the UN resolution of 1947, in fact since the Peel Commission Report of 1937, .... Canaanism made its public appearance in the shape of the 'Committee for the.
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2, 273–294, March 2011
Canaanism KLAUS HOFMANN
With the two-state solution for Palestine having been on the political agenda since the UN resolution of 1947, in fact since the Peel Commission Report of 1937, without being implemented, the alternative idea of a binational state or a state which will eventually transcend binationalism by creating a nation of citizens of whatever ethnic, cultural, or religious background, is gaining increased attention, as evidenced by recent publications.1 Meron Benvenisti stated in 2009 that under the given circumstances, ‘it appears that the continued preoccupation with establishing a Palestinian state is not just hopeless, but also injurious, since the delusions that it fosters enable the continuation of the status quo’.2 Supporters of a one-state solution may want to trace their lineage to respected Zionists such as Martin Buber and Judah Magnes and their circle, the Ihud.3 Few, however, will recall the most radical proponents of a single state to supersede Jewish–Arab antagonism, the Canaanites. Outdated as one of the various twentieth-century schemes of endowing a modern nation with an ancient foundation, suspect as an offshoot of right-wing Zionism, notorious for its anti-Judaism, Canaanism is bound to be shunned as a connection. The term ‘Canaanism’ was polemically pinned – by the poet Avraham Shlonsky, then literary editor of Haaretz – on the ‘Young Hebrews’ (’Ivriyim hatse’irim), a numerically tiny movement which, between 1939 and 1953, propagated its peculiar version of a state or a confederation of states comprising the population of Palestine, even that of a larger area in the ‘fertile crescent’ (Eretz ha-Kedem), a population summarily categorized as ‘Hebrews’ (’Ivriyim). Its inaugurator and spiritus rector was Yonatan Ratosh,4 born Uriel Heilperin in 1908 or 1909 in Warsaw.5 His family moved to Odessa and, in 1920, to Palestine. Heilperin attended the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem and the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv. In 1928 he enrolled at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and spent some time in 1929/30 as a student in Paris. In the late 1920s he consorted with the maximalist wing of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Party and was close to Abba Ahimeir, founder of the antiBritish Brit Ha’ Biryonim (The Thugs’ Covenant).6 In 1930 Ratosh joined the Haganah B (later Irgun Tsva’i Le’umi, IZL [Etzel]), in which Avraham Stern, whom he knew from his student days at the Hebrew University, was active.7 In 1934 Ratosh was on the editorial staff of Hayarden, the Revisionist paper. His relation to Jabotinsky tended to be strained. At the Revisionists’ General Conference in Prague in 1938, his political aims – anti-British policy, imminent Jewish sovereignty – did not meet with acclaim, Menachem Begin being his only supporter. After his
ISSN 0026-3206 Print/1743-7881 Online/11/020273-22 ª 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2011.542000
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disappointment at the Prague Conference, Ratosh went to Paris, where he met A.G. Horon.8 Horon was a Semitic language scholar associated with Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Movement and a close friend of Jabotinsky’s son Eri. For some time in 1934 he was secretary of the General Committee of Betar, Jabotinsky’s paramilitary youth movement. In 1938 he published Canaan et les He´breux, linking the history of ancient Israel with that of the Phoenicians. He was the editor and main contributor of the journal Shem – Revue d’Action He´braı¨que. Drawing on the archaeological finds at Ugarit/Ras Schamra in 1929,9 Horon devised the idea of an ancient Hebrew nation connected by a common language and culture, a Kulturnation in the Humboldtian sense. By anchoring the Hebrew language and culture in the territory and not in an ethnic matrix, Horon steered clear of the manoeuvre which has turned the linguistic concept ‘Semitic’ into a racial term. Hebrew is not the language of an ethnic group or a race, but the autochthonous language of the people in the region, whatever their provenance. This distinguishes Horon’s integrationist concept from Zionist assertions of an ethnic solidarity between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous population. The notion of a reuniting of world Jewry with the descendants of a Judean population which had stayed in Palestine, estranged from its religion and culture through conversion first to Christianity and eventually to Islam, had been around in earlier Zionism. Shlomo Sand finds it documented in Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present, a book co-authored in 1918 by David BenGurion and Itzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s future president, also in Ben-Zvi’s later publication, Our Population in the Country (1929).10 In fact, this assumption goes a long way in Horon’s direction, establishing cultural, notably linguistic, traces of a Jewish matrix surviving in contemporary Palestinians. However, the predominant argument is that of a shared ethnic or racial origin. For Horon, on the contrary, soil, not blood, is the foundation of nationhood. From Horon, Ratosh adopted the outlines of Canaanism. On the basis of Horon’s construct, the modern Hebrew nation is supposed to consist of two distinct components: On the one hand, it comprises Jews who have lost their autochthony and their Hebrew nationality but have preserved a connection to the Hebrew territory and its ancient culture as a religious community, notably through retaining the Hebrew language in their religious practice and their religious scriptures. On the other hand, there is the mostly Arabized indigenous population of the area, who have lost their Hebrew culture, language and nationality in the course of a history of conquest and alienation, but have retained the territorial prerequisite of a Hebrew renaissance.11 Both may recover their Hebrew nationality by overcoming their respective alienation. For Jews this means not just a return to the homeland, but the strict distinction between their religious identity as Jews and the Hebrew nationality which they share with non-Jews. As regards the non-Jewish population of the Middle-East, those who have maintained a non-Arab or, as Muslims, a non-Sunnite identity are considered the prime candidates to recover the Hebrew stratum underneath their present culture. Maronites, Copts, Kurds, Armenians, Cherkassians, Druse, Alawites, and Shiites are seen as first in line to enter a new Hebrew confederation and, eventually, nation, which would comprise the indigenous as well as the immigrant population of present-day Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, even Iraq, of, in Canaanite terminology, the ‘land of Kedem’.12
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Canaanism made its public appearance in the shape of the ‘Committee for the Formation of Hebrew Youth’ (Va’ad Legibbush Hano’ar Ha’ivri),13 which Ratosh organized in late 1942 or early 1943, a group consisting at first of perhaps 10 or 12 young intellectuals and artists, including Ratosh’s brothers, Uzi Ornan and Svi Rin.14 The group made its debut in 1943 with Ratosh’s Open Letter to the Hebrew Youth (Ketav el hano’ar ha’ivri).15 Ratosh’s second publication, Epistle to the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (Igeret ‘el Lohamei Herut Yisra’el, 1943), is an appeal addressed to the Lehi, the ‘Stern group’ reorganized after Stern’s death in 1942. The ‘Opening Discourse’ or ‘Opening Speech at the Meeting of the Committee with Representatives of the Cells’ (Massa ‘hapetihah) of 1944 is considered the fullest and most systematic programmatic utterance of the group. These early pronouncements shock with their rigorous affirmation of the reemerging Hebrew nation’s separation from and rejection of Judaism.16 The concept of a Hebrew nation dismisses the notion of a previously existing Jewish nation coming into its own. Judaism is relegated to a religious entity, which cannot claim the status of a nation, but originated when, after the destruction of the kingdom of Judaea in 597 BC, the displaced aristocracy of a dissolved nation formed a religious community, which was adapted to an exilic existence and was henceforth not dependent on a territorial basis and a national constitution.17 By rejecting the concept of a Jewish nation, the Canaanites severed their links with Zionism and abandoned Zionism’s allegiance to Judaism. ‘Canaanism, in a certain sense, is an attempt to continue on the path from the point where Zionism left off.’18 Canaanism holds on to Zionism’s nationalism but discards the Jewishness of that nationalism. A key sentence in the Open Letter to the Hebrew Youth, repeated in the Opening Discourse, pronounces: ‘The tie that binds the generations of Judaism cannot be loosened; it can only be severed.’19 In five theses and counter-theses the Opening Discourse exposes and rejects the Zionist aim and claim of a Jewish nation. Against the Zionist consensus that: . the Jews are a people . . . . this Jewish people desires this land as a homeland . . . . this Jewish people, as a people, has the capacity to set up a movement of national liberation. . this movement of national liberation is Zionism . . . . the Hebrew settlement in this land is a direct result of Zionism and a limb of world Jewry [literally, ‘the Jewish dispersion’]. . . . . the fitting symbol . . . is the Zionist tallit . . . as a substitute for a flag. Ratosh posits the Canaanite denial: . The Jews are not a nation and never were. They are not a nation but a faithcommunity [literally, ‘edah] whose existence is in the Dispersion and whose homeland is the Dispersion. . This Jewish faith-community has a Holy Land as do many faith-communities. But it has no homeland, nor does it need one . . . . A faith-community . . . does not have the capacity to establish a national liberation movement . . .
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. Zionism, as a Jewish phenomenon, as a phenomenon within a faith-community, can absolutely never . . . be a movement of national liberation or a national movement at all . . . . The Hebrews in Palestine are in no way the direct result of Zionism. Among those who immigrated there, only a small number did not come out of necessity, and these were pilgrims, whether religious or secular, [who have] come to the Jewish Holy Land.20 Judaism is denied any participation in the building of the Hebrew nation: For this land cannot be both Hebrew and Jewish and this Yishuv cannot be both a nation and a limb of the eternal Jewish dispersion. And if we shall not drive out all this sick culture of immigrants and pilgrims, then this leprosy will forever infect us, and no longer will a Hebrew homeland come to pass here or a Hebrew nation expand from here, but a Holy Land consumed by corruption and hypocrisy, one more transient center of eternal Judaism.21 The distinctness of Jew and Hebrew is exacerbated to a mutual exclusion: There is no Hebrew other than the child of the land of ‘Ever, the land of the Hebrews – no one else. And whoever is not a native of this land, the land of the Hebrews, cannot become a Hebrew, is not a Hebrew, and never was. And whoever comes from the Jewish dispersion, its times and its places, is, from the beginning to the end of days, a Jew, not a Hebrew, and he can be nothing but a Jew – good or bad, proud or lowly, but still a Jew. And a Jew and a Hebrew can never be the same. Whoever is a Hebrew cannot be a Jew, and whoever is a Jew cannot be a Hebrew. For a member of a nation cannot be a member of a faithcommunity which sees this nation of his as a faith-community, and a member of a faith-community cannot be a member of a nation which sees the very existence of this faith-community of his in the nation’s homeland as being opposed to that nation’s existence because of the essential nature of that faith-community from its beginning to the end of time. For the native’s homeland is not in the dispersion, nor can he ever regard the dispersion as his homeland. And someone from the dispersion has no feeling of a homeland, nor is there any place in his heart for this natural feeling.22 Zionism is seen as falling short of its original aim of creating an alternative to the Jewish Diaspora existence. In the eyes of the Canaanites, Zionism is held captive by the Diaspora Judaism which it has purportedly left behind. It is accused of perpetuating the Diaspora existence in new circumstances, building another ghetto in Palestine, yet lacking the religious essence of the Jewish ghetto. Zionism is therefore banished from the Hebrew project: ‘as long as the Land of the Hebrews is not cleansed of Zionism, and the hearts of the Hebrews cleansed of Jewishness, all the efforts will be vain and every sacrifice a useless one’.23 Towards the end of the 1948 War of Independence, the Canaanite group, gaining new members with Boaz and Yair Evron, Amos Kenan and others, rallied around the journal Alef.24 The group was reorganized in autumn 1951 as the ‘Center for
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Young Hebrews’ (Merkaz ha’ivriyim hatse’irim), which at its inaugural meeting convened on a 24 point platform: The Center for Young Hebrews calls for: A. 1. the promotion of self-definition of all the inhabitants of the State of Israel, regardless of religion, faith-community, or origin, and the recognition of the differentiation from Judaism of the nation that resides in the State of Israel 2. a policy founded on the recognition of the similarity of fate of the State of Israel and its neighbours, and of the role of Israel and of the other constructive forces in the region (known as ‘the Fertile Crescent’) as vanguard in the struggle for the revival, liberation, and development of the entire region 3. the removal of religious and communal barriers which incite animosity and instability . . . 4. the separation of religion from state, liberation from all manifestations of theocracy, a secular way of life, and the institution of a completely secular authority in all areas of life 5. official granting of full political, civil, and social rights and obligations to all citizens of the state, regardless of religion, faith-community, or origin . . . B. 6. a foreign policy founded on the integration of the interests of the countries of the Middle East . . . 7. integration and accommodation of the efforts of Hebrew liberation with parallel forces of secular national liberation in all the countries of the Middle East, such as those in Turkey, Egypt, and Iran 8. cooperation with all the elements which oppose Pan-Arabism in Lebanon, Syria, the Jordanian kingdom, and Iraq; and providing a unified expression to the struggle of these emerging forces in Israel and in those countries 9. a federated unity of Israel, Lebanon, and the mountain Druse, a unity that will put an end to the general economic asphyxiation . . . C. 10. the liberation of the State of Israel from subservience in its domestic and foreign policies to overseas Jewish appeals . . . 11. the denial of any official and recognized status of the world Zionist Organization in the State of Israel and the transfer of all its possessions and monetary assets, especially the Jewish National Fund, to a local authority and developmental administration.25 This programme is less radical and provocative than the previous pronouncements. The assertion of the incompatibility of Jew and Hebrew is moderated to the demand of a separation of religion and state. The Hebrew citizen may profess the Jewish religion as well as be a Christian, Alawite, or Moslem. The displacement of a Jewish by a Hebrew society and culture is neutralized to the vindication of a secular society and culture, equal rights and obligations for all citizens; the sweeping homogenization of the Middle Eastern population as a Hebrew nation is qualified to a
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gradual process starting with a rapprochement with non-Arab peoples in the Middle East. In the 1950s the Canaanite movement faded into insignificance. After 1967 Ratosh briefly resumed his activity with a publication analyzing the war; equally, after the Yom Kippur War of 1973 with an Alef anthology.26 The impact was negligible. The Canaanite movement receded into history. The Canaanite project of restoring a Hebrew nation in the Middle East could expect little support. On the Arab side it was bound to be perceived – if perceived at all – as the barely disguised ploy of an extremist Zionism, which extends its aggression from appropriation of the land to appropriation of the people on the land. Naturally, the propagation of Hebrew language and culture on the pretext of a hypothetical ancient condition in the Middle East would be seen as a Jewish initiative. After all, Hebrew had been preserved as the religious language of the Jews.27 To use it as a medium for assimilating the non-Jewish population of the Middle East appeared to be a strategy of cultural imperialism rather than of mutual integration. The Canaanites’ patronizing, even scornful, attitude towards the ‘Arabized’ Hebrews and their declared readiness to implement their project with violence were hardly conducive to winning the indigenous population over.28 Commenting on the design of permeating the indigenous population in order to Hebraize it, Boaz Evron judges that the ‘dialectical – and grotesque – corollary of this approach is the consistent support . . . of the appropriation-settlement activities of Gush Emunim’.29 This affinity is noticeable when, after the Six Day War, Aharon Amir, Ratosh’s closest disciple, editor of the Canaanite journals Alef and Keshet, organized an ‘Action Staff for the Retention of the Territories’ and tried, unsuccessfully, to bring this group into the ‘Greater Land of Israel Movement’.30 Hanan Hever arrives at the conclusion that ‘despite their anti-Zionist positions, the Canaanites necessarily wrote from the position of conquerors’. He observes the inconsistency of the Canaanite attitude towards the Arab population in Canaanite authors’ literary productions. In the terms of a post-colonial discourse, referring to Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, he states: Consequently, the powerful Subject, when it represents the Other, is caught between two poles. On the one hand is the Subject’s self-image as a powerful, hegemonic self, seeking to control the Other by repetition, which assimilates it and makes it the same as the Subject. But on the other hand, the dominant Subject is anxious to maintain the differences between them, so as to maintain authority and control.31 Boaz Evron finds that the program for the unification of the Land of Kedem on the basis of an Israeli conquest and the imposition of Hebrew culture on the inhabitants in order to create a unified Hebrew nation throughout the whole region meets with insoluble contradictions and that only an agreement of union among the region’s components, according to which each will maintain autonomy, can be a solution of these difficulties.32
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Diamond concludes that the ‘resistance with which non-Jewish entities in the Middle East would meet the ‘‘Canaanite’’ notion of integrating them with Jews on a Hebrew basis . . . renders the notion itself preposterous’.33 On the side of the Jews, abstracting the Hebrew language and suitable parts of scriptural tradition from their Jewish context, disposing of the latter as the mere chrysalis in which Hebrew had been sustained through the centuries, would be seen as a reckless laceration of Judaism. It was hardly persuasive to play down the Jewish history of the Hebrew language by highlighting an indigenous revival of Hebrew among the Jewish residents in Palestine – the old yishuv – in the nineteenth century. Horon predictably attempted to pass Palestine off as the cradle of a Hebrew revival, writing in 1939: ‘One need not hide the birthpangs of the new nation behind a Jewish veil – in an attempt to convince the whole world that there is finally something Jewish happening in Palestine, when it is actually something Hebrew in Canaan that is finally taking place’.34 In the same vein, Uzi Ornan still maintains in 1976 that ‘the people of the ‘second Aliya’ . . . came to Palestine to a living Hebrew reality and joined an animated Hebrew yishuv’.35 Ron Kuzar summarizes: ‘while mainstream Zionist discourse is based on importation of nationalism into a backward society, Canaanite discourse is based on a local renaissance absorbing the waves of immigrants into its emergent culture’.36 In fact, however, the emergent culture was largely imported by the immigrants. The revival of Hebrew as a national language was propagated in and by the East European Diaspora, as the Heilperin family37 or, for that matter, Ben Yehuda’s biography38 demonstrate. As a rule, those who carried the impulse of a cultural revival did not enter Palestine as neutral immigrants but as Jews who would not simply give up the notion of being, or at all events becoming, members of a Jewish nation.39 It hardly helped that Canaanites acknowledged this circumstance by trying to scale it down, proposing the neutralization of immigration. For them, the United States and Australia figured as examples of non-specific immigration, states which receive, apart from quota regulations, their immigrants irrespective of their ethnic, cultural, religious provenance and endow them with a new nationality instead of letting them inculcate an imported one. Dan Laor quotes Aharon Amir asking, in 1974, to ‘turn Israel into an open society, totally open, a society that absorbs immigrants not necessarily from Jewish resources’.40 Diamond, referring to Amir, writes: The American paradigm is central: in the wake of the 1967 War, when Israel’s demographic problems were keenly felt, the ‘Canaanite’ proposal was to solve it by calling for unrestricted immigration and a radical opening up of Israeli society to all who would be attracted to it, Jew and non-Jew alike.41 Canaanism’s effort to alienate the Hebrew language from its Jewish matrix – concurrent with the intention of reviving it among, in fact imposing it on, the nonJewish population of the Middle-East – was hardly viable. The plan of a linguistic formation of a non-Jewish Hebrew nation was bound to fail in the face of Hebrew becoming the language of a professedly Jewish nation. The construct of a Hebrew nationality on the basis of an ancient Hebrew culture, a project in accord with contemporary nationalisms turning to a mythic past,42 does not, however, exhaust Canaanism’s potential. It may be considered as a mere detour
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on Canaanism’s way to the concept of a modern polity. James Diamond’s assessment is as follows: First, it becomes clear that what ‘Canaanism’ ultimately envisions has little, if anything, to do with the pagan past, polytheism, or archaism. When Ratosh and his associates finally spelled out their objectives, ancient Hebrew tribalism with all its values and culture turned out to be secondary, perhaps even windowdressing. . . . What is primary is very modern: the individual, his or her civil rights, a secular egalitarianism.43 Boaz Evron concurs: Here, hopefully, I have raised enough points to show that there is no possible chance of creating a lingual-cultural-national unity of the region that has been defined as the Land of Kedem. Yet the formation of a neutral political framework that dictates no national, cultural, or ethnical content, and is structured as a federation or a confederation, is a reasonable possibility. . . . The Hebrew nation toward which the Canaanite thinkers aspired was in fact, to a decisive extent, the nation that had been the aim of Herzl, Jabotinsky and Borochov, and to a certain extent of Ben-Gurion, too – an open, secular nation in which religion is separated from state, and which is capable of absorbing members of other faiths and nations.44 In pursuing this essential aim, Canaanism unfolds its more relevant impulse. Canaanism’s concept of the Jews as a faith-community, its negation of a Jewish nationality, militates against the Zionist vindication of a Jewish state. It strikes at the roots of Zionism by casting doubt on the Jewishness of the professedly Jewish nation. It argues that short of being a theocratic commonwealth, which identifies its citizens in terms of religion, the state of Israel cannot be a Jewish state or a ‘Jews’ state’, Herzl’s Judenstaat. Herzl’s catchy term is, in the Canaanite view, a misnomer as Herzl did not focus on a religious community but a group whose relation to religion had grown tenuous. With its secular bias, it assembled around the caput mortuum of an evaporated faith and religious practice, herded by anti-Semitic discrimination rather than by its own cohesion. Ratosh accordingly complains about Zionism’s vagueness: ‘Zionism is essentially an attempt to provide an undefined answer . . . to an undefined problem . . . of an undefined human grouping (all the Jews, according to the various conceptions of ‘‘Who is a Jew?’’ – or portions thereof?) in an undefined territory.’45 Zionism does not mean to rally the Jews as a religious community, nor does the state of Israel; the religious criterion, however, is not dispensed with, a circumstance which earns Zionism the Canaanite reproach of being disingenuous. It is accused of being inconsistent and half-hearted, unwilling to let go what it purports to overcome, professing secularity while harnessing religious support. The Canaanite reproach reverberates in Ilan Pappe´’s quip: ‘As is well known, the Zionist movement does not believe in the existence of God, but strongly holds to His having promised this land to the Jews.’46 The concept of the ‘secular Jew’ is tied to a religious identity after all, though this may be a lost identity, a reference to the ‘faith of the fathers’ rather than one’s own faith. The dismal
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alternative is the racial foundation of a Jewish identity as was luridly welcomed by Menachem Ussishkin, long-time president of the Jewish National Fund, in 1941: ‘There is something positive in their tragedy and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would simply have converted to Christianity.’47 Even the racial identification could not do without the religious criterion. The Nuremberg Laws, unaided by the later expertise of genetics, had to have recourse to the religious affiliation of the person or her/his parents and grandparents.48 Zionism is seen by the Canaanites as a substitute rather than a manifestation of Judaism. James Diamond discovers this notion in Ratosh’s Opening Discourse: The Zionists were Jews who went out to the culture of the Gentiles because of an inability to find satisfaction in Judaism, but not because of the ability or the desire to take leave of it. Or perhaps they did seek to leave it but couldn’t overcome the obstacles in doing so. So they sought to define Judaism for their purposes as a polity, as a nation among the nations in which they lived, in a world that is based on the principle of nationalism, as a . . . substitute . . . for the nationalism of the Gentiles which they found lacking in themselves; in other words [the Jewish Zionists were] bereft of any grounding in society, uprooted in a world of nations. Zionism from the outset came into being as a substitute for this need. It was created out of a vacuum, in the emptiness of the Jewish heart, in order to fill it with a substitute, in order to provide the possibility to continue to live as a Jew among the Gentiles.49 Diamond endorses Ratosh’s verdict: Zionism in its classical manifestation was a substitute for Judaism. This is common wisdom among historians and everyone familiar with the modern Jewish experience. The power of Ratosh’s thought is that it ceaselessly reminds us that Zionism, because it was at bottom something ersatz, rests on false premises. He refers to ‘the pressures of the hour that required the Jews of Europe to forge this secular substitute out of their religious past’.50 The immediate ‘pressures of the hour’ are those exerted by anti-Semitism. The fundamental reason for the Zionist substitution, however, is the decay of the religious constitution of Judaism. Diamond states that it was only when the religious basis for Jewish identity broke down in the face of the Emancipation at the end of the nineteenth century that the Jewish praxis with respect to Palestine began to change. In the face of the Emancipation there was available no corresponding secular collective framework. . . . And so Zionism developed.51 Radical Zionists were conscious of this condition and affirmed it: As Klatzkin (and in a different way, Ahime’ir) would later argue, the demise of religion in the face of modern secularism necessitated that the Jews, if they were
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to survive and cohere as a people, adopt a territorial existence; or, conversely, the initiation of a Jewish national effort rendered Jewish religion obsolete.52 From a different angle, the biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann concurs when he complains that it is ‘hard to reconcile ourselves to the idea that our nationalism derives from a faith that no longer exists in our hearts’.53 By substituting religious Judaism, Zionism shifts the religious identity of the Jews to an identification with the Zionist cause, the State of Israel replacing, as Diamond puts it, ‘Jewish religion as the linchpin of Jewish life and consciousness in the Diaspora’.54 A Jewish identity so derived partakes of the quality of Zionism as a substitute. It lacks authenticity. To the extent that Jewishness exhausts itself in a commitment to the Zionist project, ultimately to the state of Israel, this project loses its authorization as a Jewish mission. If the Judaism to which Zionism professes to be committed is, in turn, nothing but a commitment to Zionism, then this circularity collapses the relationship into a quid quo pro which deprives Zionism of any moral reference outside itself. Boaz Evron diagnoses in the 1980s, that that part of the Diaspora that has lost its religious framework . . . uses Israel as a means of venting its complexes by proxy. These Jews imagine themselves to be part of the Israeli people, while maintaining their own comfortable caste existence in the Diaspora. To that end they also pay Israel handsomely to enable them to maintain this imaginary, vicarious existence . . . the Jews of Eretz Israel serve in a vicarious capacity for Diaspora Jews.55 Evron denounces ‘the false identity a Diaspora Jew acquires by his illusory identification with Israel. But this potential Israeli identity is utterly imaginary; there is no such thing’.56 He concludes: Just as the assertion of Israel’s centrality to the Jewish experience distorts the spiritual and cultural identity of Diaspora Jews and serves them as a means of avoiding confrontation with their problem of identity, permitting them to have an illusory, infantile existence as vicarious Israelis, the Zionist motivation creates a barrier between Jewish Israelis and their country, undermines their natural patriotism, and establishes a sort of transformation mechanism that enables them to change their identity as members of the Israeli nation into a reserve form of existence, as members of the worldwide Jewish caste.57 This critical diagnosis is confirmed by the acceptance and approval of this very condition in a recent debate: ‘In a world where most Jews no longer believe in God, a sense of peoplehood and bonds with Israel serve as useful anchors.’58 Canaanism’s denial of the authenticity of Israel as a Jewish state is at variance with its campaign against the Jewishness of that state. The latter is made redundant by the former. Eventually the issue is not the abolition of the Jewish state, but the demonstration of the disingenuousness of its pretence to be a Jewish state. In this respect Canaanism accords with religious critics of the Zionist project, not only with the ultra-orthodox opponents of Zionism,59 but also with a broader spectrum of orthodox Judaism, which approves of, or at least condones, the existence of Israel
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but condemns the bestowal of religious value on the polity. For example, Yeshayahu Leibowitz argues: ‘He who empties the concept of the Jewish people of its religious content (like David Ben Gurion) and still describes it as Am Segulah [chosen people] turns this concept into an expression of racist chauvinism.’60 Eliezer Goldman, in the introduction to his edition of Leibowitz’s writing, sums up: Leibowitz strongly derides the idea of a secular Jewish identity. As a matter of empirical fact, the identity of the Jewish people over the ages has consisted in adherence to the religion of Halakhah. . . . To impute the value of halakhic religion to its function in providing for the national survival is sheer idolatry – worship of the nation. . . . To attribute holiness to a people because of a hereditary strain of which they are (absurdly) considered the carriers, to a state because it is the state of that people, or to a piece of land because it is their land, independently of any halakhic norms applying to it, is mere fetishism.61 True, Leibowitz, on the basis of Canaanism’s Zionist provenance, uses ‘Canaanism’ as the defamatory term for Zionism’s ulterior prioritizing of what he calls the ‘territorial administrative framework’: To consider the state as an entity in its own right, and its problems of survival and system of administrative and political relationships as intrinsically valuable, is of the essence of Canaanism. . . . I myself have no interest in this framework as such, and consider the idea that it possesses intrinsic value a clear-cut expression of chauvinism that is partly naı¨ ve, partly brutal, or to use a stronger term – an expression of fascist mentality.62 This polemical lumping together of Zionism and Canaanism blurs the fact that Leibowitz indeed joins in Canaanism’s criticism of Zionism’s harnessing Judaism for its political project. Their motivation is, of course, widely separate, Leibowitz focusing on religious revival, Canaanism affecting indifference to religion. Yet both are intent on guarding the distinction between the political and the religious spheres and preventing a metamorphosis of the religious community into a political, national entity. Jewish orthodoxy, though with differing conclusions, endorses Canaanism’s insistence on Judaism being defined by and as a religion. Yehezkel Kaufmann’s dictum, quoted by Evron,63 that ‘the cause of Jewish distinctiveness . . . is the Jewish religion’, is echoed by Evron’s statement that ‘Jews have only one incontrovertible feature in common: their religion’.64 Moving from the displacement of Judaism by Hebraism to the relegation of either from the civic sphere, Canaanism’s initial antireligious stance makes way for, at least, indifference and leaves space for religious life. Finally, it is possible to construe the ‘Canaanite’ program as not inherently antireligious. . . . Most ironically, in its negation of Jewish nationhood, ‘Canaanism’ actually reaffirms Jewish religion. . . . As opposed to Zionism, ‘Canaanism’ sees Diaspora Jewish life, anchored in the self-sufficiency of the religious tradition and the halakhic system, as viable and even eternal, its survival beyond question.65
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Canaanism described a trajectory from the extremist wing of Revisionist Zionism through the cultural totalitarianism of a Hebrew nation to, in its 1951 platform, the concept of a modern polity, which relegates cultural, particularly religious, identities to a space separate from the political sphere and so defuses them, opening the prospect of a consociation of differing cultural, religious and ethnic groups and individuals. The phantom of a re-emerging Hebrew nation gives way to the prospect of the modern polity which transcends the cultural, religious and ethnic allegiances of its citizens. This outcome constitutes a precedent for the pursuit of a ‘greater Israel’ arriving at the point where it breaks with its Zionist matrix and abandons, even rejects, the aim of a Jewish state and envisages a binational or transnational polity rather than retrenching on its territorial claim and withdrawing to the bastion of a ‘little Israel’. The impetus of Jabotinsky’s revisionism is kept up, though scaled down from an erstwhile protest against the first partition of Palestine, the setting up of an Emirate of Transjordan in 1922/23, to a resistance against a second partition, the establishing of a Palestinian state as designated by the UN resolution of 1947. This impetus propels Jabotinsky’s heirs to a situation where they have to consider, though with reluctance and under protest, razing the ‘Iron Wall’. Recent developments on the political right in Israel, as observed by Noam Sheizaf in a survey which assembles statements by leading figures in Likud and among the settlers,66 arrive at a point equivalent to Canaanism’s erstwhile point of departure: the situation in which the pursuit of a greater Israel urges the inclusion of the Palestinians at the risk of endangering or abandoning the Jewishness of the state. The proposition of an annexation of the West Bank and of granting Israeli citizenship and equal rights to its Palestinian population may be hedged by the intention of preserving Jewish dominance, yet the risk taken is clearly seen: ‘The worst solution is apparently the right one: a binational state, full annexation, full citizenship.’67 Sheizaf points out the distance which severs these initiatives from an endorsement of a non-Jewish state, here seen as a proposition of a ‘binational left’ rather than a Canaanite one: They talk about a process that will take between a decade and a generation to complete, at the end of which the Palestinians will enjoy full personal rights, but in a country whose symbols and spirit will remain Jewish. It is at this point that the one-state right wing diverges from the binational left. The right is not talking about a neutral ‘state of all its citizens’ with no identity, nor about ‘Israstine’ with a flag showing a crescent and a Shield of David. As envisaged by the right wing, one state still means a sovereign Jewish state, but in a more complex reality, and inspired by the vision of a democratic Jewish state without an occupation and without apartheid, without fences and separations. Still, we can see the similarity with the situation in which Canaanism originated. Jabotinsky is invoked by Moshe Arens, one-time member of Betar, the Revisionist youth organization. When confronted with the accusation of becoming a postZionist, he replied: That’s a lot of nonsense. Was Jabotinsky a post-Zionist? He talked about a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, but for him a majority meant even
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51 percent, too. In his last book, he suggested that the president might be a Jew and the vice president an Arab, and also the opposite. Jabotinsky was no postZionist.68 The propinquity of Canaanism is recognized, if only by way of distancing, by Emily Amrousi, former spokesperson of the Yesha Council of settlements: ‘We are not like the Canaanite movement: we are not forgoing the State of Israel and the flag of Israel.’ The persistence of Canaanite tendencies, professed or denied, is not restricted to the political right. Canaanism released its impulse in diverse political camps. It can be registered, of course, in one-time members of the movement. Ron Kuzar presents Uzi Ornan as a representative of the development which took Canaanism to a position advocating liberal democracy.69 As a founding member in 1950 of the ‘League against Religious Coercion’, which pursued the separation of religion from the state, Ornan kept up a Canaanite endeavour to create a non-Jewish state, yet broadened his circle of political allegiance. In 1994 Ornan said in an interview: ‘Today I would replace ‘‘Canaanite’’ by ‘‘open Israeli’’.’70 Ornan’s current activity in the ‘I am Israeli’ movement, which campaigns for the recognition of an Israeli nationality in order to eliminate the discrimination between Jewish and Arab citizens, indicates the persistence of a Canaanite motivation. Uri Avneri is another prominent descendant of the Canaanite movement, according to Shavit ‘the first to attempt to translate the historical platform of Horon and Ratosh into political concepts, and by so doing to give it a more concrete embodiment, closer to the mood and concepts of Jewish youth in Palestine’.71 Diamond names Avneri as the key figure in the transformation of Canaanism beyond its pan-Hebraic imperialism.72 Ron Kuzar refers to Avneri’s political group and party, Ha’olam Haze, as ‘a partial offshoot of the Canaanite movement’ and states that the link between Ha’olam Haze and other post-1967 radical peace movements and the Canaanites ‘is a widely acknowledged fact and the personal presence of ex-Canaanites in them cannot be overlooked’.73 Avneri’s connection with Canaanism has been qualified by distance and dissent right from the start. Canaanism’s, particularly Horon’s, impact on him did not prompt him to join Ratosh’s movement, but to organize, in 1946, a rival group, significantly named in two languages, ‘Young Eretz-Israel’ in Hebrew and ‘Young Palestine’ in Arabic, also known by the name of its journal, Bama’avak (‘In the Struggle’).74 In The War of the Seventh Day Avneri gives his opinion about Ratosh’s circle: In the whole group there was not one who had a serious grasp of politics, who saw in politics his way of life, who had any expertise in the history of revolutionary movements or in the art of political action. I think that the surplus of poets and the lack of politicians determined to a great extent the path of the Canaanite group, with its romantic and dogmatic excesses and its political, ideological, and practical failures. . . . The main feature of the Hebrew idea was, in our view, the fact that it was at once both national and regional. Ratosh grasped the national aspect and exaggerated it in a dangerous way. We placed the emphasis on the regional aspect.75
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Avneri differed from Ratosh in rejecting the domineering attitude of Hebraism and recognizing an Arab cultural autonomy which would have to be accommodated in a comprehensive political arrangement. To him the ‘idea of foisting a Hebrew identity and culture upon the Arabs and other non-Jews seemed ridiculous’.76 The term ‘Hebrew’ was accordingly replaced by ‘Semitic’, the term being chosen as one with which ‘Hebrews and Arabs can identify’: ‘Our past is Semitic, our languages are Semitic, and our religions are Semitic.’77 The ‘Semitic region’ (Merkav Hashemi) was considered the territory on which a ‘Semitic alliance’ was to take political shape.78 In Zwei Vo¨lker, zwei Staaten, a German publication of 1995, Avneri recalls his early project of a Hebrew nation: ‘This new Hebrew nation was meant to belong with the Middle East and to form an alliance with the Arabs in a new world in the area, against the imperialists, the British and the French who then dominated the Middle East. We felt that we were kin to the Arabs.’79 After 1956 Avneri moved away from the idea of a direct approach to a comprehensive state in Palestine. A separate Arab state appeared to be imperative in order to put the non-Israeli Arab population and their interests on the map as a first step towards union in mutual recognition. Demanding a single state would too easily be consonant with the vindication of Jewish dominance in a greater Israel. Avneri conceived of the partitioning of Palestine at first in his version of a ‘Jordanian option’, a plan for the ‘unification of the Jordan’ (Ittihad al-Urdun), implying the dismantling of the Hashemite Kingdom and the inclusion of Transjordan in the Arab part of Palestine.80 In 1958 Avneri, with left-leaning ex-members of the Lehi, Natan Yellin-Mor, Boaz Evron, and Amos Kenan, organized the ‘Centre for Semitic Action’ (Mercaz Hape’ulah Hashemit), which advanced a 126-point ‘Hebrew Manifesto’ (Haminshar ha’ivri), to Diamond ‘a discernible adaptation of ‘Canaanite’ thought in the direction of a post-Zionist ideology’.81 This manifesto states that the ‘Hebrew nation, native of Palestine, is a new and distinct national unit’ but, revising the Canaanite severance from Judaism, that the ‘Hebrews, whose origins are in the Jewish Diaspora, are linked to it by spiritual, emotional and personal connections and consider it the source for their growth’. Canaanism’s territorial outlook is preserved: ‘Israel (the State) is an inseparable part of Eretz Israel (the land). . . . the historical concept of Zionism is invalid when it nurtures Jewish isolationism, uproots ancient Hebrew culture from its Semitic native soil.’ Section 61 of the manifesto states that ‘a new Hebrew culture must rise from the new identity of the nation and be nurtured from the ancient culture of ‘‘Ever’’ and the other Semitic cultures with which it has links of language and homeland’.82 In this document Avneri takes the position he has held ever since, demanding the partition of Palestine into two sovereign states to be joined in a two-state federation in the context of a great Semitic union of all the states in the Middle East. After the 1967 war, in Israel without Zionists, he reformulates his proposition of a federation between Israel and a new Arab–Palestinian republic as well as a ‘Semitic Union’, a ‘great confederacy of all the states in the region’. While apparently having defected from the Canaanite idea of one state for the emerging nation to the banner of ‘two states for two peoples’, Avneri remains faithful to the Canaanite principle of regional integration, federation and union. In Ein Leben fu¨r den Frieden,83 he recalls that the ‘Centre for Semitic Action’ believed that a Palestinian state would be ideal for the development of Israel in
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gaining better contact with and integration into the Arab world: ‘Integration into the Semitic region has been my watchword for fifty years and has almost become my nickname.’84 In an article of 1999, Avneri, while rejecting the one-state solution, emphasizes that the ‘guiding vision is not ‘‘separation’’ but partnership, with each nation expressing its identity in a national home of its own’. I am convinced that after living together, side by side, with Jerusalem as their common capital, the State of Israel and the State of Palestine will grow slowly together, under the pressure of geography and economics, and form a kind of federation within a general regional organization – as I wrote fifty-one years ago – a kind of Semitic Union along the lines of the present European Union. . . . Thus the positive parts of the ‘binational solution’ will become reality in a natural process.85 In an internet version of this same article, entitled ‘The Bi-national State: The Wolf shall Dwell with the Lamb’ (July 2003), he states: In the early 50s, when we raised the two-state idea again after the 1948 War, we did not speak of ‘separation’. Today, too, we reject this term absolutely. We speak of two states with an open border between them, with free movement of people and goods (subject, of course, to mutual agreements). I am convinced that, in the light of the geographical and political facts, a natural process will lead to an organic connection, perhaps a federation, and later, by common consent, to a regional community like the European Union. In the end, we shall reach the objective: to live together in peace, side by side. Perhaps a later generation will one day decide to live in one joint state. But today the propaganda for this utopia diverts attention from the practical, immediate objective, at a time when the whole world has accepted the idea of ‘two states for two peoples’. This remote utopia blocks the way to a solution that is achievable in the near future and sorely necessary, because in the meantime ‘facts on the ground’ are being created.86 Thus, a two-state arrangement is for Avneri not a solution, but a strategic step towards community and union as a long-term objective. This strategy puts him in opposition to those who advocate the less oblique approach to the same objective. It all but obliterates the basic agreement underneath the controversy. A discussion in 2007 between Uri Avneri and Ilan Pappe´ demonstrates the antagonism of the two camps, but also gives a glimpse of their eventual convergence, when Avneri winds up the dispute: I said that there can be no compromise between our positions. But let’s offer you a compromise anyway: work with us for the creation of the two states. After the two states will be there, after these dangers would be averted, go on struggling to get them united into a single state. I say this seriously. Struggle for it that the two states will become one, voluntarily.87 Avneri’s example demonstrates that the Canaanite impulse is not fixated on the formal distinction between a one-state and a two-state solution. The Canaanite
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legacy of striving for a political arrangement that includes or associates all the inhabitants of the region can be found in either approach. This shifts the controversy from the two alternative solutions to the opposition between the acceptance of a ‘binational condition’ and the insistence on separation, be it a separation of two states or a separation effected by domination in one state. Meron Benvenisti delineates the complex: This de facto binational condition has endured in its present form for over twenty years. It became quasi-permanent in the wake of the signing of the peace agreement with Jordan (in 1994), which completed the final demarcation of the external perimeter of Eretz Israel/ Palestine . . . In the prevailing circumstances, what does it matter whether one supports ‘two states for two peoples’ or a federal state, power sharing in the context of a ‘consociational democracy,’ cantonization, or other models . . . The bottom line is this: The coexistence of the two national communities is a destiny that cannot be avoided. This coexistence must be based upon communal equality and ethical principles, human dignity, and freedom; otherwise, it will not endure, but will again descend into violence. The nature of the constitutional framework for this coexistence is secondary.88 The binational condition may allow, even demand, partition as a step towards a union of equals. Avi Shlaim, by diagnosing a ‘civil war in Palestine’, implies that the current situation is a one-state situation, which therefore asks for the alternative.89 Tendentially, however, the binational condition asks for one state, though this state need not be, or, as Benvenisti stipulates, cannot be a one person, one vote democracy: The unitary binational model is wholly inappropriate for Israel/ Palestine . . . There are, of course, other, more appealing binational models, whose implementation might be more efficient and practical than that of the partition option. Alternatively, preservation of the binational territory’s integrity might prove to be simpler and less costly than ‘partition’.90 In a Haaretz article in 2003 he sees no chance for ‘a classic liberal regime of individual rights in a unitary, centralized state’ and proposes the alternative of a system that recognizes collective ethnic-national rights and maintains power sharing on the national-central level, with defined political rights for the minority and sometimes territorial-cantonal divisions. That model, called ‘consociational democracy’, has not succeeded in many places, but lately has been applied successfully to reach agreements in ancient ethnic-national conflicts such as Bosnia, through the Dayton agreement, and Northern Ireland, with the Good Friday agreement. That should be food for thought for the experts who contemptuously wave off the binational option.91 Benvenisti views the prospect of a binational state as ‘a lamentable consequence of the protracted conflict’:
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My position has always been that binationalism is an unintended and lamentable consequence. My preference, as a Zionist, is for a Jewish nation state, but I fear that the historical process that began in the aftermath of the 1967 war has brought about the gradual abrogation of this option. Hence, binationalism is not a political or ideological program so much as a de facto reality masquerading as a temporary state of affairs. It is a description of the current condition, not a prescription.92 Benvenisti arrives at this position not, as Evron or Avneri, from a Canaanite or a Revisionist background. He is rooted in a staunch Labor-Zionist upbringing. We had been brought up to hate and despise the revisionist movement from which both Herut and ITzL (the National Military Organization, or Irgun) had sprung, and we regarded Begin and other followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky as ‘enemies of the working class’ and political adventurists tainted with fascism.93 Yet a sense of ‘nativeness’ instilled in pre-state years by his father, who was engaged in ‘Knowing the Land’ activities and co-founded, in 1927, the ‘Eretz Israel Ramblers’ Society’ established a subliminal correspondence with Canaanism. Benvenisti hints at this correspondence and mentions Tschernichovsky, the poet whom Jonathan Ratosh followed in his poetry.94 My father aspired to produce a generation of ‘natives’ and saw the quintessence of their quest for ‘nativeness’ in these lines by the celebrated poet Sa’ul Tschernichovsky: ‘Man is but a small piece of land. Man is but an image of his homeland’s landscape.’ . . . Was my understanding of reality from a ‘native’ point of view the outcome of the Zionist education I had received, combined with the emotional affinity passed down to me, or had my disgust at witnessing the descent of both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms into the depths of extremism, xenophobia, violence, and killing awakened in me my ‘native’ identity – one purporting to cast off nationalism and to pursue fellowship among Arab and Jewish ‘natives’ – or was it all just a question of the chicken or the egg? One way or another, I found myself inclined toward defining my worldview as ‘native,’ or ‘neo-Canaanite.’ It is an attempt to transcend nationalism and construct an identity based on a ‘native’ affinity to the land.95 The closing passage of the ‘Epilogue’ to Son of the Cypresses corresponds with that of a previous interview.96 Significantly, the two texts interchange the words ‘self’ and ‘other’ in their final sentences: ‘I am rooted here like these cypresses. Like these orchards. What the land brings forth’ (Son of the Cypresses) reads in the interview: ‘the Other is . . . part of this place. Like these cypresses. Like these bustanim, these fruit gardens. What the land brings forth.’ In the interview Benvenisti articulates his neo-Canaanite orientation explicitly: This is where I am different from my friends in the left: because I am truly a native son of immigrants, who is drawn to the Arab culture and the Arabic language because it is here. It is the land. And I really am a neo-Canaanite.
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I love everything that springs from this soil. Whereas the right, certainly, but the left, too, hates Arabs. The Arabs bother them – they complicate things. The subject generates moral questions and that generates cultural unease. . . . So today I am sad and pessimistic. I live with a deep sense of breakdown. It is not easy for me to part with my father’s dream of a Jewish nation-state. . . . Because I know that there will not be a Jewish nation-state here and that there will not be two states for two nations here, I seize on this faint hope that maybe, after all, something shared will evolve here. Something neo-Canaanite. That maybe, despite everything, we will learn to live together. Maybe we will come to understand that the Other is not demonic, that he, too, is part of this place. Like these cypresses. Like these bustanim, these fruit gardens. What the land brings forth. Notes 1. To name just a few titles: T. Judt, ‘Israel: The Alternative’, The New York Review of Books, Vol.50, 23 Oct. 2003, pp.8–10; D. Gavron, The Other Side of Despair. Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2004); M.B. Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land of Canaan. Human Rights and the Israeli- Palestinian Struggle (London: Pluto, 2004); V. Tilley, The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli–Palestinian Deadlock (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); A. Abunimah, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli–Palestinian Impasse (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); G. Karmi, Married to Another Man. Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2007); J. Kovel, Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2007); Y. Shenhav, In the Trap of the Green Line: A Jewish Political Essay (Tel Aviv: Hotsa’at ‘Am ‘Oved, 2010 [Hebrew]). 2. M. Benvenisti, ‘The Binationalism Vogue’, Haaretz, 30 April 2009. 3. M. Buber, J.L. Magnes and E. Simon (eds.), Towards Union in Palestine. Essays on Zionism and Jewish-Arab Cooperation (Jerusalem: IHUD [Union] Association, 1947, repr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1972); J.L. Magnes, M. Reiner, L. Samuel, E. Simon and M. Smilansky, Palestine – Divided or United? The Case for a Bi-National Palestine before the United Nations (Jerusalem: IHUD [Union] Association, 1947; repr. Westport, CT: Greenwood Pr., 1983). 4. Information on Ratosh’s career is available in Y. Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation: a Study in Israeli Heresy and Fantasy (London: Frank Cass, 1987), revised translation of Me’Ivri ‘ad Kena’ani [From Hebrew to Canaanite] (Jerusalem: Domino, 1984), and in J.S. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land? The ‘Canaanite’ Critique of Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), chapter 3, ‘Yonatan Ratosh. The Transformation of Uriel Halpern’ (pp.24–48). The present outline is indebted to these studies. 5. According to Ron Kuzar (Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study [Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001], p.199) Uri’el Heilperin changed his name into Halperin, also spelt Halprin. His brother Gamli’el used the name’s last syllable as his name, Svi Rin. The youngest brother Uzi’el changed his name into Uzi Ornan, spelling the first name ‘Uzzi’. 6. Abba Ahimeir (Abba Shaul Geisenovich, 1898–1962) studied philosophy in Vienna and Lie`ge, wrote his doctoral thesis about Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes. He immigrated into Palestine in 1924. In 1930 he founded the Revisionist Maximalist faction within the Zionist Revisionist movement. 7. In 1940 Stern seceded from the Irgun and founded his Irgun Tsva’i Le’umi B’Yisrael (National Military Organization in Israel), reorganized after his death as Lohamei Herut Yisra’el (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), or Lehi. 8. Adolphe (Adya) Gourevitch, born in Kiev in 1907, died in Tel Aviv in 1975. 9. Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism, chapter 4, section 4.1 (pp.233–56), ‘Hebrew in the Land of Kedem: The Case of Ugaritic’, deals in detail with the Canaanite reception of the archaeological finds at Ras Schamra. A popularizing report on the Ras Schamra finds, untouched by Canaanism, is J. Gray, The Canaanites (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964).
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10. S. Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, trans. by Yael Lotan (London: Verso, 2009), pp.185–6. Sand refers to D. Ben-Gurjon and I. Ben Tzvi, Eretz-Ji’sroel in fergangenheit un gegenwart: geografie, gesichte, rechtliche ferheltnise, befelkerung, landwirtsaft, handel un industrie (Niu-Jork: Poiale Tzien Palestina Komitet, 5668 (1907/08), published 1918). 11. Y. Ratosh, in 1967 umah hal’ah? shalom ‘ivri [1967 and What Next? A Hebrew Peace] (Tel Aviv: Hadar, 1967), makes a point of talking about an ‘Arabicized (arva’i ) world’ and not an ‘Arab (arvi) world’ in the area (Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism, pp.219–20). 12. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, pp.3, 37. 13. Diamond’s translation; Y. Shavit (The New Hebrew Nation) and B. Evron (Jewish State or Israeli Nation? [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995]; English version of Haheshbon Haleumi [Tel Aviv: DVIR Publishing House, 1988]) translate as ‘Committee for the Consolidation of Hebrew Youth’. 14. Both brothers were temporarily members of the revisionist military underground. Both eventually became linguists, Rin as a professor of Semitic languages at the University of Pennsylvania, Ornan as professor of Hebrew at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism, pp.199–201; Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.40). 15. Quoted at length in Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation, pp.59–60; excerpt in Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, pp.40–41. 16. The context of a ‘Jewish Counter History’ is established by D. Krochmalnik, ‘Neue Tafeln. Nietzsche und die ju¨dische Counter-History’, in W. Stegmaier and D. Krochmalnik (eds.), Ju¨discher Nietzscheanismus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), pp.53–81. Also: D. Ohana, ‘Zarathustra in Jerusalem: Nietzsche and the ‘‘New Hebrews’’’, Israel Affairs, Vol.1 (1995), special issue: R. Wistrich and D. Ohana (eds.), ‘The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory and Trauma’, pp.38–60. 17. A concise presentation of the Canaanite persuasion is given in U. Ornan’s ‘The Birth of Judaism and the Composition of the Bible’, Alef, Vol.19 (1953), pp.8–9, translated from the Hebrew and reprinted in Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism, pp.202–7. See also the ‘Prologue’ in Evron, Jewish State. Diamond sums up: ‘The Jewish people, to the extent that there is such an entity, is not a nation but, according to ‘Canaanite’ ideology, a faith community, a religio-ethnic group, international and extraterritorial in nature’ (Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.2). 18. Evron, Jewish State, p.207. 19. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.54. 20. Ibid., pp.55–6. 21. Ibid., p.3. 22. ‘Opening Discourse’, in Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.61. Diamond points out that in Alef, Vol.4 (1950) this stance was softened: ‘There it is stated that in an immigrant society that is still in formation one can ‘‘consciously choose’’ to understand himself as part of a new nation and not as a member of a faith-community. . . . This principle is what allowed Ratosh, Amir, and others who were born in Europe to call themselves ‘‘Hebrews’’’ (Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.154, n.34). – Ratosh, by the way, successfully entreated the Ministry of the Interior to allow his nationality to be listed on his identity card as ‘Hebrew’ and not as ‘Jewish’. 23. ‘Opening Discourse’, in Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation, p.1. 24. Twenty-three issues between 1948 and 1953. From 1949 on Aharon Amir is the editor. Irregular issues between 1967 and 1972. 25. ‘Platform of the Center for Young Hebrews’, Alef, Vol.11 (Nov. 1951), repr. in Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, pp.65–7. 26. Y. Ratosh, 1967 umah hal’ah? shalom ‘ivri and Minitashon lemapolet: Me’asef Alef [From Victory to Collapse: An Alef Anthology] (Tel Aviv: Hadar, 1976). 27. ‘ . . . even if we accept the claims about the existence of an ancient Hebrew civilization that extended throughout the ‘‘Land of Kedem,’’ this civilization has come down to us primarily via Judaism, which had continued to create in the Hebrew language (in addition to secondary languages like Aramaic, Arabic, and Yiddish) for centuries after the collapse of the ancient Hebrew civilization’ (Evron, Jewish State, p.209). 28. Cf. Evron, Jewish State, p.215 about enforcing the Hebrew language and Hebrew culture as the common language and culture. 29. Ibid., p.216. 30. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.96, with reference to R.J. Isaac, Israel Divided. Ideological Politics in the Jewish State (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp.51–4.
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31. H. Hever, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon. Nation Building and Minority Discourse (New York: New York University Press, 2002), chapter 4, ‘Territoriality and Otherness in Hebrew Fiction of the War of Independence’ (pp.101–17, at p.108). 32. Evron, Jewish State, p.221. 33. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.72. 34. Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation, p.115. 35. Ornan in 1976, quoted in Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism, p.212. 36. Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism, p.212. 37. The father, Yekhiel Heilperin, was a Hebrew educator, opened the first Hebrew kindergarten in Warsaw in 1909, established a Hebrew seminary for kindergarten teachers in Odessa and, after 1920, served as a supervisor of the Hebrew kindergartens on behalf of the Zionist Executive in Palestine. He and his wife Pnina, a Hebrew educator as well, used Hebrew as their family language and brought their children up as Hebrew speakers (Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism, p.200; cf. Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation, p.30). 38. Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism, chapter 2, ‘Ben Yehuda: A Biography’, outlines Ben Yehuda’s career. He also informs about the debates among linguists contesting the notion of a straight revival continuing Jewish practice and asserting the need for a reconstruction of the ancient Hebrew language or, alternatively, the formation of an autonomous new language. 39. Diamond comments: ‘unlike other new nations, the new Hebrew nation faces a major difficulty: the primary stock from which it is being formed is not a heterogeneous collection of immigrants from various lands and places, as in America, but a homogeneous group of members of one faithcommunity, that is – Jews. Instead of assimilating into the new society to which they have come, they persist in perpetuating the values and outlook of the dispersion and threaten to turn Palestine into simply another locus of the Jewish Diaspora. This is really the nub of Ratosh’s quarrel with Zionism: in compromising with the spirit and the institutions of Judaism, it becomes the major impediment to the formation of the incipient Hebrew nation’ (Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.62). 40. D. Laor, ‘American Literature and Israeli Culture: The Case of the Canaanites’, Israel Studies, Vol.5 (2000), pp.287–300; at p.289. 41. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.93. 42. Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation, devotes chapter IV, ‘The Phoenixes of the Ancient East’, to this context. He mentions Ratosh’s early remark in ‘An Introduction to Hebrew History’ (Haboker, 1938): ‘There is a reason for Mussolini’s unceasing beating of the Roman drum. It is not for nothing that the Communists wish to start Orders of Adam and that Hitler tries to find a bridge to Wotan, the god of the Teutons. And it is not without purpose that the Frenchman never stops glorifying the name of the primeval Gallic being and that the symbol of the brave cock of the fighters of Gaul is the beloved symbol of democratic France even today; it is not without reason that the Egypt which has been emerging in the past few generations has paid close attention to the tradition of the Pharaos or that Mustafa Kemal, the father of the Turks, has focused on the glory of the Hittites’ (Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation, pp.37–8). 43. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.67. In the opening section of his book (p.5), Diamond writes: ‘I do not believe that ‘‘Canaanism’’ stands or falls on the power, the accuracy, or the credibility of the mythological substructure on which it rests or of its specific historiography. It is not clear to me that these were anything other than intellectual window-dressing. . . . what is left is a coherent and substantial ideology of secular nativism.’ 44. Evron, Jewish State, pp.220–21. 45. In an interview with Ehud Ben Ezer, reported in Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.23. 46. ‘Two States or One State’, A debate between former Knesset Member Uri Avnery and Dr. Ilan Pappe´’ (Gush Shalom Forum, Tel Aviv, 8 May 2007). 47. T. Segev, The Seventh Million. The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), pp.50–51. Cf. H. Eshkoli-Wagman, ‘Yishuv Zionism: Its Attitude to Nazism and the Third Reich Reconsidered’, Modern Judaism, Vol.19 (1999), pp.21–40; at p.34. 48. Shlomo Sand gives a mildly satirical survey of the latter-day development of ‘Jewish Genetics’ under the heading ‘The Scientific Puppet and the Racist Hunchback’ (The Invention of the Jewish People) pp.272–80. 49. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, pp.72–3.
Canaanism 50. 51. 52. 53.
54. 55. 56. 57. 58.
59.
60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.
67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.
76. 77.
78. 79.
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Ibid., p.73. Ibid., p.11. Ibid., p.60. Quoted in Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.23 from R.J. Isaac, Party and Politics in Israel: Three Visions of a Jewish State (New York and London: Longmans, 1981), p.62. Kaufmann’s concept of a Jewish nationality is outlined in J.(Y.) Turner, ‘The Notion of Jewish Ethnicity in Yehezkel Kaufmann’s ‘‘Golah Venekhar’’’, Modern Judaism, Vol.28 (2008), pp.257–82. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land? p.72. Evron, Jewish State, pp.111–12. Ibid., p.131. Ibid., pp.182–3. G. Troy in ‘The End of the Diaspora and the Rise of a Global Jewish Community, A Debate between Professor David Scheer and Professor Gil Troy’, Jewish Quarterly, Vol.22 (2009), pp.56–61; at p.58. ‘In his insistence on separating the secular nature of the Hebrew state from the religion of the Jewish Diaspora , Ratosh’s closest allies are the Neturei Karta, the group of Hasidim who oppose a premessianic Jewish state and have served for decades on the Palestine National Council.’ (E. Rabin, ‘‘‘Hebrew’’ Culture: The Shared Foundations of Ratosh’s Ideology and Poetry’, Modern Judaism, Vol.19 (1999), pp.119–32; at p.121). Y. Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. by Eliezer Goldman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p.86. Ibid., p.XXI. Ibid., pp.193–4. Ibid., p.53. Ibid., p.62. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, pp.68 and 99. N. Sheizaf (‘Endgame’, Haaretz, 15 July, 2010), www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/endgame1.302128, quoting Moshe Arens, Reuben Rivlin, Uri Elitzur, Tzipi Hotovely, Emily Amrousi. In the same Friday supplement, Sheizaf presents the Palestinian point of view: ‘Saeb Erekat: Nearing the Moment of Truth’. Elitzur quoted by Sheizaf, ‘Endgame’. Ibid. Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism, chapter 4, 3.2: ‘Ornan’s Later Political Discourse’. Ibid., p.225. Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation, p.135. Part III of the book bears the heading ‘The Descendants of the Canaanites’. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, pp.93–4. Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism, p.283. Ratosh in Alef, Sept. 1951: ‘Many have asked us if Uri Avneri is one of us . . . Uri Avneri was never one of us and never participated in our activities’ (Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation, p.140). Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, pp.43, 94. Diamond translates from Avneri, Milhemet hayom hashevi’i [The War of the Seventh Day] (Jerusalem: Daf Hadash, 1969), the Hebrew version of Israel Without Zionists: A Plea for Peace in the Middle East (New York and London: Macmillan, 1968). The chapter on the Canaanite movement does not appear in the English version. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.94. ‘Unsere Vergangenheit ist semitisch, unsere Sprachen sind semitisch, und unsere Religionen sind semitisch. – Dann kam der Krieg, der alles total vera¨nderte.’ (U. Avneri, Zwei Vo¨lker, zwei Staaten. Gespra¨che u¨ber Israel und Pala¨stina [Heidelberg: Palmyra, 1995], p.109). In Israel without Zionists (1968) Avneri emphasizes that he uses the term without a racial meaning but as denoting a historical heritage common to all peoples speaking languages of the Semitic family, even extending it to a ‘Semitic family of culture’ in which he includes the Turks, the Kurds and the Persians, who are descended from different races and speak non-Semitic languages, but whose history is bound up with the culture of the Semitic world and the great religions of the Semites. Cf. Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation’s section ‘From ‘‘Hebrew World’’ to ‘‘Semitic Region’’’ (pp.140–43). ‘Diese neue hebra¨ische Nation sollte zum Nahen Osten geho¨ren und sich mit den Arabern zusammen zu einer neuen Welt in diesem Raum verbu¨nden, gegen die Imperialisten, Engla¨nder und Franzosen,
294
80. 81. 82. 83. 84.
85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.
K. Hofmann
die damals den Nahen Osten beherrschten; wir fu¨hlten uns den Arabern verwandt’ (Zwei Vo˜lker, zwei Staaten, p. 108). Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation, p.145. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land?, p.95. Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation gives an excerpt from the manifesto in note 9, p.185. U. Avneri, Ein Leben fu¨r den Frieden. Klartexte u¨ber Israel und Pala¨stina (Heidelberg: Palmyra, 2003). ‘Ein idealer Weg fu¨r die Entwicklung Israels wa¨re, u¨ber einen Pala¨stinastaat einen besseren Kontakt zur arabischen Welt zu bekommen und uns damit zu integrieren. Integration in der semitischen Region war 50 Jahre lang meine Parole; sie ist beinahe ein Spitzname von mir geworden’ (Avneri, Zwei Vo¨lker, pp.25–6). ‘Denn die geographischen Bedingungen sind ja so, daß der Pala¨stinastaat – das war unser alter Traum – offene Grenzen nach beiden Seiten hat, nach Israel und nach Jordanien, und daß er fu¨r Israel das Durchgangsland zur ganzen arabischen Welt wird. Das ist die geographisch gegebene Funktion und steht auch im Einklang mit der Geschichte unseres Landes’ (ibid., p.87). U. Avneri, ‘A Binational State? God Forbid! Uri Avnery Responds to Azmi Bishara’, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol.28 (1999), pp.55–60; at pp.59–60. http://www.zionism-israel.com/avnery_binational.htm (accessed 8 Jan. 2011). ‘Two States or One State’. M. Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses (2007), pp.211, 226–7. Reprinted in ‘United We Stand’, Haaretz Friday Supplement, 2 Jan. 2010. A. Shlaim, Israel and Palestine. Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (London: Verso, 2009); chapter 2, ‘The Civil War in Palestine’. Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses, p.214. M. Benvenisti, ‘Which Kind of Binational State?’, Haaretz, 20 Nov. 2000. Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses, p.209. Ibid., 68. See E. Rabin, ‘‘‘Hebrew’’ Culture: The Shared Foundations of Ratosh’s Ideology and Poetry’, Modern Judaism, Vol.19 (1999), pp.119–32. Benvenisti, Son of the Cypresses, pp.33, 51. A. Shavit, ‘Cry, the Beloved Two-State Solution’, Haaretz Magazine, 8 Aug. 2003.
