Anti-Zionist League

Jeffrey Sachs:
Greetings and welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. Today we’re speaking with Professor Yakov Rabkin, Professor Emeritus at the University of Montreal about a number of his remarkable books and a new one that is just coming to us on the question of Zionism and Israel and the understanding of the ideologies that are extent in Israel and in the West among Israel’s supporters and the dynamics that they cause in global affairs and in the wars of the Middle East. So, welcome to book club, Professor Robkin. It’s really wonderful to meet you this way because I’ve been a long admirer and reader of yours and you’ve really opened my eyes to a lot of issues. I’m an American-born Jew, a Jewish professor. And when I was growing up, I thought and I was told as in within my family and as I got barmitzvahed and so forth that being Jewish and being Zionist was the same thing so for me your books came as a real eye openener. They are historical accounts. They are theological accounts that explain that there’s really a rather significant difference between Judaism as historically practiced and Zionism as propounded in the 20th and 21st century. In fact, your 2006 book is entitled Jewish opposition to Zionism. This is quite astounding for I think many Jews, I would say, in the United States. It’s not the rhetoric we hear.
And before turning to you, I’ll just tell you one one anecdote and then I will let you speak because you’re our honored guest on book club. But many years ago in a very controversial moment the president of Iran at the time, President Ahmed and Nhad was invited to Columbia University and there was a big protest not to have the president of Iran on the Columbia University campus. It happened that that day was the opening of the UN General Assembly and I work with the United Nations very closely. So instead of being on campus, I walked to the United Nations. When I got to 47th Street that day in the park were about a hundred rabbis or people that looked to me like rabbis, very orthodox rabbis, all holding signs that said Zionism is against the Torah. It was quite an
amazing display of what you write about. But this was a an anti-Israel protest by religious Jews from the Satmar community, I believe, in Brooklyn protesting the state of Israel. So that was very long-winded. I’m sorry to be rude about that, but let me turn it over to you. What does it mean Jewish opposition to Zionism?

3:52
Yakov Rabkin
Well, first, thank you for inviting me and I appreciate your warm words. And 47th Street is the right place for this kind of demonstration because that’s where many stores are located. For those from New York, they’ll appreciate that. Um, now, before we talk about opposition to Zionism, a few words about what Zionism is. Zionism is an ideological movement a modern one that originated in the 17th century among Protestants who began to interpret the what they call the Old Testament or the Pentatuk in a literal sense unlike Catholic Church which relied on commentary.
So once they began to interpret it literally, some groups I would say some heretical groups started writing about in gathering of the Hebrews and the holy land as a means of speeding up the second coming of Christ. And there were very important people who were what we would call today Christian Zionist. Of course, the word Zionist didn’t exist. Among them, Isaac Newton. So, we’re talking about very serious people. Joseph Priestley is another scientist who dealt with this. So,
it was just just to give a context because we have listeners from all over the world, Asia, Africa, Europe, and and the Americas. Just to put one word of context beforehand, the the the the Jewish state of ancient times had essentially disappeared during the Roman period because after a Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire that occurred in phases from 66 AD to 135 AD, the Romans had enough and ended the Jewish presence in Jerusalem where the Jewish temple was. After that time, Judaism became a a religion that was geographically diverse without a central location in what we would now say is Israel or in Jerusalem, the former location of the temple., and it became a a a religion where Jews lived outside of what the Christians would call the Holy Land or what was historical Judea the country where the Jews lived in the ancient times. So when you talk about Zionism starting in the 17th century and the ining gathering of the Jews for 1,500 years at that point the Jews had lived in the Middle East in Africa in Europe but not centrally in what was the ancient location of the Jewish temple. Correct. And we’ll get back to it at just in a moment because that’s one of the sources of opposition to Zionism. so Christian theologians and scientists and philosophers looked forward to restoration of Jews in the Holy Land. And in the 19th century in Britain, these religious concerns merged with political concerns of having a foothold for
Britain in in West Asia. And one of the people who were very active in this was Lord Shaftesbury who even published a a letter to the Christian monarchs of Europe encouraging them to promote the in gathering of the Jews in the holy land. Now all of that was happening as no Jews
had expressed any interest in this because what and I don’t think that Lord Shaftesbury even bothered to go to a local synagogue in London because his other concern he was president I think chairman of a society for the for Christianization of the Jews. So I don’t think that that position in would endear him to the rabbis of London. so the situation was rather paradoxical. Here you have
very important Christian politicians and theologians talking about Jews gathering in Palestine but there were no Jews involved.

Jews became involved later by the very end of the 19th century. And perhaps the most important connection here is one between the founder of political Zionism Theodoro Herzel a Hungarian Jew who moved to Vienna became a prominent playwright and journalist and William Heckler a Christian Zionist and the chaplain of the British embassy in Vienna and that was a very important connection. there’s a book written called the prince and the prophet about this important connection. Now here the Jews come finally into the picture and the Herdzel is in a way rather typical. He is a estranged from Jewish religion. He is essentially a Germanspeaking Austrian journalist and playwright. But he’s suffering from anti-semitism, from the hatred of Jews who in central and western Europe had received quite recently equal rights and they were moving up the social ladder and as a result a lot of people resented this because Jews used to be in Christian Europe well secondass citizens or discriminated and so on. So for Herzel. who was a very sensitive charismatic person. it was important to find a collective solution for to to anti-semitism and his first choice was to convert every Jew in Vienna to Catholicism. that didn’t quite work. His second idea, his plan B, was to found the Zionist movement. So now with this introduction you could see what kind of opposition can emerge to this kind of movement. First was of course religious opposition because as you said Jews were expelled, or at least that’s the theological position of mainstream Judaism, that because of their sins and that many times it’s written in Pentatuk: if you don’t behave, said God, you will be expelled from this land and that indeed how it was interpreted in the second century. But but Jewish sources particularly the Talmud which was written in the from the third to the fifth century, to the sixth century, Talmud warns Jews against returning to the land particularly against returning en masse, returning collectively, and they also warn against using force to 12:02
reconquer the holy land or conquer Palestine.

12:09 J S:
So, just to underscore this, maybe to say a word about what the Talmud is for people who don’t know and then what these three oaths actually say in the Talmud.

Y R: Yeah. Well, Talmud is a compendium of discussions among scholars, among Jewish scholars. There are two kinds of Talmud: One Babylonian which was in written in the territory of today’s Iran and Iraq and the other one is Jerusalem Talmud and there are discussions about various issues both philosophical and particularly legal and the Talmud specifies those three oaths that you just mentioned: that before Jews were expelled from the land they were adjured by God not to return collectively, not to use force and the nations of the world, so in other words, non-Jews, were told not to oppress Jews too much, and that’s the expression. So those three oaths were functional and remain functional for many observant Jews who consider therefore the Zionist movement which wants to bring Jews into Palestine and to become a regular secular nation like European nations, obviously they don’t appreciate that and they oppose it to this very day because for them converting a religious community into a secular nation is something that goes against important principles of Judaism.

14:01 J S:
So here we have many different forces both political force and ideological forces at play by the time Theodore Herzel becomes the the leader of the Jewish Zionist movement. You have
Christians saying “Jews should be back in their land.” You have British imperialists saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if that were the case? Because that would give us a foothold into the Ottoman lands. And we need that foothold because after all, we need to protect our passage to the crown jewel of our empire, India.” And so control over the eastern Mediterranean is very important. And now you have secular Jews reflecting the ideology of the late 19th century. Also, not only the anti-semitism but the extreme nationalism that was on the rise. Each nation in the strong ideology of the
time which continues till today to some extent. Each nation should have its territory and should be a nation state. So it also seemed, well Jews were [thinking], “…what is it? Are we a religion? Are we a people? If we’re a people like all people there should be a territory attached to that?” So this became another part. But I think what’s so fascinating and crucial about your writing is you point out that the rabbis are scratching their heads. Wait a minute. This is not our religion. We we know the religion. We know the tomud. we know the practice. Our religion is a religion of local communities at synagogues obedient to God’s commandments in in the Torah. Not and we know of the commitment in in the Babylonian Talmud not to go back to Israel. So from the the beginning actually of the Zionist movement, there was a pretty deep split in the Jewish community.

16:23 Y R:
Well, it was a very important split because the rabbis that you mentioned, they were not scratching their head that that’s a different religion. They were very much upset that the people who were promoting that movement were overtly secular, anti-religious. That was the problem. and this is particularly applies to Jews of the Russian Empire and I’ll get to it. Well, I can mention because it’s important. Jews in the Russian Empire, unlike Jews in Austro-Hungarian Empire where Herzel lived, Jews in Russia lived under official restriction to inhabit the so-called “pale of settlement” which is the western part of the Russian Empire which is Eastern Europe today, say from the Baltic republics down to Moldova. And these Jews, a part of those Jews, became radicalized, took a very active part in the revolutionary movement in Russia and these were very active Zionists because for them, in the conditions of the Russian Empire, Zionism appeared as a very attractive option. So I’m going back to kinds of opposition to Zionism. So for the religious authorities, for rabbis, these Russian revolutionaries and Viennese journalists who didn’t observe any of the commandments were totally forbidden. You shouldn’t even touch them. You shouldn’t even communicate with them. That’s that was their position. Now there was a second part perhaps even more important, at least numerically, Jews in France, Britain, Germany, Austria who received equal rights who began their ascent on the social ladder becoming doctors, professors and so on. And the last thing they wanted to hear is that they don’t belong there. They belong to some other nation that whose
homeland is in Palestine. Because that was exactly what the anti-semites were saying. You don’t belong here. go to go back to Palestine.

18:48 J S;
And some of the Christian Zionists were overt anti-semites in fact.

YR:
Well, of course, because we shouldn’t forget that the two goals to gather the Hebrews in the holy land and their conversion to Christianity go hand in hand. So that’s very important issue till today incidentally. So the second part, second kind of opposition was from these bourgeois Jews who were becoming Frenchmen and Germans and Americans and British and they didn’t want to go to any Palestine. They didn’t want to become part of a different nation. particularly because, and we have to understand the Jews around the world spoke different languages,they had different culinary
habits, they really they didn’t even look the same, so the idea that Jews constitute a separate nation is a purely Eastern European idea where indeed in Eastern Europe they lived in rather compact environment speaking a different language, Yiddish. But say among Iranian Jews I visited Iran in
2016 and even wrote about it, they are Iranians of Judeaic persuasion and I happened to be there on the new year on the Persian New Year in Aruse and on Friday night we were going to the synagogue and people met in the street, you know Jews met and they said, “Shabbat shalom noriz mubarak” in one sentence because that’s their identity.

J S:
It’s interesting in in the United States also the the reform Judaism which is the less religious kind the rabbis at the end of the 19th century met and also said our place is America.

Y R:
Indeed actually I don’t remember his name but one of the rabbis of the reform movement said this is
our Palestine, mentioning the United States. This is our Palestine. This is our promised land.

J S:
So, if we could move forward because I’d love to speak and I hope we will for hours and hours. It’s so fascinating also and so little known frankly. But to jump to 1917 to the Balfour Declaration this is where empire really merges with Zionism and maybe you could take us through that and there’s a
fascinating twist of this of of Edwin Montigue that I want to ask you about.

Y R:
Yeah. well let me just finish that the third kind of opposition which is also important came from socialists for whom Zionism was a distraction of Jews from class struggle in their countries and they were adamantly opposed to Zionism including a very important socialist labor movement, the Bund in Eastern Europe. Now indeed in 1917 a few days before Britain actually occupied Palestine the foreign minister of Britain Balfour wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild in which he said that the British government would look with favor at the establishment of Jewish homeland, and that’s a very nebulous term what it means, which is quite typical of British diplomacy.

J S:
Yes. I have a theory that all the world’s problems trace back to the British by the way because of exactly this kind of ambiguity and so forth.

Y R:
Well, I think many of the hot points today are former British possessions.

J S: Yeah. Exactly.

22:57 Y R:
Okay. So the British… the Lord Balfour promised to look with favor at the establishment of a Jewish homeland provided that the rights of local population be protected and never molested and so on. That’s a very important proviso because it doesn’t seem to have been respected. But in fact Balfour later wrote in a private letter that our point is to help the Jews to in gather in Palestine and we don’t care about the opinions of thousands of Arabs who happen to inhabit it today. You see that’s a very biblical view that you know this land belongs to Jews but it so happened that there are other people have been living there for 2,000 years but that’s irrelevant.
And that’s a crux of the issue. So the British government, or not the British government actually, it was just the foreign minister because one member of the British government, the only Jewish member of the British government, Montague, wrote accusing the British government in writing of anti-semitism says what you are doing is an anti-semitic measure and he wrote a long letter which you can find on the internet on anti-semitism of the British government. So even…

J S: So the foundational document where the British government establishes the Zionist homeland was attacked by the one Jewish member of the British cabinet for being anti-semitic because it’s unimaginable to people that this can be the actual case. And that’s just a century ago and completely foundational to the state of Israel today.

Y R:
Yeah. But you know, Balfour before that, when in I think 1906, he was the author of a bill that prohibited the entry or at least limited the entry of Russian Jews into Britain. And that fits because one of the motivations of Christian Zionists, we don’t have want to have Jews here. Let them go to
Palestine. that’s better for us. So, that’s the three types of opposition and then Zionism of course developed as a settler’s colonialism.
The word colonialism at that time was a perfectly acceptable positive term. Herzel used it. The first financial arm of the Zionist movement was called Jewish colonial trust. so we have to be very cognizant of the fact that when Zionism was establishing its colony in Palestine, there was nothing wrong about it from the European viewpoint, not from the natives viewpoint.

J S:
Colonialism was the natural order of things. Yeah. And the the western world dominated. it could establish column and should establish colonies where it wanted to often at God’s command in in the history of European colonial rule.

Y R: Yeah, indeed. Yeah, indeed. In the United States, you have places named after Bethlehem and Acron and all these biblical names because for those settlers, North America was the promised land. Tasmania was the promised land. So there were many promised lands in in history.
So for now who went to Palestine, that’s very important. Those who went to Palestine were largely Jews from former Russian Empire. many of them radicalized revolutionary socialists and they wanted to build a new socialist country in Palestine. Then there were some Jews who were pushed from Eastern Europe from Poland in particular by prevailing anti-semitism and of course the third important way with the German Jews who after 1933, after the election of Hitler as the Reichs Chancellor,they also started going to Palestine. However, the Russian Jews constitute the core of the political establishment of Israel. They, neither Polish Jews and definitely not German Jews made it into political elites of the Zionist establishment and later state of Israel. And in fact, as far as I know, only Naftali Bennett was the only prime minister of Israel who was not born in Russian Empire or whose parents were not born in Russian Empire. So all of them including Benjamin Netanyahu were. Well, Ben: his father was born in Russian Empire and this is very… it’s you see… a colleague of mine, Yakov Yadgar, at Oxford and myself we wrote a paper on the Russian roots of Israel political culture and I’m completing now a paper on violence: [a] chapter on violence in that sense
because we have to be very careful to see roots of propensity for violence and total disregard for ideological enemies in the culture of the revolutionary movement of the turn of the 20th century perhaps a caricature of what you could find in Dostoevsky’s Demons or Possessed, I don’t know how it’s translated [The Devils]. So that’s the core of the political elite.

29:11 J S:
Just to say among those violent figures, maybe you could say a word about Jabotinsky because he he is someone who is almost foundational for the the political leaders of Israel today, especially Netanyahu and and his party.

Y R:
Yeah, indeed. Netanyahu’s father was the private secretary to Jabotinsky.

J S:
Oh, that I didn’t know.

Y R: …so Netanyahu literally grew up in that atmosphere. Now who was Jabotinsky? Jabotinsky was a Odessa Jew from Odessa was a very important centre of Zionism in the Russian Empire and he was a very talented writer, a Russian writer. his native tongue was Russian and he has joined the Zionist movement. and he disagreed with the socialists on certain points but in many respects Jabotinsky was in agreement namely that the only way you can establish Zionist presence in Palestine is by force. The natives have to realize that you have an iron wall in front of you. You know, it’s very interesting. He wrote about iron wall in early 20s and now you have a concrete wall just sitting there tangibly. So Jabotinsky split from the Zionist movement. He called it revisionist Zionist movement. He was essentially removed from power in the Zionist establishment by so by the socialists, David Ben Gurian in particular. he emigrated to France, he died in the United States in 1940. But the movement he started which I would call the muscular Judaism, muscular Zionism. of course he was totally religious, uninterested in anything Jewish. and it’s also. Most people who founded that movement were not only strange, they were uninterested in Judaism. They were they were interpreting say biblical stories in a very unJewish way if I may say so. But that’s quite natural because that’s the people who were attracted to Zionism. So Jabotinsky’s movement was marginal in in the state of Israel after it was founded in 48. But in 1977 there was a change of government an election that really is a watershed, not in the sense of changing the policy but the changing the discourse because here we have to be very clear the so-called rightwing of Biyamin Netanyahu and the so-called left-wing errors of David Ben-Gurian had exactly the same idea about the natives, about the importance of occupying territories by force. Except that the socialist were clothing this in a very nice egalitarian discourse where Jabotinsky and his heirs, and particularly today, no longer bother about the form or the the decor. They say things as it is. In a way, it’s much easier today to talk about Zionism because you just have to quote today’s politicians in Israel and you don’t have to impute fascist tendencies, you can see them.

32:57 J S:
We have again with apologies to all listeners given the importance and the richness of of this discussion have to jump ahead many decades and there’s so much that we could talk about but I want to bring us up to today if I can and help and have you help us understand what is the the ruling party or the ruling government’s ideology. What are the goals of Netanyahu and his colleagues? And the reason I asked this is the following. If I understand correctly, Netanyahu is the head of a political party that at its core following Yabotinsky said, “We need to take a hard line against the locals. We need to control all of the territory of Palestine.”
But it’s not per se a religious movement. It may be non-religious or anti-religious but it seems that there’s a new kind of religious movement as well. something different from the rabbitical Judaism that has arisen and that is represented by other members of the coalition in power Smootrich and Bengir and the religious settlers and what you call national Judaism which seems to be religious in spirit even literal literal biblical in orientation even refer referring to the original promise by God to Abraham of the lands from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates which is a lot of the Middle East territory by the way. Is there a coalition at work? Are there different forces at play in Israel’s approach which is of course the coalition is wholly anti-Palestinian to the extent of slaughtering Palestinians by the tens of thousands before our eyes and on Tik Tok every day. But are there different motivations at play of a Netanyahu who’s been prime minister for much of the past 30 years and his seemingly religious colleagues today but of a different kind of Jewish religion from the rabbitical Judaism that opposed Zionism a 100 years ago.

Y R:
Indeed, you mentioned national Judaism. that’s the movement that emerged as a political force after the six-day war of 1967 when Israel conquered territories that had previously been occupied by Jordan and Egypt and they became the most active settlers in the occupied territories. They considered themselves they were observant Jews. They observed the Jewish rituals and they interpreted literally again the biblical promise. And they argue, some of them are very honest people and I admire them not for what they do but the fact that their words and their acts don’t diverge which is the case for many Zionists. They say well if we have to occupy the land we have to follow the advice of the Pentatuk and the Talmud and the three Oaths, and every and all the Jewish rabinical tradition is irrelevant because we live in different conditionsm we live in the land of Israel and we need a Torah of the land of Israel and that’s the expression they use. In fact I studied the texts that went into the source of my book on Jewish opposition to Zionism in a very Zionist seminar in Jerusalem. That’s where I studied them because for them it was inconceivable that most important rabbis whom they revere were all against Zionism. They wanted to understand that. So these people today are the motive force of settlement. But I would say the most patriotic part of Israel because those who were settlers in the 20s and 30s and who founded the kibbutim, the socialists, their children and grandchildren have become Tel Aviv bourgeois who no longer want to settle anything. and they go to psychoanalyst if they have a problem. These people are very different. They go to very risky enterprises settling all kinds of hills. But today they are also slaughtering Palestinians in big numbers on the West Bank. And of course they are the people who prevented aid reaching the Gaza Palestinians last year. So we are talking about a very motivated political group that uses religious argumentation to strengthen their cause and that’s a very potent
force.

J S:
You know in my own upbringing I learned the little bit of religious teaching to get through a bar mitzvah but not not much more than that. And frankly I was completely stunned when as an adult I went back to read Deuteronomy and the book of Joshua and, especially the book of Joshua which is the book that describes the conquest of today’s Israel by the those who had left Egypt. in the Exodus and God’s command to uproot and slaughter in fact every man, woman and child of one city, state one people after another in this book. It’s about the most violent text one could find anywhere in any library for for anything. It’s a frankly speaking a book of genocides. And it was shocking for me to to read that as the sixth book of of of the Tanakah, of the Jewish Bible. Does something like that because of the literalism play its role in the minds and the imagination of people in power today?

40:07 Y R:
Absolutely. Rabinical Judaism reinterpreted all these verses and in fact the genocide of 40:13
the seven nations that used to inhabit the holy land and there was a command to exterminate them in the Bible in the book of Joshua. You’re right. But the sages of the Talmud said, “.. now all the peoples are mixed up and we don’t know who these people are and therefore the commandment is not operational.”

J S: Wow. You see that’s how interesting. No but how how wise also because there’s of course just to put a historical gloss on that there is and David Ben-Gurian, of all people, believed in it. There’s real reason to believe that today’s Palestinian Arabs are actually biologically the stock from the ancient Jewish communities who then converted with the rise of Islam in the Middle East in the 7th century. and so in terms of who’s mixed up with whom, everyone is mixed up with each other. The rabbis were very clever to make that point.

Y R: Well, I think that the Jewish wisdom is something which would have prevented us from having the violence we have today. Of course, there’s a new generation of rabbis affiliated with national Judaism and they’ve written books that are just as blood curdling as you mentioned when you read the book of Joshua. Of course, there are today’s rabbis. Some of them write really extremely violent books that even landed some of them in court in Israel a few years ago. but by and large Jewish is tradition of compromise of pacifism and that’s precisely what the founders of Zionism detested and disdained.

J S:
I found it because of you being led to the three oaths because I had never read the book of Kubot in the Babylonian Talmud. Certainly not. But when I got to it, I found that, yes, a piece of very practical wisdom actually. Because if I understood what the rabbis were trying to say was, they were trying to tell their co-religionists, “Don’t make a mess. Maybe the rebellion against the Roman Empire wasn’t the smartest thing we’ve ever done as a people. Calm down! Don’t create new troubles. Learn to live in the places where you live.” And it seemed not only theological but profoundly practical just how to actually live in this world.

Y R:
Absolutely. And you know the founder of rabinical Judaism, the person who is hailed as someone who started, or rather restarted, Judaism after the loss of Jerusalem was Yohan bin Zakai. And the Talmud tells about him. Again, as a historian, I cannot warrant for the veracity of this, but the Talmud says that he was in Jerusalem under the siege of the Romans and the Zealots prevented Jews from leaving Jerusalem. So, he sent an arrow to the Roman troops with a little note saying, “I am among the admirers of the emperor.” How would you call this person today? A traitor. And he’s the founder of rabbitical Judaism.

43:57 J S:
How interesting. Very practical. Well, Professor Rabkin, we should go on for hours – what you’re telling us and teaching us is, utterly fascinating. I have to say it, maybe it’s a very bizarre word. I don’t want to be misunderstood and I really will be, but I don’t want to be. It’s very entertaining in the sense that it’s so fascinating the twists and turns also bizarre, unexpected but true, and in front of
our faces that the one Jew in the cabinet of Britain objects to the Balfour Declaration for example: you couldn’t make it up or that today, by number, by far the biggest base of Zionism in the United States are Christian evangelicals, not even close to the the count of Jews who in any event are probably more divided on the question. So we could go on for a very long time.
But what I would like to do is to suggest to everybody listening, please read the fascinating books that we’ve been discussing.
Jewish Opposition to Zionism – a Threat from Within, published in 2006.
What is modern Israel? An absolutely fascinating book published in 2016.
And the new book on Israel and Palestine, Jewish Rejection of Zionism
coming in the middle of 2025. Professor Rabkin, we’ll have to leave it here at this point, but thank you so much for your wisdom, your teaching, your writing, and for joining me on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.

Y R:
Thank you so much. It was a most stimulating discussion. Thanks a lot. Thank you.