plates. And I was looking out the window, and there was a little kid, a tiny kid, throwing a pebble at us. And I was like, "Bad! There's a kid throwing a stone," and this stone hit the car. And my dad kind of scooted out. I mean, he's got no sense of direction like me, and he wandered somehow into the wrong path down, and we had like a crowd of people throwing stones at us. And obviously, that was my introduction to Palestinians.
You know, so it seems I remembered my first time ever going to Israel in 1996. And, you know, one of my earliest memories was we were told by some Israelis, "You can't go to this place," but it was... you couldn't really speak Hebrew English, and it was... but it sort of transpired just after one of them like chucked a tiny little stone at his car. And I was like, "You know, that's why you can't go through this area because you will get rocks chucked."
That is the real thing, isn't it? Seeing on the news, growing up, yeah, in the '90s, it's like Palestinians chucking rocks at cars in your society. "God, aren't these..." As a kid as well, you're not really understanding it, other than the people chucking rocks at cars, and so therefore they must be bad people because they're doing something violent. And then you get older, you realize the frustration to pick up a rock and just be like, "Fuck off!"
Yeah, and that's so I didn't learn about the Nakba when I was growing up. I didn't learn about the expulsion of Palestinians and their land. I knew nothing about that. Right. The idea in Zionist circles was that it was "a land without a people for a people without a land." So it didn't have anyone there. This idea that there were Palestinians, it didn't fit into anything that I was being taught. And I guess once you're an adult, if you're not very, very inquisitive, do you really want to go against your whole community and say, "Maybe I'll look into this. Maybe I'll think about the Palestinians, and who they are, and who they were before the IDF started moving them off their land, or even actually before the Jewish National Fund started taking their land off them."
It's very confusing to someone in my position. It's clearly just as confusing for you. It's like part of the everyday. It's every time I sit, and every time I have a meal with my family. And they're saying something about Hamas. I'm just kidding. Yeah, it's tense, man.
I think that people becoming critical of Zionism is quite common, but it's very much organized by age group. So, for example, there's a series of polls that's been done on American Jews, American Diaspora Jews. And here's a question: "Hamas's reasons for fighting Israel are valid, not valid, or not sure." Of the over 65s, 64% say that the way that Hamas is fighting Israel is not valid. And then the over 50s to 64, it's 58%. The 30s to 49 is 42%, and the 18 to 29 is only 30% who say it's not valid. So, each of these brackets is showing a big swing in the direction of sympathy for Hamas, which is amazing because Hamas is portrayed everywhere as a terrorist organization. Again, you're told that Hamas equals Palestine.
So, this is an interesting history. The Israeli state was dealing with the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and that was secular. They had nothing to do with religion. It was more communistic in its thinking. And Hamas was created and funded in its inception by Israeli money. You've got a high-ranking military personnel, like the commander of Gaza of the Israeli forces, saying that Hamas was an Israeli creation. And so, it was created in its inception. It wasn't a violent organization at the beginning, but later it took up arms with the Intifada. It was a political organization. It won in Gaza fairly in the elections. And you have all kinds of politicians noting that Israel is still allowing funds to get through to it. So, for example, Qatar just made massive donations to Hamas that went through. Was it authorized by the Israeli state? And you've got other politicians saying things, for example, "Hamas is an asset to the Israeli state."
Because it's a terrorist organization, so you don't have to deal with it. Well, yes, you do need to realize that you create a really extreme adversary that then you can say, "Well, we won't negotiate. We don't negotiate with terrorists." So you always have this. So you get rid of the moderate opposition. And it's really interesting because there's been historically this happening almost as a principle of US foreign policy. If you look at different regions in the Middle East, in the wide Middle East, in the 1970s, look at photos from Iran and Turkey, Afghanistan: very liberal, open societies. And then coincidentally, you get hard-line Muslim extremist groups come in and start dictating the flow of resources. One of our biggest allies is Saudi Arabia. We like the extremists because they help us to destabilize the region and then control everything that's happening with the flow of arms, the flow of resources.
And we've seen it now in Syria. The UK has requested to remove the organization that has taken over Syria. They requested to remove it from the terrorist watchlist. And it's all old Al-Qaeda people. I mean, the leader of this group was the leader of Islamic Jihad in Iraq during the invasion. One of the really interesting things I think about Jewish history is that the Jews were outside of all of that for so long because they kept out of national politics. So you've got this prophecy in Isaiah that the Jews should be "a light unto the nations." Yeah. And exactly what that means is, you can do a lot of thinking about it. But I like to think of it in terms of a people who, without a nation-state. And by virtue of not having to go into politics and messy politics and all the dirty dealing and the stuff that you see with the British Empire and with the American colonial project. And with the Russian Empire, whoever it is, you're always making alliances and breaking alliances.
And then Israel gets drawn, or rather the Jewish people get drawn, into that. And even the very creation of Israel. Palestine, which was under British control, was promised to the French. It was promised to be autonomous. And it was promised to this new movement in Zionism, or to the Zionists. Right. All around the same time. And so the very creation of Israel begins with this deception and was funded right from the beginning by all kinds of money. And it continues to be funded in the billions today. So yeah, the Jews managed to avoid doing that for a very, very long time because in the Talmud, this is banned. Right. You're not allowed to found a state until the Messiah comes. And the Messiah himself is going to found the state. So what does that say? Either it says wait for the Messiah, or it says just give up the idea of a state.
So, obviously, the religious Jews believe that. But also the culturally Jewish people, like Freud or Spinoza or those characters, they weren't trying to found a Jewish state. They knew that they were people in exile. And there's a particularly interesting beauty of being inside a country or a culture, but also being outside of it, because you can have a particularly interesting perspective on it. So Einstein's an example of that. Freud is an example of that. Who saw something going on there, but looked at it in a different way because you're not bound by the philosophy of the culture that you're inside. That was what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks calls "the dignity of difference." And now the Jews have become a nation like all the other nations, involved in all the other things emerging nations do, which is occupying the territory of people who can't defend themselves with asymmetric warfare.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting when you bring that up, because there's the... I don't know if there are cult or a sect called the Neturei Karta in Israel, and quite prominent in the US, and historically would have these, you know, meetings with political figures. Meetings with the former president of Iran, and often touted as being antisemitic and quite extremist. And this idea of essentially the authority who has established the state of Israel not being totally legitimate.
You know, that was something that I thought of these Jewish people as a bit weird, and that they just want to lump you in with Holocaust deniers. And I think that's how the media portrays it: that if you're denying the state of Israel, then you're denying the Jewish story, and you're aligning yourself with people who want to see the Jews banished.
But I mean, if we look at it objectively, as to what's happened to Israel, it's not exactly the Holy Land flowing with milk and honey. It's fucking destruction. So maybe there is something to be said there, for it might not have been the best time.
There are Jewish communities in that land who have been there for hundreds of years; often they're called Haredi or they're called Ultra-Orthodox. Orthodox means "correct teachings," and Ultra-Orthodox doesn't really mean anything. What does it mean? Really correct teachings? The Reform movement, they decided that a lot of these teachings aren't very useful anymore. My ancestor, my grandfather's great uncle, he knew what the correct teachings were. So often when you see critiques of Israel by very well-meaning progressive Jews, they will say things along the lines of, "The problem is fundamentalism." And actually, in this case, it's not. It might be in other situations, but the fundamentals of the religion are very clear: you don't establish a state, you don't raise an army.
And just to get an idea of how important those are, in the Talmud, as I said, in the Talmud you've got 5,000 pages of laws over everything you can possibly think of. When a woman can remarry if her husband is lost in a lake or in the sea, right? It's different. So it's really, really detailed, but all of these laws are discussed over thousands of years. And most of them, no one is going to get into any serious trouble for not cutting their fingernails in the correct order as decreed by the Talmud. And in fact, the Talmud explains that not keeping the mitzvot, not keeping the commandments, is in itself punishment enough, because you're separating yourself from God. Those are most of the laws. There are only two oaths which apply to Jews in the whole of the Talmud. And one of them is, "Don't go up to Israel en masse," and the other one is, "Don't fight against the nations." All of the other rulings, all the other mitzvot, are of a different class in Jewish thinking.
Which makes me think of Chabad, for example. They are preeminent laws. They are the oaths. They are the oaths that all the Jews were subject to for thousands of years. And the only people who keep those oaths at the moment are called Ultra-Orthodox. But it's not as if they're keeping every little minute aspect of law that makes them Ultra-Orthodox. They're keeping one of the fundamental laws.
Just laws.
Yeah.
How bad?
Chabad is this religious organization which has this idea of bringing the lost sheep back to Judaism. And they're very religious and very...
Well, Messianic.
I found...
Messianic and pro-Israel.
Yeah. And it just blows my mind.
Yeah. How successful they are being.
Everywhere. You can go to any city, any major city in the world. And if you're a Jewish person on Sabbath and you're on your own, you can find a Chabad house to go to. My grandfather's great uncle, this fantastic rabbi, he couldn't stomach that internal dissociation between what he felt was right and what he would say. And I think this gets back to this idea of what is the punishment for breaking one of the commandments?
In your own moral code. If I do something that is against my own moral code, I have to go to sleep at night. I have to live with myself.
Yeah.
So I have a choice. Am I going to be internally divided? Or am I going to be internally consistent? And am I going to be divided from people in my community, people who used to be my friends, all that kind of stuff? And I think everyone's got to make their own call on that. But particularly for the neurodivergent amongst us, that internal disharmony can be very, very challenging. The same way that, I mean, for me, if I hear someone playing music out of tune, I really don't like it. I think it's one of those neurodivergent traits. I just can't sit with it.
I think the fact that quite a lot of people were able to sit with something which they both hate and yet accept... I think that does quite a lot of damage internally. I don't think that's a healthy psyche. I think that could give rise to other problems in other parts of your life. It might give rise to even illnesses as you are spending all that energy to suppress a part of yourself. As I said, from the Quran, it's either the Quran or the Hadith where it says, "Be aware of the cries of the oppressed because Allah doesn't ignore them." And I think we think about Allah, we think about God, we think about the thing which is within all of us, which is around all of us, the natural law. How do you want to look at it? If somewhere, somebody is being oppressed, perhaps that has some effect on my psyche. And if somewhere, somebody is being oppressed, and it's in my fucking Instagram feed of another burnt-out building, or another kid with head wounds who's the same age as my kid, I can't sit with that.
Do you think there are some too-literal interpretations of the Old Testament and the Old Testament God that infuse a lot of people's sentiments of a warring God, of an unashamed taking over, whereas other religions might be more explicitly preaching peace?
I think if one were to read the Old Testament without the commentaries, Jews traditionally talk about the Oral Torah and the Written Torah. And the Oral Torah is the commentaries on that. And you can't have one without the other; it doesn't make sense. The Written Torah is half a chapter. There's a whole load of conversation around that, and that's recorded from the first, second century. And before that, you've got all of the commentaries in the actual Hebrew Bible. Tons and tons of work, tons and tons of thinking. And some of the rules of Talmudic debate, rabbinical debate, are that, firstly, the ruling cannot go against a ruling that went earlier. It's not like a new political party where you just turf out the last guy's policies. It's a coherent tradition that builds upon itself. And the rulings are made in favor of leniency. So Talmud is about moving towards softness, moving towards kindness, moving towards inclusion.
Now, that's not to say that in the Talmud there are some awful racist ideologies, but you look in any religion, any religious tradition, you're going to find texts from the 10th century which are going to get you banned from Twitter, or whatever it's called these days. But I guess one thing that the Jewish tradition has really preserved up until quite recently is arguing over the text. And arguing with God is fundamental to the Jewish tradition. So for example, Noah's flood is called Noah's flood. It's not called God's flood; it's called Noah's flood. And that's because in old Jewish texts, you've got Noah who is criticized for not arguing with God and allowing the world to be destroyed.
And you get other things where, for example, God gets really cross. He says, "I'm going to go and destroy Sodom," and Abraham goes, "Well, would you destroy it if there were 50 good men there?" And God says, "Well, no, I guess not. If there's 50 good men, I won't destroy it." "What about 30? What about 20?" He haggles Him down like some Middle Eastern bazaar until it's one good man. He says, "If there's one good man in Sodom, you're going to destroy it?" He goes, "No." And Abraham says, "Well, my relative Lot's there." And so they get Lot out and his family before the destruction of the city. So arguing with God, arguing against the expression of power, is a very, very Jewish thing to do. Finding the kindness, finding the most lenient way.
That might not have been the case in the 14th century BC when the Jews were—or rather, as the story goes, the Israelites were—colonizing that land. But are we going to go back three and a half thousand years and talk about land rights? That's madness. That's what the Zionists themselves do. I mean, yeah, it's totally bizarre. Yeah, and Netanyahu talking in these biblical terms, talking about Amalek. And it's just insane. I don't know how else to describe it.
Yeah.
One of the strange things about Netanyahu is it's not like there are many people who like him. Right? It's not like he's got this... let's say Trump, to take another divisive figure. There are loads of Americans who are really into Trump. There are loads of people all over the world who are into Trump. Even among Zionists, it's not like, "Yeah, Netanyahu's really great." It's like, "There's this really dodgy geezer." I mean, he's always... he's just a constant at this point. He's been in politics since his mid-twenties, talking about this stuff, talking about the Palestinian problem. And it's almost like it's irrelevant whether you like Netanyahu or not. He is just there as a force unto himself. And, I don't even think he necessarily cares about the Israelis. I don't think he cares about the Jewish people. I've heard his English is better than his Hebrew. His son lives in Miami or whatever it is. It's like, "Well, there's a war going on." His son's hanging out in Miami or whatever it is.
So Netanyahu describes Palestinians as "wild beasts." Right. Prime Minister Menachem Begin calls Palestinians "beasts walking on two legs." Another prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, talks about them as "greedy crocodiles." And then you've got Yitzhak Shamir describing them as "grasshoppers." There's a long tradition. Yair Lapid recently calling them "animals." Yeah, there's a long history of dehumanizing the Palestinian people. Very much like the Nazis were saying, "No dogs, no Jews." And this is politics. This is real politics. Right. This isn't just careless rhetoric. This is deliberate rhetoric in order to make these people into something which isn't human. It's very easy to exterminate rats. Who wants rats? Very easy to... stray dogs, whatever it is.
And this has been the policy since the beginning. Herzl talks about "spiriting the penniless population away over the border." The Koenig report, which was leaked in 1976—this is a government memorandum—talks about using terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population. This is 1976. So you've got this policy of expulsion and extermination of the Palestinian people that goes right back to the very founding of the Israeli state and the Israeli Declaration of Independence, where this Jew-hater, Balfour, Lord Balfour, and this very divided, rather schizophrenic perspective that Herzl had on the Jews... So those are the two people mentioned in the Declaration of Independence: Herzl and Balfour.
And a couple of hours after the Israeli state is declared, it gets invaded. From a Talmudic perspective, it's like, "Oh man, the Jews are now at war with the nation!" So that's gone wrong within the first couple of hours. Right. And from a Zionist perspective, there was this heroic war where Israel was attacked by all of its mean neighbors. This is after ethnically cleansing tens of thousands of Palestinians from land which had been there for centuries.
You've also got a really interesting thing that happens with the various waves of Zionism, because you've got Religious Zionism, which has been happening for thousands of years, and you've got the Labor Zionists—these who are communists, anarchists, who want to grow vegetables outside of the constrictions of European racism and capitalist oppression. And they get on quite well with Arab neighbors. So when they're arriving, we're talking about the end of the 1800s, early 1900s, you have stories of how, for example, the Muslim women would wait for the Jewish women to pump their water, so they could finish pumping their water before the Sabbath, because they're not allowed to pump water on the Sabbath. You have joint farms. You have reasonable sharing, knowledge sharing, this kind of stuff happening. All that kind of stuff.
And in fact, if you go back into Jewish history, the mysticism of Islamic mysticism, Christian mysticism, and Jewish mysticism... sometimes you'll have a Muslim commentator referring to the saint, and the saint will be a Jew. You've got Maimonides, who is one of the greatest commentators of all time, who works as a physician for the Sultan. Again, it's never been totally rosy, but there's always been a relationship between Muslims, Jews, Arabs.
I mean, one of the really interesting bits of your article that stood out to me was the fact that everyone was speaking Arabic. So you had a common language, common understanding. And then modern Hebrew being invented, it actually meant you didn't need to be learned in Torah. You didn't need to understand the Torah. You didn't need to have any real connection to Judaism. You just had to have this language, which from my understanding, was invented just to act as a colonizing force. You have this modern language that can then measure, cut up, and claim ownership over these different concepts and territories that weren't maybe relevant to Palestinians who were already living there. I'm not saying, as you said, it wasn't all rosy, but it seemed like quite a distinct project to introduce modern Hebrew as the official language.
On the subject of the Hebrew language, my ancestor, the Rabbi Yehoshua Leib Diskin, he threw a man out of his house for speaking to him in Hebrew when he was in Palestine, and he said that they chose this very obscure dialect of German, which was Yiddish, in order to not use this sacred language for day-to-day nonsense, talking about cleaning the toilet. In Hebrew, it's barbaric from a traditional Jewish perspective. As a political tool, it was great. You have a writer who says, "Along came the Hebrew language and divided us," and he's talking about the Jews and the Muslim Arabs who were in Palestine. That was a real point of contention.
You've got different communities like the Kibbutzim of agricultural communities, and some of them who were with the Labor Zionists were getting on really well with their local people. They were sharing resources, working together, they used the same hospital, sometimes they worship at the same places. And then you have other communities which are much more aligned with the political Zionist agenda. They're not learning about local Arab customs; they're using Hebrew rather than Arabic. So there was one big fight that went on where a farmer took his animals to graze on land which they'd been grazing on for thousands of years, and this settlement community said, "No, no, no, that's our land," and got into a big fight, and people ended up dying. But this was a minority at the beginning, and it was a minority that were using Hebrew rather than Arabic and had a political agenda which was not just to form a Jewish home. No one ever had a problem with the Jews having a home. The Palestinians initially welcomed the Jews who arrived, before they started arriving in massive droves, bringing their own language and culture and not integrating. That's a big difference between a Jewish home and a Jewish state.
This has been useful. Oli and I recorded it because we found ourselves in difficult situations where we're arguing with our families, arguing with our communities, arguing with people who used to be our friends, arguing with our own beliefs for having divergent opinions on Zionism. So I put together the historical background on my Substack in order to furnish people with historical fact. There's not much opinion in there, but it is a fact that SS officials visited Zionist settlements in Palestine in 1933 and 1937. That's a useful thing for anyone to know on either side of this argument.
I really want this argument to be as cordial as possible, and I encourage anybody who is anti-war to, as far as it's possible, not enter the field of war. That means please talk to people around you about this horrible injustice that's going on, and please talk about the history that has led to it. But let's be as cordial as we can, as polite as we can, as kind as we can to each other when we do it, because we don't get anywhere by calling each other genocide enablers or self-hating Jews.
If this has been useful to you, please think about subscribing to my Substack, and please think about sending me some cash. You can buy me a coffee on there, or you can become a paid subscriber. You don't have to become a paid subscriber; you can read it all for free. It's my pleasure to produce it, but it was a lot of work, and I would really appreciate some money in order to continue doing this research. I've got a lot to say. There's other stuff on the Substack as well about history of psychiatry. For example, I'm going to have something about psychedelics and war coming out soon. So please consider supporting me if you can. And thank you very much for watching.
Shalom. Peace out.
As someone who philosophically identifies as Anarchist, I can't rectify how a people who lived without a country for thousands of years, witnessing and documenting all of the vile evils committed by the entities known as countries for that whole time, just to perpetuate their existence, could possibly think, "Oh, we should do that!".
I assume that it is well understood, amongst Anarchists, that countries have to murder, steal, and commit all kinds of gross crimes just to survive as countries. Individuals don't usually have to, but countries do. The Jewish people have borne witness to the worst of the worst offenders, at all scales, for their entire history, and most of them decided that this was not their path, their path was to exist within their own enclave, never using violence to survive, despite being the victims of the violence of others countless times. Yet some, small minority cult, decided to ape the states they had spent so long resisting.
Almost the totality of orthodox rabbis initially denounced the early Zionist movement of Theodor Herzl, including denouncing Herzl himself. I learned quite a fair bit years ago the extent of this in a few of Marvin Antelmann's publications. Others have written a fair bit about the subject since him. But one thing that has become clear is that during the first five to six decades of the 20th century, much of the Jewish world was progressively coerced politically into lining up behind Zionism. This is a story that many scholars already know about, but it is one that needs much further amplification.
Recently, my interest in Frankism and what became of them has been piqued again from where I left off some two decades ago when studying about them. To me, Herzl and his movement appears - as a shorthand way - as a sort of Frankist infiltration of Judaism. In one of his well known studies, Antelmann essentially framed things from this lens.