Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine: Jewish Statehood and the History of the Middle East

209 Pages·2017·0.93 MB·English

Tamar Amar-Dahl
Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine

Tamar Amar-Dahl
Zionist Israel and
the Question of
Palestine
Jewish Statehood and the History of the Middle
East Conflict
First edition published by Ferdinand Schöningh GmbH & Co. KG in 2012:
Das zionistische Israel. Jüdischer Nationalismus und die Geschichte des Nahostkonflikts
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Cover image: Jerusalem, Thinkstock: gkuna
Translated from the German by Dr. Olga Thierbach-McLean
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This book is dedicated to a dear friend and mentor
Professor Hans Mommsen (1930–2015)

Contents
Introduction   1
1 Zionism and the Ideology of the Jewish State   4
2 Zionist Israel and its Enemies   18
3 Israeli Democracy and the Zionist Project   52
4 Israel’s War Policy in the Service of Zionist Israel   92
5 Jewish Statehood and Regional Peace   148
Bibliography   191
Internet sources   196
Index of Persons   197

Introduction
Introduction
Israel is a product of Zionism. The Jewish state originates in Jewish nationalism
that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. In the course
of the secularization and formation of national states that was taking place in
Western Europe, the religiously hued, old Christian hatred towards Jews assumed
racist features, turning into virulent anti-Semitism. At the same time, efforts to
achieve real emancipation for European Jews were failing. Consequently, as new
approaches to a resolution seemed to be called for, the Jewish people themselves
took up the “Jewish question.”
Theodor Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat) was fol-
lowed in 1897 by the First Zionist Congress in Basel. With the founding of the
World Zionist Organization the political goal was promptly proclaimed: the estab-
lishment of a Jewish state for the Jewish people outside of Europe. The hostility
towards Jewish life in Europe turned into the Zionist principle of the “negation of
the diaspora,” with Zionist-motivated Jewish emigration starting as early as 1882,
first from Eastern and later also from Western Europe. And it was the old-new
land of Israel – Eretz Israel – that in the beginning of the twentieth century was
chosen as the appropriate territory.
Half a century later – but only after millions of European Jews had been mur-
dered by Germany’s Nazi regime – the Jewish national movement won an import-
ant victory in the proclamation of the Jewish state. Apart from 1945, the year
1948 represents the decisive turning point in contemporary Jewish history. With
the founding of Israel so soon after the Shoah, the Zionist project in Eretz Israel
appeared to be a matter of bitter urgency. More than anything else, the extermina-
tion of the intended citizens of the to-be-founded Jewish state solidified Zionism
as the ultimate answer to the “Jewish question,” not only among Jews but also on
the international political-diplomatic stage.
These two historical momentums set into motion a historic process, namely
the nationalization of the Jews in the second half of the twentieth century. Jewish
national statehood was established as a manifest way of life, with political sover-
eignty and military strength becoming the cornerstones of the new Jewish-Israeli
self-image. To wit, in the Zionist understanding of history, national statehood is
seen as the normal state of the to-be-nationalized Jewish people – a state that
needs to be actively fought for. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the
Jewish self-concept has a markedly Zionist orientation: Eretz Israel is in Jewish
hands, the majority of the Jewish people live in the old-new country, and the
Jewish nation state is the reason d’être of Israeli polity.
But Zionist Israel is neither a self-evident nor a natural state of affairs. Israel
does not have an internationally accepted state territory, a large part of the coun-
DOI 10.1515/ 9783110498806-001, © 2017 Tamar Amar-Dahl, published by De Gruyter Olden-
bourg. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.