Re: Edward Said - American Zionism (3)

Dear Khaldoun,

        You and Shoshana are on to something of enormous interest to
cultural and intellectual historians, of whom I am one, and I entirely
agree with you that Zionism has deep ideational roots in Christian Europe.
What else was the First Crusade but Zionism?  Christian sympathy for
Zionism is certainly a factor in U.S. support of Israel as well.  Still,
the implementation of Zionism after 1945 remains primarily the work of
displaced Jews and their supporters, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the U.S.
and elsewhere.  Its partly Gentile pedigree does not change the "facts
on the ground" with which Palestinians must daily contend.    

        Warren


On Fri, 10 Nov 2000 KSamman@aol.com wrote:

> 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
> 
>  
> 
>