Ghassan Kanafani

On Zionist Literature

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Agnon’s literary production is merely a call for migration (especially from Eastern Europe) to Palestine, and a call for conquest in the name of “Jewish values and culture” – in the words of the Nobel Prize Committee. His insistence on these two objectives led to artistic and ethical transgressions: he repeats the dangerous phenomenon of historical fabrication at the expense of human values. When a man engages in such a project (regardless of the efficacy of its fabrications), an international cultural institution with the stated objective of encouraging humanism does itself a disservice by lighting up a powder keg in a region whose catastrophe still weighs on the world’s conscience. But the committee did more than that. It practically justified, legitimized and blessed Israeli aggression either deliberately or otherwise, and conferred a cultural honor upon the racist Jewish current.

Benjamin Tammuz took a step further in A Tale of an Olive Tree and The Swimming Race.

42 In the former, the author tells the story of an Arab called Ali al-Taweel who owns a big old olive tree in the middle of his field in Galilee.43 The tree produces as much as the rest of the field together. Its oil is rubbed on the bodies of newly-born infants. Men drink it in the morning. It decorates the dinner table. It is gifted to friends and cures diseases. When Ali al-Taweel wanted to marry his daughter to an old man against her will, the young woman refused this oppressive arrangement. The father tied her to one of his prized olive trunks for two nights, leaving her too afraid and tired to refuse the marriage. Later, she was unable to give birth to her first child in the village because the Jews forced her family to move to the north.

The first Jewish immigrant that receives Ali al-Taweel's farm does not know anything about olive oil. He spits it when he tastes it, and because he cannot kill the tree he cuts its branches to sell them to handicraftsmen who sell wooden souvenirs to tourists. The tree then starts to extend its branches toward the north, as if - according to the author's narrative - to call to the girl that it once knew and to wait for her from behind the border. Finally, government specialists arrive to cut down the tree. The author writes at the end of the story: They carefully examined the olive grove's "rentability," they said what they said, and a week later, workers came to prepare the land. The first thing they did was to uproot seven ancient olive trees, first, because they had not been planted in rows and so disturbed plowing, and second, because they were too tall and during picking they required ladders so high that they could not be found in the warehouse of the building contractor ... and third, because this is what the agronomist demanded, having found them unrentable.

The author uses Zionist literature's traditional manner of describing the traditions of the village in a prejudiced, conceited and unrealistic manner. But the main point of the story is to tell Ali al-Taweel's tale through his relationship with the olive tree (that ancient Palestinian heritage), and the new relationship between the settlers and that heritage. These intersecting relationships are consummated by the felling of the tree, which symbolizes another thing that the author fails to mention: that it stands for an unwanted memory!

One of the justifications for conquering Palestine essentially rests upon the premise that it is a response to Hitler's massacres against the Jews especially, and against the oppression from which the Jews have suffered in general. It is thus nearly impossible for one to find Palestine treated in a Zionist novel without a reference to Hitler's massacres. It seems that the Zionist author is entirely aware of the value of this blackmailing tool against the minds of his Western readers. This is how he guarantees their sympathies from the first few pages, regardless of any errors that he may commit.

You go to a historic spot like Tiberias, hoping to find something that will evoke for people in Iowa the romantic quality of the place, and what do you find? Housing developments, ... bus stations, ... a tourist hotel, ... and on the very edge of that sacred lake, what? A kibbutz... I remember when we first came here... it looked just as it might have in Bible times... But today, you can hardly take a photograph anywhere that tells an audience clearly that you're in the Holy Land. Now it's all towns and building developments ... [whereas] in Jordan today you can still find hundreds of scenes with people in Biblical costume, ... little donkeys, heavenly-faced children playing by open wells...

With such "criticism" of Israel and praise for the Arabs, the author seeks to protect his artistic integrity in the most comical manner while preserving the propagandistic message to the greatest possible extent. As for the moment when arguments rage between conflicting points of view, the Arab takes it upon himself to provide Zionist rationalizations in a spectacular display. The Jew would say to the Arab: "this hill did not produce anything since our ancestors left it, you've neglected it and let its slopes fall apart. We will clean that hill of rocks and will bring tractors and fertilized soil." The Arab responds: "What the valley bears is enough for us... Where God put stones, man should not carry them away. We shall live as our fathers lived and we do not want your money and your tractors and your fertilizers.") This is an open admission from the mouth of the Arab about the reality of the Arabs' destructive role and their insistence on backwardness in an astonishing manner.

If the reader tries to understand the Zionist writer's position towards Arabs as merely that of direct enemies who must be fought, they will soon realise that the superlative contempt in which they are held cannot be explained as an exigency of battle alone. Far more than that, it is a justification for the uprooting of an entire people and an absolute unwillingness to find a single square centimeter of common ground upon which dialogue can take place.

Such an ostentatious sense of absolute superiority and divine infallibility was not without consequences. It established a racist position so clearly that it is hard for a critic to resist the conclusion that the European and American currents that admired Zionist literature (especially Exodus) were objectively and surreptitiously satisfying the needs of a concealed racist position, the most important aspect of which is not Jewish superiority as such but the position it exposes toward other peoples as well - especially the Arabs. It is a position that can only be described as racist.

The Zionist novel does not merely exaggerate the facts; it invents them.

The error is that what he calls the Jewish people did not form a national, geographical, civilizational or cultural unit in order for it to be compared to other peoples. If he insists on drawing such comparisons, he must regard Judaism as a race. This is why Goitein's endeavor to bridge this gap, when comparing the histories of the Arab people and the Jews, must appeal to certain metaphysical Jewish qualities. It is also what drives the author to decide that there is a racial basis for the "superiority" of the Jews over the Arabs across history - i.e., that there are inherent Jewish characteristics from which Arabs are destined to be deprived.

A perfect example of such deliberate conflation can be found in a 1955 book titled Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through The Ages by Shelomo Dov Goitein, a Professor of Islamic History and Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University. He shows that Arab-Jewish relations were good across history and were not characterized by antisemitism nor any of the persecution complexes that result from it.'2 It also states that Arabs described Jews, in modern times and up to this moment, as "Arab Jews." Zionism must therefore justify the central claim behind its conquest of Palestine, namely the principle of "responding to anti-Jewish oppression" - which represents the essence of contemporary Zionist literary works.

Yet Freud's justifications are unable to turn the Jewish question into one of nationalism. Freud, at any rate, believed that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian pharaonic priest in the court of the hapless Akhenaten? His personal letters, on the other hand, demonstrate that he was not inclined to distinguish between religion and race when it came to the Jews, despite the fatal error involved in such reason-ing. All religions make their followers feel that they "hold themselves to be specially near to Him" and that "this is what makes them proud and confident."10 This absolutely does not mean that these religions should take racist or nationalistic positions.

Yet the common ground upon which all of the aforementioned phases stood was the Zionist mixing of religion into nationalism - in order to produce a perverted sense of superiority. It is important to distinguish between two senses of superiority, in this regard: one is connected to a common, natural and legitimate sense of pride while the other is premised upon contempt for other peoples by placing them in a second tier in a "human hierarchy."

Stylistically, Herzl invented a formula that would be followed thereafter in which Palestine was said to be forlorn - simply waiting for the Jews to return to populate and develop it, without any mention of the people who already lived there. Furthermore, Jews' migration to Palestine was made to seem like a service for the Western mind: Herzl affirms repeatedly that the Jews did not do anything for the old new land but simply took to it modern institutions that existed in modern countries at the end of the nineteenth century. 4 This was perhaps the precise reason that Herzl discussed the role that Israel would play in "backwards" Africa and Asia in a manner that evoked Mordecai's orations.

In 1920, the theaters of London saw another play called The Wandering Jew by Ernest Temple Thurston. While being martyred before the courts of the Spanish Inquisition after his long journey (and martyrdom here signifies emancipation), the Wandering Jew exclaims: "the spirit of your Christ is closer to my heart, as a Jew, than it is to the lips of those who claim to believe in him." This claim reflects new chauvinistic pretensions in which Zionism would perform a political funeral for The Wandering Jew in the form of a 1933 Yiddish film produced in Yaf-fa.

The period that separates the good and kindly Wandering Jew from his depiction in the seventeenth century reveals the legend’s clear transformation. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Western Europe, it was believed that the Wandering Jew was a frightening figure who – as a bad omen – only accompanied the appearance of storms: “in such places he was spoken of in whispers. When a storm arose, people gathered together to pray that their town might be spared from a visit by the Wanderer.”5 This belief naturally reflected a dominant Christian position of the age.

The novel also "recti-fies" Disraeli's Zionism by regarding Palestine as "a politically expedient means of gathering Jews from the Diaspora."17 This claim, which has since become ubiquitous, was enshrined here as a principle of Zionism - i.e., that Zionism represents a response to racism and anti-semitism. It is a position that conceals the essence of Zionism, which counters racist oppression with racism.

In order to reject the romantic Jewish hero, and along with it the idea of social integration, Disraeli had to offer an alternative solution which, at this early historical stage of Zionism, was stunningly clear: racism. Disraeli took the claim of Jewish superiority (which represented a survival attribute according to Freud) to its inevitable conclusion by turning it into a conquering force. Rejecting integration necessitated one of two possibilities: to either assume a position of inferiority or that of superiority. Having rejected integration, Disraeli was compelled to choose the racist position.

If Jewish her-itage, or what Weiss-Rosmarin called "Jewish self-assertion," was established during times of reprieve, then calls for such conditions should have been the message of the Zionist movement. But the movement took the opposite position - for racist purposes - by claiming Jewish superiority and refusing to integrate, which in turn always contributed to undermining the prospects of coexistence. Consequently, these positions not only refute the recurring claim in Zionist literature that Israel was a part of the response to oppression, but also reveals the reason behind the bind in which the Zionist novelist constantly finds himself: to feel a constant need to "justify Israel" - and to adopt racist positions toward that end.

Such political instrumentalization of a traditional religious matter (which never meant what Goldberg wanted it to mean forgets that many Jews did not actually know Hebrew, and that they uttered Hebrew words during their prayers without knowing their meaning.

Though the practice of writing in other languages was a natural custom, this of course does not mean that Jews were not proud of the language. They have always been so, but such pride was always associated with the language's sacred func-tion.!5

The language occupied a purely religious position; it was "the language of the Jewish spirit ... even during the times when Hebrew ceased to be a complete language."1º During times when Hebrew was only the language of religion and prayer, and when Jews did not suffer from religious, political or racist persecution, they chose to use the languages of the societies in which they lived in their philosophical, intellectual and literary production. Such decisions indicate the natural status of the Hebrew language.

Thus, language became of utmost impor-tance. Hebrew was subordinated to the movement's political ends and was made, through incremental and constant direction, into a justification for the movement's existence because it represented the tenuous link that connects the world's Jews. Because Hebrew actually reflected a religious bond and not a national one, Zionism regarded the task of changing that to be among its foremost priori-ties.

While Zionism does not in fact emerge from scriptural tradition or cultural practice, it insists on its own supremacy as the primary model and final arbiter of Jewish peoplehood. This effort was not the sole domain of Jewish people. The imperial powers and philosemitic luminaries played an important role. Kanafani does not treat Zionism as a natural response to European antisemitism, instead exploring intracommunal dynamics around class and religious devotion.

On Zionist Literature

Highlights