The current issue of Ma’arav departs from the historic path and the forgotten story of the Territorialists and other groups that offered different solutions to the Jewish question. It passes through the means in which the state of Israel eliminates these narratives and generates itself as The Homeland, and returns to the imagination through different possibilities developed by artists, and through reflections about a different political existence at this time and place. The path from the ‘historic’ to the ‘imagined’ is not such a simple and well defined course for movement. The transition from the charge created by one to the potential freedom of the other is not all that clear. The historical story would have been desolate without the imagination that became possible decades ago, while today’s imagination can no longer detach itself from the concrete history of this place and of our life here.

Ma’arav special issue about “The Jewish question in history and the Jewish existence in this day and age” is published alongside the exhibition “Where to?”. The Exhibition is held at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, 28/4/2012 – 14/7/2012.

The preface was translated into English by Noa Shuval

In its simplest form, the Territorialist idea is the establishment of an autonomous entity or, alternatively, a state for the Jews in some territory other than the Land of Israel. This idea was born together with Zionist ideology. Ever since Pinsker, in his Auto-Emancipation, stated that “the goal of our present endeavors must be not the ‘Holy Land,’ but a land of our own,” there were those Jews who clung to the idea of “a land of our own,” aiming to establish either a state or some other kind of autonomous collective somewhere other than the Land of Israel.

Such settlement enterprises regularly came up in the history of the Jewish people. These were usually local, individual initiatives that disappeared as soon as they sprung up, without being followed by genuine activity. Starting with the second half of the seventeenth century up until the 1880s, various suggestions for Jewish settlement were constantly put on the table, including the Caribbean island of Curaçao; Suriname; Cayenne, French Guiana; Novorossiya; Crimea; Buffalo, New York; Texas; areas around the Tennessee, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers; Illinois, Ohio, Nebraska, Kansas, and Cypress. Not a single one of these initiatives had to do with the Territorialist ideology, which sprung out of the Zionist movement in the early twentieth century.

The Uganda Proposal, which Herzl brought before the Sixth Zionist Congress in August 1903, was the main reason for the establishment of The Jewish Territorialist Organization (ITO) in the summer of 1905, and for the transformation of Territorialism into a central ideological branch of Jewish nationalism. The Proposal constituted a watershed in the history of the Zionist movement and the Jewish people, sharpening the differences within the Zionist Organization between political Zionists, who supported Herzl, and Palestine-“loyalists”: between those who sought to establish a Jewish state in any territory that would be granted to the Jewish people, and those who insisted that the Land of Israel is the only natural place for such a state.

The choice of Eretz Israel as a home of the Jewish people was not an obvious matter in the Zionist Organization up until the Uganda Proposal, and many Zionists deliberated between “the Holy Land” and “a land of our own.” Some considered joining the Am Olam movement, and to take part in establishing agrarian colonies in the US; and a decade later there were those who saw no contradiction between agrarian settlement in Argentina and in Israel. The book The Jewish State by Theodor Herzl that was published four years after Pinsker’s death was another central link that led to the consolidation of territorialist ideology and the strengthening of the conceptual trend within the Zionist movement that the Land of Israel was a possible but not necessary territory for it. Like Auto-Emancipation, The Jewish State also did not decide the territorial issue, and instead of “our land” and “our Holy Land,” Herzl wavered between the Land of Israel and Argentina.  His dilemma is especially interesting because, unlike Pinsker’s work, The Jewish State was written after 14years of the Zionist endeavor when there were already 20settlements in the Land of Israel. Yet, despite the achievements of the settlers and the changes that occurred in the Hibbat Zion movement, the Land of Israel was not perceived as the sole solution for the Jewish people. Herzl sharpened the issue even more when he tried to make diplomacy precede settlement, and precluded any possibility of pre-emptive and unplanned settlement in the Land of Israel.

Even the Basel Program of the First Zionist Congress, which stated that “Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine,” did not put an end to searches for a chance territory for the Jewish people. In 1902, a Zionist expedition set out to El Arish, Egypt, in order to explore whether the area was fit for Jewish settlement. The idea was ruled out, as the place was found to be too barren. In late 1905, Otto Warburg, a leading German Zionist figure, member of the executive committee and later president of the Zionist Organization, promoted Jewish settlement in Mesopotamia—another failed attempt that did not bear political results.

Territorialist ideology was fed by two social phenomena that were an inseparable part of the life of Eastern European Jewish society of the early twentieth century: pogroms and emigration. The pogroms served the Territorialists as proof that Jews have no future in Eastern Europe, and that if no territory would soon be found, whether in Israel or elsewhere, the results would be catastrophic. The emigration of some 1.5 million Jews during the first decade of the twentieth century was an expression of the physical existential distress they faced. The Territorialists expressed concern that this ongoing stream of emigrants would cause host countries to close their gates, with hundreds of thousands of Jews finding themselves trapped in their countries of residence. They hoped that once the appropriate territory would be found on which a Jewish state could be established, a great number of Jews would emigrate to it. While some would do so out of choice, for the vast majority of them this would be the only option, since no other state but the future Jewish one would be willing to accept any more of them.

The removal of the Uganda Proposal from the agenda of the Zionist Organization, and its ban on new settlement proposals outside the Land of Israel, shut the door for Herzl-following political Zionists, which led to a rift in the Zionist movement. The Jewish Territorialist Organization (ITO) was founded in August 1905, on the last day of the Seventh Zionist Congress, by a group led by Israel Zangwill , who sought to establish an alternative body to the Zionist Organization. The ITO platform defined its goal in a plain and simple manner: “to obtain territory on an autonomous basis for those among the Jews who could not or would not remain in the countries in which they were living.”[1] The platform also stated that in order to achieve its aims, the ITO would strive to unite all Jews who support this cause, to negotiate with governments and with private and public bodies, and finally, to found financial and other necessary institutions.

“An autonomous territory,” as stated by the ITO, was one of the basic, most important principles of the Territorialist approach. It sought to follow Herzl’s version of Zionism by forming an autonomous Jewish government under the custody of one of the world’s superpowers. This is why they kept on warning against settlement in densely populated areas, where Jews would continue to be a persecuted minority within the social majority. It would be ridiculous, they argued, to reproduce in the country of destination the same problems Jews experienced in their countries of residence. This, for them, was a necessary condition for realizing their idea, and a goal to be strived for. They sought to base the territory in question on the immediate interests of one of the European states, and their reliance on the colonialism of these imperial powers was their main source of hope for attaining such a land.

Yet another element of Territorialist ideology was the time factor, which was regarded as crucial for the choice of territory. The claim was that the rise of Jewish distress is exponential whereas that of Zionist activity is linear: hence Zionism does not have sufficient time in order to establish a Jewish state in Israel. From the Territorialists’ perspective, this race against time was absolutely crucial for the Jewish people: The Zionist enterprise was slow-moving, 3,000 Jews were murdered between 1904–1906, and emigration reached levels never before seen. These were the reasons Herzl turned his gaze to East Africa, and his Territorialist followers—to the rest of the world.

The Territorialists’ basic position argued that Jewish distress can stand no delays: persecuted and bleeding Eastern European Jewry can no longer wait until Zionists would lay the foundations for a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. Theirs was a view that rejected Eastern European Jewish existence, and sought to rescue it even at the cost of giving up on the dream of settling the Promised Land. Their sensitivity to the suffering and distress of Jews shaped their opsimism . On the one hand, they foresaw a grim future for the Jews of Eastern Europe, ruling out any possibility of them integrating into their surrounding societies. On the other hand, the Territorialists exhibited a great deal of optimism and faith that a suitable territory would soon be found in which a Jewish state could be established.

The novelist Yosef (Joseph) Haim Brenner who, for a brief period, held territorialist views, strongly expressed territorialist pessimism and the importance of finding a strip of land for the Jews. In “Letter to Russia,” which was written after he had lost his close friend HayaWolfson in the Bialystok pogrom, Brenner gave voice to the territorialist worldview: Land! Any land that can be obtained, any land that one can begin to build our home within it; a land not for today which has already been lost to us, but a land for tomorrow, for the generations to come, for the Nemirov orphans in twenty years’ time, in fifty years, in a hundred years. As a kind of apocalyptic vision that was realized 40 years after writing the article, when six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, Brenner formulated the fear of the Territorialists and explained clearly what caused them to forgo the Land of Israel.

The Territorialists did not object to the Land of Israel out of principle, but rather doubted the success of its settlement enterprise. One of the major obstacles Zangwill foresaw was the Arab population. Territorialists were first among the Zionist movement who regarded the Arab population of Palestine as a factor that places a question mark over the success of the Zionist project. Although it was Ahad Ha’am in his 1891 essay “A Truth from Eretz Yisrael” who was first to address this issue, he did so in a sideway manner. His claim that Jewish farmers in Palestine treated their Arab workers in a manner typical of slaves turned masters was not pursued in his later writings. As Hebrew teacher Yitzhak Epstein put it, the Arab question was the missing question of Zionist thinking, prior to the Balfour Declaration. Zangwill and the other Territorialists, on the other hand, recognized this issue: they were aware of the danger involved in the friction between Jews and Arabs, which caused them to be pessimistic about the prospects of Zionism in the Land of Israel.

In 1905, shortly after the Territorialists’ splitting, Zangwill argued that the Land of Israel is populated with Arabs, and that Jews would find it hard to become a majority there: “There is, however, a difficulty from which a Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants, the pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two souls to the square mile. And not 25 per cent of them Jews; so we must be prepared either to drive out the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us.”[2]

Zangwill regarded not only the numerical relation between Jews and Arabs as a problem that Zionism would find hard to deal with, but also the Arab ownership of a vast portion of the land. “At present we are only 12 per cent of the population, and hold only 2 per cent of the land. A good deal of the holy soil is in the hands of private proprietors, and would not be ours even if we got the Charter, while the Crown lands, which belong to the Sultan, and might, therefore, be negotiated for as a whole, are, unfortunately, low and swampy and fever-haunted”.[3]

Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942) also addressed the question of the Arab population of Israel. Zeitlin, who grew up in a pious Hassidic family, was exposed at an early age to Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) literature, which took over him. He renounced his faith, and began to teach Hebrew, publishing articles on various topics in Jewish newspapers in Hebrew and Yiddish during the late nineteenth century. He was one of the keen supporters of Herzl’s political Zionism, and even served as a Zionist representative for the Gomel area in the 1901 Fifth Zionist Congress. Disappointed from the Uganda affair, he quit the Zionist Organization and joined the ITO, and in 1905 was appointed editor of Hazman (The Time)—then the main medium for Territorialist views.

In his article “The Crisis: Territorial Notes,” Zeitlin expressed his anxiety about the Jewish people after the resolutions that passed at the Congress: “I am not concerned about the division, nor am I concerned about the split, nor am I concerned about the ban, but it is about the destruction of the people that I am concerned.”[4] The reason for his anxiety was the Zionist position that regarded the Land of Israel as the exclusive territorial solution for the Jewish problem. One of his main arguments that testified to the failure in Zionist ideological thought was the Arab question and the illegitimacy of Zionists to claim the land: And who has given you Palestine or will give it to you? Or perhaps you are able to take Palestine? … What all the Palestinians forget either by accident or intentionally, is that Palestine is in the hands of others and is completely inhabited. I have as much right to dream about Palestine as I would have to dream about Paris or London.[5]

With the founding of the ITO, the Territorialists began searching for a land that would be suitable for Jewish settlement, and with the right conditions for the absorption of the great number of Jews who would wish to move there. Zangwill dedicated nine years to searching for the right territory, and never found one. He crossed lands and seas: Africa, Australia, America, Asia, negotiating with governments who kindled his hope yet bitterly disappointed him. The Territorialist claim, that some superpower is likely to be willing to grant Jews a piece of land in one of its colonies, was aligned with the imperialist trends of the early twentieth century. Zangwill and his followers believed that, due to the density of Britain’s population and the scarce population in its colonies, the empire would allow Jews to start their own settlements in those areas. The Territorialists also believed it would be possible to reach an agreement with European states, and to convince them, partly on moral grounds, to grant the Jews a piece of land, since no country has a right to hold territories it cannot settle, while other people have no place under the sun.

It appears that there was no place on earth whose advantages, disadvantages, and prospects for Jewish settlement were not considered. Several alternatives in North and South America were examined, including Canada (Ontario and Western Canada), the United States (Nevada, , Idaho, Galveston), Argentina, Bolivia, and Columbia; In Africa, Rhodesia, Libya, Angola, and East Africa were looked into; in Australia, the North-East Territory and the Kimberley area were under negotiation; and in Asia, the option of Iraq (Mesopotamia) came up. From among the suggestion that were brought up, Zangwill made diplomatic efforts only in East Africa, Canada Australia, and Angola. The rest of them were insignificant, and disappeared as soon as they came up.

As time went by the Territorialists realized that obtaining a territory is no trivial matter, finding it difficult to convince the negotiating states that a Jewish autonomous entity in one of their overseas colonies is a vital interest for their own preservation. Each time Zangwill seemed to be on the brink of a diplomatic breakthrough, the negotiations collapsed. The reasons were varied: hostile public opinion to the idea of mass Jewish immigration; fear that the ethnically segregating Jews would constitute a state within a state; finally, the colonial powers demanded the financial support of Jewish philanthropists as a precondition for the Territorialist settlement enterprise, whereas these philanthropists conditioned their support on the agreement in principle of these powers. Unable to escape this vicious cycle, Zangwill found he reached a deadlock in every negotiation he conducted.

The ITO disbanded in 1925, with most of its members returning to the Zionist movement. The outbreak of the First World War, the Balfour Declaration, the massive immigration to Palestine in the 1920s, and the tightening of the relations between the Zionist movement and the British government, all weakened the ITO, turning it irrelevant to the new world order. Yet it is precisely the reasons that led to the collapse of the ITO that best illustrate the reasons for its establishment. The first half of the 1920s was marked by great hope for the Zionist movement, contrary to the first decade of that century. The British opened the gates of Palestine for immigration, and were determined to implement the Balfour Declaration; the League of Nations ratified the British Mandate of Palestine, recognizing the historic connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel; new settlements were founded, and it appeared as if the establishment of a Jewish state is but a matter of time. Given these circumstances, the Territorialist approach no longer seemed necessary, whereas the Zionist solution in Palestine seemed promising. Territorialism emerged in periods of despair and a climate of existential threat, yet faded during periods of hope.

When the sky began to cloud during the late 1920s and early 30s, voices questioning the capacity of the Land of Israel to absorb thousands of future immigrants were once again heard. The Nazis rise to power, the deteriorating world order, the Jewish-Arab conflict, and Britain’s retreat from the Balfour Declaration led to the revival of old-new Territorialist ideas, and to the establishment of the Frayland League, led by Isaac Nachman Steinberg.

***

The attempt to get to the bottom of Territorialist thought reveals it to have been an essentially pragmatic worldview, whose advocates had a clear view of reality, and hence were looking for a quick, dramatic solution. The failure of their search for a land for the Jews might make them seem like utopian ideologists, out of touch with the reality of their people. Yet from the point of view of the early twentieth century, Zionism itself was no less utopian, driven by a dream or vision which was even less practical than the Territorialist one. The Land of Israel was as hard to obtain as any other land, including those considered by the Territorialists, and the Zionist movement too was not yet backed up by any superpower that took upon itself to promote the Jewish question. In this respect, the two rival movements had more in common than not. Both believed a territorial solution would solve the Eastern European Jewish problem, and both began their national endeavors against all odds and from a highly problematic and complex starting point.

But even if Territorialists and Zionists agreed on the diagnosis, they disagreed on the prognosis. Territorialists were pessimistic regarding the prospects of Jews in Eastern Europe, anticipating a bleak existential and economic future. Their biggest fear was that immigration-absorbing countries might close their gates, leaving Jews without any reasonable alternative. They would lead a life full of persecution, suffering, and economic hardship, sinking into a deep and long-lasting despair, with their fellow Jews unable to reach out and rescue them. A territorial sanctuary is therefore immediately required. On their other hand, following the Seventh Congress, the Zionists abandoned the approach of “catastrophic Zionism,” which characterized the era of Pinsker and Herzl, and modified their prognosis. Unlike the Territorialists, who believed that existing reality would only make matters worse for the Jews, the Zionists were convinced that the upcoming political transformations in the lives of Eastern European Jews would make things better for them and alleviate their distress.

Herein lies the essential difference between the Zionist Organization and the ITO. The Territorialists saw themselves first and foremost as a rescue organization (in the physical-existential sense), and therefore dedicated most of their time for searching after a territory suitable for immediate, mass settlement. Zionists, on the other hand—at least during the years prior to the First World War, and the first decade of the British Mandate—saw their movement primarily as a national one, centered around the Land of Israel, which was not simply regarded as a sanctuary for masses of Jews seeking an answer to their woes.

And yet the prognoses of both Territorialist and Zionists proved wrong. With respect to the Territorialists, not only did the catastrophe they feared from and warned against fail to take place in their time. They abandoned the “catastrophic ideology” after the Balfour declaration, joined the Zionist movement, and took active part in the nation-building effort in Israel. On the other hand, an opposite processes took place within the Zionist movement. In the early twentieth century, it was Zionists who abandoned the catastrophic, pessimistic approach, and yet in later years they adopted it: Once it became clear that a national disaster of unprecedented scale was threatening the Jewish people, Zionists began to regard European reality the way Territorialists did in the years following the Seventh Congress. It was only in the 1930s (and in the period following the Holocaust)—during which the Zionist movement first realized that the distress of European Jews is extreme, and that it had to strive for a fast solution in Palestine—that it began to make use of a terminology taken from the Territorialist ideology of the early twentieth century.

The Territorialists’ departure from the Zionist Organization in light of the essential debate regarding the time-frame the Jewish people had at their disposal for establishing a state, not only highlighted the difference between the two ideologies. In addition, it no longer allows the Zionist movement to associate itself with the idea that the concern for the wellbeing of the Jewish people and for its very existence in Europe was a central component of its ideology since its beginning. It seems that the Zionist rhetoric and self-image of a rescue movement hides more than it reveals. The claim that Zionism realized the existential danger to Europe’s Jews, and that from its early days it went to great lengths to found a sanctuary land for masses of Jews, was a retroactive attempt done in hindsight.

Yet despite their accurate diagnosis of the Jewish problem, and the sensitivity they exhibited to Jewish suffering, the political achievements of the Territorialists were few. Ten years of searching for a territory yielded no practical results, and the ITO came to the end of its road in the eve of the First World War. Five main reasons led to the decline of Territorialist ideology:

1. The Territorialist idea put down roots in Jewish society in times of crisis and despair: Pinsker published Auto-Emancipation following the 1881–82 pogroms; the Uganda Proposal was discussed in Zionist establishments against the background of the Kishinev pogrom; the negotiations held by the ITO took place against the background of vast emigration; and the Nazi rise to power with its Jewish persecutions during the 1930s led to the revival of Territorialism, and to the establishment of the Frayland League. In quiet and optimistic years, Territorialism lost its grip on Jewish society, and in the absence of concrete results, its activists found new political homes. The ITO began its way during a hard and miserable period for Eastern European Jewish society: a fact that brought it many supporters, turning it into a mass movement. Yet as the existential distress receded and became less threatening, and the Jewish question was perceived not in terms of life and death, the Territorialist idea weakened and lost its appeal. The Balfour Declaration and the early period of the British Mandate for Palestine were a time of hope, forming a reality that turned Territorialism irrelevant.

2. The Territorialists sought to utilize Eastern European Jewish emigration for furthering their political purposes. They regarded the tens of thousands emigrating each year from Russia, Galicia, and Romania as potential manpower, which they were hoping to turn into the demographic basis for establishing a Jewish state, by diverting the emigration current from Manhattan to a some other territory. They believed they had the power to interfere in the internal dynamics of this process, thereby bringing about the desired change. It appears, however, that in this respect, the Territorialists misinterpreted this emigration, and exaggerated their capacity to interfere with it. The decision of Jews to emigrate was driven primarily by economic distress, and the urge to change their present condition. The Americas (especially the US) gave these emigrants the opportunity to start a new life that was completely different from the ones they had in Eastern Europe. The Territorialist idea—like the Zionist one—was unable to compete with the United State’s image as the land of endless opportunities, and with the hope it sparked in the hearts of millions. The starving Jewish emigrants were not interested in partaking in any kind of ideological social experiment: their sole purpose was to feed their families. Another related issue is the Territorialist concern that liberal immigration policies might change, with more countries following in the footsteps of England by closing their gates. In that case, Eastern European Jewry would find itself trapped within a hostile, violent society, with no way out. This prediction only came true in 1924, once two million people had already migrated to every possible destination country, with England publically supporting the establishment of a Jewish national home in Israel. Once mass migration ceased, and the Zionist movement received a charter for the Land of Israel, in the form of the Balfour Declaration, the ITO found itself with no political agenda and no influence in the Jewish public.

3. The ITO’s main aim was “To obtain an autonomous territory for those Jews who cannot or will not remain in their countries of residence.” In order to achieve this, Zangwill began searching for suitable places, thinly populated, which could absorb masses of Jews. His diplomatic efforts reveal that there was almost no place on earth that was not carefully examined, which in some cases led to official contacts with various governments. Every negotiating state agreed to accept Jews as individuals but under no circumstances as a nation, rejecting any possibility for establishing a Jewish autonomy in the areas under their control. In the absence of land, the ITO had no means of executing its sole purpose, thereby losing its raison d’être. Territorialist diplomacy was also problematic to some extent. The Territorialists relied on colonial European powers, seeking to make use of their interests in the areas under their rule. This activity can be said to suffer form a moral flaw. Zangwill did not question the moral right of the European powers—especially England—to rule over vast overseas areas, and sought to utilize this in favor of Jewish interests. The First World War, which put an end to the colonial age, left Zangwill no hope of finding such a shared interest between the ITO and a European power.

4. The Territorialist movement had no pioneer elite who took upon itself the task of preparing the territory of destination for the absorption of mass waves of future immigrants. To prepare the land and establish a viable economic framework required a long period. The Zionist movement had at its disposal regiments of pioneers who visited Israel since the First Aliyah (immigration wave) up until the founding of the state. Like a relay race, in which a tired runner finishes his role by passing the baton onto the next one, who is fresh and ready, new pioneers took over veteran ones in continuing the task of Zionist activity. The Zionist locomotive kept rushing ahead, constantly increasing speed despite every hurdle. The ITO never had the kind of motivated and dedicated reservoir of pioneers that the Zionist movement had. Without a territory, the idealist quality group that every national movement requires in order to turn its ideas into practice never materialized.

5. Beyond the historical and rational reasons for the decline of the Territorialist movement, there was one other reason that was not essentially related to Jewish distress or to the geopolitical conditions of the early twentieth century. Territorialism analyzed reality in a stark manner and with open eyes: they saw the persecution of Jews as an existential danger, and regarded their rescue as their main motivation. Yet such a cold and calculated approach is not enough for fueling a national movement. The Territorialists disengaged the emotional aspect of their national activity, relying on the assumption that in times of need Jews would move to any territory whatsoever as long as it would save their lives and those of their loved ones. Yet it turned out that bleak prophesies were not enough, and that followers also had to be inspired by hope, and by a positive connection with national activity. In peaceful, more relaxed periods, Territorialism found it hard to pursue its activity and to persuade others of its importance. Just as fast as those Zionist activists moved to the Territorialist camp, they abandoned it in order to return to the bosom of Zionism. Zion proved inseparable from Zionism. The ITO’s lack of success testifies to the power of myths in national movements. Short of such a myth, the Territorialist Organization remained a small circle of intellectuals who, while indeed analyzing reality, and the grim prospects of Eastern European Jews, in a cold and calculated manner, did not have at its disposal the army that could execute their ideas when the day would come. Territorialist ideology thus suffered from a paradigmatic flaw. Whereas the Zionist movement was guided by a national approach with historical-mythical foundations, Territorialists were scientific, rational, and intellectual. Such tools and methods (surveys, statistics, choosing optimal alternatives) proved irrelevant for a national discourse whose heart and soul is mythical. This was the secret power of the Zionist movement, as well as the main source of weakness of the Territorialist one.

Historical perspective proved that the Zionist path finally led to the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, whereas the Territorialist attempts to find a suitable territory failed. At the same time, this paper refrained from using the terms “Zionist success” and “Territorialist failure.” First, since a historic study has no room for evaluative terms: Territorialist ideology has to be understood first and foremost from the point of view of its contemporaries, and not from ours. The 1903–1906 pogrom, the West-bound emigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews during the early twentieth century, the poverty of Eastern European Jewry, and the limited capacity of the Land of Israel to absorb masses of immigrants were the main reasons for the rise of Territorialism. The problems of the time were so urgent and consequential that some Jews believed that the Zionist schedule is not in alignment with Jewish distress—hence it was imperative to hurry, and to quickly establish a Jewish national home for the poor, the emigrants, and the survivors of pogroms in whatever place possible.

Second, 130 years of Zionist activism are no necessary guarantee for the success of its idea. Zionism indeed “won” over all its rivals—but the words must immediately be added: so far. The future of the Zionist project in Israel—like the future of any individual or group—is uncertain and foggy. Were Territorialist predictions to some day materialize, historical perspective would change with them: what is now regarded as a glorious victory might turn into a painful defeat. The Territorialist claim that six hundred thousand Arabs would not let the Jews settling in Israel live in peace, that the ensuing conflict would be irresolvable and last for many years, and that it would be unwise to put all the eggs in one basket, in the sense that the concentration of Jews in a single territory not only does not improve the Jewish condition but endangers it—might turn out to be a sober view of reality, and a prophecy that might fulfill itself.

The second half of the twentieth century was good to the Jewish people: it received new strength, and entered on a promising, successful course. In many respects, the State of Israel now constitutes the center of Jewish life and being, taking upon itself the right to defend the Jewish people from future catastrophes that might arrive. Should that be the case, and should the state of Israel find it hard to handle these catastrophes, we are likely to witness the rebirth of Territorialism (albeit probably in a somewhat different version), rising from the ashes like a Phoenix in times of distress and crisis.

Translated by Naveh Frumer

[2] See: Speeches, Articles and Letters of Israel Zangwill (ed Maurice Simon), in Israel Zangwill, ‘The East Africa Offer’, London 1937, p.  210

[3] Ibid,, 210.

[4] See: Zeitlin, ‘Ha-Mashber: Reshimot Teritoryali’, Ha-Zeman: Yarchon le-Inyanei ha-Chaimm ha-Sifrut, ha-Omanut, veha-Mada, Vol. 3 (July-September 1905): 259.

[5] Ibid., 264.

Link to the Article in English

When he set off for Poland, the forty-six-year-old Döblin looked the part of a bookish writer. He favored tweedy suits, wore eyeglasses that gave him a fishbowl stare, and had a pronounced crease in his brow that deepened with age. His two month tour, chronicled in Journey to Poland (1925), brought him into contact with religious Jews, wonder-working rabbis, Zionists and Yiddishists. And though Döblin traveled by train through modern Europe, his journey led him straight into the depths of “ancient national feeling.” His revelation that the Jewish “nation remained whole” despite having been “thrown out of Palestine […] two thousand years ago” roused Döblin to action. He contemplated Jewish rebirth through Zionism, wondering: “What if history were turned backward and the Jews were really given Zion?” But his flirtation with the Zionist movement was short-lived. Döblin ultimately sided with an anonymous Yiddish writer he met in Lodz who concluded that Zionism is “not where the future of the world lies”; first “the world has to be humanized.”[4]

By the mid-1930s, as Germany descended into barbarism, Döblin dedicated himself to a humanist vision of Jewish redemption. He was influenced in large part by his Polish travels and his subsequent encounters with émigré Jewish intellectuals he met in Berlin. Formerly an alienated and indifferent Jew, the nearsighted Döblin emerged as a visionary ideologue for a group of Yiddishist social revolutionaries: the Freeland League for Territorial Colonisation (Frayland-lige far Teritoryalistisher Kolonizatsye). The Freeland League took its name and inspiration from Jewish economist Theodor Hertzka’s utopian novel of East African colonization, Freeland: A Social Anticipation (1890). The similarly named Hertzka had been Theodor Herzl’s journalist colleague for the Neue Freie Presse, and his programmatic novel had influenced the Zionist leader’s own technocratic fantasies of the Jewish future both in his founding manifesto, The Jewish State (1896), and his 1902 novel, Old-New Land (Altneuland). Hertzka’s vision of cooperative land ownership in East Africa had also impressed Herzl’s hand-picked advisor on settlement issues, Franz Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer had even published a critical revision of Herzka’s novel, Freiland in Deutschland (1895), which promoted a system of economically rational, planned settlements in Germany. In 1903, Herzl invited Oppenheimer to address the Sixth Zionist Congress as an expert on settlement issues. Herzl hoped Oppenheimer’s speech would reinforce for delegates the practical nature of the so-called Uganda Plan. Later, Oppenheimer’s settlement system formed the blueprint for the structure of moshav Merchavia. In their choice of name, Freeland League leaders thus borrowed equity both from Jewish intellectual history and from successful Zionist settlement schemes in Palestine in order to legitimize their own ill-starred colonization efforts.

The Freeland League emerged in Poland as a response to rising anti-Semitism in that country and the growing belligerence of Nazism on its borders. A heterogeneous group of  intellectuals, scholars, belletrists and political activists formed the core of the nascent Freeland League in Warsaw in the early 1930s. They sought to provide Jews with an alternative to Zionism, non-territorial Bundism, and assimiliationist trends. This disunited cadre conceived of the Freeland League as a reincarnation of celebrated Anglo-Jewish author Israel Zangwill’s defunct Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO), combined with the agrarian commitments of left-labor socialist revolutionaries. At one point, the British branch of the Freeland League even entertained the possibility of adopting the ITO name and platform.[5] But even before officially chartering their organization at a London conference in 1935, Freeland supporters had published two issues of a short-lived periodical in Warsaw. Contributors to the journal, Frayland, included the influential radical Haim Zhitlowski, socialist leader Ben-Adir (Avrom Rozin), demographer Jacob (Yankev) Lestschinsky, poet Melech Ravtich (Zekharye-Khone Bergner), and—in both issues—Alfred Döblin.

Döblin fled Nazi Germany in February 1933 ahead of the Gestapo and arrived in Zurich. There he was said by a colleague to have discovered Herzl’s legacy and taken a particular interest in the failed Uganda Plan.[6] From Switzerland he made his way to France, where he settled. While his books were being burned in Berlin, in Paris he wrote two volumes of meditations on the question of Jewish collective renewal. In these works he presented Jewish Emancipation as a total failure. Instead, he advocated a revival of Zangwill’s ITO plans for mass Jewish settlement in Angola,[7] a plan he also revealed to confidantes in a letter from this period.[8] Döblin envisioned a new territorialist organization that would be even “farther-reaching than Zionism.” Indeed, he believed that his proposed movement would supersede Zionism as a means to rescue the millions of Jews “who live as a slave-people, near, on, or over the verge of destruction.”[9] His rejection of assimilation, his enthusiasm for Zangwill’s ITO, and his socialist agenda caught the attention of the Freelanders. By November 1933 he had become a founder of the Ligue Juive pour Colonisation, later to become the Paris branch of the Freeland League. The frustrations and fantasies of a small but influential circle of Warsaw-based Yiddishists had now found powerful expression in the writings of an internationally acclaimed author, a Jewish atheist who had first reconnected to his religious heritage in Poland. The Freelanders quickly translated some of Döblin’s work to bring his Jeremiads to the Yiddish-reading public. And Döblin reported to Thomas Mann that he had begun learning Yiddish himself.[10]

The first of Döblin’s essays to appear in Frayland in 1934, “The Tragic Fate of West European Jewry,” presented a grim assessment of Jewish homelessness: “Since Jews lost their land and state, they sit […] locked up in a cage like a pack of trapped animals […] because there is no security or law for Jews in the world, because behind the law there must be the sword, and the sword, as we know, is in the hands of others.” He believed that assimilated Jewry stood at a crossroads, one marked by the bent-armed shadow of the swastika. Jewish “lovers of Goethe and Schiller are on trial,” he wrote, tested by anti-Semitism. Döblin felt certain that without knowledge of “their own history” and without “one shred of Jewish content,” his Westernized coreligionists would fail to save themselves. He scorned these “ruins of the Jewish people, these end results of Western Emancipation,” who persist in a “one-sided love” of European culture.[11] Döblin, despite being every bit as assimilated as Herzl and Zangwill, here sounds more like a messianic prophet than a secular political activist.

His second article for Frayland, “Territorialism and New Judea,” appeared at the end of 1934 and expanded Döblin’s earlier vision. In this apocalyptic essay, he focused not on the original Zionist and territorialist question—“How can we get a land for the Jews?”—but on the more fundamental question—“How can we get Jews for a land?” Döblin believed that Herzl’s “wavering between Palestine and Argentina” in The Jewish State, and his later readiness “to come out in favor of Uganda” at the Sixth Zionist Congress, were symptomatic of a weakness inherent both in Herzl’s Zionism and “the old territorialism” of Zangwill. In their narrow pursuit of land, both leaders had failed to consider the spiritual dimensions of the Jewish condition. While Herzl and Zangwill hoped to create a Europeanized sanctuary for Jews on foreign soil, Döblin believed that the struggle to ape Western civilization had already “spiritually killed off half the Jewish community.” He demanded that Jews “stop…turning towards the ‘West,’” which for him was already synonymous with “cold imperialism” and “war-mongering.” Instead, Jews must “gather themselves together, define their own identity, restore themselves once again, and only then, acquire a land.” How they were to do this in practice remained undefined, but Döblin drew on his study of Jewish history to suggest a path forward.

He compared contemporary Judaism’s “battle with assimilation” to the Jewish “situation after the destruction of the Temple.” As the people of the Land of Israel, Jews once had an “organic national structure,” and to endure as the Diaspora People, their identity had to change. “Now,” he declared, “a new form is needed” to “ensure the survival of Judaism, which is being threatened with catastrophe.” Territory was not enough; Döblin sought nothing less than a complete revivification of Judaism. Döblin’s rhetoric turned metaphysical in his depiction of a New Judea. Jewish life would be new to the extent it would “turn away…from Western civilization” and “safeguard its own spiritual base.” And Jewish life would be Judea-ized when it acknowledged its relationship “to an ancient people formed not through a belligerent or political act, but through a lofty spiritual one.” He explained further that New Judea “will be Jewish precisely in that it will carry out a task for humankind. […] For that reason—and not so as to be an ordinary people living within its own borders—was the Jewish people formed thousands of years ago.”[12] Here the jab at Zionism’s normalizing mission is unmistakable.

Remarkably, excerpts of his writing on the Jewish condition appeared in Hebrew translation in a nine part essay, “Jewish Revival,” published in the yishuv’s most influential cultural journal, Turim, a weekly edited by the most important poet of the day, Avraham Shlonsky. Döblin’s reflections on the failure of the Emancipation appeared from November 1933 through February 1934 in Turim’s pages alongside poetry by now canonical Hebrew authors. Döblin even penned a special introduction to his work for Hebrew readers in which he charged that little had changed for Westernized Jews since Herzl, a claim which must have puzzled many in the yishuv.[13] In the penultimate installment of “Jewish Revival,” Döblin lectured his Hebrew readership that Jews “must aspire to mass settlement” in “under-populated lands,” maintaining that Zangwill’s abandoned designs on Angola should be “considered first of all.”[14] Surely such a suggestion would have stunned and outraged those reading his words in Tel Aviv and elsewhere throughout the British Mandate.

The following summer, Döblin traveled from Paris to attend the London conference which formalized the Freeland League. There he presented the opening lecture on the “aims and character of the Freeland movement”[15] to delegates assembled at the Russell Hotel. Notables who lent their name to the cause included philosopher Bertrand Russell, author J.B. Priestley, Jewish communal leader and scholar Dr. Moses Gaster, politician and labor activist Arthur Creech Jones, and Israel Zangwill’s widow, Edith.[16] Though the meetings of the Preparatory International Conference of the League for Jewish Colonisation were ignored by the mainstream British press, coverage in London’s Jewish Chronicle focused on the gathering’s “realist attitude” and noted in particular Döblin’s speech.[17] The yishuv newspaper Davar even devoted a long article to the “new territorialists” and highlighted Döblin’s role as the “movement’s spiritual leader.”[18]

At the conference, Döblin stated his fervent belief that Jews “stand at the end, at the catastrophic aftermath of the lost battle for emancipation.” The “central and essential task” of the League, he wrote, “is to enlighten and awaken the Jewish masses, for this is indeed a matter of establishing their own ‘Freeland.’” But Döblin believed that prior to any territorial settlement, the Freelanders must “build-up the people,” a labor both spiritual and “political-diplomatic in character.” His speech recognized Zionism’s contribution to Jewish life and the eternal holiness of the land of Israel, while insisting that “the Jewish people are greater than the land.” Thus Döblin declared that “the definitive impulse of the [Freeland] movement” should be the “formation of a new Jewish people.”[19] Before the close of the conference, many of the delegates paid their respects to Israel Zangwill by laying a wreath on his tombstone.[20] Following the ceremony, attendees assembled for a closing session where Döblin reiterated that Hitler’s rise demonstrated that Jews “could only live in peace in their own land.”[21]

The author served on the board of the Paris branch of the Freeland League until 1936,[22] the year in which he became a French citizen and Léon Blum became France’s first Jewish prime minister. But he continued to take an active role in the organization through 1937, and was considered to be something of a diplomat in the early months of that year, able to “bridge the gulf” between the Freeland League’s various factions.[23] In mid-November 1937, Döblin attended the Second General Freeland Conference in Paris, where fundamental questions of the movement’s platform were debated.[24] Wearied by the infighting, Döblin abandoned the League a few months later.[25] By that time, his stirring meditations on the Jewish question, coupled with his vocal support for a spiritually inflected territorialism had made him the most well-known Freeland advocate. The Freeland League, never a popular movement, owed much of its ideology and early legitimacy to Döblin. The author’s vigorous response, both in word and deed, to the growing persecution of European Jewry has been overshadowed by his eventual conversion to Catholicism as a result of a personal spiritual crisis.[26] And though he died a Christian, Döblin lived his life during the perilous years of Nazism as a very public Jew.

In late 1936, when the author was still active in the organization, the Paris Freelanders and the Société d’émigration et de Colonisation Juive (EMCOL) joined forces to create a Political-Geographic Committee in order to explore the possibilities of Jewish settlement in French territories.[27] The Committee met on November 20^th and 21^st, 1936 in Paris to discuss whether French overseas colonies could be considered as possible sites for mass emigration.[28] And though the Committee did not count Döblin among its members, he must have been aware of its progress, later informing his son that a Freeland expedition would be sent to New Caledonia and French Guiana.[29]

The Freeland League and EMCOL directly approached the Minister of Overseas France, Marius Moutet, on December 16, 1936 to seek his support for Jewish colonization. Their aim, they explained to Moutet, was “the establishment of a new Jewish Center” for those “Jews from Central and Eastern Europe who are compelled to leave the countries of their birth to settle in some corner of the immense [French] colonies which are so greatly underpopulated. Our preliminary investigations have drawn our attention more particularly to New Caledonia, Madagascar and French Guiana.”[30] Moutet not only had the proper administrative authority to enter into such negotiations, but he was seen as sympathetic to the Jewish plight, in part perhaps because his late wife had been a Russian Jewish immigrant to France.[31] Those involved in drafting the letter included Léonard Rosenthal, the millionaire “Pearl King,” and Julius Brutzkus, a physician, scholar, activist, and sometime ally of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky. They met with Moutet a few weeks later, on January 14, 1937, to follow up.[32] The powerful Rosenthal provided the Freeland-EMCOL delegation with direct access to Moutet, whom he considered a “friend and advisor.”[33]

Two days after their meeting, and exactly one month after receiving the Freeland-EMCOL letter, Moutet publicly announced that he was “very sympathetic to the idea of the eventual establishment of Jews in our colonies…Madagascar, for example, presents a favorable opportunity if there is appropriate organization and financial backing.” He went on to presume that “upon the high plateaus of that great island suitable land might be found” for settlements.[34] At the same time, Moutet sent the Freeland-EMCOL representatives a private letter similar in tone and content to his public declaration. In his letter, Moutet reiterated his interest in the project and noted that the issue “is now being studied both by my officials and by the respective local authorities.”[35] The Freelanders, whose program Döblin had championed for years, had clearly swayed Moutet to their cause. Moutet’s pronouncement in January 1937 was hailed by territorialists as a French version of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The Paris correspondent for Davar singled out the Freeland League’s role in obtaining what it cynically referred to as the “Moutet Declaration.”[36] The diplomatic Moutet had made no mention of a “national home” for the Jews in his pronouncement, as Lord Balfour had done two decades earlier. Nonetheless, Moutet sincerely believed that he could help Jewish “victims of political passions and religious and racial prejudice”[37] by resettling them in Madagascar.

In late 1936, several months before the Freeland League had set the “Moutet Declaration” in motion, members of the Zionist establishment discussed resettling European Jews in Madagascar as well. Dr. Nahum Goldmann, a cosmopolitan figure who co-founded the World Jewish Congress (WJC) with Rabbi Stephen Wise, the most powerful American Jew in the pre-war era, considered the French island a possible refuge for Poland’s beleaguered Jews. In a “strictly confidential” telegram to Wise, Goldmann reported that Colonel Józef Beck, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, had asked the WJC to “intervene [with the] French government” regarding “Polish Jewish immigration [to] Madagaskar.” Goldmann informed Wise that the “French government [is] not opposed in principle” to the idea, and requested $5,000 from WJC coffers to fund an “experts commission” to the island.[38] In tandem, he encouraged Beck to establish “a governmental level study committee and be ready to present the French Government with a concrete plan” for Jewish resettlement there.[39] Goldmann also wrote to the Governor General of Madagascar suggesting that Jewish artisans, tailors, cobblers, masons, carpenters and merchants represent the vanguard of Jewish settlers.[40] Goldmann’s communiqué to Wise concluded that successful resettlement of Polish Jews in Madagascar would give the fledgling WJC “much prestige [and] importance.”[41]

Other Jewish organizations, including the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), considered relocating refugees to the island. The JDC’s two main decision makers in Europe met with Moutet’s assistant and other officials in June 1937 and came away convinced of France’s “sincere […] desire to make a fair trial in opening some of the French colonial possessions for Jewish immigration.” Though the JDC officials were wary of endorsing “the so-called ‘Beck plan’ of Jewish evacuation from Poland” to Madagascar, they concluded that “it would be a great mistake for the responsible Jewish organizations to sidetrack the proposition. It fully merits at least a thorough competent investigation,”[42] The JDC even considered contributing to the costs of resettling Jewish immigrants there.[43]

Official inquiries made by the Freeland League, the WJC, and the JDC, coupled with internal political forces in Poland and France, mounted through 1937. But by this time, Döblin had begun to distance himself from the Freeland League, and the Freeland League would soon distance itself from any effort to colonize Madagascar. What originated as a territorialist vision for Jewish revival and mass settlement championed by Döblin, quickly devolved into a notorious scheme for forced emigration endorsed by Polish anti-Semites, and later, the highest echelons of the Nazi leadership.

Bibliography

Archival and Unpublished Sources

Archive Nationales, Paris, France (AN)

Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, Israel (CZA)

Hartley Library, Southampton, England (HL)

Weiner Library, London, England (WL)

“A propos d’un project d’établissement d’israélites dans les colonies françaises.”  Le Petit

Parisien. 16 Jan. 1937. p.2. [French]

Astour, Michael C. History of the Freeland League and of the Territorialist Idea

[געשיכטע פון דער פריילאנד-ליגע און פונעם טעריטאריאליסטישן געדאנק]. Vol. I & Vol. II. New

York: Freeland League, 1967. [Yiddish]

Bash, Françoise. “Gender and Survival: A Jewish Family in Occupied France, 1940-1944.”

Feminist Studies. Vol. 32. No. 2. (summer 2006): 299-331.

Chanoch, N. “Michtav M’London.” Davar.  9 Aug 1935 p. 2. [Hebrew]

חנוך, נ. “מכתב מלונדון.” דבר. 9 אוג. 1935 עמ’ 2.

Döblin, Alfred. Journey to Poland. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Paragon, 1991.

[1926]

—. Briefe. Eds. Walter Muschg, Heinz Graber. Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1970. [German]

—. “Ziel und Charakter der Freiland-Bewegung.” in Horch. Schriften zu jüdischen Fragen.

Solothurn: Walter-Verlag, 1995. pp. 312-322. [German]
—. “Jews Renew Yourselves.” The Menorah Journal. Volume XXIII, No. 1, (April-June 1935):

pp. 80-87.

—. “Teritorialism un Neue-Yehuda.” Frayland.  ["טעריטאריאליזם און ניי-יהודה." פריילאנד.]No. 3-4.

(Nov-Dec 1934): 14-25. [Yiddish]

—. “Gzar-Din un Veg fun de Maarav Yidn.” Frayland.  ”גזר-דין און וועג פון די מערב-יידן.” פריילאנד]

No. 1-2. (Sept.-Oct. 1934): 42-49. [Yiddish]

—. “Tchiya Yehudit (part 8).” Turim. ["תחיה יהודית (ח)." טורים.] 8 Feb. 1934. pp. 5-6. [Hebrew]

—. “L’korei Ivrit.” Turim.  ["לקוראי עברית." טורים.]8 Dec. 1933. p.1. [Hebrew]

Graber, Heinz. “Editor’s Introduction.” in Alfred Döblin. Journey to Poland. Trans. Joachim

Neugroschel. New York: Paragon, 1991.

Herman, N. “Hatzarat Moutet.” Davar. 1 Mar. 1937. p. 2. [Hebrew[

[הרמן, נ. "הצהרת מוטה." דבר. 1 מרץ 1937. עמ' 2.]

Horch, Hans Otto. Schriften zu jüdischen Fragen. Solothurn: Walter-Verlag, 1995. [German]

Huguet, Louis. “Alfred Döblin et le Judaisme.” Annales de la Universite d’Abidjan. Serie D

Annales de l’Université d’Abidjan. Série D, V.9. (1976): pp. 47-115. [French]

Kruk, Josef. Tahat Diglan Shel Shalosh Mahapehot: Rusim, Polanim, Yehudim. Vol. II. Trans.

Halamish and Moshe Hurvitz. Tel Aviv: Mahbarot le-sifrut, 1970. [Hebrew]

קרוק, יוסף. תחת דגלן של שלוש מהפכות: רוסים, פולנים, יהודים. כרך 2. תירגום: חלמיש ומשה הורביץ. תל אביב: מחברות לספרות, 1970.

Müller-Salget, Klaus. “Döblin and Judaism.” in A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin.

Eds. Roland Dollinger, Wulf Köpke, Heidi T. Tewarson. Rochester, NY: Camden House,

2004.

“Realist Attitude to the Jewish Problem.” Jewish Chronicle. 26 July 1935. pp. 36, 42.

Rosenthal, Leonard. The Pearl Hunter: An Autobiography. Trans. Herma Briffault. New York:

Henry Schuman, 1952.

Salomone, Sophie Romeuf. “Le Pouvoir Colonial et Les Communautes Etrangeres a

Madagascar 1896-1939.” Thesis. Univ. de Lille III, 1990. [French]

Tonini, Carla. Operation Madagascar. unpublished English ms. translation of Operazione

Madagascar: La Questione  ebraica in Polonia, 1918-1968. Bologna: CLUEB, 1999.

[Italian]

[2] Huguet. “Alfred Döblin et le Judaisme.” pp. 66-68.

[3] Huguet. “Alfred Döblin et le Judaisme.” pp. 66-68; Müller-Salget. “Döblin and Judaism.” p. 235.

[4] Quotations in this paragraph taken from Döblin. Journey to Poland. pp. 50, 102, 255.

[5] Minute book of Freeland League-London (date illegible). [CZA A330/14]

[6] Kruk.תחת דגלן. p. 448.

[7] Döblin. “Jews Renew Yourselves.” p. 84.

[8] Döblin. Letter to Elvira & Arthur Rosin. 4 July 1933. Briefe. p. 181.

[9] This and previous quote from: Döblin. “Jews Renew Yourselves.” p. 87.

[10] Döblin. Letter to Thomas Mann. 23 May 1935. Briefe. pp. 207-208.

[11] Quotations in this paragraph taken from: Döblin. “גזר-דין און וועג פון די מערב-יידן.” פריילאנד. No. 1-2. (Sept.-Oct. 1934): 42-49.

[12] Quotations in previous two paragraphs taken from: Döblin. “טעריטאריאליזם און ניי-יהודה.”  .פריילאנדNo. 3-4. (Nov-Dec 1934): 14-25.

[13] Döblin.  .טורים “לקוראי עברית.”8 Dec. 1933 p.1.

[14] Döblin. “תחיה יהודית (ח).” טורים . 8 Feb. 1934 p.5.

[15] Döblin. “Ziel und Charakter der Freiland-Bewegung.” Title.

[16] “Realist Attitude to the Jewish Problem.” Jewish Chronicle. 26 July 1935. p. 42.

[17] “Realist Attitude to the Jewish Problem.” Jewish Chronicle. 26 July 1935. p. 36, 42

[18] חנוך. “מכתב מלונדון.” דבר. 9 אוגוסט 1935. עמ’2.

[19] Quotations in this paragraph taken from: Döblin. “Ziel und Charakter der Freiland-Bewegung.” pp. 312-322.

[20] “Tribute to Israel Zangwill” Jewish Daily Post. 23 July 1935. n.p. [Zangwill Papers MS 294 18/3/2 HL]

[21] Döblin qtd. in Jewish Chronicle. 26 July 1935. p. 36, 42.

[22] Müller-Salget. “Döblin and Judaism.” pp. 238-239.

[23] Letter J. Brutzkus to J. Leftwich. 1 Mar. 1937 [CZA A330/14].

[24] Astour. געשיכטע פון דער פריילאנד-ליגע.Vol. I. pp. 238-246..

[25] Huguet. “Alfred Döblin et le Judaisme.” p. 98.

[26] Huguet. “Alfred Döblin et le Judaisme.” pp. 105-108. Döblin converted in November 1941 but kept it a secret until July 1947, in part because of the sensitivities of his Jewish friends.

[27] Astour. געשיכטע פון דער פריילאנד-ליגע.Vol. I. pp. 184-187.

[28] Astour. געשיכטע פון דער פריילאנד-ליגע.Vol. I. p. 186.

[29] Döblin. Briefe. pp. 216-217. Letter to Peter Döblin 18 Sept. 1937.

[30] Freeland League to M. Moutet. 16 Dec. 1936. [CZA A330/14]

[31] Bash. “Gender and Survival: A Jewish Family in Occupied France, 1940-1944.” p. 302.

[32] Astour. געשיכטע פון דער פריילאנד-ליגע. Vol. I. p. 191.

[33] Rosenthal. The Pearl Hunter. p. 128.

[34] This and previous quote from: “A propos d’un project d’établissement d’israélites dans les colonies françaises.”  Le Petit Parisien. 16 Jan. 1937. p.2.

[35] “Possibilities of Land Settlement in the French Colonies, America Joint Distribution Committee, European Executive Office, Paris. Sept. 1938.” Letter from M. Moutet to Freeland League-EMCOL 19 Jan, 1937 reproduced in this document, henceforth referred to as “Possibilities of Land Settlement in French Colonies.” [Archive Nationales AJ43/43]. Special thanks to Vicki Caron for helping me track down this source.

[36] הרמן. “הצהרת מוטה.” דבר.1 מרץ 1937. עמ’ 2.

[37] “A propos d’un project d’établissement d’israélites dans les colonies françaises.” Le Petit Parisien. 16 Jan. 1937. p.2.

[38] This and previous quotations from: Telegram N. Goldmann to S. Wise 4 Oct. 1936. [WJC Papers; WL A15/File 3 France 36-37]

[39] N. Goldmann qtd. in Tonini. Operation Madagascar. p.11. Special thanks to Carla Tonini for providing me with her unpublished translation of her monograph.

[40] N.Goldmann qtd. in Salomone. “Le Pouvoir Colonial et Les Communautes Etrangeres a Madagascar 1896-1939.” p. 222.

[41] Telegram N. Goldmann to S. Wise 4 Oct. 1936. [WJC Papers; WL A15/File 3 France 36-37]

[42] This and previous quote from: Letter to Charles J. Liebman from Dr. Bernhard Kahn and Dr. J. Rosen. 12 June 1937. In “Possibilities of Land Settlement in French Colonies.” [Archive Nationales AJ43/43]

[43] Summary of “Previous Efforts on Behalf of Jewish Settlements in French Colonies.” In “Possibilities of Land Settlement in French Colonies.” [Archive Nationales AJ43/43]

As we have seen, the State of Israel describes itself as the homeland of world Jewry and strives to be united with it. In this article I seek to illuminate Israel’s diasporization process of populations outside its borders, and show how this process functions as a dual-purpose mechanism: on the one hand it bolsters and establishes Israel’s status as the homeland of world Jewry, and perpetuates the ‘negation of the exile’ perception whereby meaningful Jewish existence is not possible outside the borders of the homeland, and on the other it seeks to draw and shape the borders of the national collective in a manner that is congruent with Israel’s self-perception as a Western entity in the Middle East. Israel’s diasporization of populations outside its borders therefore establishes it as a homeland to which Jews ‘return’ in order to redeem themselves, and renders irrelevant the question of ‘where to’. To demonstrate this, I shall examine the specific case of Israel’s diasporization of Russian-speaking Jews.

The law that expresses more than anything else Israel’s self-definition as the sole homeland of world Jewry is the Law of Return which enables every Jew, as well as the children and grandchildren of Jews, to immigrate to Israel with their family and become fully-fledged citizens. It was this law that facilitated the arrival of the massive wave of immigration from Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which began in the 1990s and today constitutes approximately 17% of the population defined as ‘Jewish’ in Israel. However, Israel’s aspirations to define itself as the homeland of the Jewish people are not always consistent with the self-definition of the Jews themselves, certainly not of all the Jews. In an article addressing the issue of immigrants to Israel from the former USSR returning to their countries of origin, Yossi Yonah contends that the explanation for this phenomenon lies, inter alia, in the disparity between Israel’s definition of the Jews from the former USSR as its diaspora community, and the self-definition of these Jews themselves. He argues that the State of Israel justifies its immigration policy by means of ethno-cultural Zionist rhetoric that describes the Jews of the former USSR as a diaspora community driven by an adamant and determined aspiration for repatriation. According to this description, the diaspora community aspires to attain religious, cultural, and spiritual self-realization by means of aliyah (immigrationto Israel) and assimilation into the Jewish-Zionist collective[1]. However, as Yonah shows, the diaspora communities and the ‘nation’ have not always enjoyed a harmonious relationship. Although some Jews from the former USSR indeed defined themselves as a national minority connected by a deep bond with the Zionist ethos, others defined themselves as an ethno-religious minority group whose connection with Zionist ideas and the Zionist-Jewish nation state is loose and flimsy. The inconsistency between the self-definition of Jews from the former USSR and the State of Israel’s conceptualization of them explains the fact that during the nineties many of the potential immigrants sought to define themselves as ‘refugees’, and that their preferred immigration destination was primarily the US, not Israel. The significance of this is that the majority of Jews from the former USSR did not adopt the national affinity that Israel sought to impose on them. However, as a consequence of the US enforcing stricter immigration policies in 1989, which prevented the unrestricted entry of immigrants from the former USSR, Israel became an attractive immigration destination for them since it offered automatic citizenship and numerous material benefits[2].

Yonah argues that this historical description does not seek to question the present affinity of immigrants from the former USSR to the national-Zionist ethos, but rather indicates the impressive ability of nationalism to bring about changes in the collective self-definition of diaspora communities[3]. Employing the terminology of nationalism researcher  Brubaker, the basic premise in this description is that nationalism should be viewed as a political stance rather than an ethno-demographic fact, a practical category rather than an analytical one[4]. The national identity of different groups does not constitute a primordial fact, and consequently does not mark the end of a natural and necessary process of the collective acknowledging its national identity and its demand for self-determination, but is the product of a random, circumstantial process. Consequently, the fact that Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants came to Israel even though it was not their preferred immigration destination, and did not define themselves as Zionists or Jews, does not contradict the fact that once they do immigrate they acquire the Jewish-national identity.

Even today, after the immigration wave from the former USSR to Israel has virtually ceased, the State of Israel continues to regard Jews from the former USSR who remained in their countries of origin as its diaspora community, and emphasizes the need for every Jew to immigrate to Israel, despite the fact that many of them do not define themselves as Zionists, and their attitude to Israel can be defined as ambivalent. A survey conducted in December 2007 among Jews from the Ukraine and Russia shows that although 75% of the respondents claimed they were “proud to be Jewish”, only 9% think it is necessary to believe in the principles of Zionism, and 37% believe it is “advisable” to do so[5]. In the main their answers to the question “Who is a Jew?” do not correspond with the definition of Judaism as it is expressed in the Law of Return, or alternatively as it is formulated according to the Jewish  Halacha (religious Jewish law). Thus, 16% claim that a Jew is anyone who perceives himself as such, whereas 33% (the highest number of respondents) claim that a Jew is a person who observes tradition or leads a Jewish way of life[6].

Nevertheless, the fact that a large proportion of Jews from the former USSR do not define themselves as Zionists and do not wish to leave their countries of origin does not prevent Israel from investing efforts to persuade them to immigrate to it. Israel’s motivation to continue encouraging immigration from the former USSR, despite the fact that a considerable percentage of immigrants are not Zionist-oriented, and many of them are not Jewish, should be ascribed to its fears of demographic inferiority in light of the natural increase among Palestinians, and to its aspiration to strengthen its Western character vis-à-vis the population defined as ‘mizrahi’ (Jews of Eastern/Oriental origin) within the Jewish collective[7]. In other words, the non-Jews are coveted since they are, in the words of Ian Lustick, “neither Arab nor Oriental”[8], to which can also be added “and not haredi (ultra-Orthodox)”, and Israel invests considerable efforts in the diasporization of communities that do not define themselves as its diaspora, do not perceive Israel as a ‘homeland’, and certainly do not consider themselves as living in ‘exile’.

The disparity between the self-definition of Russian-speakers outside Israel and how Israel defines them is perceived by the authorities in Israel as a technical problem rather than a fundamental issue. In a meeting of the Knesset Absorption Committee entitled “Unprecedented Slump in Immigration to Israel”, Director-General of the Jewish Agency Moshe Vigdor described the efforts made by the organization he heads to increase the number of immigrants from Russia to Israel. He reported on preparations for the renovation of a new building purchased by the Jewish Agency opposite the new synagogue in Moscow that would constitute a lodestone for young Jews, and described the educational activities held by the Jewish Agency in Moscow, and its collaborations with various organizations. According to him, the purpose of all these activities was to persuade Jews to immigrate to Israel: “It is very important for all of us to be networked so that we can bring here as many young people as possible because this experience is important and increases the chances of aliyah later on”[9]. Vigdor also described the Jewish Agency’s activities among populations of Russian-speaking Jews around the world, a fact that illustrates even more so the disparity between how the State of Israel perceives these Jews and how they perceive themselves, since with the fall of the Communist Bloc these people preferred to immigrate to different countries, such as the US, Germany, and Canada, over the option that was open to them to immigrate to Israel. As we have seen, this fact is perceived by the authorities engaged in immigrant absorption in Israel as an obstacle that needs to be overcome by any means, rather than a fundamental problem mandating renewed debate of the basic premises underlying the policy to encourage immigration. Thus for example, Israel asked the US to stop granting refugee status to Jews from the former USSR so that they would not be able to immigrate to the US and would be compelled to come to Israel[10], and Vigdor reports on similar efforts to stop the immigration of Jews from the former USSR to Germany:

The issue of Germany was already marked at the [Jewish] Agency about four years ago. There was a task force that went to Germany and studied the issues there. There was intensive activity of the Agency’s previous director-general with the German government to stop the entry process and the building of the community there, and it was no simple matter […][11]

Additionally, Israel continues to invest efforts to bring back another population, namely the immigrants to Israel who chose to return to their countries of origin. The number of people holding Israeli citizenship in Russia is estimated at 100,000[12]. In November 2007, the State of Israel launched a heavily-budgeted international campaign that appealed to Israelis living outside Israel to “come back home”. Great emphasis was placed on Israelis in the CIS, but disappointingly it transpired that they do not visit the website where the campaign was held. In an interview for the daily Haaretz, Israel’s Minister of Immigrant Absorption Ya’akov Edri contended that a campaign needs to be formulated that meets the unique needs of people with Israeli citizenship in Russia: “I intend to invest special efforts to bring back the former immigrants. I am certain we will soon be able to announce a gradual increase in the number of immigrants returning to Israel”[13]. Following reorganization, the campaign stopped engaging in the emotional aspect of appealing to sons and daughters to come back home, and focused on describing the various benefits they would be entitled to should they decide to come back to live in Israel. This example shows how Israel adapts its tactics to changing reality and recognizes that a campaign that appeals to Zionist emotions does not have the power to attract the immigrants who returned to Russia. However, even if the strategy changes, the supreme objective – returning all Jews to their homeland – remains firm, and as I shall now show, the narrative that shapes it remains unchanged, but assimilates the new reality.

As we have seen, from a practical aspect Israel is not averse to trying to bring back Jews who do not define themselves as Zionists and do not express a desire to immigrate to it. This therefore raises the question of how Israel contends with the existence of a narrative that proposes the possibility of meaningful Jewish existence in the Diaspora, which challenges the hegemony of the State of Israel with regard to world Jewry and its self-definition as a homeland with which they aspire to unite. One of the ways of contending with this is to describe Zionism as the ultimate stage of Jewish consciousness. This progressive perception, which presumes a gradual continuum of consciousness development, and that Zionism expresses the highest point to which this development aspires, facilitates the arguments that a Jew who is not a Zionist is a Jew who is ‘stuck’ in a lower developmental stage, and that this is a temporary situation. In this way the revival of Jewish life in Russia typifying Vladimir Putin’s period as president can be described as a stage constituting a natural foundation for the inevitable development of Zionist consciousness. This is illustrated in the speech delivered by Chairman of the Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and the Diaspora, MK Zvi Hendel, before guests from the World Congress of Russian-Speaking Jews who attended a meeting on “Israel-Diaspora Relations, Expressing Solidarity with the State of Israel”:

We need you in the world, we need the solidarity of the Jewish people, because you are our brothers and we are the state that gives you confidence throughout the world, and your help is important. And help that is no less important is that anyone who has reached a stage of Zionist maturity, we need them here. People who can encourage their surroundings, friends, neighborhood, city, town, or country, to immigrate to Israel. The place of the Jewish people is in Israel. […] Not everyone can immigrate, and it is difficult for some and it takes them time to immigrate, but those who can, must be encouraged.[14]

Emerging from these words is that living in the Diaspora is perceived as a temporary matter. The premise is that while the help and assistance of Jews living outside Israel is important, those who have “reached a stage of Zionist maturity” have concluded their role in the Diaspora and should come to Israel. It further emerges that this development is inevitable: ultimately the future of all Jews is to reach the aforesaid Zionist maturity, but in the meantime “it is difficult for some and it takes them time to immigrate”, and consequently they should be supported and encouraged.

Another illustration of the tension between the self-definition of Jews in Russia and Israel’s aspiration to define them as its diaspora, a diaspora that is destined to return to its homeland, can be found in a speech delivered by Prime Minister  Olmert in October 2006 during a visit in Moscow to the Marina Roscha Jewish  Community Center, which was built by Jewish oligarch Lev Leviev, who is associated with the Chabad[15] movement. In his speech Olmert attempts to ‘walk the tightrope’, that is, to give expression to the conflicting desires and different stances vis-à-vis the Jews of Russia. He expresses the tension created as a result of the differences between how the Russian government views the Jewish community in Russia, how the Jews in Russia perceive themselves, and how the State of Israel defines them. This situation gave rise to a speech filled with inner contradictions that on the one hand commends the Jews for remaining in Russia, and at the same time pleads with them to “come back home” to Israel:

We have a small problem here with this issue and I need to speak about it candidly. On the one hand there is a very friendly president who embraces the Jews of Russia. On the other there are Jewish institutions, international Jewish organizations, and there is the Jewish Agency. In addition, and first and foremost, there is Lev Leviev. Everything is so good that the Jews remain in Russia, but there is nothing we want more than for all of you to ultimately come home. Home is to our Jerusalem, a unified Jerusalem in Eretz Israel.

[…] I know you are happy where you live, and we have great respect for this country and all the countries you live in, and we appreciate the friendship extended by the governments to the Jewish communities. But the thing we want most and pray for and yearn for more than anything and hope for is that you come home.[16]

It emerges from Olmert’s words that his stance, whereby the Jews of Russia are a diaspora of the State of Israel and an inseparable part of it, is not an innocent one, but a clear and conscious ideological perception that seeks to surmount rival narratives, such as the one whereby Israel constitutes a spiritual center for world Jewry, but it is not the homeland of the Jews of Russia in practical terms, and consequently they do not aspire to unite with it, and living in Russia is not a temporary stage on the way to self-realization by immigration to Israel. The logic of Olmert’s words can be explained by means of Brubaker’s assertion that diaspora is a category of practice that is used to make claims, to articulate projects, to shape identities and loyalties, and not a bounded identity[17]. This perception is strengthened as Olmert continues:

[…] But especially – and this is the most important thing – when you come to us you’ll be home and we want all of you – all of you – from all the places you hail from, after you receive the best Jewish education that Lev Leviev and Rabbi Lazar and the Jewish Agency and the Russian government help you to receive, after all that pack your bags, come home and we will all live in the State of Israel and Eretz Israel.

Inherent in his very definition of Israel as “home” for the Jews of Russia is the premise that the current place of residence of his audience is not – and cannot be – home. Olmert’s appeal to the Jews to receive the Jewish education offered to them by the Russian government, Lev Leviev, and the Jewish institutions, and then pack their bags and come “home”, interprets the cultural-religious revival of the Jews of Russia and Lev Leviev’s enterprise as a revival stage on the way to the Jews’ return to their homeland, and constructs it as part of the national-Zionist narrative. Lev Leviev’s enterprise which, like its owner, is not Zionist-oriented, alongside Putin’s pro-Jewish policy, turn in Olmert’s speech into a chapter in the national-Zionist narrative, whose role is to prepare the ground for the maturation of Zionist consciousness.

It is evident, therefore, that the rhetoric employed by the State of Israel’s various agents is directed toward defining Israel as the sole and exclusive ‘homeland’ of Jews around the world, and that the dominant narrative is ‘negation of the Diaspora’. Living in the Diaspora is perceived as temporary, and the objective is to bring about the ‘return’ of all the Jews to their homeland.

In summary, the inclusiveness of the definition of Judaism in accordance with the Law of Return and the desire to bolster Jewish demography[18] give rise to expanding the definition of the Jewish Diaspora in a manner that is not contingent either on the Halachic definition of Judaism or the self-definition of members of the diaspora. In other words, as an outcome of Israel’s self-definition as the homeland of Jews wherever they may be, and its desire to strengthen its national collective, it lays claim to populations that do not define themselves as Zionist, do not express interest in immigrating to it, and their affinity with Judaism is frequently doubtful. In this context it is important to bear in mind that the diasporization of populations that are perceived as desirable for the collective is firmly linked to practices of excluding non-Jewish groups within Israel’s territorial borders, groups such as migrant workers, non-Jewish citizens, and first and foremost Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. This exclusion is grounded in the logic whereby the national-Jewish collective should be reinforced on the one hand, and contending with the ‘demographic threat’ inherent in the growing number of non-Jewish groups on the other. A typical illustration of this can be found in the law that constitutes a mirror image of the Law of Return: The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order) 5763-2003, which denies the issuance of Israeli citizenship or residence to spouses of Israeli citizens who are residents of Judea and Samaria or the Gaza Strip, and freezes the issuance of citizenship under the ‘family reunification’ provisions for Palestinian families that are Israeli citizens with Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens. In other words, the desire to enlarge the national collective by diasporization of populations outside its territorial borders is founded on Israel’s desire to establish and ratify its central status as the homeland of all the Jews around the world, and at the same to strengthen its Western character and ensure the existence of a stable and steadfast Jewish majority within its borders.

Translated by: Margalit Rodgers

Notes:

[2] Lazin, F.A . (2005). The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics: Israel versus the American Jewish Establishment. Lexington Books: New York.

[3] Yonah, Y. (2004).

[4] Brubaker, R. (1996). Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: UK.

[5] Haaretz, December 18, 2007.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Yonah, Y. (2000).

[8] Lustick, I.S. (1999). Israel as a Non-Arab State: The Political Implications of Mass Immigration of Non-Jews. Middle East Journal 53(3), 417-433.

[9] Minute No. 199, Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and the Diaspora, June 3, 2008.

[10] Lazin, F.A. (2005).

[11] Minute No. 199, Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and the Diaspora.

[12] Lily Galili, Haaretz, April 4, 2008, “The Immigrants Who Left for Russia Don’t Want to Come Back”.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Minute No. 235, Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and the Diaspora, July 3, 2002.

[15] A Chasidic movement in Orthodox Judaism

[16] Speech retrieved from the Chabbad Movement website http://ns2.shturem.net/index.php?section=news&id=9574.

[17] Brubaker, R. (2005). The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(1), 1-19.

[18] In this respect it is important to note that paradoxically it is actually the inclusiveness of the Law of Return and Israel’s declared aspiration to enlarge its Jewish collective that in effect enabled the immigration to it of approximately 300,000 non-Jews who are eligible for immigration under the provisions of the Law of Return.

Yael Bartana:     It started with an invitation from Joanna Mytkowska and Andrzej Przywara of Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, to come to Poland. I met them before, in 2003, and they sensed that I might be inspired by Poland. They found much resemblance between Israeli and Polish societies. But three years have passed before I actually visited Poland. When I did arrive, I found the prejudice against Jews to be very strong there. It was Anti-Semitism at its finest as well as Anti-gay, anti-everything that I am. Being there, experiencing the absence of Jews, the reenactment of the Crucifixion of Christ while immersed in the Polish of church preachers, it was quite intense. I went with Joanna on a trip to visit old Jewish towns. And the current absence of Jews compelled me to start thinking about this project. I knew the history, but being there, feeling this absence, physically as well as emotionally – that got me imagining what is possible, how to change this situation, what condition will allow us to overcome this trauma, this great divide between two cultures that were once very close.

U.E.:     Did you actually experience this vacancy or did it emerge out of the historical understanding that this is what happened there, because you saw abandoned Jewish homes and Synagogues?

Y.B.:     I had a strong sense of encounter with the ghosts of history. Maybe they were the ghosts of my great-grandparents. There is one Synagogue in Warsaw everybody talks about; they all say that it was a house that belonged to Jews. And this emptiness, this feeling was very strong; to walk around and to start imagining something like “next shots” in a film, when suddenly everything is full of life, imagining that this could happen.

U.E.:    But this came about after a long time of you not living in Israel, didn’t it?

Y.B.:     It has been many years since I’ve last lived in Israel. Earnestly, what’s even more strange and interesting is that Poland is the only European country in which I felt a strong connection to the place without even understanding why. I’ve lived in The Netherlands but there I felt completely disconnected. When I arrived in Poland it was mystical, maybe it really was the ghosts that made me connect to this place. It started from a personal experience, but clearly it can’t be isolated from the work that I had done before: films that challenge Israel and the Israeli national consciousness. I came to this project charged. I already had it in my mind as a type of medium, format, or a way to communicate with the ideology. It was obvious that it had to exist as propaganda, as a type of experiment – what such idea can do, how it can affect to the whole perception of modern Judaism and Zionism.

U.E.:     And the fact that you are an Israeli artist that comes to Europe, that in your own life you ‘return to Europe’, and try to live a life in those same places, do you think about that?

Y.B.:     Not really, that’s another thing that still astounds me, the extent to which I’m detached from this Jewish narrative. I’ve never seen myself as a Jew living in Europe; I see myself as an Israeli living in Europe.

U.E.:     And what does it mean? That this is temporary? That you are still based in Israel?

Y.B.:     Yes, it means that the connection to Israel is deep and emotional, as problematic as it is, with all the inconvenience and discontent, and the fact that it’s been a long time since going back to Israel could even be considered as an option. But at the same time, in my work I’m only dealing with Israel, only with this monster. I think that it’s a question of personality. Even when I left, in 1996, it was out of personal frustration with Israel, an inconvenience to live there. But at the same time, it’s my home, so this is always a dilemma. The language, the friends, the history, and the legacy, all make it impossible to break away. It’s the most basic thing that every human being needs in order to feel connected to a place. I don’t feel Dutch or German in any way, nor do I feel European. I would never feel German even if I do live in Berlin.

U.E.:     And today, after so many years, do you still feel the same? Do you still feel Israeli?

Y.E.:      I feel also Israeli, or an Israeli who left the country for an undetermined amount of time. Sometimes I have the feeling that I’m the eternal-returning. Most of my friends and the people that I work with are still Israeli. It’s a project that started from a very personal place, yet it tried not to speak about the personal, rather it tried to understand something more collective, something related to a certain mechanism, to a certain political-ideological perception. This is why Slawomir (Sierakowski) is important to me, because he speaks out of his own truth; it’s the place that can hardly be found in politics because of the need to relinquish the personal in order to have an influence. Within the project of the movement, I can not talk, as an Israeli, about the situation of Poland in Europe; I need Slawomir to be a part of it, and this is the most important place. This is also true for the third chapter of the trilogy: when we see the people talking, it’s less fictional. This is the place, the guts.

U.E.:     Coming back to the framework of the project, maybe the most basic question to be asked is: are you really interested in a physical return to Europe or only in the possibility to imagine such thing?

Y.E.:      This process intrigues me more on a symbolic level than as an actual act. I mean, if people would actually want to return to Poland and should Poland accept them, that’s great. But as far as I’m concerned, their role would still be to keep imagining and to try and create more situations. I don’t see myself as an agent for the return of the Jews to Poland. The circumstances that allow it are the ones that enable imagination which is grounded in reality. It cannot work if it’s just preposterous: ‘let’s all go and settle on the moon’. It has to be charged, it has to relate to real current affairs. Sometimes the unbearable reality requires imagination and fantasy in order to try and create a different truth or message to undermine the hegemony.

U.E.:     Is it important that the imagination should have some effect on reality? Eventually, there should be an influence on the way we perceive things and relationships in the real world.

Y.E.:      The circumstances for imagining, for the imagination, weren’t so far-fetched. Not the least because I realized that in Poland there’s a strong sense of nostalgia. The Polish intelligentsia (which even among the Polish left is very nostalgic) is preoccupied with memory, with the longing for the Jews. Do they really miss the Jews or are they simply taken with remembrance? It’s an essential question for this project. The change has to come from within the Polish society. If you, Slawek, if you will, urged us to return, what do you want? What change should come about? Something has to change for the Jews to return. And from here on it’s possible to continue to imagine.

U.E.:     To describe the imagined in more and more detailed until, perhaps, it becomes a reality. The details should be specified to the point of becoming a series of simple steps, or a rule book for the thing itself.

Y.E.:      Yes, and it’s possible that one person out of this whole thing will rise and say “OK, now let’s start the real process” and maybe after the congress it will become clear what this “real process” is. The more specific the questions become, the harder it is to stay in the narrow framework of Jews and Poles, with the Jew symbolizing the other. The question that keeps popping up is how to open this framework, how to speak about it nowadays: about the ones that currently suffer from xenophobia in Europe, and about the diasporic communities that live here, in Israel, and suffer from discrimination.

U.E.:     If this is the case, then the more precise question is to which groups this project relates, rather than whom it addresses. Because first and foremost, this project addresses Jews and Poles, doesn’t it? At least in terms of whom it might provoke – Israeli Jews and Poles.  At least in this sense it is first of all a project that acts on the Jewish and Polish imagination.

Y.B.:     Today, Poland is a part of Europe. The whole story, in a nut shell, is the fact that the Jews are not the same Jews, and the Poles or Europeans are not the same Europeans. There’s no real return to history. We’re not in the same story anymore. If the Jew returns as an Israeli, he returns as an Israeli with a different culture, and a particular national identity and history. And the Pole is not the pole that expelled the Jews.

U.E.:     In our past conversations you talked about the structure of repetition[1], repetition which is also a movement in space, movement back to the place in which we were, as well as reenactment. It’s an ever changing repetition. There is always something in it from the original but, inevitably, there is always a difference. In the Jewish-Polish case, a whole history unfolds between the original and the possibility for return/repetition.

Y.B.:     Yes, it evokes the question what would happen if Moroccan Jews would decide that they also want to return to live in Europe. Are they returning or are they not? It challenges the narrative and the structure of the repetition. Unless it’s very simple, that is, if this project is only about Ashkenazi Jews. But I find the return/repetition to be much more interesting in a broader sense, independent of place of origin. Of course, the Holocaust also plays as the cause of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder of the Israeli society as a whole, and it taints the attitude towards the return as return to the crime scene. Why return to Europe? Because only through the return and repetition is it possible to detach – and maybe even be released – from the Holocaust.

U.E.:     In other words, we have to return. We have no choice.

Y.B.:     Exactly, no choice, we have to take this step in order to progress.

U.E.:     But in the sense of return to the crime scene, it can still stay within the limits of an Ashkenazi project, because, at least in the collective imagination, the Holocaust was an Ashkenazi catastrophe.

Y.B.:     That’s right, but these days, it’s not only the Ashkenazi who have to remember it every year and study it in school, but all the Jews in Israel, regardless of where they came from.

U.E.:     In order to enter the melting pot, everyone must go through the same traumas, or at least contain them. So how is such a project received? Are there people that are truly disturbed by it, in Israel and in Poland?

Y.B.:     Surprisingly, or maybe not, in Poland this project was received with much love. I’m sure that there are people who hate this project, who say that it’s terrible, that it has many problems, but generally speaking, it was very well received. In 2009 I was nominated to be Woman of the Year in Poland, and won second place. I represented Poland in the Venice Biennale, so from the Polish point of view I’m now considered as a kind of Polish artist. It’s as if they have been waiting for this project. At the beginning of the new millennium, following Jan Gross’ book “Neighbors”, Polish Intellectuals and artists were engaging with the Holocaust more and more. It maybe ironic but it is the Jewish community in Poland that opposes the trilogy and the movement, because the way they see it, it undermines the legitimacy of Israel’s existence. But not only them, people from the Polish side also came to protest during the shooting, and they complained ‘how dare we touch the Polish national symbol?’ claiming that it’s forbidden by law. ‘How dare we change it and add the Star of David on top of it?’ There were many such cries, but again, those are the Polish psychoses whose parallels can be easily identified within the Israeli right. It seemed familiar: the extremism, the conservatism, the xenophobia, with no real attempt for engagement. I simply ignored it and moved on.

U.E.:     And how was it in Israel?

Y.B.:     Again, it depends. Obviously, there are people who understand the provocation that this project is trying to create. On the other hand, there’s a very reductive call asking ‘why do you want to return us to Poland? Why three million Jews to Poland? What is this project?’. Last year, at the International Holocaust Memorial Day, we screened ‘Mary Kozmary’ to an audience of diplomats and Holocaust survivors, and I felt awkward in front of Holocaust survivors and Poles who were deported from Poland. But it was amazing; they were so moved by the thought that Poles would actually invite them to return to Poland, in Polish. They approached Slawomir with emotion, surrounded him, and started speaking old Polish to him. They said that there was no way that they would ever return to Poland, that the Poles were Anti-Semites. But it was their home. Can you imagine being thrown out of Israel and seventy years later being asked to return? It’s emotionally overwhelming. There is something very real for the people to which this project speaks on a personal level, and I believe that this is its strength: as far-fetched and provocative as it is, something in it aspires to be sincere.

U.E.:     Essentially, the political imagination of the possible return of Jews to Europe is tightly linked to a different political imagination – that of the Palestinian return, it’s connected to the imagination of the Jew as a conqueror and to the historical tangle created between all the identities and events. In other words, it is linked not only to the explicit imagination of a renewed Jewish reality in Poland, but also to the possibility of different Palestinian-Jewish relations. To what extend are you concerned with this notion when you think about this project?

Y.B.:     First of all, the idea behind this project was never isolated from all that is happening in Israel. The symbolic provocation of three million Jews is like saying that six million Jews return to Europe. The idea that such a huge Jewish community was erased from Europe puts the audience in a state of shock, and this shock is important. There are always attempts to try and illustrate what the Holocaust is and how much six million is. But three million is also an incomprehensible number, and it acts as a slogan. 3.3 million Jews can change the lives of 40 million Poles. We cannot comprehend these numbers. After seeing this film, Ariella Azoulay imagined herself standing in Rabin Square, calling the Palestinians to return, and I believe that this is the most powerful thing that I’ve created. The fact that I imagine something and it affects other people by allowing them to fantasize something else departing from this project. This project stir up many fantasies. Germans see it one way and Poles see it another way. The Germans asked why I wasn’t working on a project in which a German calls the Jews to come back to Germany. What was created in this movement is a mechanism that produces possibilities. A Turkish woman I met said: “maybe we should say that the Ottoman Empire should be reestablished in Germany”. It is when people start to fantasize that the strength of this movement becomes apparent.

On the other hand, this project was not created simply to provoke. When I was in Poland there was a lot of talk about the Polish intelligentsia trying to deal with the memory of the Jewish community, trying to delve into it. There is a lot of preoccupation with the nonexistent community, a lot of preoccupation with history, with the Holocaust. I think that this is the difference between Poland and Germany. Poland experienced Communism and throughout the Communist regime there was hardly any processing of the Holocaust. Poles told me that they found out about the Holocaust, about the fact that there was an important Jewish community in Lodz, for example, only after the fall of Communism. It was never part of history.

U.E.:     In what way do they think about the Jews and their return?

Y.B.:     The main question is whether they really want the Jews back or whether others can play the role of the Jew in order to reestablish the culture. Could there be a replacement, a virtual Jew? Take the Klezmer culture for example, today it’s not essential that the musicians will be Jewish, Poles can also play Klezmer music. There is a replacement. When thinking about the return, the question is whether the longing is real. Are they concerned with the memory or with the thing itself? After all, Poland is in no way equipped to deal with the return of such a huge community of Jews.

U.E.:     Going back to the structure of the project, in the trilogy there are numerous symbols and rituals created specifically for the movement. These symbols recreate a constellation of familiar images and ideological techniques. I feel that it is impossible to produce the political possibility without this constellation that wraps it in a specific formation. In your opinion, what place does art have in organizing these symbols and shapes? What does art do to images? I think that this question is fundamental to the Exhibition ‘Where to?’. What does art do with the visual mechanisms that are normally used to serve ideologies?

Y.B.:     For me, it was a strategy I used to speak directly about nationality, about community. The new symbol shatters or destroys the existing representation and takes over a different one. Take for example the films of Leni Riefenstahl and her place as an artist who, during the thirties, did avant-garde work while serving the Nazi ideology. It’s very hard to remake and quote films that are associated with specific ideology. Here, the strategy was to create a process of transformation or reversal, to take a cinematic language and try to give it a new context, to go through the pain, to go through history in order to talk about the future, and all the while it is clearly linked to a specific ideology.

U.E.:     So, in a sense, you repeat the constellation of images, but this repetition is not duplication. It does something with these images. I want to dwell upon this notion, to understand your process with these images, which seem to have more of a political history than a visual history. What does your treatment of these images does to them and to this history, and generally to the possibility of a political movement? I think it produces something very special – you are working with images that, historically speaking, tried to create and present the ‘many’ as one, to produce the unification and order of the ideology, but your work goes in the opposite direction, against this unification. In other words, it dismantles and introduces the exact things that the unification tried to neutralize, or cast aside. Your work uses the same visual tools in order to represent the ‘many’ as something that, historically, the ideology opposed more than anything.

Y.B.:     Yes, undermining ideology by using the visual tools of the ideology. We shouldn’t forget the strength of this aesthetics. While being very manipulative, it is also very beautiful and powerful. It is a direct aesthetics that sends a message. For instance, think of the public appearance of a leader, which the film undermines of course, against the images of the masses clapping. In the film, the leader of the movement stands in front of an empty stadium. It reminds me of “Shoah”, when Lanzmann invites a Holocaust survivor to return to Poland, to a place where many Jews had been murdered, and they stand in front of a clear meadow. We understand that they are dealing with memory, we understand that something terrible has happened there, and there is no need to see it. As audience we fill in the vision which is hidden from us.

U.E.:     The second part of the trilogy reenacts Wall and Tower, only this time the settlement takes place in Poland. This reenactment includes periodic costumes and the actual historical building procedures. The structures are exactly the same structures, they are assembled using the same methods, and the people are wearing the same historic dress. Is the reproduction of the same specific structure at this day and age fundamental? Why bring to Poland Wall and Tower and not trailers, for example? This renaissance is the revival of a settlement that stood precisely here one hundred years ago, and if it were to happen in post war Poland, it would have probably already happen differently. What is the significance of returning to this particular visual?

Y.B.:     I wanted to focus on the Zionist ethos, in building the modern Jewish nation, and look at it from the outside. To use the repetition to explore and understand its qualities, to look at it anew from today’s perspective, to dislocate it, to undermine it, to use anachronism ad absurdum and find out what it produces in Poland. Wall and Tower is “mini-Israel”. This process is a way to pull ourselves out of the national mess. On the other hand, there is something thrilling in this vigor of the pioneer, the vanguard of the Jewish movement. It the point of view of the pioneering “we”, “we” are returning, “we” are starting the Jewish renaissance, but beware; we are not the Jews that you once knew. Something happened in these past 60-70 years. All of a sudden the Jews have a nationality.

U.E.:     But what you are saying, and I find this point interesting, is that the change is not the 60 years that have past between then and now, but what had happened even before – the New Jew. The Settling Jew, the Jewish settlement project that had started before the Holocaust, the days of Wall and Tower. In this sense, the returning Jew really is a different Jew. He is the Jew of Wall and Tower, the New Jew, just like he imagined himself when he arrived in the land of Israel at the beginning of the 20^th century, or at least at the end of the 19^th century. This is why the use of this historic look is so significant.

Y.B.:     when I researched Wall and Tower I understood that these people were very much inspired by the architecture of the Wild West, where it was well accepted that if you occupied a piece of land it was yours to keep.

U.E.:     The last part of the trilogy closes the narrative that was opened in the first chapters with hope and revival, and in one instant turns it into violence and crisis, with the death of the leader of the movement. Although we do not see this part, it is obvious that the movement is in a state of crisis. Are such movements condemned to this kind of future? Do you think that the death of the leader creates new possibilities for the movement and its future? What is the role of this chapter for you?

Y.B.:     Once the production of ‘Wall and Tower’ was over, it was clear to me that the leader of the movement should be assassinated. The ‘messiah’ must be assassinated. Not the least due to the fact that the Polish Minister of Culture embraced the project as the Polish representative in the Venice Biennale, which created a new reality for the project. I felt it was important to integrate opposing voices into the project, to give them place to undermine the new narrative. ‘Should we really return and live in the Diaspora and respond to the call of this nice Polish guy, who loves Jews and wants to return us to Poland?’ It seemed too simplistic that now we should return and live happily ever after. It seemed wrong not just at the story level, but it is also linked to the history of many progressive political leaders. Many of them were assassinated: Kennedy, Gandhi, Lincoln, and Rabin. I also think that it takes crisis to push people into the public sphere.

U.E.:     Would you say that the movement was actually created at this moment?

Y.B:      It created another new possibility. The moment the leader of this imagined movement died, may possibly be the point in which it can actually turn into real political movement. If there is no imagined leader, it might be really possible, let’s start to establish a movement.

U.E.:     Right now you are at the transition stage, between the film trilogy and the first congress of the movement, scheduled to take place in Berlin during the biennale in May 2012. How do you see this transition from the fully imagined and staged to an event that consists of many people and opinions, where your control over it  as an artist diminishes?

Y.B.:     This is an imagined movement that allows its members to fantasize and demand a reality in which they want to live, to not give in to politicians. The congress is an action that calls the people to imagine in public. Slawomir always paraphrases ‘The Matrix’: you take the blue pill – 3.3 million Jews return to Poland. You take the red pill – you start to create social changes. Which pill would you take?

U.E.:     So if they were simply to return, to appear in the space, it would be meaningless?

Y.B.:     It’s interesting to think that most Israelis want to return to Germany.

U.E.:     Finally, could you explain what you think about the role of contemporary art in this day and age, more specifically, what is art, as you understand it, capable of doing? What should it do?

Y.B.:     I see art as a useful tool that allows us not only to give a reflection of society but to be actively involved in it. Nevertheless, I feel that there is a problem with political art and the autonomy that it allows. Sometimes, the attempt to speak about ethics compels certain artists to take an unethical action or speak in the name of the other. The question of representation is very important. I ask myself many difficult questions: How serious is this project? Is it only provocation? I think that art has a great significance and an enormous power, and for an artist coming from a region of conflict such as Palestine-Israel or the former Yugoslavia, there is no other way but to be socially involved. Many artists can look from the outside, that is the general role of an artist, but what do you do with this role? Is it enough to criticize or should one produce alternatives and inspire people to go against the tide?

U.E.:     I think that when it works, the power of art, as we mentioned before, lies in the possibility to create a new political imagination, in the ability to open a spectrum of possibilities.

Y.B.:     I keep asking myself whether this is enough. I don’t know, I’m asking.

U.E.:     I think that it’s quite a lot, and in many disciplines you don’t even have that.

Y.B.:     I agree, but there has to be representation, you have to know what is your voice and in relation to what. I can only speak about my experience as an Israeli and a Jew, and there should be a certain basic loyalty to the personal identity and history that, in my mind, many artists miss. This is something that I have a problem with. In whose name are you speaking? In the Return to Poland project I had to cooperate with a Pole; I couldn’t have shouted in an empty stadium “Jews, come back”. In this sense, Slawomir’s role in this project is crucial, because he also speaks about himself, he says ‘I believe in this, I wouldn’t have participated in this project had I not believed in it’. He is the only one who could make this request.

Translated into English by Noa Shuval

What is the Jewish Question? The Jewish Question is the Israel Question. There is virtually no conscious Jewish existence today that does not position itself with one form or another of relation to Israel, whether it accepts Israeli hegemony in Jewish life or rejects it, whether it accepts Zionist hegemony in Israeli life or rejects it. The State of Israel – by virtue of its very establishment, history, unique separation regime, the living conditions it enables and imposes on Jews and non-Jews within its borders, and the Zionist ideology whereby the majority of its Jewish inhabitants perceive it – redefines not only who is a Jew, but also the possibility for Jewish existence and the frameworks within which the Jewish Question can even appear and be formulated. The non-Israeli Jew who is even stimulated to engage with the Jewish Question, i.e., the fate of the Jews, the situation of Jewish religious cultures and frameworks, and his own Jewishness (and these three questions are linked but discrete), has to first of all decide whether he accepts the answers proposed and shaped by the Jewish state’s apparatuses and its hegemonic discourse, Zionism in its contemporary version, rejects them, or ignores them.

Zionism in its prevalent meaning is an entire doctrine of the impossible.[2] This doctrine can be cursorily and simplistically phrased as follows: it is impossible without an entire system of separations whose principles were determined a priori and their validity never examined. Today the Zionist says that it is impossible – at least in present historical conditions – to maintain a state that is not a nation state, that it is impossible to realize nationhood without a state, that it is impossible to ensure Jewish existence without a Jewish state, that it is impossible to  maintain a Jewish state without ensuring a Jewish majority, and that it is impossible to ensure a Jewish majority in a Jewish state without Jewish monopoly over the state’s apparatuses. This political doctrine of the impossible is founded on acceptance of one a priori principle of separation – separation between ethnic nationalities, identifying national separation with state separation, and deriving a long series of a posteriori separations that need to be created and maintained in order to ensure the a priori separation.

But everything that the hegemonic Zionist discourse claims to be impossible – is possible. The simple proof of possibility is the fact that they actually exist or have existed in the past. Each of the ostensible impossibilities determined by the Zionist discourse exists or has existed in practice.

What Exists in Practice and is Presented as Impossible

1. “It is impossible to maintain a state that is not a nation state”. Israel is living proof that it is possible to maintain a state that is not a nation state. Since 1967 Israel has been a two-nation state; its two-nation regime is based, as we know, on separations – between Jews and non-Jews, between citizens and non-citizens. These are of course hierarchical separations whose implications are structural discrimination against non-Jews in general and systematic and violent oppression of non-citizen non-Jews in particular.
2. “It is impossible to realize nationhood without a state”. The Zionist movement in the past, and the Palestinian movement that accompanies it like an echo in the present, are proof that it is possible to maintain national life without a state. At the same time, Israel is also proof that nationhood is not a historical entity that precedes the state and hovers somewhere outside it, but a product of the national ideology practices; and once the state appears and considers itself the realization of Jewish nationhood, nationality is also – decisively so – the effect of its legal, military, economic, and ideological mechanisms.
3. “It is impossible to ensure Jewish existence without a Jewish state”. This argument is attended by a big question mark posed by the leaders of the state themselves when they present the possibility of the Iranian regime developing nuclear weapons as a threat to Israel’s very existence, not only as a state but as a populated area. If they are right, Israel is under permanent threat of annihilation. If tempted to defuse this threat by means of a suicidal attack by Israeli forces (with or without American backing) on a country like Iran – which has existed as a sovereign state since the beginning of the sixteenth century, whose population numbers approximately 75 million people, and according to various sources, not only Israeli, it is armed and equipped with long-range missiles, and experienced in activating terrorists throughout the world – they are sentencing Israel to a regional conflict that will continue for generations to come. The war that is ostensibly intended to ensure Jewish existence will make Jews all over the world targets for Iranian retribution. These threats of war and the practical preparations for it (overt and covert, real and false) only serve to highlight what is already obvious: Israel is dangerous for the Jews. Since the extermination of the Jews in World War II, Jewish existence is far less secure within Israel than without, and this holds true whether Iran possesses nuclear capabilities or not, whether it intends to use them against Israel or not. Added to that is the unique contribution of the continuing occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people to hatred of Jews, especially among Muslims. This hatred also exposes non-Israeli Jews to new threats, since they are perceived as the representatives and successors of the Jewish regime in Israel. The fact that about half of the Jewish people lives in Israel, which is in a permanent state of hostility and war with nations and countries in the region (currently with the Palestinians within and without, the Hezbollah, the Syrian and Iranian regimes, and with Muslims all over the world) creates a situation whereby instead of constituting a guarantee for Jewish existence, the Jewish state has become the greatest danger to Jewish existence in the present era; the non-critical identification of extensive Jewish publics in the US and Europe with Israel’s regime and policies contributes to the spread of hostility to Jewish communities all over the world, to new forms of anti-Semitism, and in countries with large Muslim concentrations such as France, to new physical threats as well. This can be understood only when taking into consideration the extent to which organized Jewish life in the Diaspora is intertwined with the State of Israel, i.e., the extent to which the Jewish Question is the Question of Israel.
4. “It is impossible to maintain a Jewish state without ensuring a Jewish majority”. This argument is refuted by the fact that the state was declared and established as a Jewish state before it had a Jewish majority, and it continues to be declared Jewish even though the Jewish majority in it almost disappeared with the occupation of the Territories. The maxim whereby a Jewish majority in the Land of Israel is a condition for realizing Zionism guided Israel’s political and military leadership in 1948, and contributed directly to the decisions that led to the expulsion and flight of 750,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1950, and to preventing the return of refugees ever since. The same maxim has guided the Israeli occupation regime since 1967 and enabled control of the Territories without counting their inhabitants, perceiving them as ‘foreign’ and external for legal and diplomatic purposes, and ‘domestic’ and internal for economic and settlement purposes, for infrastructure development, and to foster national consciousness. But when we overcome the representations of the occupied territories in the Zionist discourse, and understand that excluding the territories is a form of including and containing them, it transpires that a little over six million Jews and a little less than six million Arabs live in the Jewish state, and its Jewish majority is temporary and coincidental, a broken reed. And for precisely this reason, the following argument is also false:
5. “It is impossible to ensure a Jewish majority in the state without Jewish monopoly over the state’s mechanisms”. It transpires that even Jewish monopoly over the state’s apparatuses cannot ensure a Jewish majority over time. It also transpires that a Jewish majority would have been possible without such a monopoly. The Partition Plan granted a majority to the Jews in the state without granting them monopoly over its apparatuses on the premise that the new state would not discriminate against the Arab minority that was meant to remain within its borders, and would invite it to “participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions”, as promised in the Declaration of Independence. This promise has never been fulfilled. The majority-minority ratio was rapidly changed by means of the massive Jewish immigration, alongside expulsion and displacement of Palestinians, which continued uninterrupted from the end of 1947 until the early 1950s, resumed during the June 1967 battles, and has continued by administrative means and on a smaller scale since the occupation of the territories. In other words, in historical terms, creating a majority through the expulsion and displacement of Palestinians from 1947 to 1950, and attaining monopoly of the state’s apparatuses were bound up in one another, the two sides of the violence that founded the Israeli regime, and it is incorrect to view one as a condition for the other. From an ideological perspective, sustaining and feeding the fear of losing the Jewish majority (the ‘demographic demon’) are a means to maintaining and justifying this monopoly. This impossibility is groundless – and in this it differs from its predecessors – not because the situation declared as impossible exists in practice, but because it existed in the past, on the eve of the state’s establishment, and the causal connection it contains is false: fears of losing the Jewish majority constitute motivation and justification for achieving and maintaining monopoly. This monopoly creates a chronic distortion of the allegedly democratic regime within the Green Line, for in a democratic regime that grants equal rights to non-Jewish citizens, this monopoly is not supposed to reflect the Jewish majority and cannot be justified by it. And most importantly – it is used to establish a tyrannical regime beyond the Green Line, which instead of reinforcing the Jewish majority, in effect reduces and endangers it.

These maxims, as we have seen, underpin Zionist ideology as a doctrine of the impossible in Jewish existence. Once refuted, one by one, a horizon for new thinking opens up. I shall now present outlines for two such ways of thinking, both linked to the negations presented by Zionist ideology: the first reformulates what is possible according to what already exists in any case, or according to what could exist as a result of certain combinations of existing elements, but does not commit to what is right and desirable. The second formulates what is right and desirable in accordance with an understanding of the possible.

What is Possible

1. It is possible to maintain a state that is not a nation state. Due to the recent waves of migrations from poor to wealthy countries all over the world, there is in effect a considerable disparity between citizenship, nationality, and residency in virtually every developed country. Today, practically all democratic nation states are contending with an increasingly growing ‘backyard’ of national minorities with impaired citizenship and immigrants without citizenship. In order to remain democratic they have to adapt the universal element of citizenship to the particular-historical element of nationhood. In other words, they have to separate nationhood from state just as they separated religion from state in the past. Different models of this kind of separation already exist, for example in the US, Spain, Belgium, and Germany. The non-nation state can protect the nations residing within it just as it protects the religious communities that exist within it, and can enable each of them to prosper, on condition that this prosperity is not manifested in oppression of or discrimination against other nations.
2. It is possible to realize nationhood – even in its modern meaning that was created in the nineteenth century – without a state. Kurds, Armenians, Basques, Palestinians, and Catalans maintain national life without having a state of their own. Germans maintain national life even though they share their country with millions of Turks, Arabs, Jews, and others. Members of certain nationalities envisage a state and aspire to attain it, while others lament a state that has been lost, but their nationalism does not come into being in a state and does not cease in its absence. Even if we insist on thinking about nationhood within the boundaries formulated by nineteenth-century nationalist ideology, we can imagine a national identity of which a uninational/mononational nation state is not an essential component, and develop national political imagination that does not view the state as a necessary embodiment of national existence. And there is no need to insist on this model of nationalism. A state is a form of governance, nationality is a form of association and partnership, and the connection between the two is the product of contingent historical development; it is neither logical nor necessary. Jews lived as a stateless people long before modern nationalism, and will certainly continue to exist as a people even when this nationalism passes from the world as a unique form of association. It should also be borne in mind that the Nazis exterminated Jews not because they were a stateless nation, but because they were perceived as an inferior race that must be eliminated in order to preserve the purity of the Aryan race – not the German nation.
3. It is possible to ensure Jewish existence without a Jewish state. In fact, Israel’s success in eradicating the distinction between regime (as a form of political rule) and state, and between state and nation, and in existing as a one-nation state at the expense of the non-Jewish population within it, largely depends on Jewish existence outside it. Instead of Israel ensuring Jewish existence, the world’s Jews are enlisted to ensure the fantasy of a Jewish nation state. These Jews, and especially the organized Jewish community in the US, directly contribute to preserving Israel’s military power and diplomatic status, and the wellbeing of its citizens, especially its Jewish citizens. Israel provides them with a focus for national activity and call upon them to identify with an imagined national reality at the cost of increasingly deepening denial of Israel’s regime, its form of political rule, and the moral consequences of Jewish sovereignty. But it does not ensure either the very existence of these Jews or their existence as Jews. In the US, France, Berlin, and more recently in Warsaw and Kiev, Jewish communities, some more and some less religious, are flourishing in the heart of non-Jewish countries under the auspices of their respective governments and due to the conditions they enable. Jews fill senior government posts, maintain religious and cultural institutions, split and unite depending on circumstances, because the regimes under which they live allow national and religious freedom to their citizens. The State of Israel, as an ideal and a collection of ideological apparatuses, is the most important element that provides them with the story of their unity in a single nation-community as well as the image of that community, but they are free to do with this story as they see fit, to reshape this image in their own way.
4. It is possible to maintain a Jewish state without ensuring a Jewish majority. On the one hand this is possible if Jewish monopoly over the state’s apparatuses is ensured. That is precisely what is happening today, and what will happen in the foreseeable future, when demographic changes create a reality wherein the majority of the country’s inhabitants who are subject to the Israeli regime will no longer be Jews. And there is also another possibility, if one believes that the state becomes Jewish according to the contribution of its Jewish citizens to its culture, public space, politics, and according to their reflection in the laws of the state. If Israel becomes a state that respects the nationality of all its citizens, it will be able to be Jewish (as well) in its culture and character, no less than it is today. For the state to embody the national belonging of its citizens in its governance and laws, a separation of nationhood and state is required, not the imposition of one nation on a multination state. This kind of coercion distorts rather than ensures nationhood, and turns it into an ongoing campaign of humiliation and oppression.
5. It is possible to ensure a Jewish majority in a Jewish state without Jewish monopoly over the Jewish state’s apparatuses. This can come about in a variety of ways. For example: Jewish Israeli citizens join forces with Palestinian Israeli citizens and form a coalition that withdraws from the territories occupied in 1967, and gradually changes the one-state separation regime within the 1967 borders until Israel becomes the state of all its citizens. The bi-national  agreements on which the new regime will be founded will remove the state’s apparatuses from the exclusive grasp of the Jews, ensure not only due representation of Palestinians in the Knesset but also equal access to all government institutions, and will establish the state’s responsibility for the two nations living in it in the new constitution. The rise in the standard of living of Palestinian citizens and reduction of the inequality between them and Jewish citizens will also reduce the differences in birthrates. Following withdrawal from the Territories, Jews will constitute approximately 78% of all Israeli citizens. A compromise on the refugee issue will enable absorption of a further one million Palestinians into Israel (within the Green Line). Following this immigration wave, there will be 2.5 million Arabs in Israel, and they will constitute approximately 30% of all Israeli citizens. Out of responsibility toward the two nations, the state will be open to absorb Jewish and Palestinian immigration. The immigration of Jews and Palestinians will be subject to a regulating mechanism so that the relative proportion of immigrants from the two groups remains fixed in accordance with their proportion in the population. Maintaining the Jewish majority will be the product of agreements at the center of which is the Jews relinquishing their monopoly on the state’s apparatuses.

What is Right

1. A nation state – it is right and desirable to completely separate nationhood from state. Under conditions of globalization and mass immigration, which is an inseparable part of world economy, it is right to redefine citizenship on the basis of a combination of duration of stay, subordination to the laws of the state, and employment. After a specified transition period, anyone residing in the state’s territory, abides by its laws, and is employed within it, so that other residents of the state enjoy the fruits of his labor, has to become a citizen. For its part, the state has to protect all its citizens and provide them with the freedom and infrastructure for their various associations – religious, national, professional, political, economic, and so forth. There is absolutely no necessity for the different associations to unite into a single bloc (i.e., for all the members of a religion to be members of the same nation, or vice versa, for all members of a political party to belong to the same trade union, or worship in the same church, and so forth). All that is required is for the state to provide equal services to all the associations of the same type, and foster them as it is supposed to foster individuals: provide them with equal conditions to advance their issues, protect them against the trespass of other associations (or individuals), and provide them with a neutral framework wherein they can resolve disputes between them non-violently. In this kind of framework, the shared interest of all citizens overshadows their interest in fostering their particular associations, since they are always liable to find themselves harmed by other associations due to the tendency of associations to spread, trespass, segregate, or attain exclusivity in their particular sphere. In other words – and these are essential but insufficient minimum conditions for a just regime – the classic opposition to monopoly must be expanded beyond the economic sphere and applied to all aspects of society.
2. Nationhood without a state – as an ideology propounded by ‘nationalist movements’, nationalism was the uniting adhesive and facilitating discourse that enlisted many to a political struggle with the aim of attaining liberation, power, and control in conditions of relative inferiority vis-à-vis the existing regime and other groups. As the ideology of a state, nationalism provided a false political image that gave expression and provided a metaphysical basis for the unity and oneness of the state, blurred the heterogeneity within it, and enabled one group to take control over others. But as a framework of belonging that accords meaning, historical depth, and a horizon of development for the existence of the individual as one of many, among many, as someone who in any case already always maintains multiple relationship with many, nationalism does not necessitate a state. This kind of framework is the only proper existence for nationhood, which the state has to facilitate just as it facilitates religious congregations. There is no need to shunt nationalism aside to the private domain in order to achieve this – in the way that liberal thinking sought to and still seeks to shunt religion to the realm of subjectivity and ‘inner belief’. Like religion, nationalism can occupy the public domain, on condition that it is perceived as a shared space for different religions and nationalities, political groups and economic companies, and to which none of them can lay claim for itself.
3. Jewish existence without a Jewish state – this kind of existence should be possible anywhere and everywhere. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the possibility of peaceful, secure Jewish presence wherein not only physical existence is ensured, but also the cultural, national, and religious existence of the Jewish community, became the test of a society’s enlightenment. It is not a state in the Middle East that should or can ensure this kind of existence, but an enlightened regime and civic responsibility wherever Jews live. The Zionists, who seize upon every anti-Semitic outburst, or one that can be presented as anti-Semitic, in order to display it as proof of the justness of Zionism, are unwitting partners of the anti-Semitic forces seeking to cleanse their surroundings of Jews in Europe, Islamic countries, or anywhere else in the world. Israeli Jews who are fearful for the Jewish fate should aspire to a situation whereby Jewish existence is ensured wherever Jews live by virtue of the regime and social conditions prevailing there, irrespective of the State of Israel, its regime, or policies. Moreover, in light of the current situation of this regime and the Israeli government’s disastrous policies, Jews in Israel have a direct interest in secure Jewish existence in the Diaspora: these are their sanctuaries from the catastrophe in whose shadow they live, these are the solidarity groups on whose support they can rely in times of trouble.
4. A Jewish state without an ensured Jewish majority; A Jewish majority without monopoly over the state’s mechanisms – the homogeneity – national or religious – of a state that is homogenous in any case can be ensured by means of strictly enforced, stringent immigration laws that protect the state against the entry of foreign workers and against excessively long stays by tourists. But under conditions of a mixed population, immigration laws are insufficient (the solution proposed above to maintain the majority-minority ratio by means of control over Jewish and Palestinian immigration rates is effective only on the premise that the rate of natural increase remains unchanged). The only way to truly ensure a majority, either national or religious, is to control the minority’s birthrate and nurture that of the majority. This is not right. This form of racial biopolitics lurks at the bottom of the slippery slope of the ‘demographic danger’ even after the Palestinian state is established on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and is liable to invite control over birth rate, and hence is not right. The issue is not to ensure a Jewish majority, but to enable free but non-suppressing Jewish existence that ensures the freedom of every individual to nurture his or her nationhood, or the freedom to live with total indifference toward this aspect of one’s identity. In the dual nationality conditions of Israel/Palestine, this kind of existence is only possible on the basis of agreement between Jews and Palestinians. The question of whether such agreement will lead to the ‘two-state solution’ or a binational state that will be the state of all its citizens, is secondary. Any appropriate solution will have to include federative arrangements that acknowledge national distinctness on the one hand, and geographic, historical, and economic partnership on the other. Perhaps it will be one state in which different national and religious groups have autonomy, and perhaps it will be two states with agreements between them enabling different forms of integration between their citizens. In any event, it would not be right for these agreements to be dictated by temporary majority-minority ratios, they must not stabilize these ratios by means of biopolitical intervention, and in the event of binational states as well, no group, either national or other, can be allowed to monopolize the state’s mechanisms.

A state that is not a nation state, wherein citizenship is granted on the basis of duration of stay, subordination to the laws of the state, and employment, and wherein the national associations within it are equally protected and nurtured; nationalism that does not require a state, and its existence is ensured in every state and country; conditions for peaceful and secure Jewish existence wherever Jews live; federative arrangements between Jews and Palestinians within a single, dual, or split state framework, and in any event one that grants Jews and Palestinians the freedom to nurture their nationhood as well as the freedom to live in total indifference toward this aspect of their identity – this is what is right and possible. It is of this, not the Zionist doctrine of the impossible, that it is appropriate to say: If you will it, it is no dream.

Translated by: Margalit Rodgers

[2] From here onward, the present article develops ideas presented in two previous texts: Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming), Chapter 4; Adi Ophir, Minimum Conditions for Critical Theory, in Gil Eyal (Ed.), Four Lectures on Critical Theories (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, in print).

Internet shutdowns, website filtering, overflow, substitution and defamation: Arab regimes and the Internet, a guidebook for dictators

Wars produce images, deliberate and planned as well as inadvertent. In postmodern warfare, warlike images are used indistinctly as raw materials for journalistic and historic documentation, propaganda, political statements, art, weapons and casus belli. A shoe is thrown at George W. Bush in front of the cameras. The Americans release footage featuring the dismembered bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons. A Danish newspaper publishes cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad. News agencies air videos of Israeli flags on fire. A blurred cellular photo of Saddam Hussein hanging from the gallows. Airplanes crash into the Twin Towers shot by dozens of amateur cameramen. Terrorist groups’ PR tapes present prisoners and captives being executed. The White House uploads a photo of senior officials being briefed on Osama Bin-Laden’s liquidation to Flickr. Hosni Mubarak is shot live as he denies allegations while lying on a bed in a courtroom cage.

One of the most dramatic events of the Egyptian Revolution was not captured on film, however. It happened on Friday, January 28, late at night, three days after Egypt’s urban centers were swept by violent riots. “Urgent: Egypt has shut down the Internet”, informed Issandr El Amrani his politics and culture website, The Arabist. “Egypt leaves the Internet”, wrote James Cowie at the Renesys blog (Renesys is a company which studies worldwide Internet traffic flows), and called it “an unprecedented government act”. According to Renesys, all Egyptian Internet providers (apart for Noor Group, which provided the connection for the Egyptian stock market) were cut off from the World Wide Web. Telecom Italia Sparkle – a major provider in Egypt – reported zero Internet traffic to and from Egypt as of half past midnight. Other reports also referred to the blocking of text messaging services.

The media have trouble documenting the Internet visually.  In TV stories about hackers, dating websites, or other present-day Internet fads, you always see a person sitting next to a computer, rolling his mouse or typing on his keyboard. Newspapers show photos of web pages in browser displays, usually outdated Explorers (if this fails to strike you as odd, imagine every news story about a TV show accompanied by frames from the show as displayed on TV screens). News websites present illustration photos at worst, and screenshots at best.

How do you capture Internet shutdown on camera? In my opinion, the image most powerfully etched in collective memory was a graph produced by the Arbor Networks data security company, illustrating Internet traffic between Egypt and the rest of the world on January 27 and 28. You don’t have to be an expert in networks or graphs to realize that this was the online equivalent of a nationwide blackout.

The Dictator’s Dilemma is “the idea that authoritarian governments cannot have their Internet cake and eat it, too”, blogged Zeynep Tufekci, Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, following the Egypt’s Internet shutdown. “The dilemma is often framed as this: ‘If they allow Internet to spread within the country, it poses a threat to their regime. If they don’t, they are cut off from the world – economically and socially”. Tufekci believes that the threat posed by the Internet against such regimes does not necessarily lie in its ability to spread information they are attempting to censor and conceal from the public, but its ability to support the formation of a “counter-public” that is outside state control. “[I]t is not that people are waiting for that key piece of information to start their revolt – and that information just happens to be behind the wall of censorship – but that they are isolated, unsure of the power of the regime, unsure of their position and potential”.

Theoretic and academic debates about the role played by online social networks in the upheavals in the Arab world and in Iran will most likely continue for decades to come. But in real time, the rulers of these countries had no doubt – or time to doubt – the Internet’s lethal potential. They acted against the web with all the means and audacity available to dictatorships.

Total Internet shutdown
The trump card used by Arab dictatorships against the opposition. This is the drastic step taken by Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya and other Middle-Eastern countries to prevent citizens from obtaining and distributing information, and organizing rallies. As Tufekci blogged it, “How do you censor five million Facebook accounts in real time except to shut them all down?”

The added bonus is that the eyes of the world so curious to see what’s going on inside your kingdom will become blinded, nor will outsiders be able to support the rebels. It not too difficult to shut down the Internet in a dictatorship, where telecommunication companies are either directly owned by the state or operate subject to heavily restricted licenses.

Even such blocking is not airtight, however. On the day Egyptian Internet was blocked, for example, WikiLeaks twitted that according to some reports, opposition activists were faxing WikiLeaks bulletins into Egypt in order to bypass the blocking. Others sent instructions on how to connect to the web using Noor – the only provider left online – cellular phones and calls to providers in other countries. Still others broadcast information about events in Egypt through amateur radio stations.

Website filtering and blocking
Tunisia, the first Arab Spring domino to fall, blocked websites long before the revolution, and did this on a massive scale, as in China and Iran. When WikiLeaks published US diplomatic cables with detailed descriptions of corruption in the Tunisian regime, the latter denied any access to the whistleblowing website and others which reported its findings. Consequently, Anonymous hacktivists attacked Tunisian government websites. Public outrage broke out when policemen seized 26 year-old Mohamed Bouazizi’s vegetable stand, to which he reacted by self-immolation. It took just one more month for President Zin El Abidine Ben Ali to announce he will not run for another term in office and that the Internet will no longer be censored. Immediately afterwards, he fled to Saudi Arabia were he sought political asylum. Shortly after that, video sharing websites, including YouTube, were unblocked.

Iranian authorities moved against Twitter and Facebook following the key role played by these social networks in the uprising in the run-up to the June 2009 elections: opposition activists used them to distribute information and electoral propaganda.  “We are disappointed to learn of reports that users in Iran may not have access to Facebook, especially at a time when voters are turning to the Internet as a source of information about election candidates and their positions”, wrote Facebook spokeswoman in politically correct corporate corporate-speak, as though Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were a democratic ruler who happened to stumble over the Internet cable.

Right after the election, the State Department asked Twitter to reschedule its planned maintenance downtime so as not to obstruct communications among Iranian opposition activists. Twitter acquiesced. Twitter cofounder Biz stone explained the move by pointing to the “role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran”, but denied this was done following the department’s request: “[T]he State Department does not have access to our decision making process. Nevertheless, we can both agree that the open exchange of information is a positive force in the world”. This failed to impress the Iranians, who talked of an imperialist conspiracy, said Alec Ross, Hillary Clinton’s Senior Advisor for Innovation. According to Ross, the Iranians viewed Facebook and Twitter as American companies, tools of the US government. Ross responded jokingly by wishing that were true.

Middle-Eastern activists and their supporters worldwide mobilized to find ways of bypassing these blockings, including the installation of Tor anonymity software and using proxy servers to route connections through non-censoring countries. American scientists are currently working on Telex: software designed to conceal information from banned websites within traffic from safe sites.

Overflowing the Internet with pro-government contents and attacking the opposition
As early as 2000, Iran created the Montazery.com website in an attempt to divert traffic from Montazeri.com, the true website of Iranian dissident ayatollah under house arrest who had written a scathing memoir against the Khomeini and the Islamic Republic. In 2008, it announced it would unleash an “army” of 10,000 bloggers from the Revolutionary guard. In early 2011, it launched its first cyber police unit to fight “Internet crimes”. Its police chief General Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam said it will take on the “anti-revolutionary” dissident groups that use online social networks to organize protests against the president. “Through these very social networks in our country, anti-revolutionary groups and dissidents found each other and contacted foreign countries and triggered riots”, said Moghaddam, referring to the protests against the presidential election results in 2009.

Last February, Iranian activists posted a list of security tips for demonstrators and arrested members of the opposition. Its writers may have learned the hard way. Many tips had to do concealing digital information. Apart from specific tips on how to prevent authorities from getting hold of sensitive information, demonstrators were warned against the perils of Facebook. Those interrogated were told to expect policemen and undercover agents to ask them about their Facebook accounts and to prepare for such questioning by changing their family name on the social network and apply strict privacy settings. In particular, the post warned activists against friendship requests by unknown individuals, because of the cyber army’s habit of requesting friendships using fake photos to view the information on activists’ Facebook pages.

Mubarak’s regime also acted against its web critics. One day after the Internet was shut down in Egypt, right before the violent demonstration in a timing that seemed deliberate WikiLeaks published American embassy cables about Egypt, including reports on the Egyptian blogosphere. According to the leaked documents, the Egyptian government arrested, imprisoned, tortured and sexually abused several bloggers who had criticized it, offended Christianity or Islam, or where associated with the banned Muslim Brotherhood movement. In one cable, a US diplomat reported that the Egyptian government fears young and technologically savvy bloggers associated with the Brotherhood due to their ability to mobilize mass support for the movement and organize public rallies through the Internet.

Alternative national network
Instead of trying to block “problematic” website, a practice that is about as efficient as trying to filter sand out of the ocean, why not start an alternative national network, cut off from the World Wide Web, with exclusively pro-government content? This was exactly the planned announced last April by Head of Economic Affairs Ali Aghamohammadi: “Iran will soon create an Internet that conforms to Islamic principles, to improve its communication and trade links with the world. We can describe it as a genuinely ‘halal’ [kosher] network aimed at Muslims on a[n] ethical and moral level”. According to the Minister of Information and Communications Technology Reza Taghipour, the network was to be launched by the end of August, with its own search engine planned for 2012. According to Aghamohammadi, initially the network will be operated in tandem with the World Wide Web, which will continue to serve ministries, large corporations and banks. Eventually, though, the halal network will completely substitute WWW, and Iran will offer other Islamic countries to join it.

***

Muammar Gaddafi’s regime has finally been toppled. Although information about the upheavals flowed online from Libya to the rest of the world, from February to late August most of the population was disconnected. Upon the rebels’ takeover of the capital Tripoli, they entered the international communication cable’s control center and restored the Internet. The website of Libyan Telecom and Technology congratulated Libya “on emancipation from the rule of the tyrant”. Israeli journalist and blogger Omer Kabir twitted: “The Internet is back in Tripoli after six months. We can now expect the riots to subside as the entire country checks the inbox”.

__________________

Ido Kenan is a freelance blogger (Room 404) and journalist. For more than ten years, he has been writing about the Internet, web life and digital culture. I thank Itamar Shaltiel for his help in writing this article.

Michael Sfard
Translated into Fnglish by Naveh Frumer

Every secret depends on the following three: uncertainty, the irrelevance of truth, and the irreversibility of being exposed to it. Uncertainty: In order to create margins that are far wider than the kernel of the secret; a kind of buffer zone that, while itself might contain no secret, is nonetheless basking in the warmth of the original one. The irrelevance of truth: So that, on the one hand, censoring the publication of the secret won’t amount to confirming its existence, and on the other hand, so that the biggest secret of all will not be revealed—namely its absence. The irreversibility of being exposed to the secret: Since whoever are exposed themselves turn into receptacles for the secret, and hence become part of it, thereby joining the deterrence and the most powerful defense of the secret—self-censorship.

Whoever comes close to the secret risks falling down Alice’s rabbit-hole, to a wonderland in which a poem can be senseless from start to finish, and a secret can be defined as that which is secret. The attempt to locate the borders of the secret is doomed to fail: The makers of the secret long-since figured out that ever-changing, unclear, and elusive contours serve to bury it so well, that often they themselves cannot tell the secret’s straw men from the secret proper (assuming such a distinction even exists). Travelling in the kingdom of the secret one quickly finds that truth and lie are its equal citizens, equally enjoying the protection of the secret’s guardians. The first lesson in censorship school is that false news can pose a national security risk no lesser and sometimes even greater than true news. As a top figure in the Israeli Censorship told me during a visit to their offices, located in a Tel Aviv office building alongside accounting and law firms, “I don’t care whether the story is true or not.” This implies that the secrecy of the secret has nothing to do with its accuracy, but with its guardians’ belief that its exposure might possess a reality-generating power. (One doubts whether they realize this is also the significance of keeping it a secret). Hence we find that, without any academic, philosophical background, Military Censorship officers come up with postmodern views that question the pertinence of the distinction between true and false, that place every secret on wheels that are perpetually in motion, that generate a second-order discourse about the very existence of the secret, and that, most significantly, generate a power-circle of those who have a hold on the secret—which might or might not exist.

Should our scout nonetheless find its way beyond the secret’s lines, he or she will be transformed forever. Like Israel’s water reservoir, the secret too has upper and lower red lines, below which there are always additional black lines, and perhaps even—but this is yet another secret we will never know for sure—silver of gold lines, beyond which only the High Priest is allowed to venture on Yom Kippur. Learning a secret is an irreversible status, like parenthood, like adulthood. The exposure to it is radioactive, it sticks to you. Not only can one not get rid of it, they themselves become dangerous to those around them, who also risk catching it. The exposed person becomes a carrier, and as such is incorporated into the secret’s realm of expansion. The moment of exposure is the moment in which the secret’s defense systems organize themselves around that person, turning them from a subject into an object: from someone from whom the secret must be kept hidden, to a secret that must itself be hidden from others. It is precisely this view of the exposed person as a receptacle of the secret that allowed the Shin-Bet (General Security Service) to argue against the release, after 16 years in prison, of the aging KGB agent Prof. Marcus Klingberg, claiming with the utmost seriousness that he “knows something he doesn’t know that he knows.” Klingberg’s own consciousness is of no importance—just as the consciousness of a bottle containing a message is of no importance.

In the past, the leper colony of secret-bearers resided within Ashkelon’s Shikma prison. There, in solitary confinement, was the man who received the name “the atom spy”, Mordechai Vanunu. In the cell next to him was Klingberg who, a few years earlier, shared the place with spy Shimon Levinson. The Israeli Prison Service, under orders from the Shin Bet, made sure these prisoners won’t be around others, for fear the latter might catch the secret. The fact they were around each other was apparently less of a problem, since they are all eternal secret-carriers in any case.

The encounter between the fluid, evasive, and contour-less secret and the rigidly square and unimaginative world of law is fascinating. Regular legal structures, which seek to regulate people’s behavior, exhibit a set of values opposed to that of the secret. The quality of a legal norm is measured by its exactness, and by the capacity of its addressees to rightly delimit it (certainty). The application of a legal norm is always carried out with an emphasis on finding out all the relevant facts as they really happened (truth). The philosophy of the secret, seeking to set up walls that would delimit a territory that is by nature undefined, is antagonistic to the highest norm of criminal law, according to which “everything which is not forbidden is allowed.” The flirtation of law with “truth,” with its unreserved loyalty to a rigid worldview, makes it hard to apply those ideas that are based on a fluid worldview, whose agents are forces and processes rather than objects and facts. Recruiting the well-ordered and logical universe of the law in order to protect secrets leads to the unavoidable violation of fundamental legal principles, and to the creation of a juridical field dominated by an entirely different physics.

Israeli law has created such a field. British Mandatory censorship legislation, together with Israeli criminal legislation, gave birth to a tautological definition of the secret, one version of which is

“any piece of information national security requires would be kept secret” (1977 Israeli Penal Code, section 113 (b)(1))

Another version is

“any piece of information whose content, form, the manner in which it is held, its source, or the circumstances of receiving it testify to the duty to keep it secret.” (ibid.)

The first version has to do with content, stating that a secret is a secret. The second version is circumstantial, stating that a secret is what looks like a secret. Has the reader made any progress in understanding the concept of the secret? In practice, both this definition and the criminal offenses it ascribes—espionage and the delivery of secret information, punishable by prison sentence of seven to twenty years—end up turning the table: everything which is not allowed is forbidden. Incidentally, in order to legally ground the idea of truth discussed earlier, “information” is defined in the following manner:

“Information: including false information, and any description, plan, password, etc.” (article 91)

In order to complete the vagueness and tighten the seal around the secret, those British Mandatory regulations that define the authority of the Military Censorship forbid mentioning anything that might indicate that a given publication has been modified under the wheels of the censorship (1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations, article 98). Here we have another kind of second-order secret: not only is it forbidden to reveal it, it is also forbidden to reveal that it is forbidden to reveal.

For a jurist, who is used to precise definitions, measured prohibitions, and a clear distinction between a fact either being or not being the case, such definitions are like an idol in the Holy of Holies. They undo the respectable façade of the law, the product of generations of refining the art of precise formulation and definition, and the construction of linguistic structures that distinguish between generalities and exceptions. In poetic terms, the definition of a secret is like the verse “there’s nothing, nothing like you / I can’t live without you,” in Sarit Hadad’s song “You’re a Cannon”. Why bother coming up with a rhyme when one can simply use the same word again?

The refugee camp encapsulates crucial features of our political planet – refugees are suspended from political rights and placed under quarantine in the political regime of nation states. In that regard, the refugee camp is above all, a capsule. A capsule where populations are suspended from the legal order that governs their lives, defined and regulated according to the United Nations’ humanitarian conventions and the volatile domain of international politics.

My latest video essay X-Mission engages with the camp – the Palestinian refugee camp more precisely – as this extreme form of extra-territoriality. Before getting into discussion of content, I want to present some reflections on the making of a video on this exceptional and yet exemplary case. X-Mission was conceived to be intensely discursive, an experiment in a kind of provisional theoretical criticism of the multiple discourses which constitute the camp. In 35 video minutes it delivers something of a geological cross section through the juridical, philosophical, urban planning, mythological, and post-national, narrative layers that articulate the highly compressed space. In this anthology of remarkable expertise offered by various scholars, what takes shape for once is not the metaphorical waiting room for a disabled history to pick up momentum again, but a veritable factory of ideas. In view of what could almost be described as an archeological endeavor, video is used as a cognitive tool to get to know the deeper strata of things.

However prominent the scope of Palestinian exile, its political complexity and historical depth, I am aware of just how difficult it is to make any meaningful contribution to a condition that is so glaringly over-represented. Firstly, my intention was to find a way to speak about Palestinians without falling into the inevitability of positing them in relation to Israel or to the conflict. The purpose of a non-dialectical approach is not to deviate from the problems or to depoliticize the subject matter of course but rather to avoid the trap of tired binary arguments, and allow instead a rethinking of the case in relation to other texts I have developed around global networks of contemporary migrant communities in previous video essays (Remote Sensing, Sahara Chronicle). In the midst of a general reshuffling of power and responsibility in the shifting global system of super states and supra-national bodies, I wanted to avoid lapsing back into archaic national allegories to create a conceptual framework in the attempt to grasp our being-in-the world. Particularly that the establishment of nation-states has produced a mass of non-citizens, stateless persons, and refugees at every instance.

In cognizance of this backdrop, the refugee becomes the walking proof of just how fallible and incomplete the global organization of nation states truly is. To (re-)think the camp is therefore an attempt to (re-)think the world system as such. This is the reason I went looking for other referential categories than those developed historically.

From "X-Mission"

Growing urban dissolution, enclavization and ghettoization on a global scale assign people different sorts of spaces, mobilities and rights. The refugee camp is but a systemic variety of a condition, emblematic of developments in late capitalism. One way of considering the camp is through the lens of knowledge gained from analysis of globalization, trans-nationalism but also through other forms of political extra-territoriality – such as the al-Qaeda network and the US anti-terrorist paradigm – that have had a decisive impact on the Palestinian condition today. This is the reason for starting the video with images of Afghani refugees from 1989 – the instance when the focus of belligerence shifted from Cold War adversary to so-called militant Islam. Ultimately, this is the crucial time frame for X-Mission, particularly since 9/11 has been used to impose a state of exception and, through political rhetoric, legitimize measures that encroach upon the rights of any potentially suspicious person who fits the profile of a Muslim non-citizen male, regardless of his origin[1]. In the last years of the Bush Administration, when I was researching and filming the video, it became increasingly obvious that the case of the Palestinian refugee needed to be examined in the light of all these new developments.

Besides this historical re-contextualisation, and the non-dialectical approach at unfolding knowledge, there is another aesthetic strategy at work in this video essay. Like most of my other video works, X-Mission establishes a direct correspondence between the conceptual structure of the video and the particularities of the place it describes. A video on circuitous border movements calls for a different formal structure than one on clandestine, rhizome-like transit migration, or yet another on the construction of an oil pipeline running through three territories. The question of the geographic characteristics of the camp is crucial for the video montage.

Although refugee camps are temporarily created in times of crisis, driven by a rhetoric of security, they tend to be consolidating and self-perpetuating. In the sixty years of their existence, Palestinian refugee tent cities spread in the Arab world have long since turned into precarious cinder block settlements. In the Palestinian case we have to understand the refugee camp above all as a spatial device of containment that deprives people of their mobility and condemns them to a localized life on extremely reduced grounds. Yet at the same time, the refugee camp is a product of supra-national forms of organization (United Nation High Commissioner of Refugees, NGOs) and in that sense, connected systemically to a global context. In a cultural analysis of this canonical space, it seems meaningful to link these two features. To render this condition I opted for the form of a cultural report that includes local analysis by experts (architect, anthropologist, journalist, historian) while drawing on data and video material from YouTube, suggesting use of media that connects the camp to the global distribution of cultural power. Although I made three field trips to Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Jordan and the West Bank, documentary images of camp life have been deployed sparingly in this video. The interviews, interspersed with multiple-layer video montage deriving from both downloaded and self-recorded sources, spin an intricate web of discursive interrelations.As in my previous video works, the journalistic function of reporting joins the intellectual project of cultural analysis and aesthetic production.

From "X-Mission"

When it comes to the refugee question, it is essential to understand the legal superstructure. Palestinians are of particular interest here, because their case is not only the oldest and largest refugee case in international law, but it also helped to constitute the international regime over-seeing the question of refugees after the Second World War. This case exemplifies how international law has failed to maintain a framework of protection, first depriving Palestinians of their political rights as citizens – turning them, perhaps too quickly, into a voiceless mass of refugees – and subsequently dispossessing them of the right to international protection guaranteed to all refugees. The Palestinian refugees are the exception within the exception.

Because it was the United Nations that created the “problem” of the Palestinian refugees in the first place, it set up a regime of heightened protection for them, explains Susan Akram (designated as ‘The Lawyer’).[2] From the beginning, in 1948, Palestinians were to have two agencies devoted exclusively to them: the UNCCP entrusted with a complete international protection and resolution mandate, and UNRWA, whose job was to provide food, clothing and shelter.[3] Thus were Palestinians regarded to have been taken care of, the charter of the UNHCR (the UN High Commissioner for Refugees founded in 1950) had a special clause excluding the Palestinians from its mandate. When it became clear that the UNCCP was unable to resolve the Palestinian conflict, its funding was substantially truncated, which incapacitated it in its role as protector. Within four years, Palestinians were left without this international protection provided by the UNHCR to all other refugee groups around the world. They had no agency to intervene on an international level and no access to the International Court of Justice. The protection gap has never been closed, not least because the absence of any legal framework has been very convenient to the power politics behind negotiations. Under the guise of fiscal prudence, a major refugee case was maneuvered outside international law, where it has remained parked for decades.

This exceptional condition has made Palestinian refugees especially vulnerable to arbitrary re-impositions of the state of exception, as a recent incident in Nahr el-Bared, a camp in northern Lebanon, demonstrates. Nahr el-Bared is one of twelve existing camps in Lebanon founded between 1948 and subsequent years; several others have been destroyed. Allocated by the UN, the plot of land near the Syrian border first hosted tented settlements that were replaced by cinder block houses whenever refugees could afford to build them. The urban fabric grew organically without a master plan, expressing a form of life all together indifferent to strategic urban planning. Fifty years later, the population had multiplied but the surface of the camp had not been allowed to increase, resulting in one of the most densely populated places on earth. In juridical terms, this is UN territory, but it is Lebanese territory for matters of security, and Palestinian in terms of identity.

For the purpose of this video, I interviewed Sari Hanafi and Ismael Sheikh Hassan, whose texts elaborating on the spatial politics of this camp and the tenacious negotiations of its reconstruction are included in this issue. To avoid re-iteration of details, rather than focus on the stratified and often ambivalent apparatus of sovereignty that rules this space, I drew attention to the flexible process through which refugees have begun to re-inscribe themselves into the political fabric. While the battle over Nahr el-Bared is still underway, a community-based reconstruction committee was established to research the state of the camp before its destruction and to draw an accurate plan that later served as a basis for negotiations.[4] In a collective process that included volunteer architects, the camp dwellers defined shapes and limits of their plot prior to reconstruction in order to recreate them. The reconstruction of the camp posed the interesting question of how refugees would plan their housing and urban organization themselves if they had a say. Despite the many complaints about lack of space and sunlight in the camps, which by the way the architects attempted to resolve, often successfully, it turned out that for the dwellers, the urban morphology of the old camp made a lot of sense. The Lebanese state and army, however, had different plans for the reconstruction of Nahr el-Bared. In the organic system of narrow alleys, they saw an obstacle to entering the camp with vehicles, underscoring their perception of the space as a military zone, when in fact it is an urban zone.

The common struggle to define the refugee space suggests that the camp, in this instance, is not the site of what Agamben calls “bare life,” that exists outside all political and cultural distinctions; on the contrary, it is a highly juridical space of dispossession and re-possession. These endeavors have created an informal political domain that evades sovereign decisions, to reveal a place where Palestinian refugees – who are literally placed on the outer reaches of international law – can unfold self-authorized, constructive means through which to re-inscribe themselves into the wider political fabric composed, with the accumulation of time, of a complex mix of post-national considerations.

The refugee camp emerges as what Eyal Weizman calls “a site where the politics of a troubled geography is folded into a reduced, bounded space elsewhere,”[5] producing an intense microcosm with complex relations to homeland and related communities abroad. Given the importance of the inter-connectivity among these separated pockets of Palestinian populations, X-Mission attempts to place the Palestinian refugee in the context of a global diaspora and considers de-territorialized models of belonging that have emerged through the networked matrix of this widely dispersed community.

Post-national ideas have gained momentum through the relentless proliferation of trans-national and extra-territorial spaces in which people live or work with few guarantees for safety and dignity. For a growing number of people, life is now about finding a way to survive in the cracks of our system of nation states. This is why I turn to supra-national concepts – which are able to tackle massive statelessness – and to forms of post-national resistance and agency.

Half of the Palestinians live outside of historic Palestine and constitute the largest and oldest refugee population in the world. They are mostly in neighboring states (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria), but also in communities scattered across the world. “How Palestinians negotiate the space now and build a nation outside the territory should not be perceived only as negative, as a trap, as being outside of something” suggests Beshara Doumani (‘The Historian’).[6] “Their transnational experience is one of the most important resources they have in order to build a future for themselves in which they can live a life with dignity. whether inside or outside a state of their own, and have rights like other human beings. How they do that can be seen as a laboratory for other stateless and transnational groups, whether they are refugees or migrant laborers or people who simply find themselves outside certain spaces that they have long known.”

Somewhat out of phase with their trans-national condition, the Palestinian’s political language continues to focus on self-determination through territorial sovereignty. However, many Palestinians have started to wonder whether the national project should be expanded from its state-centric focus to also include other vehicles for attaining rights and the ability to survive in the world especially at a time that the nation state itself is in decline and has often proved to be a place in which large numbers of people do not necessarily attain civil or economic rights, and certainly not freedom or justice. All three segments of the Palestinian people – those in Israel, the Occupied Territories and in exile need to become part of a larger project that stretches the political beyond the traditional conception of state system established in the Middle East after the First World War.

From "X-Mission"

In the meantime, like any other major diasporic society, the Palestinian community has devised all sorts of ways to build a transnational network that allows them to negotiate the juridical zones that they are not allowed to enter, or in which they are forced to stay, by breaking them, overcoming them and finding ways around them. Across Borders, a web project hosted by Birzeit University in the West Bank, links eleven refugee camps in the region. Given that the terrestrial connection between Palestinian cities is often disrupted and that refugees in Lebanon are not allowed to visit the West Bank, it is all the more important for camp dwellers to be informed about the circumstances in the other camps. Besides personal and collective stories, the website diffuses daily news relative to Palestinian camp life in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. It is often the only way for people to know how their relatives are doing and if problems have occurred in and around the camp. The site also receives many visitors and commentators from abroad and Shaadi, who maintains the site in Dheisheh camp near Bethlehem, is something of a virtual cosmopolitan whose worldliness is acquired, in large part, via technology.

On a different note, this video essay reflects on the artist’s mission as a particular sort of fieldwork. Most obviously, perhaps, X-Mission can be understood as a witness report from the field, inserting artistic research into a wide range of scholarly and humanitarian field works. Humanitarian officers are almost never simply on a field research they are on a mission, which implies their visit has purposes beyond the simple collection of information. They go with the aim of making a direct intervention, relieving suffering, helping people recover from disaster, providing medical and educational assistance or witnessing injustice; a mission can, therefore, be understood as the kind of fieldwork that embraces a moral component. Adi Ophir argues that “contemporary technologies of disaster are “in the moral” in the same way that scientists are said to be “in the truth,” which does not necessarily mean to act morally (in the same way that a scientist may err and still be “in the truth”); it means that a certain attention to moral considerations becomes inevitable.”[7] From this perspective, the camp as a response to crisis is always already a place for morality, not because it is placed above and beyond its political, economic, or religious meanings, but because of the existence of a complex apparatus of rescue and relief.

My video essays investigate the condition and organization of survival in the world, but they are not meant to contribute to an abstract relief program of sorts; they don’t mean to rescue anyone. The area that constitutes “the moral” in society is a complex humanitarian apparatus run by the state, the market and civil society at large, which consists of a fairly structured assemblage of power and knowledge, including spatial arrangements, means of communication, means of data collecting and processing, organizational procedures and discursive practices. It is into all these practices that my videos intervene. In terms of representational politics, the struggle for autonomy is the focus of my approach to this most fragile form of life, which borders on “bare life,” where human agency is taken for the fundamental rhetorical practice.

Aside from intervening in rhetorical conventions of human rights discourse, X-Mission reports on a distinct tendency in the art world to converge aesthetic pleasure and moral mobilization. Since the early 1990s, the art market has channeled an astounding quantity of participatory projects with “communities in crisis” towards privileged global art consumers. We might indeed ask why the global art world should be considered the appropriate stage for the concerns of a disenfranchised community when it remains unclear whether increased representational visibility is necessarily linked with political agency. Drawing on Ophir’s ideas, one possible explanation is that art projects with a strong social commitment provide a special opportunity for the “moralization” of the market-driven art world and its civil audience. On the other hand, when it comes to large international exhibitions perceived by city and state governments as image-enhancing, such art projects present an opportunity for the politicization of a morally-motivated civil society. How X-Mission, or any of my videos for that matter, operate within these parameters is difficult to monitor. Their intention is to make an aesthetic contribution to current discourses that form and inform complex geopolitical developments while reflecting on how art participates in making them intelligible.

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[1] Human Rights Watch report on 9/11 detentions, quoted in Leela Fernandes “The Boundaries of Terror, Feminism, Human Rights, and the Politics of Global Crisis” in Just Advocacy? (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), eds. Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol, 2005, 66.

[2] The circumstances of the founding years of these institutions are extracted from a video interview I conducted with Susan Akram, Professor for International and Human Rights Laws at the Boston University Law School in February 2008.

[3] UNCCP, the UN Conciliation Commission on Palestine, was established in 1948 and UNRWA, the UN Relief and Work Agency in 1949.

[4] Interview conducted with Ismael Sheikh Hassan, architect and urban planner involved in the Nahr el-Bared reconstruction committee, December 2007 in Beirut and July 2008 in Tripoli.

[5] Eyal Weizman, in conversation with Médecins Sans Frontières founding member Roni Brauman, Colombia University, New York, 2008. Also see the text “Return to Nature” by Decolonizing Architecture in this issue.

[6] Beshara Doumani, University of California Berkeley, interviewed in July 2008 in Tripoli. The conversation continues in the present journal in a discussion on the Palestinian museum in the making.

[7] Adi Ophir, “The Sovereign, the Humanitarian, and the Terrorist” in Nongovernmental Politics, (New York: Zone Books), ed. Michel Feher, 165.

Biography:

Ursula Biemann studied art and cultural theory at the School of Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. As a video essayist, theorist and curator, she has produced a considerable body of work on migration, mobility, technology and gender. Recent art research projects include “Black Sea Files” on the Caspian oil geography (2005) at Kunstwerke Berlin and the Istanbul Biennial; and the video anthology “Sahara Chronicle” 2006-2009. Her award winning videos are internationally exhibited. She published numerous books “Geography and the Politics of Mobility”(2003) and a monograph “Mission Reports—Artistic Practice in the Field “(2008) Cornerhouse Publishers. Biemann holds a honorary degree from the Swedish University. She is a researcher at the Institute for Critical Theory at the University of Arts Zurich and teaches seminars and workshops internationally.