Sermons

FRS Sermon February 15 2025

‘On Zionisms’

I am going to share with you a personal story, it happened more than 40 years ago and I don’t think I have ever talked about it. I’m not embarrassed by it and there’s no shame involved - it’s just something that someone once said to me that lodged inside me - and it’s re-emerged in my mind in recent months.

It was June 1983 and I was finishing my third year of training as a psychotherapist. It was the last time I and my colleagues would be meeting, formally meeting – we’d had seminars together and been in a weekly experiential group sharing all sorts of personal issues and preoccupations. But it was the end of term, the course was over, and we were having some food together, it was a party I suppose, a celebration of sorts. We’d survived.  

The food was all laid out on a rug on the floor and we were sitting around, lounging around, on cushions if memory serves, (that was all very much of its time), and maybe we had been drinking some wine, (I don’t remember that, but it sort of fits), and suddenly one of my colleagues – we were a group of eight, different ages, men and women, different backgrounds but all British-born (which you don’t get now on therapy training courses) – and this colleague said to me: ‘Howard, I have been wanting to ask you something for quite a while’. I will call him Harold, for convenience sake. And because that was his name. He died many years ago, it’s okay. He was in his early 60s then, I guess – so he was 30 years older than me - English to the core, upper middle class, educated but not that bright, or rather he was good with numbers, I think he was an accountant, but he wasn’t that emotionally intelligent or indeed thoughtful.     

Anyway, ‘What I want to know’, he said, ‘is this: are you one of those Zionists?’ And the condescension, the lip-curling disdain, is what I still remember, vividly. ‘Are you one of those Zionists?’ He knew I was Jewish of course – it so happened that I was the only Jewish member of that year group  – and on this last evening, this is what he wanted to ask.  Like he’d been saving it up.

Now some background. June1983, you might recall, was less than a year after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut, massacres of Palestinians and Lebanese Shi’ite civilians, perpetrated by Christian Phalangists under the tutelage of the IDF, the Israel Defence Forces. Israel had invaded Lebanon in mid-1982 with the intention of rooting out the PLO, which they had succeeded in doing. By September of that year there was a ceasefire agreement in place - the PLO had withdrawn; but in violation of the ceasefire the IDF advanced into West Beirut, and this enabled the Christian militias to carry out their war crimes. Between 1300 and three and a half thousand civilians were killed, the numbers are still disputed, but the independent UN commission investigating afterwards established that as the atrocities were taking place, the IDF had received reports of what was happening but had done nothing to prevent them. Indeed they had stationed troops at the exits of the area to prevent the camp’s residents from escaping.  The commission concluded that the IDF had been complicit in a situation which met the agreed criteria for genocidal activity.  

Simultaneously, the Israeli Kahan Commission found similarly that the IDF was indirectly responsible for the massacres and it forced the Defence Minister,  Ariel Sharon, to resign. Incidentally, or maybe not, twenty years later Sharon was Prime Minister.

So, all that ancient history is just to sketch out the backdrop to my colleague’s question:  ‘Are you one of those Zionists?’. Now, Jews in this country have had to respond to that question for a couple of generations by now. Over the years it’s been spat out by the non-Jewish world - and it still is, of course.

But if we are honest, it is a question that is asked, usually more benignly, by Jews themselves. When we ask the question of each other, or pose it to ourselves, ‘Are you one of those Zionists?’  or just ‘Are you a Zionist?’ the question won’t carry the same antisemitic undertone as Harold’s question. Or not until recently, not until this last 16 months, when Jews being asked this question by  other Jews - checking out one’s Zionist credentials as it were - have sometimes been abused, excoriated, condemned, if they haven’t given the right answer. Unless you give the ‘right’ answer you can be accused of being secretly antisemitic;  or rather - to use the jargon bandied around - ‘a self-hating Jew’.

It’s become a very loaded question in the UK Jewish community, in this community too. ‘Are you a Zionist?’ There is a whiff of McCarthyism around: “Are you now or have you ever been harbouring any doubts about Zionism?”

By the way, I looked up the Rules of Governance for this community, Finchley Reform, our constitution as it were, and where it describes the aims of the synagogue it says they are “the practice, promotion, development and advancement of Judaism through public worship, [and] religious, educational, social, cultural and charitable activities” and there is currently a suggestion that the word “humanitarian” should be added  to that list. So it is all very edifying – but you will notice that neither Zionism, nor indeed Israel, is mentioned. We are a Diaspora congregation and the focus is on the expression and nurturing of Judaism.

But back to 1983. I was shocked by Harold’s question – or maybe by the way he said it - and I’m sorry to say I don’t remember what I replied.  But what I should have said, or rather asked, was the question I would ask now: ‘Well, I suppose it depends what you mean. Who are ‘those’ Zionists? Who are you talking about? Are you talking about the ethnic cleansers in the government? Or are you talking about those who belong to Jews for Justice for Palestine?’

And, secondly, and perhaps even more fundamentally, I should have asked: ‘And what are you actually talking about when you speak about being a “Zionist”?’

You see there are so many Zionisms, past and present, that the term is almost devoid of meaning. It is analogous to the word  ‘Judaism’ – you always hear people say, ‘well Judaism says XYZ’ as if Judaism is some monolithic entity or object; but I have started to say ‘Actually there is no such thing as ‘Judaism’ – there are just various Judaisms. We are incorrigibly plural. And I think that is even more true of Zionism: there’s no such thing as Zionism, there are just various Zionisms.

Martin Buber’s ethical Zionism was radically different from Jabotinsky’s militant Revisionist Zionism, which was itself a world away from Achad Ha Am’s cultural Zionism. Amos Oz’s Zionism was always radically different from Netanyahu’s. The Zionisms of Israeli NGOs like B’Tzelem or Breaking the Silence or Peace Now - or the New Israel Fund here in the UK - are as far from the racist thugs of the settler movement or ministers like Ben-Gevir and Smotrich as it is possible to be. To talk of Zionism – unqualified and in the singular – rapidly becomes meaningless.

I would argue that the concept ‘Zionism’  can only have a meaning – rather than it being a weapon in a verbal war fuelled by the need to feel self-righteousness – it can only have a meaning if it is immediately qualified in some way. In a way that opens up what kind of values you are committed to. So one could talk of oneself as being committed to a Zionism that is dedicated to building a society aligned with Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, one of adherence to social justice, religious pluralism and universal human rights, within borders agreed by the international community, a democratic  state  attentive to the rights of all indigenous ethnic groups – and so on. The key question is: what are the values you are aligned with?

So, I would now say to Harold, no I am not one of ‘those Zionists’: the ethnic cleansers, or the defenders of the Occupation and so-called Greater Israel, or the backers of the 2018 Basic Law that made Arab citizens of Israel into second-class citizens, or the Zionist denigrators of Diaspora Jews  for having the chutzpah to believe they can live full, richly-textured Jewishly-committed lives in the suburbs of any city in the world. No, I am not one of ‘those’ Zionists.

If senior Muslim and Jewish denominational leaders can sign a agreement this week - the so-called Drumlanrig Accord (it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue but I guess you can’t have everything) - to foster deeper understanding and a commitment to work together for the common good, then we should celebrate a rare ray of sunshine amidst the storm clouds that are gathered around us. If Zionists and non-Zionists and anti-Zionists were able to come together to share their passionate convictions about  what values they share, then it is here in the Diaspora that Jews are leading the way in enacting our Jewish purpose: to be or l’goyim, a light to the nations.

The sad thing is that such an Accord within the Jewish community feels light years away. These last 16 months have exposed a deep and elemental fissure in the Jewish world. The debates about what Israel does, or fails to do, what it has done over 75 years, what it should do or shouldn’t do now – these debates are part of a desperate battle being fought for the soul of Judaism itself. What has been revealed are incompatible visions of what Jewishness is, what it is for. These visions of how to live out the essence and purpose of a three thousand year old Judaic civilisation, they compete for airspace, for validation: the battle of competing visions, and for the role of Israel within these visions, is desperate because each faction needs to feel that their values are the ones that count and that they are on the right side of history; and of Jewish history.  

I have heard it said recently that there are people in our community – you might be among them, I don’t know how extensive this view is  – that feel there’s been some failure of ‘moral leadership’, rabbinic leadership, clergy leadership, since October 7^th in relation to what has unfolded in the Middle East. It does sadden me, that this is a perception. I can’t speak for my colleagues – they are eloquent spokespeople for themselves, and I haven’t myself followed much of what has been said by them – but I have tried to be consistent in adhering to and articulating a particular Jewish vision of the ethical issues involved, while at the same time acknowledging that the Jewish world has been painfully split.

So, no I am not one of ‘those Zionists’ – I am more attuned to someone like the Israeli novelist David Grossman, who is as near to a prophetic voice in our beleaguered times as we are likely to get. Let me finish by reading you some sentences of his from an essay entitled ‘What Is a Jewish State?’:

The Judaism I connect with is repelled by the euphoria and arrogance I see among certain circles…and by their shackled fusions that tighten around my neck: the fusing of religion with messianism, of faith with zealotry, of the national with the nationalistic and fascistic…An occupation regime cannot be democratic: it simply cannot. After all, democracy stems from the profound belief that all human beings are born equal and that it is wrong to deny a person the right to participate in determining his or her own fate.

Years of occupation and humiliation can create the illusion that there is a hierarchy in human value. The occupied nation is eventually perceived as existentially, innately inferior. Its misery and wretchedness are perceived by the occupier as a fate that supposedly stems from its essence. (That is how, as we know, anti-Semites have always treated Jews). Its members are viewed as people whose human rights may be denied, whose values and desires can be disparaged. It goes without saying that the occupying nation sees itself as superior and, therefore, as innate master. In this reality, and as the influence of religion grows, there is an increasing belief that it is God's will. And it is not hard to see how, in this climate, the democratic world view wanes…And I ask: how can those who believe man is created in God's image trample that image?

(The Thinking Heart: On Israel and Palestine, Jonathan Cape, 2024), p.37-8

I suppose that is what you call ‘moral leadership’.