Title: Place for the Palestinians in the Altneuland: Herzl, Anti-Semitism, and the Jewish State
Alt / Archive: https://archive.md/fNZ8Y
Context/Wikipedia:
Theodor Herzl was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer who was the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state. Due to his Zionist work, he is known in Hebrew as Chozeh HaMedinah, lit. 'Visionary of the State'. He is specifically mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence and is officially referred to as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State"
I've been trying to figure out how to post and talk about this paper I found while trying to learn about Herzl and the origins of Israel.
The linked paper / essay is interesting, but what left me stunned was seeing Herzl's own words in the quoted excerpts, where he talks about what he believes is the root causes of the persecution of Jewish people and how he thinks it can be solved.
I'm going to CW from here. Reading the essay would be a good idea for better contextual understanding.
CW antisemitism
An excerpt from Herz's "Mauschel" published in Die Welt 1897 where he identifies the reason for the persecution of Jewish people is the existence of Eastern European and Slavic Jews (as opposed to Herzl, an integrated white man in Vienna) or broadly "Ghetto Jews"
'We've known him for a long time, and just merely to look at him, let alone approach or, heaven forbid, touch him was enough to make us feel sick. But our disgust, until now, was moderated by pity; we sought extenuating, historical explanations for his being so crooked, sleazy, and shabby a specimen. Moreover, we told ourselves that he was, afer all, our fellow tribesman, though we had no cause to be proud of his fellowship.... who is this Yid, anyway? A type, my dear friends, a figure that pops up time and again, the dreadful companion of the Jew, and so inseparable from him that they have always been mistaken for one for the other. The Jew is a human being like any other, no better and no worse.... The Yid, on the other hand, is a hideous distortion of the human character, something unspeakably low and repulsive'.
He goes on to describe how the establishment of a Jewish state would be brutally hard work. He predicted that cosmopolitans like himself would not be interested in moving to the site of this future state. The essay explains his idea that
A Jewish state [...] would isolate eastern Jews -- those provokers and amplifiers of anti-semitic feeling -- and, through a carefully rationalized program of 'relief by labor', use their unremunerated work both to transform them from 'good for nothing beggar[s] into honest bread winner[s]'
Or in Herzl's words:
'We shall not leave our old home before the new one is prepared for us. Those only will depart who are sure thereby to improve their position; those who are now desperate will go first, after them the poor, next the prosperous, and, last of all, the wealthy. Those who go in advance will raise themselves to a higher grade, equal to that whose representatives will shortly follow. Thus the exodus will be at the same time an ascent of the classes'
"Arbeit macht frei, but not for me" type beat.
The last excerpt I'm going to share is Herzl's declaration that the Zionist project would liberate Jewish people from antisemitic persecution whether it succeeded in creating a state or not.
'In our own day, even a flight from religion can no longer rid the Jew of the Yid. Race is now the issue - as if the Jew and the Yid belonged to the same race. But go and prove that to the anti-Semite. To him, the two are always and inextricably link.... And then came Zionism!.... We'll breathe more easily, having got rid once and for all of these people whom, with furtive shame, we were obliged to treat as our fellow tribesmen….Watch out, Yid. Zionism might proceed like Wilhelm Tell…and keep a second arrow in reserve. Should the first shot miss, the second will serve the cause of vengeance. Friends, Zionism's second arrow will pierce the Yid's chest'
The essay explains, the "first arrow" Zionism would shoot would be the creation of a Jewish state. But if they failed in that project, the only alternative left would be for integrated Western European Jews to exterminate the "problematic" Jewish people who provoked antisemitism by existing. That's the second arrow piercing the undesirables' chest.
I think I first read this thing a couple of weeks ago but it keeps intruding on my thoughts.
The notion of good Jews and bad Jews and the necessity for the good to exterminate the bad to alleviate the persecution of the whole - familiar rhetoric, I've seen the same thing expressed by various chauvinists and ethnic supremacists, historical and contemporary.
I guess why this keeps nagging at me is that so much of this thinking actually did become a blueprint for the founding of Israel.
and that the words are so shockingly hateful that they make the lie of Israel's being necessary for the peace and security of all Jewish people bitterly laughable.
Herzl wanted to purify his own "tribe" of the members which be believed fully embodied the worst antisemitic stereotypes. You could pass his words off as German Nazi propaganda without altering a thing. He's still considered the founding visionary for the state that exists today.
For some reason I didn't expect it to be this blatant and disgusting. For some reason I thought if I went far enough back I'd find something other than hate and more antisemitism, that it'd been a different time and that maybe the project started with at least naively 'positive' intentions.
Dunno why I thought that. Propaganda I suppose.