October 7th, 2023 From The Perspective Of Zionist History: A Crucial Wakeup Alarm

October 7th, 2023 From The Perspective Of Zionist History: A Crucial Wakeup Alarm Hagit Lavsky (bio) Keywords October 7, Israel, Hamas, Israel-Palestinian conflict, Holocaust, Zionism, Zionist ideology, State-religion relations, Liberal democracy This is going to be a desperate account of a Zionist Israeli historian, who has begun to doubt the prospects for the fulfilment of Zionist goals and its guarantee of Israel's existence as a modern national state. Indeed, what happened and is still ongoing is beyond anything we could have imagined even considering our long historical experience of the bloody Israel-Palestinian conflict. Never before have we encountered such a vicious attack, nothing less than a crime against humanity. Pogroms belonged in our minds to pre-Israeli Jewish history, when we Jews could not but count on the mercy of non-Jewish sovereign states. The October 7th pogrom took place, however, under Israeli sovereignty, and therefore doubled the traumatic effect on the Israeli public. Having said this, as a historian who has devoted a significant amount of my research to studying the Holocaust, it seems to me that the tendency to bring the Holocaust into the picture is altogether wrongheaded. The Holocaust was the implementation of the genocidal Nazi ideology which was determined to eliminate the Jews from the face of the earth, or at least from Europe, and not just the outburst of localized murderous violence. As I will argue here, comparing the Hamas attack to the Holocaust is tantamount to covering our eyes and prevents us from being alert to the alarm that the attack does sound and to begin a thorough self-examination: to admit having at least a partial responsibility for what has happened—not just in the short run—and to try to draw constructive conclusions for the future. End Page 82 The following argumentation presents two paradoxes inherent in Zionist ideology and argues that Israeli strategy was to avoid, rather than to confront, both paradoxes. Moreover, I argue that these two paradoxes are linked with each other, and that there is no way to deal with either of them and to solve the dilemmas they pose separately. The strategy of avoidance, accompanied by complacence, self-reliance, and self-righteousness, eventually led to the deterioration of Israeli democracy, embodied in Netanyahu's unruly government, pushing Israel to the brink of civil war. Moreover, we have not realized that a true democracy cannot sustain an occupation regime. Avoiding any genuine effort to solve the conflict and to end the occupation regime led to the corruption of Israeli democracy and to the emergence of Palestinian terrorism as the decisive power in Gaza, threatening the Palestinian authority until the eruption of the brutal attack and the unavoidable horrible war, with no end in view. The Zionist national movement was born with the goal to solve the "Jewish problem", namely to redeem the Jewish people from their abnormal Diasporic existence and thereby to remove antisemitism from the international arena. The consolidation of modern European National states over the course of the nineteenth century, the emergence of secularization and democracy, followed by emancipation for the Jews, awakened the Jews' hopes to integrate in the new order. The Jewish effort to assimilate and to integrate into non-Jewish societies failed, however, and was confronted instead with the emergence of a new kind of antisemitism, based on racial argumentation and embodied in political anti-Jewish parties. Zionism claimed that the failure of integration revealed that Jews were persecuted as a non-belonging ethnic body, rather than out of religious enmity, and hence, that any effort to combat antisemitism from within the European context would prove fruitless. Zionism suggested instead that Jewish otherness be recognized and that Jews admit to being a national entity rather than to try to integrate as individuals into other nations. Zionism called upon Jews to transform Jewish Diasporic existence into a healthy normal national existence, and to acquire what was missing from the Jewish entity to become a normal nation—a territory and national sovereignty. Based on historical ties and two millennia of sustained religious links, Zionism concentrated on the ancient land of Israel. Early Zionism had to struggle with Jewish...