Bookshelf: How Zionism devies traditional Jewish philosophy

Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss - Last year one of the most important books on Zionism, ever, was published in English by Pluto: What Is Modern Israel? by Yakov Rabkin, a professor of history at the University of Montreal. The central theme of the book is how Zionists have exploited Judaism and western traditions to offer Israel as a liberal democracy when it is actually a nationalist colonialists project hanging on by its paranoid fingernails.

Rabkin has expertise. He is a religious academic, and it is his Judaism that has brought him to embrace universalist cosmopolitanism when it comes to interpreting history in our century. Given his background, he has been able to defy what he calls the “climate of intellectual terror that surrounds the Question of Israel.”

In reading his book, it struck me that the greatest service I could provide to a reader is to roll out Rabkin’s deadly insights about the nature of the “Jewish state,” and the essential antagonism of Judaism and Zionism. What follows is a long sequence of Rabkin’s observations and findings, all of which aim to end that climate of terror and allow westerners to speak freely about the Zionist era.

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akov Rabkin’s devastating critique of Zionism: it is opposed to Jewish tradition and liberalism

US Politics

Philip Weiss on June 27, 2017 47 Comments

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Yakov Rabkin, at the Cork conference on international law and the state of Israel, April 2017 Photograph by Tom Suarez

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Last year one of the most important books on Zionism, ever, was published in English by Pluto: What Is Modern Israel? by Yakov Rabkin, a professor of history at the University of Montreal. The central theme of the book is how Zionists have exploited Judaism and western traditions to offer Israel as a liberal democracy when it is actually a nationalist colonialists project hanging on by its paranoid fingernails.

Rabkin has expertise. He is a religious academic, and it is his Judaism that has brought him to embrace universalist cosmopolitanism when it comes to interpreting history in our century. Given his background, he has been able to defy what he calls the “climate of intellectual terror that surrounds the Question of Israel.”

In reading his book, it struck me that the greatest service I could provide to a reader is to roll out Rabkin’s deadly insights about the nature of the “Jewish state,” and the essential antagonism of Judaism and Zionism. What follows is a long sequence of Rabkin’s observations and findings, all of which aim to end that climate of terror and allow westerners to speak freely about the Zionist era. Let’s go.

Zionism has four essential goals, Rakin says. 1, “to transform the transnational Jewish identity centered on the Torah into a national identity like that of other European nations.” 2, “To develop a new vernacular language.” 3, “To displace the Jews from their countries of origin to Palestine. 4, “To establish political and economic control over Palestine.”

Thus, Zionism is a case of “imposed modernization typical of western colonialism,” a policy rejected by both Arab and traditional Jewish populations.