Secular Zionism, R.I.P.?

The seeds of Israel’s twin crises of the last year – the refusal by the losers in the November 2022 elections to accept the results and the satanic rampage by functionally psychopathic Muslim sex fiends in the Muslim Brotherhood a.k.a. Hamas — are right there in one of the two founding documents of the Zionist movement, Altneuland, the second of Theodor Herzl’s two books.

The first, Der Judenstaat/ The State of Jews (not to be confused with a Judischer Staat, a Jewish state) reads like a stock offering or prospectus for his project; the politics, nuts, bolts, and mechanics of building state on land that was at the moment and had been for millennia barren wasteland.

By contrast, his Altneuland/Old-New Land was an imaginary, Jules Verne-esque time-travel fantasy to the Judenstaat twenty-years after its founding. This was Herzl’s “vision” of what life in the future state would be like. He is known in Israel as khozeh ha-medina, the “Visionary of the State” who prophesied in 1898 that it would take fifty years to come to life and in that he was jaw-droppingly correct. It was published in 1903, the year before he died at age forty-four.

But otherwise, there is zero correspondence between his vision and the actual history of the Zionist movement and modern state after him. There is no correspondence whatsoever, because Herzl seems to have been a perfect ignoramus about a) Islam b) the relationship between Jews and Muslims over fourteen centuries.

The conflict between the two religious communities did not begin with the war in 1967 when Israel took the Golan Heights from the Syrians, Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria from the Jordanians and Gaza from the Egyptians. It did not begin in 1947 with the UN Partition Plan; not in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration, not in 1897 with the first Zionist conference in Basle, Switzerland, organized and chaired by Herzl.

He envisioned a kumbaya relationship when Zionist history since his death has known nothing like that. From the second year of Islam, the Jews everywhere lived under Islamic tyranny. Every day of the last fourteen centuries saw them discriminated against in Islam. They were “oppressed and humiliated” because the Koran itself commands that Believers treat them this way. In Muslim minds, the Zionist movement is a blasphemous uprising of the dhimmi Jews who have no right to live free of their status as defined in sharia law.

Worst of all, in Herzl’s vision, the Judenstaat came into being peacefully thanks to international diplomacy. In Herzl’s fantasy, there would be no war of independence. Contrary to his rosy prophecy, the real, first twenty years in the born-again state began with the 1948-49 invasion by six Arab states during which one per cent of the Jewish population perished; which led to the 1950s and the age of the murderous fedayeen, a religious term for terrorists before they were rebranded in the 1960s as “patriotic Palestinian freedom-fighters pining for their ancient stolen homeland.”

In the 1950s, the terror strikes launched out of Gaza were so severe, there were times when all vehicular traffic between Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem had to be accompanied by an IDF escort. This led in 1956 to Israel launching the Sinai Campaign and did so in conjunction with the British and French who had their own scores to settle with Egypt.

In 1967, the Muslims tried again to destroy the state of free Jews, to kill thousands of them, rape who knows how many, and steal all the wealth the Zionists had created on real estate the Muslims had maintained uninhabited and undeveloped for over a thousand years. In 1857, American novelist Herman Melville made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and described it as a “caked, depopulated Hell.” Ten years later, fellow novelist Mark Twain made his pilgrimage and wrote the land “sits in sack cloth and ashes.” Neither one during their separate visits met anyone who called himself a “Palestinian” or was called that by others.

Today, though, Jew-haters believe that in history, Palestine was the green and fertile homeland of the ancient Palestinians that was stolen from them by genocidal, colonialist Jews.

So, Israel’s real first two decades exposed Herr Herzl as no prophet. According to Israel’s No. 1 Herzl authority, the late Marxian intellectual Shlomo Avineri z”l  who just died , three elements characterized his vision. 1) There would be equal citizenship for all inhabitants, Jews, and non-Jews alike. 2) The economy would be a combination of the best of capitalism and the best of socialism. 3) The relationship between state and religion would be spelled out satisfactorily.

As to the first, Herzl demanded equality for women, still a revolutionary idea in the West, but he also “was very much aware that Palestine was not empty. Some of the people he describes in Altneuland are Arabs, and one of them is even one of the country’s leaders…Herzl recognized that there were non-Jews, and that they should be given equal rights.”

Indeed, Avineri wrote, “This is the core of the fictional plot. The country in 1923, he imagined, would be in the middle of an election for parliament, with a new political party on the scene led by a recent immigrant, a rabbi, who says that non-Jews should not have equal rights, because it is a Jewish state. The plot is how the political establishment fights against this Jewish racist. Herzl describes the argument of the Jewish racist party and then the arguments of the liberals who want to maintain the democratic structure of a liberal Jewish commonwealth. The liberals’ argument is twofold: On the one hand, it goes back to Jewish sources, remembering we were slaves in Egypt and invoking quotes from the Bible that speak about equality. But there is also another argument, which claims that a modern state needs to be based on equal citizenship.”

Shlomo Avineri was an Israeli, who, like most of them, misunderstood the English word “racist” as it is used in English commonly connoting human physical appearance. In modern Hebrew, “racism” has unfortunately been translated as gizanoot derived from geza that Alcalay translates as “trunk, stem, stock” which lacks the skin-color association and can refer to plant life.  In English, racism does not generically apply to all kinds of groups as geza in Hebrew can, but specifically to one’s natal, superficial endowment. So Avineri got it in wrong in calling the rabbi a racist, when skin color has absolutely nothing to do with Jewish identity. Neither is it “racist” for Jews to shun non-Jews as partners for marriage. Marxists are inclined to see in Judaism a form of bigotry and rabbis as ‘racists.”

On the contrary, after eighteen centuries of living all over the world and accepting converts, the scattered Jews became arguably the most racially mixed nation on earth. The State of Israel came to life with olim/in-migrants from over 130 countries and Israelis look it; they come in all skin colors, hair textures, shapes of the eye.

Hitler himself, who believed in the crackpot science of racial purity, sneered at the Jews who had no sense of racial purity. In his words, they were a “mongrel” people and therefore an inferior race. How interesting that today, two generations after the Holocaust, the Jews in Israel have morphed into the worst racial purists governing an “apartheid” society just like the old South Africa.

And as for Herzl’s call for “equality” between Jews and non-Jews; this is simply and prima facie an illogical impossibility. Israel’s post-religious Jews define their state as both “Jewish and democratic,” which history has shown to be not true, if by democratic we mean a population of equals. Sorry, but twenty percent of Israel’s citizens are not Jews and cannot sing the national anthem in which a Jewish heart is pining to return home. Where is the equality in that?

Likewise, this same twenty percent is left cold by the Israeli flag decorated with two religious symbols: the shield of King David, the greatest and most successful poet in history, a very religious Jew and model for the future Messiah. The Jewish prayer shawl was no less the inspiration for the flag’s two stripes.

Instead of waving the banner of an impossible “equality” between Jews and non-Jews, the Israeli declaration of independence would have been more realistic and honest by calling for “decent and fair treatment” for non-Jews.

But Israel’s worst mistake at its founding was this worship of “equality” that led to granting citizenship to Muslims when their religion is nothing but a form of Jew-hatred. Remove that venom from the Koran and Hadith, and all the stories plagiarized from Tanakh/the Jewish Bible in them, and there is nothing left. Islam is bereft of even one religious idea or concept not pilfered from Judaism.

A year ago, mobs of anti-religious Israelis refused to accept the results of a legitimately run democratic election because they feared any change in the judicial system would oppress them with more religiosity in the public square. Israel’s anti-religionist seculars look upon the classical Jewish religion as constricting a person’s freedom. Their mobs used a made-up word for this feared process, hadata, meaning the “religionizing” of society. When these anti-religious Israelis blocked traffic, which is a crime that endangers life, they were demanding that Israel remain “Jewish and a democratic” which they understand to mean a religious and a non-religious state, which is an oxymoron. In common parlance, this is wanting to have your cake and eat it too; be a Jewish state but also a liberal democracy just like all the others in which religion is none of the government’s business. In sum, Herzl the visionary was no theoretician of government, no Montesquieu, Locke, Madison or Hamilton when it came to designing an system of self-government.

But above all, Herzl’s abysmal ignorance of Islam contained the seeds of the eruption of evil on earth on October 7, 2023. It erupted because the Israelis have never been able to see the Muslims for who and what they are. Israeli school children are not taught the sad history of Jews under Islam; they are not taught the lies of that religion.

Islam is nothing but the Jewish religion purloined and perverted. There are dozens of Jewish characters in the Jewish Bible who re-appear in the Koran, and in every case, the stories are corrupt. Most infamously, Islam preaches that when Ibrahim was commanded to bind his son for a sacrifice, the son chosen was Isma’il and the event took place in Mecca; so, when the Jews say the son chosen was Yitzhak, and the binding took place in Jerusalem, “They lie. They stole the story from Islam” as they believe today the Jews stole Palestine from its rightful owners.

Israelis, thanks to Herzl, have also believed that by being nice to the Muslims, Israelis can modify their behavior and melt the hate they harbor in their hearts.

On October 7, ironically, the worst hit Jewish communities were socialist communes/kibbutzim populated by the same slice of Israeli society that ruled the roost for the first generation of the state, the anti-religious, “leftist peace camp,” collectivists who never constituted more than 5% of the population, one of whose iconic heroes was Moshe Dayan who Napoleonically decided in 1967 to return the conquered Temple Mount to the Muslims who just days before in their masses were bellowing “Slaughter the Jews! Let’s finish Hitler’s work!” And then in 1993 the Marxists Peres and Rabin wanted to give away Samaria and Judea, the latter ground zero of Jewish history and source of this people’s national and individual identities.

October 7 was a terrible price to pay for a lesson in just who these Arab Muslims are and the bleak prospects of having a nice, friendly, cooperative relationship with them.

October 7 was the day Herzl’s kumbaya vision was massacred by the Muslim Brotherhood/Hama founded in 1928 and having nothing to do with statehood for the “Palestinians,” a verbal hologram of a people – that is something that looks like it is there but is not.

And massacred no less by that other murder cult called Islamic Jihad, whose name likewise has nothing to do with statehood for a phantom “Palestinian” nation.

The Islamic resistance to free Jews has always been a holy war, a religious war. They call it Jihad, which means war against all non-Muslims and especially the Jews.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.