Wayne O'Leary

Joe Biden’s Zionist Dilemma

“I am a Zionist,” Joe Biden is fond of saying. He said it to Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet during a visit to Israel last fall — to general approval. He’s said it in so many words on numerous other occasions; it’s become a Biden trope.

We can assume the president means it; he seems to be expressing a sincere belief. The question is: Does he really know what the term means, and does he fully understand the ramifications of using it in such an offhand manner?

It’s a mystery why Biden is so adamant in his “ironclad” support of Israel. A major influence appears to have been his 1973 meeting with then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during which she informed the young Delaware senator that defending Israel was imperative because besieged world Jewry had “no place else to go.” This was the same Golda Meir who, in 1969, had coldly asserted that Palestinians did not exist as a people, being merely wandering nomads nonindigenous to the disputed land at issue. The future president did not seemingly question this preposterous statement.

Biden’s meeting with Meir postdated the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and the Arab states, a seminal occurrence in the modern history of Zionism. (See Antony Loewenstein’s excellent survey, “My Israel Question,” 2006.). The war added considerably to Israel’s land area, made it a conquering military power in the Middle East, created a messianic settlement movement in the occupied territories of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Gaza, and produced as a by-product (in 1973) the ultra-nationalist Likud Party.

In the U.S., meanwhile, the conflict revived a flagging interest in the Holocaust, buttressed support for the Jewish state, and made Israel a key factor in Washington’s strategic Cold War thinking and policies. As a consequence, American politicians of Biden’s generation were drawn inexorably into Israel’s orbit, increasingly loath to criticize its actions or U.S. backing for them.

To Joe Biden and his contemporaries, reflexive support for Israel became a kind of secular religion that, in his case, Golda Meir’s verbal laying on of hands simply reinforced. While this may explain Biden’s identification with the Zionist cause, it doesn’t explain or excuse his failure to recognize its multiple nuances and inbred flaws, especially in late years as the movement has taken a profoundly negative direction.

Zionism, originally the idea of establishing an exclusive Jewish homeland (it’s since evolved into an expression of Jewish nationalism), can be definitively dated as a movement from 1894. Its founding father was an Austrian-Jewish journalist named Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), who conceived of it in response to the antisemitism surrounding the infamous court-martial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, convicted on trumped-up charges of treason. Herzl proceeded to propose a secular Jewish state in 1896 as an alternative to ethnic assimilation into what he considered antisemitic European societies; he organized the first Zionist Congress the following year.

Almost immediately, Zionists determined that the only location for Herzl’s Jewish homeland must be Biblical Palestine. Other options were considered, most notably Uganda, near Kenya in East Africa, offered by colonial Britain. Fatefully, a Zionist congress, including Herzl’s successor, Chaim Weizmann, rejected that proposal in 1904 on religious and cultural grounds, though Herzl had been amenable. Subsequently, Palestine was formalized as the future Jewish homeland by Britain’s Balfour Declaration (1917), ratified at Versailles with adjoining Transjordan (today’s Jordan) reserved for the Arabs.

Which brings us roundabout to Joe Biden’s contemporary Israel problem. In the decades following World War I, the Zionist movement established by Herzl split into two main factions, with Weizmann as symbolic figurehead. The factions, representing two competing visions of Zionism, have endured since then, one remaining secular and rationalist, the other trending into mysticism, romanticism and religiosity.

The first camp, which more or less ran Israel up to 1977, was what’s been called Labor Zionism; it was led for decades, before and after statehood, by David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), who became Israel’s first prime minister in 1948. Democratic-socialist in domestic politics and economics, moderate in external relations, the left-wing Laborites sought to achieve Zionism’s objectives gradually with minimum disruption. They accepted the U.N. partition of Palestine in 1947 and later entertained proposals for a two-state solution to the Palestinian quandary. Ben-Gurion himself even suggested returning the Arab territory seized during the 1967 war.

Labor’s conservative opposition was the Zionist Revisionist movement, founded in 1925 by Vladimir “Ze’ve” Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a radical right-winger whose beliefs (re: race, nationality, the authoritarian state) verged on fascism.

Noam Chomsky (“Middle East Solutions,” 2003) characterized Jabotinsky and his Revisionists as militantly anti-Arab, anti-labor and anti-socialist — in effect, a “Zionist bourgeoisie,” whose reactionary political models prior to 1940 included Mussolini, Franco and (irony of ironies) the German Nazis, and whose operational tactics included coercion, intimidation and outright terrorism. Revisionism’s ultimate objective: permanently exclusive Jewish sovereignty over all of Palestine and Transjordan from Egypt to Iraq as a sacred historic right, divinely conferred.

Among Jabotinsky’s followers was future Prime Minister Menachem Begin (1913-92), commander of a Revisionist-generated terror group (Irgun) in the 1940s, who continued to believe in a Greater Israel beyond the pre-1967 borders established in 1948. The Likud Party he created, now led by Benjamin Netanyahu, became the ideological heir to the original Revisionists; it has ruled Israel for most of the past half-century during which time the fantasy of exclusionary geopolitical expansion has continued to be a guiding principle.

Another acolyte of Jabotinsky, as David Remnick informs us in his penetrating profile of the current prime minister (The New Yorker, 1/22/24), was Netanyahu’s own father Benzion, who passed on his hard-line Zionist ideology of “territorial maximization” and no sharing of Biblical land, to his son, who likewise opposes any future Palestinian state.

Netanyahu has lately gone Begin one better by allying his rightist Likud with Israel’s extreme religious Zionist parties, backers of the violent and messianic settler movement, whose leaders would impose national rabbinical law, annex the Golan and the West Bank, and “transfer” (forcibly expel) all Palestinians from Gaza. In 2017, one of their number, Netanyahu’s present finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, rhetorically anticipated today’s Palestinian resistance by calling for a Jewish state “from the river to the sea.”

These are the kindly theocrats who now personify dominant right-wing Zionism within Israel’s government. The question is: How does this square with President Biden’s rosy definition of the word?

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2024

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