ENGAGE - ARCHIVE

Israelis who have known me as an anti-Zionist of long standing are curious to hear what I think about Zionism. I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism, which was based on a confidence in the European labour movement, or, more broadly, in European society and civilization, which that society and civilization have not justified. If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers.

For the remnants of European Jewry – is it only for them? – the Jewish State has become an historic necessity. It is also a living reality. Whatever their cleavages, grievances, and frustrations, the Jews of Israel are animated by a fresh and strong sense of nationhood and by a dogged determination to consolidate and strengthen their State by every means at their disposal. They also have the feeling – how well justified – that the ‘civilized world’, which in one way or another has the fate of European Jewry on its conscience, has no moral ground to stand on when it tries to sermonize or threaten Israel for any real or imaginary breaches of international commitments.

Even now, however, I am not a Zionist; and I have repeatedly said so in public and in private. The Israelis accept this with unexpected tolerance but seem bewildered:

‘How is it possible not to embrace Zionism?’ they ask, ‘if one recognises the State of Israel as an historic necessity?’

What a difficult and painful question to answer!

From a burning or sinking ship people jump no matter where – on to a lifeboat, a raft, or a float. The jumping is for them an ‘historic necessity’; and the raft is in a sense the basis of their whole existence. But does it follow that the jumping should be made into a programme, or that one should take a raft-State as the basis of a political orientation? (I hope that Israelis or Zionists who happen to read this will not misunderstand the expression ‘raft-State’. It describes the precariousness of Israel, but is not meant to belittle Israel’s constructive achievement.)

To my mind it is just another Jewish tragedy that the world has driven the Jew to seek safety in a nation-state in the middle of this century when the nation-state is falling into decay.

Through several centuries every progressive development in the life of Western nations was bound up with the formation and growth of the nation-state or with the movement for the nation-state. The Jew was not connected with that movement and did not benefit from it. He remained shut up in his synagogue and in his religious loyalties while Western man subordinated religious to national loyalties and found his stature within his nation rather than within his Church. Only now, when man no longer grows in stature within the nation and when he can find himself anew only within some supranational community, has the Jew found his nation and his State. What a melancholy anachronism!

‘Ah, but show us the nation that has abandoned its statehood for the sake of a cosmopolitan or internationalist dream,’ say my Israeli friends.

No-one has done so, of course; and it has not occurred to me to urge Israelis to do so. The point is that the nation-state decays and disintegrates whether people are aware of it or not, no matter what their efforts to preserve it. The process is world-wide, however varied its local manifestations.

Written in 1954. Isaac Deutscher (1968) The Non-Jewish Jew and other essays, London: Oxford University Press, pp 111-113

From an interview given by Isaac Deutscher to New Left Review on 23 June 1967:
A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling he hit a person standing down below and broke that person’s legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune. If both behaved rationally, they would not become enemies. The man who escaped from the blazing house, having recovered, would have tried to help and consol the other sufferer; and the latter might have realized that he was the victim of circumstances over which neither of them had control. But look what happens when these people behave irrationally. The injured man blames the other for his misery and swears to make him pay for it. The other, afraid of the crippled man’s revenge, insults him, kicks him, and beats him up whenever they meet. The kicked man again swears revenge and is again punched and punished. The bitter enmity, so fortuitous at first, hardens and comes to overshadow the whole existence of both men and to poison their minds.

You will, I am sure, recognize yourselves (I said to my Israeli audience), the remnants of European Jewry in Israel, in the man who jumped from the blazing house. The other character represents, of course, the Palestine Arabs, more than a million of them, who have lost their lands and their homes. They are resentful; they gaze from across the frontiers on their old native places; they raid you stealthily and swear revenge. You punch and kick them mercilessly; you have shown that you know how to do it. But what is the sense of it? And what is the prospect?

The responsibility for the tragedy of European Jews, for Auschwitz, Majdanek, and the slaughters in the ghetto, rests entirely on our own western bourgeois ‘civilization’, of which Nazism was the legitimate, even though degenerate, offspring. Yet it was the Arabs who were made to pay the price for the crimes the West committed towards the Jews. They are still made to pay it, for the ‘guilty conscience’ of the West is, of course, pro-Israeli and anti-Arab. And how easily Israel had allowed itself to be bribed and fooled by the false ‘conscience money’.

Isaac Deutscher (1968) The Non-Jewish Jew and other essays, London: Oxford University Press, pp 136-137