Re: Edward Said - American Zionism (3)

Greetings Friends,

This is turning out to be a very productive discussion.  Both 
Boris Stremlin and Prof. Wagar are onto something here that 
is essential to understanding the present Palestinian-Israeli 
conflict.  But this discussion is much more than that.  The kinds 
of questions they raise are relevant to a wide variety of politically
engaged scholarship, from world systems to postcolonial intellectuals.  

The first point I'd like to make comes out of a joint research
project that Shoshana Lev and I are pursuing: Zionism has a
long history that was first developed NOT within European Jewry.
Indeed, the idea for the creation of a Jewish State was developed 
and nourished among Bible reading Protestants beginning as early
as the Reformation, among the most anti-Jewish elements in Western
Europe.  Jewish Zionists only began to develop a mythology of the 
land of Israel a few centuries after it had matured among European 
Christians.  Hear me out please.

Informing our thesis is the argument that the imagery and symbolism 
of the Holy Land was, and remains, an essential part of the Western 
conception of European identity, where the Scriptures (both the New 
and the Torah), Jesus' life, his crucifixion and resurrection, as well as 
the lives of the twelve apostles and the tremendous outpouring of 
pilgrimage literature and other artistic visual representations of the 
Land called Holy, all provided "the West" with a vibrant and living 
historical memory of the Holy Land.  

The Land Called Holy, the need and desire to identify with it, the 
feeling and belief that it is part of "our" past, solely belonging to 
"us", has come to be viewed as an essential property of the "West."     
The impact of this historical memory has provided the source by 
which Palestine would come to be viewed not as the property of 
the "Oriental Other" but as an internal property of Europe itself.  
The symbolism of its sacredness in Scriptures and popular 
memory (weekly Church recounting of Jesus in Jerusalem, for 
example) provided the colonialist enterprise with a powerful and 
convenient discourse in its ambitions in the region.  

This conception of the Holy Land, moreover, is the very same 
idea that Jewish activist like Herzl will appropriate centuries 
later from his European Christian predecessors.   

In almost all accounts, with the possible exception of a few
important studies, Zionism is usually presented as the sole 
property of the Jews.  As Ragina Sharif argues in her book 
"Non-Jewish Zionism", most analysts portray the success story 
of Zionism and the triumph of the development of the Jewish 
State of Israel "to the political and diplomatic skills of Zionist 
Jews, like Chaim Weizmann, Louis Brandeis or Nahum 
Sokolow, who tirelessly influenced non-Jewish public figures."  

Rarely is the success story ever placed in its larger context, 
and rarely do we get a sense of the influences of other non-Jews 
on the Zionist project itself.  Long before the arrival of Theodor 
Herzl's "The Jewish State", there had, according to Ragina Sharif, 
already developed a very significant non-Jewish Zionist movement 
within Europe which should be viewed as forming a "parallel 
and not an annex to the history of Jewish Zionism."

This is highly significant, for when the time came ripe for Jews 
like Herzl to propose a Jewish State and Palestine was caught 
in the midst of a weak Ottoman Empire and its replacement 
by the British, the idea of Israel seemed all too familiar to Europe.  
The memory of the Land Called Holy and the grip it had on the 
European imagination throughout the centuries played into the 
fact that when the call by Jewish Zionists for the creation of the 
Jewish State in Palestine appeared on the scene in the nineteenth
century it all seemed second nature.   

"The very name 'Israel' is part of the Christian heritage," wrote Eytan 
in 1958.  "When the Jewish State," he continues, "was established 
and called Israel, it did not have to explain itself."  The fact that 
Zionist ideas flourished in the context of European Hegemony in 
general and British colonial interventions in the Middle East in 
particular, has shaped and influenced this modern Jewish 
reformulation of a physical, rather than a spiritual, return to Jerusalem.  
These need to be seen together, not as separate phenomenon but 
rather as a tightly integrated development in which the realization of 
the Zionist vision to establish a colonial State was made possible.  

It is our contention therefore that in order to understand Zionism
it is pertinent to locate it in this wider context and to see its discursive 
properties as emanating from, and latching itself unto, this much 
older imperial European legacy.  I'm looking forward to continuing
this discussion further.

Khaldoun Samman