On Zion, Zionism, and Zionists: A Biblical History

Roger Berkowitz

Jim Sleeper begins his long essay on the many forgotten historical and religious foundations of the shallow modern understanding of claims like “zionism,” “settler colonialism,” and “antisemitism” by quoting T.S. Eliot who writes, “"Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Sleeper is seeking to offer manifold correctives and complexities to any and all simplified narratives of justification: justifications for Hamas’ October 7th atrocities and war crimes in the service of its stated genocidal aims; Israel’s vengeful response that has flaunted the laws of war in the name of wrathful collective punishment; the claims of American evangelicals who see Israel and the United States both as divinely sanctioned ethno-states; and Israeli apologists, and radical left-wing pro-Hamas ideologues. Sleeper’s basic point is that we can’t understand the volcanic eruptions in both the Middle East and in the United States without facing up to the ancient religious passions that drive both American and Jewish history. He writes: 

But larger eruptions of hatred and mayhem in America’s increasingly divided, uncivil society are driven not by antisemitism or by today's Jews, nor by the riptides of global capital and technology and the desperate migrations and belligerent nationalisms that they accelerate. More than most of us recognize, they’re driven by ancient religious passions that figured deeply in Israel’s and America's origins. Both nations’ professedly “liberal” and civic-republican cultures are profoundly and perhaps fatally conflicted, in ways that prompt not only news headlines but also biblically resonant upheavals, even when the participants don’t consider themselves religious at all.

The 17th-century English Calvinists who colonized lands that they called New England and Virginia, and whose 18th-century legatees participated in founding the American republic, pursued strategies remarkably similar to those of today’s Israeli settlers in the West Bank and today's military invaders of Gaza, some of whom claim a divine mandate and others a “manifest destiny” to impose one ethno-religious identity at the expense of longtime inhabitants.

The ”settler-colonial” paradigm (or accusation) touted by today's American progressives in attacking Israel certainly fits the early American Puritans, who had no ancestral roots or claims on the lands they were settling and seizing. Yet their pivot backward toward ancient Israelites’ divinely promised “Zion” has infected America’s civic-republican culture in ways that still drive Protestants’ and Jews’ obsessions with Israel's presence in the Middle East.

That Jews, unlike Puritans, actually do have ancestors in their “promised land” was confirmed in 1947 by the discovery of scrolls transcribed in Hebrew and buried in caves near the Dead Sea seven centuries before Islam existed and before Arabic was spoken in the region. That complicates the “settler-colonial” paradigm, which applies readily to English Puritans but more ambiguously to Jews. Yet those passages also contain prophetic warnings that Israelites’ territorial claims were contingent on keeping the covenant sealed at Sinai — or, as we might put it now, on transcending narrow tribalism to meet a higher, more universal standard. If they didn’t, God would punish them at the hands of their enemies:

Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel comes! …. Go down to Gath of the Philistines. Are you better than these kingdoms? Or is their territory greater than your territory, O you who put far away the day of disaster and bring near the seat of violence? Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches, … who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph! [Amos 6]

The reluctant but overwhelmed prophet Isaiah reported that God would punish the Israelite elites’ arrogance by destroying their Zion "until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken."

There's no question that Hamas’ intentions toward Jews are genocidal and nihilistic, and that it's a despotic, destructive force for the Palestinians under its rule. That doesn’t cancel out the historical reality that Winthrop, Mather and other English settlers who founded Harvard and our republic were as genocidal as the biblical Hebrews they self-consciously modeled themselves upon. Condemning only one side’s bloodlust, or blaming American campus protesters for (allegedly) defending it, while ignoring the other side’s equivalent nihilism serves neither justice nor a civic-republican ethos that began on this continent with Puritan efforts to balance personal autonomy with strong community. Such selective outrage can only intensify the pathologies of Nakba-traumatized Palestinians and Holocaust-traumatized Jews who play fast and loose with Americans’ grievances and hopes.

What Adam Shatz has called "vengeful pathologies" inflame not only those tied ancestrally or materially to one or another side in this war but also those with no such ties or interests who protest it more passionately than numerous more devastating conflicts in recent memory. Thousands of American young people didn't take to the campus quads to condemn the killing of approximately 100,000 civilians and more than a million combatants in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. Very few seemed to lose sleep over the murder of tens of thousands of Chechens in Russia's “counter-insurgency” war of the 2000s, which Human Rights Watch called "unparalleled in the area since World War II for its scope and destructiveness."

These and other recent horrors are surely as hideous as the IDF’s killing of more than 30,000 Gazans, including many women and children, and the destruction of their homes, schools and hospitals. We should also note the unmatched sadism of Hamas’ body-camera footage depicting the murder of 1,200 or so Israelis, most of them civilians, some of whom were forced to watch family members killed or brutalized before being slaughtered themselves. Campus organizations, churches, labor unions and social justice advocates who mobilized against Israel's retaliatory attacks have said very little about Hamas’ evident strategy of using thousands of Palestinian civilians as human shields. 

Some explanations for this are plausible but not entirely convincing. One is that U.S. efforts on Israel’s behalf reflect the foreign policy establishment’s effort to manage largely unmanageable upheavals in the post-World War II order. Another is that globalized communications, commerce and finance have enabled a new regime of profiteering and power-grabbing by an array of bad actors: social media managers, demagogues, propagandists and lobbyists for authoritarian regimes. Those developments have undermined the promise of democracy that seemed to emerge during the “Arab Spring” rebellions of 2011. Authoritarians have adapted the new technologies to serve what William J. Dobson calls “The Dictator’s Learning Curve.” 
A more plausible but still inadequate answer contends that young Americans protesting the Gaza war are indulging a form of politics that privileges their zeal to “find themselves” in moralistic posturing and ideological positioning. “This concern for the Palestinians is not a matter of anti-Semitism so much as it is a reflection of self-absorption,” Shatz wrote in The Nation in 2014. "Palestinians are for the radical Western left what Algerians were for Third World’ists…: natural-born resisters, fighting not only Israel but its imperial patrons…. Palestine is still ‘the question’ because it holds up a mirror to us. ‘Too many people want to save Palestine’ one activist said to me. But it could just as well be said that too many people want to be saved by Palestine.”

An “all-consuming preoccupation with America and Israel,” Shatz continued, has left some progressives “strangely incurious about the crimes for which the West can’t be blamed and the developments, such as the politicization of sectarian identity, that are shaking the region far more profoundly than the Israeli-Palestinian arena.” Why aren’t progressives who champion freedom of speech, conscience, sexual identity and reproductive choice chanting, “From Tehran to Tripoli, Muslims will be free”?

My criticism of the left is not meant to excuse the Zionist movement and Israel's degrading treatment of Palestinians since at least the 1930s, when leaders such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky were unapologetically racist, or since 1967, when Israel conquered and occupied Gaza and the West Bank. But I also cannot condemn Israel uniquely, when it is invoked by Americans whose ancestors destroyed Indigenous peoples and enslaved millions of Africans. "Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation,” noted Ernst Renan, the 19th-century scholar of Semitic languages and civilizations. Equally “essential,” it would seem, are demagogic leaders who safeguard their own nations' false memories by ginning up moralistic condemnations of other peoples’ vengeful pathologies.