The Zionist Who Predicted Zionism's Self-Destruction

0:00 [music] In 1944, Hannah Arand wrote an essay called Zionism Reconsidered. She began by identifying a disastrous political turning point for Zionism. She wrote that the end result of 50 years of Zionist politics was embodied in a single moment. The Atlantic City Convention of the World Zionist Organization. There, American Zionists from left to right unanimously demanded a Jewish state that would embrace all of Palestine, undivided and unddeinished. This, she argued, was the moment the extremist strand prevailed within Zionism, foreclosing alternative paths and placing the movement on a course of

0:46 self-destruction. For decades, Zionism was a debate, not a monolith. On one side was Ahad Haam who warned that ignoring the Arab population would destroy the Jewish project's soul. On the other side were Herszel and Jabotinsky who viewed Zionism as a European colonial project. Arent who was aligned with the thinking of the cultural Zionists wrote this time the Arabs were simply not mentioned in the resolution which obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary immigration or secondclass citizenship. Ahad Ham had warned that ignoring the Arab population would destroy the Jewish project morally and politically. Figures like Judah Magnus and Martin

1:31 Boua argued for parody, shared political life and legitimacy rooted in consent. But the cultural Zionists were in the minority as they were up against the European worldview that European immigrants brought to Palestine. that the Arabs were an inferior race and the wishes of superior civilized Europeans took precedence over primitive savages. In his 1891 essay, Truth from Erit Israel, Ahad Ham wrote about the Zionist settlers of the first aliyah. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without sufficient cause, and then boast about it. and nobody stands up against these

2:16 despicable and dangerous inclinations. He goes on to say, "We are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages like donkeys who neither see nor understand what goes on around them. But this is a great error. The Arabs and especially those in the towns understand our actions and intentions very well." Herzel, on the other hand, embodied European white supremacism when he wrote, "We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism." Jabatinsky wrote in the Iron Wall, "Zionist colonization must either stop or else proceed regardless of the native

3:02 population." Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able. It was Herzel and Jabbatinsky's brand of Zionism that won out in Atlantic City. Hence saw this as a recipe for disaster. She wrote, "Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse."

3:47 Hezel had embraced this dependence on colonial powers. We should as a neutral state remain in contact with all Europe which would have to guarantee our existence. Arent saw this as a guarantee of insecurity and neverending conflict. Even a Jewish majority in Palestine, nay, even a transfer of all Palestine Arabs, which is openly demanded by revisionists, would not substantially change a situation in which Jews must either ask protection from an outside power against their neighbors or affect a working agreement with their neighbors. aren't felt that no people can secure freedom by denying it to another. Those who are dismayed at the spectacle

4:32 of a national movement that starting out with such an idealistic Alain sold out at the very first moment to the powers that be that felt no solidarity with other oppressed peoples. The Zionists had chosen to ally themselves with anti-semites and imperialist colonial powers to realize their goals. It began with the sponsorship of the British Empire to Benorian's pact with Nazi Germany and after 1948, Israel's support for apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia and every military dictatorship in Latin America. Orren's most chilling insight was that Zionism had fled into a doctrine of eternal anti-semitism and that doctrine drove it toward

5:18 maximalism, dependency, and permanent conflict. Once that premise is accepted, politics collapses. If you applied Zionist logic to black Americans, it would mean that racism is eternal, the civil rights struggle is futile, and equality should be abandoned in favor of separation. That is not emancipation. It is a politics of despair and an implicit acceptance of Nazi racial premises as the permanent structure of human society. It concedes that racism and anti-semitism cannot be dismantled, only escaped, and in doing so normalizes the very worldview it claims to oppose. Decades later, after the Holocaust, some

6:04 Zionist thinkers would claim that the Holocaust had proved Zionism's premise. They coined the term catastrophic Zionism, a belief that Jewish safety is a zero someum game because the world is inherently and permanently hostile. Arent had warned that this was a disaster that would spawn a Zionism that requires perpetual crisis to justify itself, that assumes coexistence is impossible in advance, and that treats domination as the only path to security. It doomed any hope of coexistence in Palestine. Since all societies were anti-Semitic, how could you coexist with Palestinian society? The settlers weren't coming to join a society. They were coming to replace one. To see how that looks in a context

6:52 closer to home, just imagine if Jewish immigrants arrived in South Carolina and declared that they wanted to make South Carolina an independent Jewish state and displace the locals. After all, the people of South Carolina had more than 40 states to go live in. How long do you think those settlements would have been tolerated by the Americans? But here is the ultimate irony, the cognitive dissonance of modern Zionism. The movement's core premise, the one it uses to justify every wall and every raid, is that the diaspora is unsafe and unlivable. If that's true, every Jewish person in the West has a moral obligation to move to Israel. And yet,

7:37 the state of Israel depends on American Jews remaining exactly where they are. It needs them in the US to secure the political patronage, the billiondoll checks, and the diplomatic cover of the world's biggest superpower. The doctrine of the unlivable diaspora is just weaponized rhetoric. It is a destiny for some and a convenient fiction for others. Arent couldn't have known the specifics of what would unfold over the next eight decades. But the logic she identified, seeking security through domination, depending on imperial powers, treating conflict as eternal and unsolvable, has manifested in exactly the kind of situation she feared. Applied to Palestine, this logic has

8:23 produced a genocidal apartheid state committed to the pursuit of a greater Israel, a territorial project that requires the displacement of millions of Arabs through expulsion, extermination, confinement, or enforced secondass status. Security is sought not through equality or coexistence because that is considered a naive and hopeless quest. Only through separation, ethnic cleansing, territorial expansion, and domination can a group be secure. This is how a movement born in response to racial persecution becomes the mirror image of the violent racialized rule Jews once fled. Thanks for watching. Please hit the like and subscribe buttons if you would like to see more content like this.