Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 4, Episode 12: Yakov M. Rabkin, Israel in Palestine: Jewish Rejection of Zionism

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Season 4, Episode 12: Yakov M. Rabkin, Israel in Palestine: Jewish Rejection of Zionism · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Greetings and welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're speaking with Professor Yaqov Rabkin, a professor emeritus at the University of Montreal, about a number of his remarkable books and a new one that is just coming to us on the question of Zionism in Israel and the understanding of the ideologies that are extant in Israel and in the West among uh Israel's supporters and the dynamics that they cause in uh global affairs and in the wars of the Middle East.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: So welcome to Book Club, Professor Robkin.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh really wonderful to meet you this way uh because I've been a long admirer and reader of yours, and you've really opened my eyes to a lot of issues.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm an American-born Jew, a Jewish uh professor, and when I was growing up, I thought and I was told within my family, uh, and as I got bar mitzvah and so forth, that being Jewish and being Zionist was the same thing.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, your books came as a real eye-opener.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: They are historical accounts, they are theological accounts that explain that there's really a rather significant difference between Judaism as historically practiced and Zionism as propounded in the 20th and 21st century.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, your 2006 book is entitled Jewish Opposition to Zionism.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is uh quite astounding for I think many Jews, uh I would say, uh in the United States.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the rhetoric we hear.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And before turning to you, I'll just tell you one uh one anecdote, and then I will let you speak because you're our honored guest on Book Club.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: But uh many years ago, in a very controversial moment, the president of Iran at the time, President Ahmedinejad, was invited to Columbia University, and there was a big protest uh not to have uh the president of Iran on the Columbia University campus.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: It happened that that day was the opening of the UN General Assembly, and I work with the United Nations very closely.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of being on campus, I walked to the United Nations.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: When I got to 47th Street that day in the park were about a hundred rabbis, or people that looked to me like rabbis, uh very orthodox rabbis, all holding signs that said Zionism is against the Torah.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it was quite an amazing display of what you write about.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: But this was an anti-Israel protest by religious Jews from the Sotmar community, I believe, in Brooklyn, protesting the state of Israel.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: So that was very long-winded.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry to be uh rude about that, but let me turn it over to you.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean, Jewish opposition to Zionism?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first, thank you for inviting me, and I appreciate your warm words.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: And 47th Street is the right place for this kind of demonstration because that's where many Hasidic stores are located.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: For those from New York, they'll appreciate that.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, uh, before we talk about opposition to Zionism, a few words about what Zionism is.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: Zionism is an ideological movement, a modern one, that originated in the 17th century among Protestants who began to interpret the what they call the Old Testament or the Pentateuch in a literal sense, unlike the Catholic Church, which uh relied on commentary.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: So once they began to interpret it literally, some groups, I would say some heretical groups, started writing about ingathering of the Hebrews and the Holy Land as a means of speeding up the second coming of Christ.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there were very important people who were what we will call today Christian Zionists, of course the word Zionist didn't exist, among them Isaac Newton.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: So we're talking about very serious people.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Joseph Priestley is another scientist who dealt with this.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And just to give context, because we have listeners from all over the world, uh Asia, Africa, uh, Europe, and the Americas, just to uh put one word of context beforehand, the Jewish state of ancient times had uh essentially disappeared during the Roman period because after a Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire that occurred in phases from 66 A.D.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: to 135 A.D., the Romans said enough and uh ended the Jewish presence in Jerusalem where the Jewish temple was.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: After that time, Judaism became a religion that was geographically diverse without a central location in what we would now say is Israel or in Jerusalem, the former location of the temple.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it became uh a religion where Jews lived outside of what the Christians uh would call the Holy Land or what was historical Judea, the country where the Jews uh lived in the ancient times.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: So when you talk about Zionism starting in the 17th century and the ingathering of the Jews, for 1,500 years at that point, the Jews had lived in the Middle East, in Africa, in Europe, but not uh centrally in what was the ancient uh location of the Jewish temple.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll get back to it just in a moment, because that's one of the sources of opposition to Zionism.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: So Christian theologians and scientists and philosophers looked forward to restoration of Jews in the Holy Land.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: And in the 19th century, in Britain, these religious concerns merged with political concerns of having a foothold for Britain in West Asia.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: And uh one of the people who were very active in this was Lord Shaftesbury, who even published a letter to the Christian monarchs of Europe encouraging them to promote the ingathering of the Jews in the Holy Land.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, all of that was happening as no Jews had expressed any interest in this.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because why and I don't think that Lord Shaftesbury even bothered to go to a local synagogue in London, because his other uh concern, he was president, I think chairman of a society for the Christianization of the Jews.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think that that position would endear him to the rabbis of London.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: So the uh situation was rather paradoxical.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Here you have uh very important Christian politicians and theologians talking about Jews gathering in uh Palestine, but there were no Jews uh involved.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: Jews became involved later, by the very end of the 19th century, and perhaps the most important connection here is one between the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, a Hungarian Jew who moved to Vienna, became a prominent playwright and journalist, and William Heckler, a Christian Zionist and the chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a very important connection.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's a book written called Prince and the Prophet about this important connection.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now, here the Jews come finally into the picture.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: And Thurder Herzl is in a way uh rather typical.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: He is estranged from Jewish religion.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: He is essentially a German-speaking Austrian journalist and playwright, but he's suffering from antisemitism, from the hatred of Jews who in Central and Western Europe had received quite recently equal rights, and they were moving up the social ladder.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: And as a result, uh a lot of people resented this because Jews used to be in Christian Europe, well, second-class citizens or discriminated, and so on.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: So for Herzl, who was a very sensitive, charismatic person, it was important to find a collective solution for to anti-Semitism.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: And his first choice was to convert every Jew in Vienna to Catholicism.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: That didn't quite work.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: His second idea, his plan B, uh, was to found the Zionist movement.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: So now with this introduction, you could see what kind of opposition can emerge to this kind of movement.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: First was, of course, religious opposition, because uh, as you said, uh Jews were expelled, or at least that's the how I put theological position of uh mainstream Judaism, that because of their sins, and that many times it's written in the Pentateuch, if you don't behave, said God, you will be expelled from this land.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that indeed how it was interpreted uh in the second century.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: But Jewish sources, particularly the Talmud, which was written from the third to the fifth century to the sixth century, the Talmud warns Jews against returning to the land, particularly against returning en masse, returning collectively.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And they also warn against using force to uh reconquer the Holy Land or conquer Palestine.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: So just to underscore this, maybe to say a word about what the Talmud is for people who don't know, um, and then what these three oaths actually uh say in the Talmud.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, the Talmud is a compendium of discussions among scholars, among Jewish scholars.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: There are two kinds of Talmud, one Babylonian, which was written in the territory of today's Iran and Iraq, and the other one is Jerusalem Talmud.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: And there are discussions about various issues, both philosophical and particularly legal.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the Talmud specifies those three oaths that you just mentioned that before Jews were expelled from the land, they were adjured by God not to return collectively, not to use force, and uh the nations of the world, so in other words, non-Jews, were told not to oppress Jews too much, when that's the expression.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: So those three oaths were functional and remain functional for many observant Jews, who consider, therefore, the Zionist movement which wants to bring Jews into Palestine and to become a regular secular nation like European nations.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, they don't appreciate that and they oppose it to this very day.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because for them, converting a religious community into a secular nation uh is something that goes against important principles of Judaism.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: So here we have many different forces, uh, both political force and ideological forces at play.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: By the time Theodore Herzl becomes the leader of the Jewish Zionist movement, you have Christians saying Jews should be back in their land.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: You have British imperialists saying, wouldn't it be nice if that were the case?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because that would give us a foothold into the Ottoman lands.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we need that foothold because, after all, we need to protect our passage to the crown jewel of our empire, India.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh control over the Eastern Mediterranean is very important.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And now you have secular Jews reflecting the ideology of the late 19th century, also, not only the anti-Semitism, but the extreme nationalism that was uh on the rise.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh each nation in the strong ideology of the time, which continues till today to some extent, each nation should have its territory and should be a nation-state.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it also seemed, well, Jews, what is it?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Are we a religion?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Are we a people?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: If we're a people, like all people, uh, there should be a territory attached to that.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so this became another part.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I think what's so fascinating and crucial about your writing is you point out that the rabbis are scratching their heads.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Wait a minute, this is not our religion.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: We we know the religion, we know the Talmud, uh, we know the practice.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Our religion is a religion of uh local communities at synagogues obedient to God's uh commandments uh in the Torah, and we know of the commitment in in the Babylonian Talmud not to go back to Israel.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: So from the the beginning, actually, of the Zionist movement, there was a pretty deep split in the Jewish community.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was a very important split because uh the rabbis that you mentioned, they were not scratching their head that that's a different religion.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: They were very much upset that the people who were promoting that movement were overtly secular, anti-religious.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: That was the problem.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: And uh this is particularly applies to Jews of the Russian Empire.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll get to it.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I can mention because it's important.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Jews in the Russian Empire, unlike Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire where Herzl lived, Jews in Russia lived under official restriction to inhabit the so-called Pale of Settlement, which is the western part of uh of the Russian Empire, which is Eastern Europe today, uh say from the Baltic Republics down to Moldova.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: And these Jews, a part of those Jews, became radicalized, uh, took a very active part in the revolutionary movement in Russia.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: And these were very active Zionists because for them, in the conditions of the Russian Empire, Zionism appeared as a very attractive option.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going back to kinds of opposition to Zionism.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: So for the religious authorities for rabbis, these Russian revolutionaries and uh Viennese journalists who didn't observe any of the commandments were totally uh forbidden.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: They they you shouldn't even touch them, you shouldn't even communicate with them.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's that was their position.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now there was a second part, perhaps even more important, in at least numerically, Jews in France, Britain, Germany, Austria, who received equal rights, who began their ascent on the social ladder, becoming doctors, professors, and so on.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the last thing they wanted to hear is that they don't belong there.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: They belong to some other nation whose homeland is in Palestine.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because that was exactly what the anti-Semites were saying.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: You don't belong here, go to go back to Palestine.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the Christian Zionists were overt anti-Semites, in fact.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, of course, because we shouldn't forget that the two goals to gather the Hebrews in the Holy Land and their conversion to Christianity go hand in hand.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a very important issue.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Till today, incidentally.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: So the second part, second kind of opposition was from these bourgeois Jews who were becoming Frenchmen and Germans and Americans and British, and they didn't want to go to any Palestine, they didn't want to become part of a different nation, particularly because, and we have to understand, the Jews around the world spoke different languages, they had different culinary habits, they they really didn't even look the same.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea that Jews constitute a separate nation is a purely Eastern European idea, where indeed, in Eastern Europe, they lived in a rather compact environment, speaking a different language, Yiddish.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: But say, among Iranian Jews, uh, I visited Iran in 2016 and even wrote about it, they are Iranians of Judaic persuasion.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I happened to be there on the New Year, on the Persian New Year in Noruz, and it on Friday night we were going to the synagogue, and people met in the street, you know, Jews met, and they said, Shabbat Shalom Noruz Mubarak, in one sentence, uh, because that's their identity.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting in in the United States also the the Reform Judaism, which is the less religious kind, the rabbis at the end of the 19th century met and uh also said, our place is America.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh actually, uh I don't remember his name, but one of the rabbis of the reform movement said, This is our Palestine, mentioning the United States.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is our Palestine, this is our promised land.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: So if we could move forward, because uh I'd love to speak, and I hope we will, for hours and hours.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's so fascinating, also, and so little known, frankly.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: But uh to jump to 1917, to the Balfour Declaration.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is where empire really merges with Zionism.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh maybe you could take us through that.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a fascinating twist of this of Edwin Montague that I want to ask you about.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, let me just finish that.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: The third kind of opposition, which is also important, came from socialists, for whom Zionism was a distraction of Jews from class struggle uh in their countries, and they were adamantly opposed to Zionism, including a very important socialist labor movement, the Bund, in Eastern Europe.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, uh, indeed, uh in 1917, a few days before uh Britain actually occupied Palestine, the Foreign Minister of Britain, Balfour, wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild in which he said that uh the British government will look with favor at the establishment of Jewish homeland, and that's a very nebulous term, what it means, which is quite typical of British diplomacy.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: I have a theory that all the world's problems trace back to the British, by the way, because of exactly this kind of uh ambiguity and so forth.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think many of the hot points today are former British possessions.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Lord Balfour promised to look with favor at uh the establishment of a Jewish homeland, provided that the rights of local population be protected and never molested, and so on.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very important provisor because uh it doesn't seem to have been respected.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: But in fact, Balfour later wrote in a private letter that our point is to help the Jews to ingather in Palestine, and we don't care about the opinions of thousands of Arabs who happen to inhabit it today.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: You see, that's a very biblical view that you know this land belongs to Jews, but it so happened that there are other people who have been living there for 2,000 years, but that's irrelevant.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a crux of the issue.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: So the British government, or not the British government, actually, it was just the foreign minister because one member of the British government, the only Jewish member of the British government, Montague, wrote, accused the British government in writing of anti-Semitism.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: It says, what you are doing is an anti-Semitic measure, and he wrote a long letter, which you can find on the internet, on anti-Semitism of the British government.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: So just to underscore this, the foundational document where the British government establishes the Zionist homeland was attacked by the one Jewish member of the British.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Cabinet for being anti-Semitic, because it's unimaginable to people that this can be the actual case.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's just a century ago and completely foundational to the state of Israel today.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but you know, Balfour, before that, I think 1906, he was the author of a bill that prohibited the entry or this limited the entry of Russian Jews into Britain.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that fits because one of the motivations of Christian Zionists, we don't have want to have Jews here, let them go to Palestine.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's better for us.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the three types of opposition.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then Zionism, of course, developed as a settler's colonialism.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And the word colonialism at that time was a perfectly acceptable positive term.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Herzl used it.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: The first financial arm of the Zionist movement was called Jewish colonial trust.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we have to be very cognizant of the fact that when Zionism was establishing its colony in Palestine, there was nothing wrong about it from the European viewpoint, not from the natives' viewpoint.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Colonialism was the natural order of things.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: The Western world dominated.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: It could establish colon and should establish colonies where it wanted to, often at God's command in the history of European colonial rule.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed, in the United States, you have places named after Bethlehem and Akron and all these biblical names.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because for those settlers, North America was the promised land.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: The new Israel.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: Tasmania was the promised land.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: So there were many promised lands in history.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: But now, who went to Palestine?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's very important.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Those who went to Palestine were largely Jews from former Russian Empire.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Many of them radicalized revolutionary socialists, and they wanted to build a new socialist country in Palestine.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Then there were some Jews who were pushed from Eastern Europe, from Poland in particular, by prevailing anti-Semitism.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, the third important way with German Jews, who after 1933, after the election of Hitler as the Reichschancellor, they also started going to Palestine.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: However, the Russian Jews constitute the core of the political establishment of Israel.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Neither Polish Jews and definitely not German Jews made it into political elites of the Zionist establishment and later State of Israel.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, as far as I know, only Naftali Bennett, he's the only prime minister of Israel who was not born in the Russian Empire or whose parents were not born in the Russian Empire.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: So all of them, including Benjamin Netanyahu, were, well, his father was born in the Russian Empire.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: And this is very, it's, you see, I a colleague of mine, Yaakov Yadgar at Oxford and myself, we wrote a paper on the Russian roots of Israel political culture.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm completing now a paper on a violence, chapter on violence in that sense, because we have to be very careful to see roots of propensity for violence and total disregard for ideological enemies in the culture of the revolutionary movement of the turn of the 20th century, perhaps a caricature of what you could find in Dostoevsky's Demons or Possessed.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how it's translated.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that's uh the core of the political elite.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: Just to say, uh, among those violent uh figures, uh maybe you could say a word about Yabotinsky, because he is someone who is almost foundational for the political leaders of Israel today, especially Netanyahu and his party.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, indeed, uh Netanyahu's father was the private secretary to Jabotinsky.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that I didn't know.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so uh Netanyahu literally grew up in that atmosphere.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now who was Jabotinsky?
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: Jabotinsky was uh uh Odessa Jew from Odessa was a very important center of Zionism in the Russian Empire.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he was a very talented writer, a Russian writer.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh his native tongue was Russian, and he has joined the Zionist movement, and he disagreed with the socialists on certain points, but in many respects, uh Zabotinsky was in agreement, namely that the only way you can establish a Zionist presence in Palestine is by force.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: The natives have to realize that you have an iron wall in front of you.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's very interesting.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote about the iron wall in the early 20s, and now you have a concrete wall just sitting there tangibly.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: So Zabutinski split from the Zionist movement.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: He called it a revisionist Zionist movement.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he was essentially removed from power in the Zionist establishment by the socialists, David Ben Gurion in particular.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: He emigrated to France, he died in the United States in 1940.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: But the movement he started, which I would call the muscular Judaism, muscular Zionism.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh of course he was totally religious, uninterested in anything Jewish.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's also most people who founded that movement were not only strange, they were uninterested in Judaism.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: They were interpreting, say, biblical stories in a very unjuwish way, if I may say so.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: But that's quite natural, because that's the people who uh were attracted to Zionism.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: So Zabutinsky's movement uh was marginal in the state of Israel after it was founded in 48, but in 1977, there was a change of government, an election that uh really is a watershed, not in the sense of changing the policy, but changing the discourse.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because here we have to be very clear.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: The so-called right wing of Benjamin Nutanyao and the so-called left-wing heirs of David Ben Gurion had exactly the same idea about the natives, about the importance of occupying territories by force, except that the socialists were clothing this in a very nice egalitarian discourse, whereas Jabotinsky and his heirs, and particularly today, no longer bother about the form or the decor.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: They say things as it is.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: In a way, it's much easier today to talk about Zionism because you just have to quote today's politicians in Israel, and you don't have to impute fascist tendencies.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: You can see them.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: We have, again, with apologies to all listeners, given the importance and the richness of this discussion, have to jump ahead many decades.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and uh there's so much uh that we could talk about.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to bring us up to today, if I can, and have you help us understand what is the ruling party or the ruling government's ideology?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: What are the goals of Netanyahu and his colleagues?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I ask this is the following.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: If I understand correctly, Netanyahu is the head of uh political party that at its core, following Yabotinsky, said we need to take a hard line against the locals, we need to control all of the territory of Palestine.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not per se a religious movement, it may be non-religious or anti-religious, but it seems that there's a new kind of religious movement as well, something different from the rabbinical Judaism that has arisen and that is represented by other members of the coalition in power, Smotrich and Ben Gavir, and the religious settlers and what you call national Judaism, which seems to be religious in spirit, even literal biblical in orientation, even referring to the original promise by God to Abraham of the lands from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates, which is a lot of the Middle East territory, by the way.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a coalition at work?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: Are there different forces at play in Israel's approach, which is, of course, uh the coalition is wholly anti-Palestinian to the extent of slaughtering Palestinians by the tens of thousands before our eyes and on TikTok every day?
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: But are there different motivations at play of Anatniahu, who's been prime minister for much of the past thirty years, and his seemingly religious colleagues today, but of a different kind of Jewish religion from the rabbinical Judaism that opposed Zionism a hundred years ago.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed, you mentioned uh National Judaism.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's the movement that emerged as a political force after the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel conquered territories that had previously been occupied by Jordan and Egypt.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: And uh they became the most active settlers in the occupied territories.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: They considered themselves, they were observant Jews, they observed the Jewish rituals, and they interpreted literally again the biblical promise.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: And they argue, uh, some of them are very honest people, and I admire them not for what they do, but the fact that their words and their acts don't diverge, which is the case for many Zionists.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: They say, well, if we have to occupy the land, we have to follow the advice of the Pentateuch and the Talmud and the Three Oaths, and every and all the Jewish rabbinical tradition is irrelevant because we live in different conditions.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: We live in the land of Israel and we need a Torah of the land of Israel.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the expression they use.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I studied the texts that went into the source of my book on Jewish opposition to Zionism in a very Zionist seminar in Jerusalem.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I studied them, because for them it was inconceivable that most important rabbis whom they revere were all against Zionism.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: They wanted to understand that.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: So these people today are the motif of settlement, but I would say the most patriotic part of Israel, because those who were settlers in the 20s and 30s and who founded the kibbutzim and the socialists, their children and grandchildren have become Tel Aviv bourgeois who no longer want to settle anything, and they go to psychoanalysts if they have a problem.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: These people are very different.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: They go to very risky enterprises settling all kinds of hills, but today they're also slaughtering Palestinians uh in big numbers on the West Bank.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, uh they are the people who prevented aid reaching the Gaza Palestinians uh last year.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we are talking about a very motivated political group that uses religious argumentation to strengthen their cause, and that's a very potent force.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in my own upbringing, I learned the little bit of religious teaching to uh get through bar mitzvah, but not much more than that.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, I was completely stunned when as an adult I went back to read Deuteronomy and the book of Joshua, and especially the book of Joshua, which is the book that describes uh the conquest of today's Israel by those who had left Egypt uh in the Exodus, and God's command to uproot and slaughter, in fact, every man, woman, and child of one city, state, uh one people after another in this book.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's about the most violent text one could find uh anywhere in any library for for anything.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh, frankly speaking, a book of genocides.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it was shocking for me to to read that as the sixth book of the Tanakh of the of the Jewish uh uh Bible.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: Does something like that, because of the literalism, play its role in the the minds and the imagination of people in power today?
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: Rabbinical Judaism reinterpreted all these verses, and in fact, the genocide of the seven nations that used to inhabit uh the Holy Land, and there was a command to exterminate them in the Bible, in the book of Joshua, you're right.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: But the sages of the Talmud said, now all the peoples are mixed up, and we don't know who these people are, and therefore the commandment is not operational.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: You see, how interesting.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, how wise also, because there's uh, of course, just to put a historical gloss on that, there is, and David Ben Gorian of all people believed in it, there's real reason to believe that today's Palestinian Arabs are actually biologically the stock from the ancient Jewish communities who then converted with the rise of Islam in the Middle East in the seventh century.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in terms of who's mixed up with whom, everyone is mixed up with each other.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: The rabbis were very clever to make that point.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that the Jewish wisdom is something which would have prevented us from having the violence we have today.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, there's a new generation of rabbis affiliated with National Judaism, and they've written books that are just as blood curling as you mentioned when you read the book of Joshua.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, there are today's rabbis, some of them write really extremely violent books that even landed some of them in court in Israel a few years ago.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: But uh by and large, Jewish tradition is uh a concentration of compromise, of pacifism, and that's precisely what the founders of Zionism detested and disdained.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because of you being led to the three oaths, because I had never read the book of Ketubot in the Babylonian Talmud, certainly not.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but uh when I got to it, I found that, yes, a a piece of very practical wisdom, actually.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because if I understood what the rabbis were trying to say was they were trying to tell their co-religionists, don't make a mess.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, maybe the rebellion against the Roman Empire wasn't the smartest thing we've ever done as a people.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, calm down.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, don't uh create new troubles.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: Learn to live in the places where you live.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it seemed not only theological, but profoundly practical.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: Just how to actually live in this world.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the founder of rabbinical Judaism, the person who is hailed as someone who started uh or rather restarted Judaism after the loss of Jerusalem, was Johan and bin Zakai.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the Talmud tells about him.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Again, as a historian, I cannot warrant for the veracity of this, but uh the Talmud says that he was in Jerusalem under the siege of the Romans, and the zealots prevented from leaving Jerusalem.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: So he sent an arrow to the Roman troops with a little note saying, I am among the admirers of the emperor.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: How would you call this person today a traitor?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: And he's the founder of Rabbinical Judaism.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: How interesting.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Very practical.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Professor Robkin, we should go on for hours.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what you're telling us and teaching us is uh utterly fascinating.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: I have to say, maybe it's a very bizarre word.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to be misunderstood, and I really will be, but I don't want to be.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's very entertaining in the sense that it's so fascinating, the twists and turns.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: Also bizarre, unexpected, but true, and in front of our faces, that the one Jew in the Cabinet of Britain objects to the Balfour Declaration, for example.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't make it up.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Or that today, by number, by far the biggest base of Zionism in the United States are Christian evangelicals, uh, not even close uh to uh the count of uh Jews, who in any event are probably more divided on the question.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we could go on for a very long time.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: But what I would like to do is to suggest to everybody listening, please read the fascinating books that we've been discussing: Jewish Opposition to Zionism, A Threat from Within, published in 2006.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: What is Modern Israel?
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: An absolutely uh fascinating book published in 2016, and the new book on Israel and Palestine, a Jewish rejection of Zionist colonization, uh coming uh in the middle of 2025.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: Professor Robkin, we'll have to leave it here at this point, but thank you so much for your wisdom, your teaching, your writing, and for joining me on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was a most stimulating discussion.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 40:45
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