This article was authored in June 2024. It appears in our fifth print issue, Contra Temps, available here
Buber had written that for “political Zionism,” “the State is the goal and Zion a ‘myth’ that inflames the masses.” That propaganda employed to shore up nationalist militarism and settler-colonialism could leverage European guilt to “distort and exploit respectable religious beliefs to justify Israeli politics” undoubtedly placed political Zionism in a broader family of 20th-century politics grounded in the technicization of myth, of which fascism was the crucial example. Zionism’s instrumentalizations of theological texts belong to the ambit of what Jesi termed “right-wing culture,” understood as one “made up of authority, mythological security about the norms of knowing, teaching, commanding, and obeying,” in which “the past becomes a kind of processed mush that can be modeled and readied in the most useful way possible.”
“If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1946)
“If the State of Israel didn’t exist, imperialism would invent it.” ABDELKEBIR KHATIBI (1974)
“Were there no Israel, America would have to invent one.” JOE BIDEN (2015)
The modern history of Zionism as a settler-colonial ethno-nationalist ideology and practice is also the history of the ruptures it has recurrently elicited within the Jewish diaspora, as well as among social movements and intellectuals worldwide. Though emerging at a moment of quantitatively and qualitatively unprecedented violence wrought by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people, calls for the abolition of Zionism, or for an exodus from it, are not in themselves new. Whether we consider the Balfour Declaration, the Nakba and the foundation of the state of Israel, the wars of 1967 and 1973, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, or the two Intifadas, the political crises in which Zionism has been a leading protagonist have doubled as intellectual crises on the scale of the world.
As we learn from the writings of Robin D.G. Kelley, Michael R. Fischbach, Greg Thomas, and others, the momentous fault line between “civil rights” and “Black power” in Afro-America’s liberation movements was also drawn and redrawn with reference to positions taken around Palestinian solidarity and the racial-colonial dimensions of the Zionist project. Similarly, when the June War broke out in 1967, shortly after a singular philosophical-diplomatic tour that had taken the French philosopher to both Gaza and Tel Aviv, Jean-Paul Sartre’s equivocations around Zionism and Palestinian liberation led to the nigh-on total collapse of his standing as a thinker of anti- and post-colonial freedom in the Arab world. Frantz Fanon’s widow Josie instructed the publisher François Maspero to remove Sartre’s preface from all future editions of The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre’s partial apologias for Israel would also occasion a coruscating polemical tract by the Moroccan literary critic, novelist, and poet Abdelkebir Khatibi, Vomito Blanco: Zionism and the Unhappy Consciousness (1974), which I’ll turn to by way of conclusion.
Some of the most eloquent reflections on this ethical and political labor of division were advanced by the poet and critic Franco Fortini, a communist “non-Jewish Jew” (to borrow Isaac Deutscher’s formula). Fortini penned a remarkable memoir-pamphlet, The Dogs of the Sinai, on what he regarded as the abject and unthinking rallying to Israel of much left and Jewish opinion in Italy on the occasion of the “Six-Day War.” (He also had some acerbic words for the Italian Communist Party’s tailing of the Soviet line and its rhetorical Nasserism.) In Dogs (which was rendered into a powerful essay-film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet called Fortini/Cani), Fortini tells, in a poetic and unsparing auto-analysis, of the pressure and entreaties from Jewish family members or political acquaintances to declare himself for a supposedly besieged Israel, and of the recalibrations of his own experiences of both anti-fascism and antisemitism which the war and its ideological repercussions elicited.
This is also a story of class, of the writer’s own place in the history of the (Jewish, intellectual, leftist) petite bourgeoisie. As he observes: “If I have changed, I owe it to this—to the way in which great world events forced me to interpret myself differently.” In this view, the political break is always also inner, as is a class struggle that counsels against excessive sensitivity to personal slander: “In what concerns political choices and judgments, for those who adopt class conflict on a global scale as their standard, it is ridiculous to say ‘I do not tolerate’ or ‘I do not allow.’ If you know that class conflict is the last of the visible conflicts because it is the first in importance, that it is outside of any natural ‘right,’ one of the ‘base things of the world,’ of the ‘despised’ things, the ‘things which are not’ [Corinthians 1:28], you must, in a sense, ‘tolerate’ and ‘allow’ false accusations.”
This sensitivity to the shaping force of class struggle—in its geopolitical manifestation as imperialism—also animates Fortini’s intransigent and Brechtian apologia for the virtues of political simplicity, so resonant today when liberal editorialists and litterateurs once again sing the virtues of nuance: ”For the sake of those who love to remind you that the world is complex, that simplifications stem from intellectual uncertainty or stereotyping, from an unresolved Oedipus complex or—it would amount to the same—from the authoritarian personality, I will note that the complexity of the real, its interpretation on an infinity of levels, does not exempt anyone from an objective simplification, from the inscription of every life in an order of behaviors that are class behaviors… subjective simplification [is] a provocation, a reagent that induces the others to register their class identity, their inner clinamen. As long as the June war had not been fought and won, distant observers could remain uncertain about the degree of class commitment, of fidelity to imperialist service, of the Israeli political leadership.”….
https://proteanmag.com/2025/06/22/zionism-breaks/
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Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy
The Battle for the Soul of Judaism: Tribalism, Amalek and Axial Age Universalism of Isaiah
The Obscure Scribe Who Invented Judaism
Biblical Archaeology and the Judeo-Christian legends / The Deconstruction of the Walls of Jericho
Peter Beinart: ‘What Israel Is Doing in the Name of the Jewish People Is a Desecration’
Gaza and the Death of Conscience
Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after Gaza
Israel’s War in Gaza Is Nothing but a War of Annihilation
Arab Failures: The Unspoken Complicity in Israel’s Genocide
Chris Hedges: The Gaza Riviera
Sadegh Hedayat on Religion, Power, and Manufactured Ignorance
Communiqué issued by the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem in Gaza
After the truth-shower 