Perhaps I need not add that we were seeing it all through strong Zionist lenses. What we were expected to see was a Galilee that was ‘ours’ to populate, not a Galilee that was still largely populated by what we called ‘Arabs’. The only signs of Arabs on our journey were their dimly lit villages at a safe distance from our nightly camps, their invisible presence symbolised by the Czech Mauser rifles (unloaded) that some of us were entrusted to carry, and which were intended to impress upon us that ‘our’ land had to be defended against the ‘Arabs’ who wanted to take it away from us.

In the film, I wanted to retrace the same journey to see what I had missed at the time: the ruins of razed villages, displaced populations and confiscated lands, as well as the hastily concealed memories of assaults and massacres. “A down-to-earth perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” was my brief summary of the film’s concept.

I still believe it was a good idea. A conflict that ultimately is about who has the right to control, develop and inhabit the same piece of land can perhaps best be seen and understood from a hiker’s perspective. I also wanted to show that the colonisation of land that had come to be associated with the Jewish settlements on the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war (the West Bank), was still on-going on territories within the 1967 borders (the Galilee).

In the end, I backed out, as I came to realize that the landscape I had hiked as a teenager no longer existed. Everywhere new roads, new settlements, new borders, new obstacles to the walk I had envisaged. What was left to see in a landscape where the past seemed to have been so irrevocably buried and covered?

All this comes back to me as I once again follow the Palestinian lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh on his ‘Palestinian walks’. I read the book when it was published in English nearly twenty years ago and perceived it as a moving attempt to give voice to what I would call the Palestinian cause – that is, the cause which I had hoped to make visible during my walk in the Galilee.

Raja Shehadeh regularly sets out on walks, a sarha as he calls it, in the hills surrounding his hometown of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank: ‘A man going on a sarha wanders aimlessly, not restricted by time or place, going where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself.’ With a keen eye for the distinctive natural and cultural features of the landscape, he allows us to see not only the people and communities that have shaped it, but also the intrusions, large and small, that have made it vanish before his eyes; military roadblocks, forbidden roads, new settlements, violent settlers, and the deliberate exclusion and displacement of Palestinians from the land that they had regarded as theirs.

Today, it is no longer possible for a Palestinian make a sarha in the hills of Palestine, Shehadeh observes in a newly written foreword (2024). “Having grown up here, and with my ancestors having built the terraces and cultivated the land, I am now denied even the pleasure of walking in peace.” Walking in ‘a vanishing landscape’, he nevertheless manages to portray the Palestinian cause in down-to-earth detail – views, scents, colours, plants, artefacts, traditions and memories – thereby making us see what the Zionist colonisation of Palestine is in the process of destroying. Shehadeh is outraged not only by the ruthlessness towards the Palestinian people, but also by the ruthlessness towards the Palestinian landscape. “After a short drive down the slope, we came across a five-metre wall made of concrete and steel that enclosed the entire Albina’s land,” he writes. Albina was a Palestinian landowner whom Shehadeh had represented against a group of Jewish settlers. “I gasped when I saw it. I remembered the gentle slope bordered by a few pine trees. Now there was a rude termination of the ancient village as though a prison had been placed at the southern tip of the hill.”

In 1979, Raja Shehadeh founded the human rights organisation Al-Haq in the hope “that international law, reason and decency would ultimately prevail”, but during his walks he witnesses at close quarters how the Zionist colonisation project is being pursued and completed, and how the space for law, reason and decency is literally disappearing. “For a long time, I was aware that the freedom to walk in the hills would not last,” Shehadeh writes, “but I was not prepared for the disappointment I would feel when my fears were realised.”

Whilst Raja Shehadeh belongs to a Palestinian generation that, for a time, was able to convince itself that the occupation would be lifted, the settlements halted and the Palestinian cause furthered by international law and justice – and which therefore has a life of dashed expectations and shattered illusions to look back on – the poet and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd belongs to a generation that harbours no expectations and illusions whatsoever. Least of all after Israel, through its genocidal attack on the Palestinians in Gaza and the state-sponsored terror against the Palestinians in the West Bank, has made clear its intention to put an end to the Palestinian cause once and for all.

For the twenty-eight-year-old El-Kurd, born in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem, the Palestinian cause is no longer about a patch of negotiated land here or there, or the sort of peace that presupposes the Palestinians ‘behave themselves’ and stop being monsters and terrorists, allowing Israel to pull out its ‘fangs’. As an eleven-year-old, he saw his home taken over by Jewish settlers and his family’s furniture thrown out onto the street, his little sister’s cot set alight, and busloads of Jewish tourists flocking to the street outside and pointing at the house ‘as if we were animals at a market’, and Israeli police officers, “with a sneer”, handing eviction orders and court summonses to his grandmother in the name of a “Jewish” state.

Thus, he has little sympathy for those who demand that the Palestinians “with surgical precision” distinguish between Jews and Zionists. Nor can he understand why the way the Palestinians speak of their prison guards is considered more important than the fact that they are being held captive in the first place. For Mohammed El-Kurd, the Palestinian cause is ultimately about the Palestinians’ right to be seen and treated as human beings, without having to prove, time and again, that they are. Following Hannah Arendt, he regards homelessness, statelessness and lawlessness as steps towards the dehumanisation of the Palestinians, and ultimately towards their elimination in one way or another.

I read his book ‘Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal’ as a defiant battle cry from the abyss of dehumanisation, a sometimes bitter reckoning with an ideology and a state that would have preferred the Palestinians not to exist, and which would still prefer to be rid of them, and which therefore has conjured up the image of them as primitive, violent, unreasonable, impossible to live alongside, and in need of ‘humanisation’ by repeatedly pulling out their fangs.

El-Kurd does not believe that the Palestinian cause can be won by the Palestinians ‘humanising’ themselves and demonstrating their ‘proximity to innocence’, as he puts it. By now, he argues, it should be clear that the strategy of self-humanisation has had the opposite effect. “Zionism’s objection to the Palestinian people,” he writes, “is not about how we exist, but that we exist at all.”

And that is probably how it is. Whatever the Palestinians have said and done over the years – not to mention what they have had to endure – it has been a short step to their dehumanisation. When, in October 2023, they were described as ‘human animals’ by Israel’s Defence Minister (as an argument for cutting off food and water to Gaza), it was neither the first nor the last time that the Arabs of Palestine had been labelled as inferior beings by Israeli representatives. In the Israel of my youth, the very word ‘Arab’ had connotations of something of a lower order and was repeatedly used as an invective. An ‘Arab craft’, avoda aravit, was the term for shoddy workmanship. ‘Arabs’ were potential terrorists who had to be constantly monitored and kept under surveillance. A Palestinian boy throwing stones at an Israeli soldier is still a dangerous terrorist, whilst a Jewish settler who attacks Palestinian homes and olive groves is, at most, an unruly troublemaker. Whilst Palestinians have been forced time and again to express their abhorrence of what Hamas did on 7 October 2023, no corresponding demands are made of all those who have stood by silently – or even applauded – whilst witnessing what Israel has done and continues to do to the Palestinians.

It is not difficult to understand the mixture of bitter disappointment and defiant determination that characterises the young Palestinian generation for whom El-Kurd speaks. More brutally and emphatically than ever before, they have seen their Palestinian future shattered, yet their representatives are not allowed to speak out on their own behalf without being labelled terrorists and having their protests censored or even banned. ‘We have become “children of darkness”’, writes El-Kurd, forced to ‘mutter under our breath the words we should chant’.

And perhaps this is what is most striking about the Palestinian cause: the willingness of far too many to silence it, repress it, slander it, make excuses for it, indeed even deny it.

El-Kurd himself offers no concrete answer as to what the Palestinians can do about the situation, other than to stop being ‘perfect victims’ and rely on the ‘politics of appeal’. Instead, he urges Palestinians to ‘embody the Palestinian condition, a condition of resistance and refusal, in the lives we lead and the company we keep.’ To what political effect, remains unclear, and the book – whilst deeply moving – becomes, if anything, a confirmation of the very Palestinian powerlessness it seeks to challenge and counteract.

From their distinct perspectives, Raja Shehadeh and Mohammed El-Kurd have nevertheless succeeded in bringing the Palestinian cause to the fore in a both forceful and moving way.

What happened next is, as they say, a long story. It is also a sometimes painful tale of difficult reassessments, shattered illusions and a deepening alienation from the country I had just thought of as mine. In the book, I wrote: “Close, close beneath the land I had once rooted in and loved, lay a land of violence, injustice and hatred. And in between, a growing layer of lies, falsified history, and buried foundations.”

But the land that had been lost, at least to me, was not the land of Israel per se, only the land that Israel had become, which was a different land from the land that as a young pioneer I had been brought up to see. Or, as I put it in The Lost Land: “Once I had hiked across Israel without noticing the overgrown stone foundations, the ruined tombstones that sometimes jutted out from the edges of the fields, the scattered remains of house facades and stone walls. Now I noticed the stones everywhere. And turned every single one of them over. I became obsessed with tracing the names of the villages now buried under the houses and stones and groves and fields of the kibbutzim and moshavim of the new Israel.”

Yet this was written at a time when, for a while, it seemed possible to imagine another Israel than the Israel I had lost, an Israel bent on a policy for peace and reconciliation with the people on whose land the new state had largely been built.

One of those dates in history is deeply etched in my memory (that kind of date when you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing) is September 13, 1993. I was on a plane to Tel Aviv (to work on my book) when the pilot announced that Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin had shaken hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat outside the White House in Washington. As we landed, I still had to ask someone on the ground: Did they really shake hands?

The handshake did not last long; peace and reconciliation became continued occupation and colonization, and the hope for a new future for two closely knit peoples on a narrow strip of land between the river and the sea became a rolling disaster fueled by hubris, fanaticism and hopelessness. For a long time, Israel convinced itself that millions of Palestinians could be forever occupied, oppressed, and physically separated, and eventually somehow disappear from the eyes of the Israelis and the world.

I myself saw it as a path to political suicide, convinced that a state built on the occupation and oppression of another people would sooner or later undermine the conditions of its own existence. And that the state of Israel would increasingly resemble Masada, the steep mountain fortress in the Judean desert where in the year 73 some thousand Jewish men, women and children decided to commit collective suicide rather than surrender to their Roman besiegers. The association between Israel and Masada had become explicit ever since the Israeli army in the 1950s began gathering its graduating elite units on its top to pledge in a solemn ceremony to “never let Masada fall again”.

With the choice of Masada as a symbol of the new state, the notion of Israel as a perpetual fortress under perpetual siege was also consolidated. In a newspaper column almost exactly twenty years ago (Dagens Nyheter, 29.4.04) I wrote:

“In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that the strategy adopted by the present-day leaders of Masada is the same strategy that led to defeat and destruction almost two thousand years ago. Israel’s ruling extremists [at that time a right-wing coalition under Ariel Sharon] may plan to drive out as many Palestinians as possible and lock up the rest in walled, Bantustan-like areas, but the society they create in the process will increasingly resemble an isolated fortress in the desert, held together by fear, surrounded by walls and ruled by fanatics.”

Events after October 7, 2023, have made it possible, if not before, to imagine Israel as a lost land in the literal sense of the word. Maybe not militarily, at least not yet, but politically and psychologically the injuries may already be fatal. The once impregnable fortification of Masada has been breached, a hubristic contempt for the world has become a war strategy and a messianic contempt for reality has become national policy. The ideas and ideals that once built Israel and held it together can do so ever less.

So today, a former longtime columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz can publish a book entitled The End of Israel without being dismissed as a hysteric. Perhaps as a traitor or antisemite, but that’s something else. Bradley Burston has long warned that Israel is headed for disaster, for many years as a lone Cassandra voice in an increasingly overbearing Israel (perpetual occupation, etc.), but since October 7th new voices have been added to the choir of warning prophets.

Burston directs much of his anger and despair at Benjamin Netanyahu personally, but in the book’s selection of columns, all dated in relation to the outbreak of the ongoing disaster, he returns time and again to the element of self-deception and self-destruction in Israeli society.

On February 3, 2010 (”thirteen years before the war”), in the context of protests against the expulsion of the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, he writes: “The settlers’ policy of extortion has contorted Israel into a body that does not dare to take the risks necessary to cure the disease, the occupation, and will therefore eventually be killed by it.”

And in the book’s preface, written after October 7: “These columns are a study in loss. They depict the decline and fall of a nation that, even before the terrible war now underway, might have wondered if this year’s Independence Day would be its last.”

So what does the end of Israel mean?

First and foremost, I believe, the end of Israel as a state governed by the rule of law. Certainly the laws of Israel have long allowed for discriminatory institutions and practices, and a state built on occupation, colonization and ethnic separation cannot claim to be fully governed by the rule of law. But even before the war, the issue had come to a head when the Netanyahu government sought to remove the last legal barriers (vested with the Israeli Supreme Court) to unhinged majority rule in the hands of messianic settlers and authoritarian nationalists. Only a radical shift in power and mentality in Israel in favor of a historic settlement with the Palestinians could, in my view, put brakes on this development. To those who say that a historic settlement with the Palestinians is impossible, especially after October 7, I would point to the historical alternative: Masada.

The end for Israel could certainly also be a devastating major war in the region. Messianic and apocalyptic fanatics, both Jewish and Christian, even hope for this to happen (Armageddon and all that), and Israel’s increasingly world-provoking war in Gaza is playing right into their hands.

Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the emblematic founder of Zionism, the movement that built Israel, would almost certainly have been horrified by what Israel has become today. The utopian novel he wrote a year before his death, Altneuland, now published for the first time in Swedish translation, depicts the “old-new” society of Palestine as an oasis of social justice, enlightened progress and multicultural coexistence. The most frightening figure in Altneuland is not an Arab terrorist but a Jewish rabbi, Dr. Geyer, who in an ongoing election campaign advocates that Palestine should be reserved for Jews only.
In Herzl’s Altneuland, Rabbi Geyer is soundly defeated.
Not so his late successors in Netanyahu’s Israel.
‘If you wish, this is not a fairy tale’, is Herzl’s famous epigraph to Altneuland.
He could have added that not all fairy tales have a happy ending.

When thirteen American colonies proclaimed their independence from Great Britain on July 4, 1776, they did so with words that would not only shape the idea of America but ideas of freedom and democracy around the world. This may seem a hyperbolic claim to make for a document that was hard to take seriously at the time it was conceived. How could it be asserted that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, when several of the men (yes, only men) signing it were owners of slaves, traded in slaves, and built their wealth on slave labor? Moreover, they had no problem whatsoever in characterizing their own relatively free life under British colonial rule as slavery. The purpose of the British king’s decrees and impositions was to establish a tyranny, an absolute Tyranny, they wrote without batting an eye.

The king, George III, had also had the audacity to promise freedom to slaves who chose to join the British army in its war against the American freedom fighters. Moreover, it was not only the slaves (the chained) who were conspicuously absent from the Declaration, but the indigenous peoples of America as well. In the text, they are only present as merciless Indian savages, incited by the tyrant in London to massacre free Americans on the American “frontier.” Not a word, of course, about the fact that the “frontier” was driving the Indian savages from their homes and taking their lands, much less of their right to life, liberty, and even the pursuit of happiness.

In short, the Declaration is a document strongly shaped by its time, for the most part a highly charged indictment of the king in London for having, in matters both large and small (actually quite small), encroached upon the Americans’ right to self-governance. It was undeniably true that London taxed them without asking permission—taxation without representation—and imposed laws they had not asked for, and relocated legislative assemblies (there were, after all, such bodies) to remote locations that were difficult for people to reach (with the perceived purpose of wearing down any opposition), but it was actually not much worse than that. The freedom that most Americans already enjoyed (forget the slaves) was a freedom that most people in Europe could only dream of. And soon, some of them began to do just that. The French Revolution of 1789 was largely inspired by the American Revolution (which is was soon to be called). The French Declaration of the “Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, was in some passages taken almost verbatim from the American one, and the principal author of the American Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, who at that time was the U.S. ambassador to Paris, participated discreetly but actively in meetings preparing for the French Declaration (sometimes at Jefferson’s ambassadorial residence).

Over time, liberal and democratic forces around the world would come to view America in the light of the lofty words of the Declaration. They would, of course, also see the slavery and the racism, as well as the fact that the lofty words continued to hover far above the reality of life for most Americans. Also, if they looked closely, they would discover that down on the ground a different idea about what America was or should be was thriving: a society built on race, heritage, and religion. In the America of lofty words, Americans were bound together by the promise of a shared future; in the America of narrow horizons, they were torn apart by ties to a not-so-shared past. With every new past setting foot in America—Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Catholic—Americans with the “right” past—white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant—rose up against everything and everyone of a different kind.

In 1861, the America of narrow horizons, led by the slave-holding Southern states, would launch a war against the America of lofty words, led by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, with the aim of defeating once and for all the idea that all men were created equal. The American Civil War lasted four years and claimed 800,000 lives (two percent of the population), and even though the South lost the war and slavery was abolished, the victorious idea was not able to claim final victory. Very soon, “the lost cause,” as it came to be known, reared its ugly head again in the white supremacist regime of the Southern states (Jim Crow), and lived on as an undercurrent of bitterness and suspicion in the American society.

In 1968, the Lost Cause got its first presidential candidate, Alabama Governor George Wallace, and in 2016, its first president, Donald J. Trump, and it soon became clear that the words that had held America together for nearly two hundred and fifty years no longer did so.

At that moment, if not before, it became all-too clear how important the idea had been, and how fragile, and how significant it had been for its survival who at critical moments had been the President of the United States. Without Abraham Lincoln’s determination to make the abolition of slavery a matter of existence for the American union, and without his reaffirmation of the lofty words of the Declaration in a speech as concise as effective at the Gettysburg battlefield in November 1863, the idea of America would probably have perished right there and then. Instead, it was given new life by Lincoln’s poetic embellishment of its significance; a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Lincoln’s rhetoric power in making the Declaration the undisputed foundation of a newborn America further cemented its status as a sacred document, virtually impossible to openly question or criticize. From then on, American presidents were forced to invoke those lofty words and cite them as their guiding principle even when, in practice, they were trampling on them.

This, of course, provided ever new ammunition to the argument that the lofty words meant nothing, but it also provided ever new strength to those who wanted to use the words to reshape the American landscape. The struggle for desegregation in the American South in the 1950s and the enactment of major voting rights and civil rights reforms in the 1960s were waged with the Declaration as a weapon. When on August 28, 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of his dream for America, he spoke the words of the founders.

“”The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”,” coined the philosopher Friedrich Hegel, by which he meant that we can only understand history in hindsight. And so, I believe, is the case with the American founding; only in the American dusk that we are now experiencing, we may perhaps better understand the radicality of the words of the Declaration of Independence — not only in their time but in ours as well. Its “self-evident truths”—we hold these truths to be self-evident—which were hardly self-evident when they were written, are, if possible, even less self-evident today. Today, they are a thorn in the side not only of kings, slave owners, and colonial rulers of all kinds, but also of a popularly elected American president who, backed by tens of millions of voters, openly mocks and attacks them. In Donald Trump’s America, human and civil rights have come to be defined by heritage, origin, religion—and money.

One might think that Americans should have known better than to abandon the words of an idea that have held them together for two hundred and fifty years—by the skin of their teeth at times, to be sure, but nonetheless. However, the America of lost causes and narrow horizons has been around from the very beginning, with inhabitants that have never truly embraced neither the words nor the idea.

Late in the day in America—perhaps too late—we can thus more clearly perceive the revolutionary power of the Declaration. At first, it was easy to dismiss them as empty words, conceived by a privileged group of men with little intention of putting them into practice. But very soon those words took flight, and a new America was shaped by them, fought over them, and nearly torn apart by them; and no matter how high above the ground they still soared, there was always someone who, with a dose of grand rhetoric, could make them seem more earth-bound than they actually were.

That is no longer the case. With a president who would never dream of taking the lofty words of the Declaration in his mouth, much less rallying Americans around them, the American idea has seemingly and irrevocably lost the last remnants of its cohesive power.

The Americans are thus back to where they were at the moment of the 1776 founding, when thirteen divided colonies/states allowed themselves to be united by a common idea. At this founding moment, however, there is no common idea that can bind Americans together again.

A crucial difference is also that the tyrant from whom the Americans freed themselves at that time—and whose extensive crime record fills most of the Declaration of Independence—was a British king and not a popularly elected American president.

If the Americans were to take it into their heads to revolt against a tyrant that they themselves had elected, they could almost verbatim copy the indictment against George III of Great Britain. And if the men of 1776 were to come to life, I imagine they would take to their pens once more.

“Tyranny,” they would write of the reign of Donald Trump. “Absolute tyranny.”

Link to the Swedish text as published in Expressen.

WHEN I LIVED in Israel for a few years in the early sixties, all the schoolchildren made a pilgrimage to Masada, the impenetrable fortress in the desert west of the Dead Sea where, in 73 AD, a thousand Jewish men, women and children chose to commit collective suicide rather than be defeated and captured by their Roman besiegers. The contemporary historian Flavius Josephus characterized the inhabitants of this last remaining pocket of resistance in the Jewish uprising against the Romans as a sect of religious and political fanatics (Zealots) – the temple had already been destroyed, Jerusalem already conquered and the war already lost – but nonetheless depicts their fate with empathy and compassion.

Masada has remained a highly official but deeply ambiguous symbol of the State of Israel. On the one hand, it is the place where thousands of Israeli recruits annually swear allegiance to the nation under the battle cry “Masada shall never fall again”. On the other hand, the place that more than any other symbolizes the disastrous consequences of a survival strategy based on isolation, barricading and intransigence.

For a time, the soldiering ceremony at Masada seemed compatible with a strategy based on compromise, reconciliation and peace, but in recent years it has become increasingly clear that the strategy adopted by Masada’s present-day leaders is the same strategy that led to siege, defeat and destruction almost two thousand years ago.

In all likelihood, today’s Masada will last much longer because it is much better equipped, much more heavily fortified and currently supported by the most powerful military force of our time, but with each passing day, the State of Israel, by its actions and statements, is undermining the political and territorial conditions for a long-term compromise with its Arab neighbors and thus the conditions for its survival as a Jewish state, because the Arab neighbors cannot be kept away by an ever-higher and more massive wall or destroyed by ever more arbitrary acts of armed violence and territorial colonization.

In short, time is running out for every alternative to the suicidal strategy of Massada. For Ariel Sharon and his extreme nationalist allies in the current Israeli government, there has unfortunately never been any other strategy. In their world, Israel has always been and will always be surrounded by eternal enemies and can therefore only survive by being more powerful than them, which Israel can only be by remaining a Jewish garrison state fortified to the teeth, the bigger the better. In this paranoid strategy, every concession is a sign of weakness, every compromise a step towards defeat, every invitation for peace a preparation for betrayal. The only peace this government accepts is the peace of the powerful with the powerless, and the only human motivation it recognizes is fear. The fear of the occupiers, the fear of the occupied, the fear of the Jews.

The more fear that can be produced, the greater the support for Masada’s current commanders. Palestinian acts of terror and anti-Semitic propaganda play right into their hands, of course, and they consequently devote themselves to stimulating both. The former through an occupation that systematically produces humiliation, hatred and hopelessness which is a reliable breeding ground for desperate violence. The latter by systematically undermining the line between criticism of Israel and hatred of Jews.

While it is true that Jew-hatred in the world is on the rise, it is also true that the leaders of Masada are not opposed to it and do not hesitate to fuel it. Their goal now, as in the past, is to scare all the world’s Jews into going to Israel where their national and religious destiny will finally be realized.

THIS, unfortunately, also happens to be a goal shared to the letter by the influential revivalist Christian right in the United States, who believe that the return of Jews to the Holy Land foreshadows the final battle of Armageddon and the return of Jesus, and who therefore support Israel’s most extreme politicians and most fanatical settlers as the quickest and most effective way to accelerate God’s plan. It is to this end that Ulf Ekman of the Swedish evangelical congregation Word of Life, closely associated with the revivalist Christian right in the United States, has built up a large operation in Israel from which he runs, among other things, Operation Jabotinsky (after the founder of the party now led by Ariel Sharon) with the aim of transferring as many Jews as possible from Russia to Israel.

With George W. Bush, this revivalist Christian right has apparently got its first president in the White House and, little by little, a Middle East policy that plays alarmingly well into the hands of both Mississippi and Massada fanatics.

Anyone looking for rational motives behind this policy is, of course, looking in vain. Ariel Sharon is driven by the belief in eternal victory and George W. Bush by the belief in the final battle, both of which must be characterized as deeply irrational motivations. With President Bush’s recognition of Israel’s occupation policy, the territorial conditions for the two-state solution, which could have formed a bridge of reconciliation between the Jewish inhabitants of Massada and the Arab world that inevitably encroaches on them, are rapidly being destroyed.

Fifteen years from now, the Palestinians will be the majority in the territory that Israel dominates and occupies. Israel’s ruling extremists may plan to expel as many of them as possible and confine the rest to walled, Bantustan-like areas, but the society they create will increasingly resemble an isolated fortress in the desert, held together by fear, built on walls and ruled by fanatics.

You don’t have to read Flavius Josephus to realize that this is the path to collective suicide.

https://www.rosenberg.se/israels-politics-of-suicide

Det vilade något overkligt över det amerikanska projektet, för ett slags projekt var det, ett helt nyskapat samhälle med en riktning, ett mål och en mening. Någon skulle säga att overkligheten var själva styrkan. Förmågan hos det amerikanska projektet att gång efter annan mana fram bilden av en framtid där vars och ens ambitioner och livsdrömmar skulle förverkligas – om inte idag så i morgon, om inte för dig själv så för dina barn. Det var ett samhälle som inte hölls samman av ett gemensamt förflutet, som i den gamla världen, utan av en gemensam framtid i den nya. Amerika var löftet om att om och om igen kunna lämna det som varit och börja livet på nytt.

Det var ett löfte som i längden bara kunde hållas vid liv av en idé stark nog att med jämna mellanrum besegra verkligheten, eller åtminstone den handfasta erfarenheten av svikna förväntningar och personliga misslyckanden, i ett Amerika där risken för bådadera tidvis var större än någon annanstans, och den sociala rörligheten, dvs möjligheten att ta sig från en samhällsklass till en annan, lägre än i de flesta europeiska länder.

Vilket i sin tur krävde att idén om Amerika måste ges ny luft under vingarna så snart den riskerade att störta mot marken – vilket hade hänt gång efter annan i den amerikanska historien. När jag i mitten av 1980-talet kom till USA hade det just hänt igen, i självtvivlen efter Vietnamkrigets politiska och militära nederlag, och Nixon-erans moraliska moras, och de stora orden i den amerikanska idén syntes mera verklighetsfrämmande än någonsin.

Men det var också då här åren som idén fick sin senaste – och kanske sista –livräddande injektion. Och det var inte helt förvånande en tidigare Hollywoodskådespelare, Ronald Reagan, som levererade den. Amerika, sa han, var fortfarande den skinande stad på berget, det nya Jerusalem, som de protestantiska invandrarna från England, puritanerna, hade sett framför sig när de i början av 1600-talet landsteg i den nya världen. Amerika var fortfarande en dröm värd att tro på.

Under mina år i USA var det inte svårt att se hur högt höjd över den sociala och ekonomiska verkligheten idén var för de flesta amerikaner, men jag kunde också se hur starkt dess grepp fortfarande kunde vara om människors fantasier och drömmar. Jag minns särskilt ett valmöte med Ronald Reagan på hösten 1986 i Orange County, Kalifornien, med en publik till stor del bestående av människor som nyss hade kommit hit med den amerikanska framgångsdrömmen på näthinnan.

Och när presidenten till sist klev in på scenen och med sin välmodulerade röst än en gång tog de stora amerikanska orden i sin mun, och folkjublet steg mot luften, slog det mig på nytt i hur hög grad idén eller drömmen har varit beroende av ledare med den retoriska förmågan att göra myt av den amerikanska verkligheten.

”Behöver Amerika en magiker för att hålla sina myter vid liv? Eller en kejsare som med jämna mellanrum förmår övertyga folket om att kostymen är verklig?”, undrade jag i en bok skriven efter mina år i USA.

En bok som redan då gjorde ett starkt intryck på mig, var Jean Baudrillards Amerika. Den franske filosofen och sociologen hade där satt sina högst egna ord på den konstellation av idé och verklighet, modernitet och primitivitet, magiskt tänkande och jordnära realism, rotlöshet och målmedvetenhet, religiositet och materialism, som så påtagligt skilde Amerika från snart sagt alla andra samhällen i vår tid.

Hyperrealitet eller hyperverklighet är det begrepp som Baudrillard myntar för att beskriva ett tillstånd där gränsen mellan fantasi och verklighet hade suddats ut, där människors föreställningar om verkligheten till stor del formas i en värld av mediala bilder och tecken. kan framstå som mera verklig än den verklighet vi erfar med våra sinnen.

I viss mån gäller väl det här oss alla. Ingen av oss lever i verkligheten som den är utan i våra mer eller mindre erfarenhetsbaserade föreställningar om den. Men vad Baudrillard på sitt omisskännliga sätt sätter ord på är ett säreget amerikanskt tillstånd där föreställningarna alltför lätt lossar från erfarenheterna, och människor får svårt att skilja verklighet från dröm, sant från falskt, äkta från oäkta. Ungefär som en sekt – instängd i sina mer eller mindre verklighetsfrämmande föreställningar om världen.

Varför är sekterna i Amerika så mäktiga och dynamiska? frågar sig Baudrillard.

Och hans svar är att de sekter som i Amerika trodde sig ha grundat det nya Jerusalem hade bevarat, som han skriver, ”sitt ursprungs praktiska religiösa svärmeri och sin moraliska besatthet.”

”Mängden enskilda sekter får inte bedra oss”, fortsätter han, “det viktiga är att hela Amerika är engagerat i sektens moraliska institution, i dess omedelbara krav på saliggörande, dess begär efter rättfärdiggörande, och utan tvekan också dess vanvett och delirium.”

Jag hade ju själv sett detta sekternas Amerika växa sig starkt under Reagans 80-tal, med extatiska teve-predikanter som i gigantiska megakyrkor lovade ett nytt, moraliskt renat, kristet Amerika. Jag hann också se hur deras löften och fantasier trängde in i politiken och undan för undan förvandlade det republikanska partiet till ett slags sekt det också. När Donald Trump 2016 gick till val på att göra Amerika stort igen så var det sektens språk han talade och det var som sektledare han skulle komma att dyrkas av de tiotals miljoner amerikaner som blint slöt upp bakom honom.

Likt en sentida Tocqueville reste Baudrillard till 1980-talets Amerika för att spana efter mänsklighetens framtid. 40 år senare, med Donald Trumps Amerika framför ögonen, började hans iakttagelser framstå som närmast profetiska.

”Det primitiva”, skriver Baudrillard, ”har trängt in i den självförhärligande och omänskliga karaktären hos ett universum som kraftigt överskrider sitt moraliska, sociala eller ekologiska förnuft”.

Jag ser alla de understrykningar jag gjorde när jag läste Baudrillards Amerika för första gången och jag får god lust att stryka under samma meningar igen, bara hårdare, och med ännu större förundran över träffsäkerheten i dem.

Litteratur
Jean Baudrillard: Amerika. Översättning: Johan Öberg. Bokförlaget Faethon, 2026.

Länk till radioessän.

From the pit of decay and dust
With blood and sweat
Shall arise a race
Genius, generous and cruel
Shall arise again in all its strength and glory.

Vladimir Jabotinsky: The Betar Song (1932)

My history teacher in secondary school number nine in Tel Aviv had nicotine-yellow fingers, heavy eyelids and a high, liver-spotted forehead deeply wrinkled by a long-standing dissatisfaction with the times in general and its youth in particular. He must have been in his upper fifties and, unlike the other teachers, wore a suit and tie, even if the suit was shabby and the tie had eaten eggs. There was something dark and unredeemed about Dr Israel Zvi Kanner. Or was it just something I imagined after hearing some of my classmates, the ones with the white laces in their blue shirts, whisper that Dr Kanner was a fascist. Eventually I learnt that fascist denoted something as seemingly innocent as a member of Israel’s main opposition party, the Freedom Party or Herut. Eventually I learnt that, perhaps, it wasn’t so innocent after all.

In retrospect, I cannot recall that Dr Kanner’s teaching differed in any significant way from that of other teachers. He corrected our exams with an angry red pen and repeated question marks, but usually for minor things. On the other hand, history was a subject in which a potential “fascist” agenda could easily be hidden. The curriculum was heavily structured around the role of the Jewish people in history. The explicit purpose was to strengthen our understanding of the unique role and character of the Jewish nation, and of the State of Israel as the historical fulfilment of its destiny. In any case, it was a history that suited the alleged political affiliation of Dr Kanner well.

Otherwise, the party that Dr Kanner allegedly belonged to was a shunned outsider in the Israeli society of my youth. It was sustained by traditions and ideas largely alien, or even hostile, to the state-building ideals of Labor Zionism. It had little reverence for the emblematic kibbutz movement, it regarded the all-pervasive trade union movement, Histadrut, as an enemy, and portrayed itself as the victim of a historical injustice inflicted by Labor Zionism. Herut was not just a losing party in Israeli politics, it was a party of losers. It was a party with a defeated view of Zionism and the role of the Jewish State. It was a party nurturing the myth that Israel owed its existence to the losers, not the winners. The Herut Party had its roots in the armed nationalist movement, Irgun, which in the 1930s and 1940s had declared war not only on the Arabs and the British, but also periodically on the Zionist leadership in Palestine. In the losers’ mythology, it was the armed terror that had paved the way for the founding of the state, not the colonization, institution-building and diplomacy of the Labor Zionists. By force of arms Israel had been created, and by force of arms Israel would in due course expand to its biblical borders, which in some versions stretched from the Nile to the Euphrates.

On the history of Zionism and the State of Israel, Dr Kanner might have had a thing or two to add to what was in the official textbooks, but he never got the chance as I recall, since Zionism was a topic of its own, with a special teacher who rightly taught us that Dr Kanner was a loser.

*

In 1963, few could imagine that the “fascists” would ever come to power. Their members, organizations and institutions were carefully kept outside the political establishment, and thus outside large sectors of Israeli economic and social life. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Herut party never received more than 13-16 percent in the general elections, but persisted with cult-like contempt to pursue its expansionist view of the proper borders of Israel. There was an air of unreality about former guerrilla leader, later party leader, Menachem Begin’s fixation on the wrongs of the past, his rhetorical re-fighting of battles lost, his melodramatic struggle against the German reparations to Holocaust survivors, his lilting exhortations in Polish-broken Hebrew to “complete” Eretz Israel, i.e. to conquer the West Bank (still ruled by Jordan).

This was a party that had cultivated a historical counter-myth inspired more by interwar European notions of national honor and identity than by the political realities of modern Israel. It was a myth whose historical founder, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), had instructed his movement’s young recruits to eat “quietly and slowly”, not to slurp their soup, and generally to behave like English gentlemen: “If all Jews could behave properly, the antisemites would probably hate us anyway, but it would be hatred mixed with respect, and our position in the world would be quite different from what it is today.”^[1]

To Jabotinsky, the Hebrew word hadar – honor, splendor, glory – represented everything that the oppressed Jew in the Diaspora lacked: “dignified beauty and harmony of manner, gesture, speech and attitude”. Hadar was a reversal of the antisemitic Jewish caricature (and thus, to some extent, an acceptance of its premises). Hadar was the centerpiece of a myth in which the Nation became the highest expression of morality, virtue and pride.

It was a myth that certainly did not lack affinities with official Labor Zionism, but which, with the formation of the State of Israel, became encapsulated in the historical bitterness and rhetorical self-pity of the loser.

It would take the war of 1967 for the losers to commence their march from the periphery of Israeli society to its center.

*

Zionist right-wing nationalism or revisionism, like Labor Zionism, was to an astonishing degree the work of a single generation of young people and their conception of the world. While the ragtag socialists of the Second Aliyah who created Labor Zionism were molded in the wake of the revolutionary uprisings in early 20th century Russia, by nineteen-year-olds like David Ben-Gurion, the uniformed activists who created Revisionist Zionism were molded in the antisemitic nationalism of interwar Poland, by nineteen-year-olds like Menachem Begin. Whereas nationalism in the ethnically homogeneous nations of the West had promoted liberal and democratic values, nationalism in the ethnically and politically complex societies of Central Europe was based on honor, cohesion and strength, and eventually on expansion and racism. It was a nationalism born from a long-lasting suppression and humiliation of ethnic minorities, by dominant and self-confident ethnic majorities. Poland was characterized by centuries of occupation and national humiliation, with almost a third of its population belonging to ethnic minorities. Poland’s young nationalism was from the outset vindictive, self-righteous and authoritarian.

A key figure in the formative world of the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, was the Polish marshal and national hero Józef Piłsudski. At the outbreak of World War I, Piłsudski, with the support of Austria-Hungary, launched a guerrilla war against the country’s Russian rulers and succeeded in expanding Poland’s borders beyond what the victorious war powers had envisaged. As the undisputed leader of the newly formed Polish state, he strived to restore Poland’s territory to the pre-partition borders of 1772 and establish a militarily strong nation between Russia and Germany. The country’s ethnic and religious minorities would be offered limited autonomy under Polish national and cultural sovereignty. Jabotinsky characterized Piłsudski as a benevolent and enlightened leader, keen to see his Poland “clean, punctual, efficient and decent”.

In opposition to Piłsudski’s modernizing and ethnically tolerant nationalism, rose a more xenophobic and ethnic variety led by Roman Dmowski. After Piłsudski’s death in 1935, Dmowski’s blatantly antisemitic nationalism became increasingly influential, which undoubtedly contributed to Piłsudski becoming a role model for Jewish right-wing nationalism. Piłsudski’s patriotism was, in Jabotinsky’s appreciative words, ”an austere and ascetic religion, demanding and ascetic religion, scornful of all emotionalism.”^[2] Piłsudski may not have loved Jews, but he did not hate them either. It was only in the nature of things for Polish nationalists to be concerned about Poles and for Jewish nationalists to be concerned about Jews. ”One cannot help suspecting,” wrote Jabotinsky, ”that he [Piłsudski] would not have thought it regrettable had Poland only had 1% of Jews instead of 10%,; and as there were never enough jobs to go around, one may imagine (though he never mentioned it) that he wanted them to go to Poles and not to the Jews.”^[3] Piłsudski and his colonels were men of honor who were only doing for the Poles what Jabotinsky and the revisionists wanted to do for the Jews.

Just as the Ukrainian nationalist leaders wanted to do for the Ukrainians. Jabotinsky’s support for Ukrainian nationalism, the most xenophobic and antisemitic in all of Eastern Europe, notorious for its bloody pogroms, showed that he did not want to pass judgement on the content of any particular nationalism. Nationalism was itself an overarching value and its hallmark was not necessarily ethnic trust and brotherhood. One could not expect love from other nations, only respect for your power. In a 1910 publication entitled ”Man is a Wolf to Man” (homo homini lupus), Jabotinsky (whose Hebrew first name, Zeev, means wolf) wrote:

Stupid is the person who believes in his neighbor, good and loving as the neighbor may be; stupid is the person who relies on justice. Justice exists only for those whose fists and stubbornness make it possible for them to realize it. [...] Do not believe anyone, be always on your guard, carry your stick always with you – this is the only way of surviving in this wolfish battle of all against all.^[4]

Jabotinsky’s nationalism aimed for the Jewish nation to be a wolf among wolves, always suspicious, always ready to strike, always commanding the respect of its neighbors. Jabotinsky’s Jewish state was not a means to fulfil certain political, religious or social ideals but an end in itself; the mystical embodiment of an immanent Jewish nation, dramatically removed from its non-Jewish surroundings, cleansed of its Jewish ills and weaknesses, freed of conflicts, class struggle and foreign influence. In Vladimir Jabotinsky’s mind, the radical futurist visions of masses and machines in the early twenties merged with the deepening social and ethnic divisions of the early thirties. In Jabotinsky’s Jewish state, nature would be subordinate to humans, the individual subordinate to the nation, and the nation subordinate to its leader:

What we Jews need, above all, is to learn moving in unison – stepping with one step, striking with one stroke. I know the value of individualism – it a great asset too. But the highest rung of civilisation belongs to those who, though conscious and proud of their individuality, possess the power, at the moment of need, to conquest their own will, to fall in with the alignment of the nation, to act in their millions as if they were one single man or one single machine [...] A day may come when much will depend on the question whether the Jewish people is able, at a sign given from one center, to respond, all the world, with one voice – like one man, “like a machine”.^[5]

The worldview that became Zionist revisionism and which was to inform not only the underground armed uprising in Palestine but also Menachem Begin’s Herut Party, cannot be understood separately from the Polish and Central European nationalist maelstrom from which it emerged. It was a worldview fueled by the incipient fear and resentment of social and ethnic groups that had hoped for a place in a new Europe, but now saw the abyss opening up. These included the hundreds of thousands of Jewish small businessmen, civil servants and artisans who had belatedly emerged from the Jewish communities and begun to carve out a position for themselves in Piłsudski’s Poland, but who in the 1930s were pushed back, persecuted, humiliated and proletarianized as they competed with millions of Poles for jobs and income in a harsh economic environment. Jewish right-wing nationalism in Poland, like its Polish role model, thus developed in an increasingly radical and activist direction. The members of the Betar youth organization wore brown uniforms, were drilled in marches and parades, trained self-defense, and, with the open support of the Polish government, organized military training camps for Jewish youth ready to leave for Palestine. ^[6]

Within a few years, Betar grew into a mass movement among Poland’s young Jews and became the core of the revisionist organization. It promised to make the Jews a respected group in the Polish society by becoming a trained and disciplined force of its own, and to rid Europe of its Jewish problem through the “evacuation” of Jews to a Jewish state established by the force of Jewish arms. The evacuation idea was entirely in line with what Polish nationalist parties were advocating at the time.

When in the mid-thirties, an armed Jewish nationalist organization, Irgun, was formed in Palestine to launch offensive operations against the Palestinian Arabs and to organize illegal Jewish immigration, it retained its main foothold and support in Poland. Indeed, Irgun’s operations in Palestine would probably have been impossible without the support of the Polish government. Its very name, Irgun Zvai Leumi, the National Military Organization, was taken directly from its Polish counterpart, Piłsudski’s ”military organization”, Organizacja Bojowa. Its terror tactics were clearly inspired by Piłsudski’s hit and run warfare during the early Polish liberation struggle. While most other Jewish organizations in Poland, Zionist and non-Zionist alike, distanced themselves from Poland’s nationalist and antisemitic parties, Betar had no hesitations whatsoever in this regard, on the contrary. ”These ties with the Polish establishment were forged precisely in the years of heightened antisemitism and the growing influence of the radical right in the Polish ruling elite,” notes Israeli historian Yonathan Shapiro. ”A bizarre identity was forged between an antisemitic and nationalist radical right and a Jewish national movement.”^[7]

*

It was this movement that formed Menachem Begin and his generational unit. Begin himself soon became one of Betar’s senior leaders in Poland, in the spring of 1939 the most senior. Already responsible for Irgun’s Polish activities, he now sought coordinate Betar with Irgun. Recruitment to Betar in Poland would also be recruitment to Irgun’s armed struggle in Eretz Israel.

After Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Jabotinsky had gradually begun to distance himself from organized fascism in Europe. He emphasized the need for help from European states, especially Britain, to establish the Jewish state and bring about the “evacuation” of Europe’s Jews. In Palestine, he sought a political settlement with Ben-Gurion and a coordination of their respective military organizations, the Hagana and the Irgun.

In blatant opposition to Jabotinsky, Begin argued for a full militarization of Zionism, for an immediate armed conquest of Eretz Israel, for a possible armed struggle in countries other than Palestine (following the pattern of the Irish nationalists in England). It was a course of action that excluded all diplomacy and any attempt to win external support for the Jewish cause. In Palestine, it resulted in an armed rebellion against the British and an uncompromising fight against Ben-Gurion’s policy of havlaga, restraint. At the Betar Congress in Warsaw in September 1938, the following exchange took place between the still revered but increasingly circumscribed Jabotinsky and the increasingly powerful Begin:

Jabotinsky: Would the gentleman please tell me how he will get the Betari soldiers into the country [Palestine] without the support of foreigners?
Begin: If the force is created, help will also come from the Diaspora…
Jabotinsky: Has the gentleman taken note of the proportions of the Jewish military force and the Arab force in Eretz Israel?
Begin: We will win by virtue of our own moral strength.^[8]

Then the pleasantries ended. Jabotinsky likened Begin’s speech to “the squeaking of a door”, called his conquest plans absurd, and argued that until there was a Jewish majority in Palestine, the Jews were dependent on the conscience of the world, ”someone must hold the doors open for us”. Begin’s policy was tantamount to suicide. ”If there is no more conscience in the world, the only alternative is [jumping into the Wisła [River] or [joining] communism.”

Jabotinsky made strong efforts to prevent Begin’s election as leader of Betar, but in vain. Despite his still undisputed formal leadership, he had been politically outmaneuvered. The movement in Poland was radicalized by the developments in Palestine, just as the movement in Palestine seemed to ignore the developments in Europe. The result was a politically reckless and chauvinistic Zionist fraction, which until the very end, i.e. as late as April and May 1939, published articles in the Yiddish newspaper Die Tat, in which Western democracies were equated with Hitler and Nazism, Hitler’s views on the racial question were commented on with sympathy (apart from the objection that the anti-Jewish policy “in practice” prevented the Jews from establishing their own state), and antisemitism was not necessarily an integral part of Nazism, which in the final analysis was a version of fascism and therefore a good thing. ^[9]

*

Could European Jews become fascists? Before 1933, indeed even before 1939, the answer was not complicated. Of course Jews could become fascists, and right-wing nationalists too, for that matter. In the Italian fascist movement, which was not programmatically racist or antisemitic, the proportion of Jewish activists was for a long time far greater than the proportion of Jews in the population.

It was not entirely uncomplicated, of course, since Jewish nationalism did not have a nation, but in the high-strung political climate in which a belligerent Jewish nationalism nevertheless emerged, this mattered little. Uniforms, military drill and dreams of national redemption gave hope and meaning to a young Jewish generation which no longer had a foothold in the Jewish society, and who were now being deprived of their new-won foothold in the Polish society. More problematic, indeed paradoxical and eventually tragic, was that the revisionist movement came to accept antisemitism in both theory and practice as a fully legitimate expression of the national aspirations of other peoples. “[The] Jewish people is a very nasty people, and its neighbors hate it, and they are right”, Vladimir Jabotinsky recalled provocatively saying at one of the first Zionist meetings of his youth. “Its end in the Diaspora will be a general Bartholomew night, and the only rescue is general immigration to Palestine.”^[10]

This understanding of the “objective” causes of antisemitism would become a recurring theme in Jabotinsky’s work. Shortly before his death in 1940, he was still trying to distinguish between a rational and manageable antisemitism, the “antisemitism of things”, and a more pathological and difficult-to-reach type, the “antisemitism of people”. The first and in Poland predominant variant was, he argued, due to factual circumstances that must necessarily lead to conflict – there were too many Jews in a country with too few jobs and too little food: “Apart for of the hooligan element, there was little actual hatred of the Jews in Polish society. Often enough, those who were ready to sign a petition for anti-Jewish legislation would swear that they were honestly sorry for the harm which their action was bound to cause the Jews – but there was no other way out: ‘it’s either my son or the Jew’s son, for there is only one loaf’”.^[11] The Polish nationalist leaders, including Piłsudski, who for most of the 1920s and 1930s had turned a blind eye to antisemitism, and when appropriate used it for their own purposes, had acted out of national self-interest. In a kind of tragic echo of Nazi propaganda, Jabotinsky was convinced that “the Jewish curse” was the ubiquitous cause of the war. Its origin was not so much Jew-hatred as a sympathy with “one’s own people”, a basic and primordial instinct “which cannot be criticized because, after all, it is as natural as preferring one’s own children to one’s neighbor’s offspring.” ^[12]

Revisionist Zionism’s early association with fascist ideas and rites was no accidental aberration. Its notions of a common destiny and mission of the Jewish people, of the Jewish state as the embodiment of that destiny, and of Eretz Israel as the sacred living space of the Jewish state, could be given a fascist framing with very little shift in perspective. In addition, Jabotinsky’s early assertion of the importance of race to the character of a society was not that there were entirely pure races or that some races were necessarily superior to others, only that race was “a fundamental factor of all civilisation and all history”, that each nation had a distinct racial psychology, and that a nation’s institutions, even its economic life, were profoundly shaped by racial factors.^[13] Although Jabotinsky’s racial thinking was not premised on intolerance, on the contrary he advocated broad ethnic and cultural autonomy within the framework of a dominant nation (which became revisionism’s “solution” to the “Arab problem”), it led him to a fascist-like view of the nation as a distinct organic personality to which individual members must accommodate themselves. Jabotinsky’s favorite metaphor for the State was a Machine, not an Organism, but he meant the same thing.

*

The Jewish state that Jabotinsky dreamed of establishing in Palestine arguably had some fascist features: autocratic and charismatic leadership instead of parliamentarism and democracy, state-organized professional corporations instead of parties and trade unions, state regulation of the labor market instead of free bargaining and the right to strike. Moreover, in the early thirties the revisionist movement in Palestine reached a strong enough position to try to put its ideas into practice. One of the main targets was the powerful labor Zionist trade union movement, the Histadrut, which had succeeded in negotiating a system that often made union membership a condition for employment. The system was condemned by Jabotinsky as a blow to the national cause in general and to the supporters of the nationalist movement in particular. The latter were now forced, like everyone else, to seek their jobs through the local Histadrut offices and not directly from employers. In 1930, some plantation owners tried to break the power of the Histadrut by directly recruiting workers from Betar. The move triggered physical clashes between protesting Histadrut workers and Betar activists and put in motion a violent spiral of strikes and strike-breaking over the next three years. In fiery articles, Jabotinsky urged his followers to “break” the Histadrut and establish a new workers’ organization that would put the interests of the nation above those of the class. The Jews of Palestine would see themselves not as workers or proletarians but as “volunteers” willing to sacrifice their futile personal and material interests for something greater than themselves.

During these years, parts of the revisionist movement in Palestine developed in an explicitly fascist direction. One of Betar’s central figures, the journalist Abba Ahimeir, a former member of a left-wing Zionist organization, now titled his newspaper columns “From the Diary of a Fascist” and called for a Jewish Mussolini. In 1936, he enthusiastically supported Franco in Spain, hoping for a “Zionist Alcázar”, a symbol of fascist loyalty and sacrifice.^[14]

Around Ahimeir formed a circle of other former left-wing intellectuals, among them the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg^[15]and the writer Heschel Yevin, who, formerly from the left and now from the right, called for a relentless struggle against “corrupt” democracy and for the establishment of a “spiritual dictatorship”. In response to what they perceived as Jabotinsky’s leaning toward appeasement and compromise, they formed Brit Ha’birjonim, the pugilists’ union, which advocated violence not only against the external enemies, the Arabs and the British, but also against the traitors and appeasers of the Zionist establishment. Its members liked to compare themselves to the Sicarii, a sect of knife-wielding assassins who did not hesitate to liquidate suspected collaborators during the Jewish revolt against the Romans (67-70 CE). The assassins were the true heroes of history, Ahimeir wrote. A murder was justified when the motive was just.^[16]This made for a political culture steeped in secrecy and suspicion, loyalty and betrayal, sacrifice and submission, which was the culture that formed the man who fifty years later would lead the State of Israel.

*

Betar member Yitzhak Shamir (Yesernitsky) had arrived in Palestine from Poland in 1935 at the age of twenty, and was immediately drawn to the circles that in 1941 would form the most extreme and uncompromising of the underground terrorist groups of Jewish Palestine, Lochamei Herut Israel (Lehi), the Freedom Fighters of Israel. Its leader, the poet Abraham Stern, initially promoted the thesis that Hitler and Churchill were equally bad, that the world war was a fight between evil and evil, and that Germany could very well be made an ally of the Zionist cause. By deporting Europe’s Jews to Palestine, Hitler could kill two birds with one stone: get rid of the hated Jews and undermine British power in the Middle East. Confident that Hitler would see it their way, Lehi called for immediate and unrestricted military actions against the British in Palestine – and against anyone else hoping to hinder the establishment of a Jewish state “from the Nile to the Euphrates”. ^[17]

Out of this deranged political fantasy grew a ruthless terrorist organisation. It was no coincidence that Abraham Stern adopted the name Yair, after Elazar Ben Yair, the suicide leader of Masada. Nor was it a coincidence that Lehi member Yitzhak Shamir single-handedly and without much ado “executed” his fellow combatant, Elijahu Giladi, on the grounds that he had become “dangerous to the movement”. “It is my belief that I had no alternative”, Shamir wrote fifty years later in his memoirs. He also wrote that in 1940 and 1941 “it was reasonable to feel that there was little for Jews to choose from between the Germans and the British”.

The Yitzhak Shamir who shot Elijahu Giladi, and who saw Churchill as great an enemy as Hitler, carried his dark and vengeful world with him through his career in Israeli intelligence, his rise to the top of the Herut party, and eventually his years as Israel’s foreign minister and prime minister. Behind an increasingly polished facade of officialdom and politics, lingered the thoughts of an extremist and the feelings of a terrorist. It was not a modern, democratic statesman who summarized his life in 1994, but a suspicious and bitter fighter who lamented the injustice of history, the evil of the world and the weakness of humanity. No, not even Menachem Begin, his predecessor and mentor, had understood that murder was sometimes a necessary political measure: “Going to war when there was no alternative was all right, but singling out of one person, even of an informer, for execution was morally wrong in his eyes. He wanted courtrooms, trials, validation; cautious legal procedures that were impossible in the underground [...] Like Jabotinsky, the idol, whom he in many ways emulated, for much of the period of the struggle against the British he went on believing in the primary importance of the political effort and its priority over armed conflict. ‘Do you really think you can create a state with pistols?’ he asked me once before he became commander of the Irgun.” ^[18]

Shamir’s answer is implicit.

*

Essentially, Shamir’s and Lehi’s political fantasies did not differ much from those of Jabotinsky’s and Begin’s. In principle, the revisionist movement was in favor of an immediate military confrontation with the Arabs and, if necessary, with the British, in order to conquer all of the Land of Israel. The Jewish state must come first, the Jewish majority later. Their minimum territorial demand was the entire British Mandate of Palestine including Transjordan, or, as they preferred to put it, the former Hebrew kingdoms on both sides of the Jordan River. Geographical size and territorial expansion were central ideological tenets in the revisionist concept of the Jewish nation, not a matter of political and pragmatic considerations. What could seem impractical, unrealistic or even inhumane was nevertheless necessary. Ultimately, the Leader decided what was necessary and what was not, which in practice meant that there was plenty of room for unprincipled considerations. Jabotinsky saw principles as a mobilizing and inspiring factor, not necessarily as a program of action.

Another principled idea of revisionism was the formative role of violence in nation-building. Violence was not only a means to achieve national goals but also a way to restore national honor, respect and dignity. The hero of the nation was the soldier, not the farmer. For Jabotinsky, however, the symbolic significance of armed forces remained more important than their military usefulness. The army was a source of loyalty, discipline and pride, but not necessarily a substitute for politics. In practice, a Jewish state in Palestine could only be realized through a combination of military strength and a political alliance with the West, not through an isolated Jewish war of conquest.

The dramatic events of the 1930s gradually increased the tension between the ideological principles of Revisionism and the pressures of Realpolitik. Jabotinsky’s faith in diplomacy and alliances was inevitably coming into conflict with the radical elements in Betar who opted for terror and guerilla warfare. “We must shoot, the hit is not important”, Menachem Begin wrote from Poland,^[19] and in Palestine Brit Ha’birjonim staged a series of spectacular actions to provoke confrontations with the Arabs, the British and the Labor Zionist establishment. Initially this tactic enjoyed certain public support among Palestine’s Jewish settlers in face of growing Arab resistance, but when, in June 1933, one of Brit Ha’birjonim’s main objects of hatred, the socialist mayor of Tel Aviv, Chaim Arlosoroff, was murdered while walking along the beach with his wife, the movement lost its legitimacy. Arlosoroff had been involved in attempts to negotiate with Nazi Germany to bring about Jewish emigration and the transfer of Jewish assets to Palestine, if need be in the form of German-made products. For this and other things, he had been labelled a traitor and become the subject of harsh personal attacks. It was Arlosoroff that Abba Ahimeir had referred to in an article on the day of the murder when he wrote: “Jews have always known how to deal with those who trade on the honor and beliefs of their people.”^[20] And it was Ahimeir and some of his followers who were arrested, prosecuted and convicted for the murder (only to be acquitted by a higher court a few years later).

*

The murder of Arlosoroff was a turning point in the history of the Revisionist movement. Until then it had been a politically dynamic and partly successful competitor to socialist labor Zionism. Toward the end of the 1920’s, at a time of growing Arab resistance (symbolized by a massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929) and with signs of a negative shift in the British view of the Jewish national movement, its influence grew dramatically within the Zionist movement; from 4 percent of the vote at the 1927 World Zionist Congress to 25 at the 1931 Congress. There was a corresponding increase in support for the revisionist demand for a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. Some believed that Jabotinsky missed the opportunity to get a majority at the 1931 Congress and to wrest power from Ben-Gurion’s Labor Zionists. Or as one of the participants summarized: ”They were in sight of the ‘Promised Land’ – the capture of the Zionist leadership – which they hoped to achieve at one stroke, and they were laying down impossible conditions”. ^[21]

Two years later, at the 1933 Congress, the tide had turned. Hitler was in power, Arlosoroff had been assassinated, and the Revisionists’ fascist-inspired rhetoric had taken on increasingly dark undertones. Their share of the votes now plunged from 25 to 14 percent, while Ben-Gurion’s Zionist Labor Party, Mapai, soared from 29 percent to 44 (71 percent among the delegates from Palestine), taking a decisive step toward half a century of ideological hegemony,

Revisionism, on the other hand, became increasingly alienated from the Zionist mainstream. A last-ditch attempt to heal the rift through direct and secret negotiations between Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion failed. Not because the leaders were far apart, in fact they managed to reach an agreement, but because they could no longer control their own highly polarized narratives. The agreed compromise was emphatically rejected by Ben-Gurion’s Labor Party and weakened Jabotinsky’s authority within the Revisionist movement. Shortly thereafter, the Revisionists left the World Zionist Organisation. Doors were slammed shut, rifts were widened, plots were hatched, weapons were loaded.

*

In retrospect, it is hard to understand how the Revisionist movement so effectively managed to put itself out in the cold. The Labor Zionists wanted a Jewish state as much as the Revisionists, but by different means and, above all, based on a different understanding of what was achievable. What Labor Zionists preferred to do in silence, the zealous Revisionists wanted to say and do in the open. Their fascist-inspired ideology had them worship physical action, muscular strength, theatrical heroism, and subversive provocations, fostering a deep disregard for tactical considerations and political compromises.

Considering the nature of its Zionism however, Revisionism was little more than the political and logical extension of Theodor Herzl’s feverish fantasy of a Jewish state in one fell swoop. Like Herzl, Jabotinsky believed that the Jewish state must be the instantaneous outcome of an alliance between Zionism and a European imperial power. On top of everything else, Jabotinsky was an inveterate Anglophile and to the very last he hoped it would be England. Herzl may have been unaware or naive about the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Jabotinsky was not.

Like Herzl, Revisionism regarded the Jewish problem as permanent, insoluble, and acute, and Zionism as a movement for the massive transfer of Europe’s Jews, preferably to Palestine. Just as Herzl was discussing Uganda as an alternative solution to the Jewish problem, Jabotinsky as late as 1940 was considering Jewish statehood in British Guiana or Western Australia. It was also Jabotinsky who brought to life Herzl confidant Max Nordau’s 1919 plan for the immediate transport of 1.5 million Jews to Palestine from Eastern Europe, a project that would certainly “reduce the tension in Eastern and Central Europe” but at the same time put an end to the labor Zionist dream of a farmers’ and workers’ state. At a stroke, the Jewish state would have a majority of small businessmen and craftsmen, an economy based on manufacturing rather than agriculture, and a growing social base for nationalist rather than socialist policies.

There are in fact fascinating parallels between the Zionist visions of Herzl and Jabotinsky. Both intended the Jewish state to be a radical modern utopia with no contact with the existing society in Palestine. “Future cities,” wrote Jabotinsky, “can be rationally marked upon the empty map of the State-area just as future green areas can be indicated on the uncompleted map of a projected town.”^[22]

For both Herzl and Jabotinsky, the Jewish problem would be solved when the Jews had a state of their own, where they could raise their own flag, plan their own cities, build their own factories and train their own soldiers. Ultimately, Zionism became for Jabotinsky what it had been for Herzl, an emergency rescue and resettlement operation: “Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River is the only ‘suitable’ site for that Jewish state, which, being the only remedy against Europe’s cancer, is the world’s urgent need [...] A homeland for the Jews means a land where they would dwell only among Jews, or would at least constitute a majority sufficiently overwhelming in numbers to eliminate the possibility of pogroms, or economic ousting, even the uneasy distress of the unwanted lodger.” ^[23]

It seems more than an irony of fate that Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky, the emblematic founder of the Zionist movement and its enfant terrible, are officially and solemnly buried a stone’s throw from each other on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

*

It cannot be emphasized enough that Revisionism was an ideology born, nurtured and matured out of the phobias and conflicts of Europe, not Palestine. Jabotinsky himself did not settle in Palestine until 1928 and was able to stay there only a little over a year. After traveling abroad in December 1929, he was refused a re-entry visa. He died in New York in 1940, more concerned with the plight of the Jews in Europe than with the intrigues of Palestine. Menachem Begin did not arrive in Palestine until 1942, after spending eight months in a Siberian prison camp.^[24] The two leaders’ difficulties in fully comprehending the political reality of Palestine may have stemmed from the fact that their minds were formed elsewhere.

Tragedy has long shrouded the history of revisionism in gracious silence. The fact that Jews had allowed themselves to be carried away by the same thoughts and visions as their would-be executioners was for a time hard to bear. Other aspects of the intellectually brilliant Jabotinsky were brought forth to show that some part of his contradictory personality was also democratic and liberal. Nor was Menachem Begin’s central role in Betar in those fateful years allowed to color the image of either him or the party he later would bring to power in Israel.

But nothing was forgotten, of course. And nothing was regretted. Very soon after his metamorphosis from underground, fascist-inspired guerrilla leader to the leader of a political party in a parliamentary democracy, Begin introduced into Israeli politics the historical themes of revisionism: the demand for territorial expansion, the glorification of the army, the sanctification of the Jewish state, the distrust of the non-Jewish world, the justification and glorification of the actions of the Revisionist underground in the creation of Israel. Or as Begin would put it in his melodramatic fashion: “If there had not been found in a section Jewry, the strength and the spirit to rise in revolt, the sun would have set on our people. […] We should not today have a Jewish state. We should have had a ghetto with our enemies trying to turn it into a graveyard.”^[25]

The Revisionist version of Zionist history also came with its own stab-in-the-back myth, based on an event in June 1948. During a temporary ceasefire in the war between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, the provisional leader of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, ordered the newly created Israeli Defence Forces, IDF, in Hebrew Tsahal, to open fire at a ship loaded with weapons and volunteers for the Irgun, which no longer officially existed as an independent army. The leaders of Irgun had not yet fully grasped the power-political consequences of Israeli statehood but insisted, in breach of a UN embargo on bringing weapons into the combat zone, that the cargo be landed openly just north of Tel Aviv and that twenty percent of the weapons be distributed to the still remaining Irgun units in Jerusalem. There is reason to believe that Ben Gurion was driven to his drastic action not only by respect for the UN embargo or by concern for the cohesion of the Israeli army, but also by fear of a right-wing military coup..

From this act of “fratricide” (several Irgun members were killed in the battle), Menachem Begin would spin an intensely propagated myth that the “War of Independence” had been undermined by Ben-Gurion, that true Jewish patriots had been shot in the back, that military battles that could have been won were lost, that Israel’s borders could have been extended if Irgun had been allowed to dislodge its weapons and carry out its planned military operations. ^[26]

What had been lost through betrayals and injustices, the revisionists would make up for in due course. The struggle for a Greater Israel on both sides of the Jordan River became the central theme of the revisionist Herut Party for nearly two decades. “Our right to all parts of the homeland is unassailable”, wrote Herut, the party newspaper, in 1949. The 1949 armistice lines were described as “grotesque”, befitting a state “in a Levantine operetta”. Israel was no more than a ghetto surrounded by Arabs, “if we do not eliminate the borders, the borders will eliminate us”. Israeli raids into Arab territory were glorified, while Arab raids into Israel were consistently labeled as pogroms. In 1951, Begin accused the Israeli leadership of failing to use the assassination of Jordan’s King Abdullah to “complete” the territory. In 1954, with the military coup by Nasser in Egypt, it should have similarly “seized the opportunity” to take Gaza.

Throughout the fifties, the Israeli electorate showed a striking indifference to this vociferously expansionist foreign policy. Even after the Sinai War in October 1956 and the subsequent return of war-conquered Sinai and Gaza to Egypt, Begin failed to gain popular support for his territorial demands. Until 1965 (when Herut formed part of a new right-wing coalition, Likud) the party never received more than 14 percent of the vote in general elections. The politics and culture of the revisionist world failed to capture the ideological imagination of most Israelis. Not necessarily because the revisionists were the only ones dreaming of more territory or celebrating military strength, but because there were too many wrongs to avenge, too many unfinished battles to fight, too little joy, confidence and contentment.

Typical was Begin’s dramatic fight against the war reparations agreement between Israel and Germany in December 1951, an agreement that would provide crucial financial resources to the State of Israel, but which to Begin represented a terrible bargain with the honor and pride of the Jewish people. The money from Germany was blood money, accepting it was tantamount to national suicide, stopping the agreement was literally a matter of freedom or death. At a violent demonstration in Jerusalem, Begin accused the police of using tear gas from Germany, ”the same gas which was used killed your fathers and mothers.”^[27] Through endless outbursts and interruptions, he tried to stop the ongoing parliamentary debate on the agreement, called Ben-Gurion a hooligan and again declared himself ready to die for his cause. He was then escorted out of the parliamentary chamber and suspended for three months, while the agreement ratified and yet another performance of political theatrics had been followed by – nothing.

Menachem Begin came from a world of bygone symbols and myths, from a generational unit whose carefully constructed reality had capsized and which would probably have dissolved and perished in any other society. Only in the ideologically charged Jewish state was there enough myth-making energy to keep even the most pathetic outsider alive.

Paradoxically, it was the fixation on past wrongs, nourished by the bitterness and frustration of exclusion, that in the late 1960’s would become the key to Herut’s electoral breakthrough in Israeli politics – by offering a language and a worldview to another excluded segment of the Israeli population – the Oriental Jews.

*

With the territorial conquests of 1967 the ideological isolation Begin and his revisionist party finally broke. Positions that had seemed far-fetched, to say the least, were now literally fetched by Israeli troops. Suppressed historical myths were suddenly reinforced by historical events. It was not the “unrealistic” revisionists that had succumbed to the reality politics of Labor Zionism, but reality politics that had succumbed to revisionist Zionism. Entrenched Herut slogans about the historical right of the Jews “to the whole land of Israel”, Eretz Israel Ha’schlema, were gaining public support. The ideological gap between Herut and Labor Zionist Mapai on foreign policy and defense was significantly narrowed. Within Labor Zionism there were now factions who saw the establishment of Jewish settlements in the newly conquered territories as a fulfillment of their own ideological ambitions. These were the same factions that in the 1930’s and 1940’s had opposed the partition of Palestine and advocated a Jewish “socialist commonwealth” throughout the whole territory of the British mandate. There was, if you will, a dormant left-wing expansionist tradition that was now coming to life again. The first demands for new Jewish settlements came from within the ranks of Labor Zionism. ^[28]

It became suddenly apparent that the line between the two competing Zionist ideologies, Revisionism and Labor Zionism, was being drawn in the sand. Gradually, Labor Zionism had incorporated selected but important elements of Revisionist thought. The state had become more important than class and the army had become the emblematic national institution.

The war of 1967 marked the ascendance of a new generation of Israeli-born leaders. Their legitimacy and authority did not come not from sustaining and managing the ideological myths of Labor Zionism, but from their capacity to run a state and win its wars. While Revisionism radiated ideological certainty, Labor Zionism radiated administrative competence and military-strategic genius. That image was severely shattered in the disastrous war of October 1973, and in the postponed elections in December of that year, the party of Labor Zionism, Mapai, lost 7 percentage points to the Herut-dominated Likud coalition. One election later, in 1977, the ideological shift became an electoral fact.

*

In the early sixties in secondary school number nine in Tel Aviv, there were no myths, only truths and lies. We were all encapsulated in the same certainty that must have characterized the young state’s oft-invoked historical hero, Judas Maccabeus, in his fight against the Hellenization of Jewish Palestine in the 160s BCE. In a world of indifferent gods, unprincipled compromises and moral confusion, the rebellious Maccabees drew strength from deeply rooted Jewish notions of good and evil, and clearcut distinctions between right and wrong.

With a mixture of wonder and estrangement, I look at the neat Hebrew handwriting of a fourteen-year-old newly ascended Jewish boy who, on 13 May 1963, writes: “The Hasmonean uprising was a natural step in the course of events in Judea, part of the struggle for liberation from foreign power, against the extermination order of Antony Epiphanes, and for the introduction of religious freedom for all.”

“Antony??? No, Antiochus!”, Dr Kanner has added in his angry red pen. Otherwise, no objections. Tov, good, it says at the top.

He would have to wait exactly fourteen more years, Dr Kanner.

Fourteen more years as an outsider.

^[1] Jabotinsky: “Betar’s idea”, Tel Aviv 1934, Y Shapiro, p 17.

^[2] Jabotinsky, p 83

^[3] Ibid., p 84

^[4] Avineri 1981 (2017), p 172-173.

^[5] Cohen, p 167.

^[6] Betar is the Hebrew acronym for Brit Trumpeldor, Covenant of Trumpeldor, after Joseph Trumpeldor, who in 1909 died defending Tel Hai, a Zionist outpost in northern Galilee.

^[7] Y Shapiro, p 56.

^[8] Y Shapiro, p 58.

^[9] Ibid., pp 59-60.

^[10] Avineri 1981 (2017), p. 170.

^[11] Jabotinsky, p 86-87.

^[12] Jabotinsky, p 75.

^[13] Cohen, p. 165.

^[14] Alcázar was a military fortress which during the Spanish Civil War was besieged by Republican forces, who threatened to execute the captive son of a Franco commander if the fortress did not surrender, which it did not, and the son was executed in front of his father.

^[15] Uri Zvi Greenberg’s poetry and journalism developed early on in a strongly anti-Arab and racist direction. As early as 1924-25, he called for the removal of the mosques on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He began referring to Arabs as Canaanites, thus legitimizing the conquest of the country (it was the land of the Canaanites that God had given to Abraham), and he spoke openly about the need for violence. “Our nationalism is a historical imperative in the blood of the Hebrew race” was a characteristic statement. Shapira, p. 148.

^[16] This line of reasoning was developed in Achimeir’s 1926 pamphlet Megilat Sikarikin, Scroll of the Sicarii. Shapira, p. 197.

^[17] The term “from the Nile to the Euphrates” is taken from Genesis 15:18, and was invoked by Abraham Stern in the “Principles of Rebirth” that led to the formation of Lehi.

^[18] Shamir, pp. 86-87.

^[19] Y Shapiro, p 41.

^[20] Cohen, p 158

^[21] Emmanuel Neumann, an American Zionist leader, who in 1931 was mandated to negotiate a coalition with Jabotinsky on behalf of two ‘centre parties’, the General Zionists and the religious Mizrahi. Cohen, p 151.

^[22] Jabotinsky, p 195.

^[23] Jabotinsky, p 189, p 135.

^[24] Begin, along with several thousand Polish prisoners of war, was released in 1942 following a tripartite agreement between Moscow, the Western Allies and the Polish government-in-exile in London to form a Polish army-in-exile. It was as a soldier in that army that Begin was shortly afterwards sent to Palestine for British-led soldier training, and it was only then, with the tacit consent of his Polish superiors, that he joined the Irgun, where he immediately assumed command. Sachar II, p 26.

^[25] Begin, p 39.

^[26] “At our first attack we should have captured Ramleh... They needed only a few hundred rifles... or six per cent of the number loaded in the hold of the ‘Altalena’”. Begin, p 154.

^[27] Cohen, p 230.

^[28] The party within Labor Zionism that historically represented a more expansionist stance on the territorial issue was Ahdut Ha-Avoda, the Unity of Labor, whose ideology also permeated one of the three dominant kibbutz movements, Kibbutz Ha-Meuhad (the other two, Ihud Ha-Kibbutzim and Kibbutz Ha-Artzi, were affiliated with Ben-Gurion’s Mapai and the occasionally Soviet-influenced Mapam, respectively). Ahdut Ha-Avoda argued that class was more important than state, that more collective farms were more important than fixed borders, that partition therefore was a bad thing, while the establishment of new kibbutzim throughout the Palestinian territory was an ideological imperative. After the June 1967 war, Ahdut Ha-Avoda leader Itzhak Tabenkin demanded immediate Jewish settlement in the occupied territories and advocated national co-operation with Herut and the Revisionists. Shortly thereafter, the party merged with Mapai and Rafi, Ben-Gurion’s breakaway party, including Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, to form a new labor party that thus included both ideological and pragmatic advocates for a greater Israel. Yigal Allon, the minister behind the first official Israeli settlement plan, came from Ahdut Ha-Avoda. See also Cohen, p. 264 ff.

It was intended as irony. In the year 1984, it certainly looked as though Orwell had got both the year and the future wrong. Nevertheless the Soviet Union whose totalitarian nature he had taken to its dystopian extreme still existed and showed no signs of disintegration. War was still peace. Freedom was still slavery. Ignorance was still strength. In these years, the Russian writer Aleksander Zinoviev coined the term ‘homo sovieticus’, the Soviet man, by which he meant a human being devoid of individuality, finding its purpose and meaning in collective conformity. This was perhaps not quite the same as in Big Brother’s Oceania, whose subjects were systematically deprived of meaningful language and free thought, but it seemed realistic enough for Orwell’s story to continue to be read as it was intended: a cautionary tale of the temptation and reality of totalitarian conformity.

It was not only in the Soviet Union that Orwell saw an unfree individual in the making. In a letter to the writer Arthur Koestler in 1945, he wrote: “It is chiefly in the form of uncritical admiration for the Soviet Union that totalitarian ideas are taking root in the West. Meanwhile, we are witnessing the gradual decline of democratic thinking, of human decency, of the pursuit of freedom…”

in 1989 the Soviet society collapsed, and for a time “1984” seemed to be consigned to history, and so I tended to believe as well. “The horizons and networks of the individual have opened up, and can reasonably never again be closed off in the way Orwell’s future envisaged,” I wrote in 2003, in the foreword to a rival dystopia, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which I thought had more to go for it.

I was wrong. In 2026, “1984” has returned, and not as the future of a totalitarian empire somewhere else, but as a future close to us, here and now. It is often forgotten that “1984” is set in London and that Big Brother’s Oceania encompasses the former USA, whilst the European continent forms part of the Russian-dominated superstate Eurasia. In “1984”, three superstates (including the superstate Eastasia) wage constant and bloody wars against one another over borders, raw materials and power. Sometimes it is all against all, sometimes two against one.

At a time when an authoritarian US seeks to subjugate the Western Hemisphere (including Canada and Greenland), an authoritarian Russia seeks to subjugate Ukraine and divide Europe, and an authoritarian China seeks to conquer Taiwan and exert power here and there, the geopolitical scenario of 1984 no longer feels alien. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney did not use the word ‘superstates’ in his speech at Davos; he spoke of ‘hegemons’, but he meant the same thing: a world where, in the words of Thucydides, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

This is the world that Orwell, in “1984”, drives to its dystopian extreme. In Big Brother’s Oceania, the weak have been stripped of their capacity for resistance by being deprived of their ability to speak and think. The central function of the ‘Ministry of Truth’ is to render language useless for distinguishing between true and false, real and unreal, between what has happened and what has not happened. In Orwell’s world, words are stripped of their meaning, or can mean two incompatible things at the same time, or can mean one thing yesterday and another today, which sabotages all interpersonal communication and establishes a totalitarian reign of lies.

The method of destroying communication in Orwell’s “1984”—word-purge and word-fabrication within an all-powerful Ministry of Truth—may not have been designed for the future, but the image of a society where people must not trust what they themselves see and hear (the ‘Party’s’ supreme commandment in “1984”), where it is easier to communicate fear and suspicion than trust and understanding, where lies have established themselves as the norm and a means of power, feels more relevant today than when I read “1984” back in 1984.

In our time, however, the breakdown of communication is not primarily the result of a totalitarian seizure of power of any kind (though there is a connection), but of a rapidly advancing digital communications revolution that makes it increasingly difficult to know what is true and false, and therefore all the easier to spread lies and slander, create fear and uncertainty, and sow division and hatred. Today, lies pave the way for Big Brother, rather than the other way round. When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, he had a network of more or less covert producers of lies and slander behind him, some of them backed by Putin’s Russia.

Once in power in 2017, Trump made communication based on lies and slander his primary weapon, and once back in power in 2025, he made loyalty to a lie the foundation of his exercise of power. His hand-picked ministers and officials must all attest that it was Donald Trump and not Joe Biden who won the 2020 election. Much like when party members in Big Brother’s Ingsoc had to say that black is white ‘when party discipline demanded it’, and preferably also start believing that black is white, and forget that they had ever believed anything else.

In true Orwellian spirit, Trump’s America has banned the use of certain words in federal documents and contexts, whilst the use of other words has been mandated. New names are rapidly replacing old ones. The Department of Defence is now the Department of War, the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America, etc.

Big Brother knew what he was doing when he launched his assault on language – and so do his modern-day successors. The global media platforms, and the global media moguls and trillionaires who own and control them, and the authoritarian leaders who know how to ally themselves with them, can do things to our language and our thoughts that Orwell’s Big Brother could not have dreamed of. I imagine the Big Brother of our time as an amalgam of boundless violent power (might makes right), boundless communicative power (lie is the norm) and boundless financial power (the rule of the trillionaires).

It is, in any case, a scenario that I find no more improbable than Orwell’s “1984”, which is why “1984” remains a book that, to quote Walter Dickson’s review in [the Swedish magazine] Ny Tid on 9 June 1950, “breathes a marvellous and precious life into the freedoms we possess”.

KORT SAGT, tiden rinner ut för varje alternativ till självmordsstrategin från Massada. För Ariel Sharon och hans extremnationalistiska bundsförvanter i den nuvarande israeliska regeringen har det tyvärr aldrig funnits någon annan strategi. I deras värld har Israel alltid varit och kommer alltid att förbli omgivet av eviga fiender och kan därför bara överleva genom att vara mäktigare än dem, vilket Israel bara kan vara genom att förbli en till tänderna befäst judisk garnisonsstat, ju större desto bättre. Varje eftergift är i denna paranoida strategi ett tecken på svaghet, varje kompromiss ett steg mot nederlag, varje fredsinvit en förberedelse till svek. Den enda fred denna regering accepterar är de maktfullkomligas fred med de maktlösa och den enda mänskliga drivkraft den erkänner är rädslan. Rädslan hos ockupanterna, rädslan hos de ockuperade, rädslan hos judarna.
Ju mer rädsla som härvid kan produceras desto större uppslutning bakom Massadas nutida befälhavare. Palestinska terrordåd och antisemitisk propaganda spelar dem naturligtvis rakt i händerna och de ägnar sig följaktligen bekymmerslöst åt att stimulera bådadera. Det förra genom en ockupation som systematiskt producerar förödmjukelse, hat och hopplöshet vilket är en pålitlig grogrund för desperat våld. Det senare genom att systematiskt undergräva gränsen mellan Israelkritik och judehat.
Det är sant att judehatet i världen ökar men det är också sant att ledarna i Massada inte har någonting emot det och inte heller drar sig för att underblåsa det. Deras mål nu som förr är att all världens judar ska skrämmas att bege sig till Israel där deras nationella och religiösa öde slutligen ska fullbordas.

DETTA RÅKAR tyvärr också vara ett mål som till punkt och pricka delas av den inflytelserika väckelsekristna högern i USA, som tror att judarnas återvändande till det heliga landet förebådar den sista striden vid Harmagedon och Jesu återkomst och som därför understödjer Israels extremaste politiker och mest fanatiska bosättare eftersom dessa snabbast och effektivast påskyndar Guds plan. Det är i det syftet som Livets Ords Ulf Ekman, intimt förbunden med den väckelsekristna högern i USA, har byggt upp en stor verksamhet i Israel varifrån han bland annat bedriver Operation Jabotinsky (efter grundaren av det parti som idag leds av Ariel Sharon) med uppgift att förflytta så många judar som möjligt från Ryssland till Israel.
Med George W. Bush har denna väckelsekristna höger av allt att döma fått sin första president i Vita Huset och undan för undan en Mellanösternpolitik som oroväckande väl spelar såväl Mississippis som Massadas fanatiker i händerna.

DEN SOM SÖKER rationella motiv bakom denna politik söker naturligtvis förgäves. Ariel Sharon drivs av tron på den eviga segern och George W. Bush av tron på den sista striden, vilka båda måste karakteriseras som djupt irrationella drivkrafter. Med president Bushs erkännande av Israels ockupationspolitik raseras snabbt de territoriella förutsättningarna för den tvåstatslösning som hade kunnat bilda en försoningens bro mellan Massadas judiska invånare och den arabiska värld som ofrånkomligen inringar dem.
Om femton år kommer palestinierna att vara i majoritet i det område som Israel behärskar och ockuperar. Israels styrande extremister må planera att driva bort så många som möjligt av dem och spärra in resten i muromgärdade, bantustanliknande, områden, men det samhälle de därvid skapar kommer alltmer att likna en isolerad befästning i öknen, sammanhållet av rädsla, byggt på murar och styrt av fanatiker.
Att detta är vägen till kollektivt självmord behöver man inte läsa Flavius Josefus för att inse.

The fact that I am invited here tonight to give my view on Jewish identity and culture, albeit with the recognition that we here are dealing with many identities and many cultures, testifies to the amorphous nature of this subject. Almost anyone can say just about anything on this subject.

So let me say something about myself.

Or rather ask: in what way am I a Jew? I am surely not practising any part of the Jewish religion and tradition except going to my mother’s place for Seder and Rosh Hashana and that has mostly become an occasion for family reunion. I am not even a member of the Jewish Congregation in Stockholm. I do not participate in any Jewish social activities, except when I am invited to talk. I am even by some Jews considered anti-Jewish because of my positions on Zionism and on the relation between Israel and Palestine. In addition I am married to a Swedish, non-Jewish, woman, and our three daughters have been brought up with open borders. They have been made well aware of their background and have been eager to find out more – but if and when and how they wish to identify themselves as Jewish is completely up to them. Of course, in this case the orthodox matrilinear tradition weighs heavily against them. Although this tradition doesn’t weigh too heavily in Stockholm. Not anymore. Patrilinear Jewish heritage has been accepted by the leading conservative faction of the Jewish congregation. But of course not by everybody. And of course not by the ruling orthodoxy of Israel.

So already within one family, my family, we can see how the question of who and what is a Jew, quickly disintegrates and slips away.

Still I would not hesitate to call myself a Jew. Or rather, if anyone asks, I will answer “yes“. Well, the obvious criteria of course apply. There are Jews on both my mother’s and father’s side as long as living memory have it. My mother came from a famous (or perhaps infamous) shtetl in Eastern Poland, Chelm (known for its fools), where she grew up in a large orthodox family of rabbis, craftsmen, merchants and strong women. During the hard years of the 1930’s the family joined the wave of migration to the larger cities, in this case Lodz, where they did pretty well under the circumstances. Most of the family perished, either in the ghetto or in Auschwitz. My mother and one elder sister were the sole, miraculous, survivors. My father’s family belonged to the aspiring Jewish middle class in Lodz, my grandfather owned a transportation company in the city, the family was more assimilated and secularized than my mother’s, and the children were sent to modern, secular, schools. This large family perished as well. My father and an elder brother were the sole, miraculous, survivors.

That these two young survivors, who were in the same wagon, on the same transport from Lodz to Auschwitz, managed to find each other after the war, and eventually make some kind of home in a country called Sweden, and there give birth to a son that was me, is in my eyes, more than enough of history and heritage to make me a Jew.

So if anyone asks what kind of Jew I am, I would say that I am a Jew by history and heritage. But a very specific history and a very specific heritage. I am a Jew of the Holocaust. I am a Jew of Hitler and of genocidal anti-Semitism.

I am also a Jew because of its aftermath – the collective postwar Jewish experience of survival, state-building and nationhood.

I am thus Jew determined by external events and by external definition – not by inner conviction and choice. I am a Jew defined by a recent past and an imminent future.

It is probably fair to say that Jewish communal life in Europe during these first postwar decades was held together mainly by the memory of the Shoah and the identification with the State of Israel. Both factors defined in their own way the future limits and the options of Jewish life. Neither demanded much of Jewish inner spiritual and cultural renewal. To remain a Jew in Europe was to have escaped Hitler and not yet have fulfilled the Zionist mission. To be a Jew was to engage in an act of solidarity with the annihilated – thus denying Hitler a posthumous victory – and to participate in the birth of a Jewish nation.

Some things in life you don’t choose. They are chosen for you. My Jewishness is such a thing. It makes it both simple – and complicated.

Simple, because it is by default. Complicated, because it has nowhere to go – and nothing to sustain it beyond one generation or two. A Jewish identity defined by the experience of the Shoah and by the obligations of Israel, must weaken when the experience fades – and the obligations lose their moral force.

And I believe this is happening right know; the two pillars of Jewish postwar existence, the Shoah and Israel, are rapidly losing their ability to define a distinct Jewish existence. As a consequence we are now witnessing a rapid disintegration of common Jewish positions and interests and beliefs and lifestyles and definitions.

The origins of the question

In many way we are brought back to that juncture in Jewish history when the question “Who is a Jew?“ and “What is a Jew?“ were raised for the first time, when the option of choosing between different ways of being a Jew originally occurred, in the wake of the European enlightenment, with its revolutionary ideas of national citizenship, religious freedom and individual human rights. Before, no-one would have had any problem with the question “Who is Jew?“ Jews lived in separate communities, within separate social and religious jurisdiction, within a system of traditions and beliefs that was more or less the same all over Europe. The question “Who is a Jew?“ thus had a very specific and concrete answer.

With the rapid dissolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century of the Western European ghetto – the Jewish kehila – a whole panorama of new Jewish life-styles opened up. Jewishness became a matter of choice. For the first time in millennia Jews had to ask themselves what it meant be a Jew. Did it mean a continued life in the relative seclusion and protection of the Jewish kehila, or did it allow for an exit into the tempting modern secular world of learning, politics, business – and tolerance? Were there many ways of being a Jew? Could one be a good Jew at home and a respected citizen on the street? Could one stop being Jewish by an act of will and/or conversion?

Some tried to reform Judaism, to make it into a modern religion, others resisted, and there were soon as many opinions on how to modernize as there were on how to resist. Many Jews tried to leave Judaism altogether, whether they formally converted or just simply joined in the secular movements and passions of the time. Within a few decades the Jewish community of Western Europe had undergone a radical transformation which completely changed its conditions of existence – and survival.

It did not take long before the answers were as many as the questions, and it did not take much longer to realize that none of the answers did “solve“ the dilemma of modern Jewish existence. On the contrary, the dilemma rapidly turned into depression, despair and delirious utopianism. We all know the problems that ensued; on the one hand an ongoing inner disintegration of Jewish life, on the other a growing external pressure of modern anti-Semitism. We also know how the Jews of Europe eventually tried to respond and react.

Two options seemed at the time more promising to bewildered modern Jews than others; one was communism – the other nationalism.

In that sense were are better off today. We don’t need to explore again these two answers to the questions of Jewish existence.

They have both been thoroughly tested – and proven wrong.

You might also conclude that we are worse off than the Jews two hundred years ago – since we now have less hope of ever finding an answer.

The national answer

In what way then have the previous answers been proven wrong? Well, about communism we don’t need to argue anymore. About nationalism we need to. The re-nationalization of Jewish existence, which was the goal of Zionism, was and is still a most persistent part of modern Jewish existence.

After the Shoah, nationalization of Judaism became the new defining paradigm of Jewish life. Zionism went almost overnight from a sharply contested ideology and movement to an almost indisputable symbol of postwar Jewry. The little blue-and-white donations box for the Jewish National Fund was prominently displayed in nearly every Jewish home in Europe and the US. Even Jews who had no intention whatsoever to emigrate personally – and that went for most Jews in America, Britain and incidental havens like Sweden – firmly engaged in support for those who so wished and for the Zionist idea as such.

The underlying assumption here was that Jewish postwar life quickly would gravitate towards the new state. Some argued provocatively, like Arthur Koestler, that the option of freely emigrating to Israel was in fact a historically unique, one-time option to remain a Jew or not. The choice of remaining Jewish or not was the choice of Israel. The national dimension of Judaism was the only one remaining. It was still difficult to imagine a rift between the interests of the Jewish state and Jewish interests beyond the state.

Nevertheless, the potential of a rift was obvious. A state is a state, with its own agendas, interests and responsibilities. Its main loyalty must be to the well-being of its voters and taxpayers, not to people and communities outside its legal web of rights and obligations. The interest of Zionism and of Israel was indeed to transform the Jews of the world into a homogeneous collective of national citizens and put an end to the ambiguities of the Diaspora. The nationalization of Judaism tacitly assumed that all Jews either should become citizens of the Jewish state or begin to regard themselves as national exiles in relation to it. Their relation with Israel would then resemble the relation of exiled Greeks or Poles or Turks to their countries of origin. Not a complex and diffuse religious-cultural diaspora anymore, but a clear-cut ethnic community, albeit with common religious traditions to go with it.

In any case, this was the very solution that held the long awaited promise of Jewish “normalization“. Only to a Jewish national, to an actual or soon-to-be citizen of the Jewish state, could the perks of the Herzlian utopia be offered in full. The option of a “secular“ Jewish existence, of remaining a Jew while shedding Judaism, was the option of becoming an Israeli Jew, or an Israeli Jew in temporary or permanent exile. For Jews who wished to identify otherwise, who actually, God forbid, would conclude that life in the diaspora was preferable to life in the Jewish state, or that the values of their particular Judaism could not be accommodated within a national-ethnic framework, that the ethics of Judaism were more important than its “ethnics“, this solution had more ominous implications.

Most importantly, it created an inevitable rivalry between sharply diverging interpretations of Jewish existence, at first hard to see and admit but after fifty years of Israel increasingly open and obvious. The once self-evident role of the Jewish state in the life of postwar Jewry is far from self-evident anymore. The conflict of interest between an increasingly self-contained and single-minded Jewish nationalism on the one hand and an increasingly independent-minded Jewish diaspora in USA and Europe on the other, cannot be subdued any longer. It now loudly manifests itself in both the religious and the political sphere, both inside Israel and outside. The national institutions of the Jewish state for instance now claim the right to interpret who is a Jew or who is not, disavowing the legitimacy of large diasporic Jewish communities, one of them in fact larger than the national community in Israel. The national institutions in Israel, in their daily decisions and actions, tacitly claim to speak for the Jews of the world and not only for the Jews of Israel, which is a position increasingly hard to maintain in face of the deep internal and external controversies surrounding the most crucial of these decisions and actions, some of them concerning the nature of the Jewish state as such.

The nationalization of Judaism is thus proving to be a false or insufficient solution to the Jewish dilemma. Or rather, it has transferred the dilemma from one arena to another, extended considerably the range of Jewish self-interpretation, and thereby has given cause to further conflict and further Jewish disintegration.

The issue of double loyalties

Many of the questions once associated with the so-called Jewish problem have vanished – together with the vanished so-called solutions. The seemingly unavoidable accusation – or some times self-reprehension – of having double loyalties for instance, was intimately connected with the raise of the nation-state, with modern citizenship, and the ensuing demand that Jews become loyal Swedes or Frenchmen or Englishmen. It could only occur in an ethnic-national context, not in a confessional-religious.

Whatever specific Jewish loyalties there were, to Jews in other nations, to other historical myths, to other places, to another God, to other values, they soon became the focus of resentment and hatred and self-doubt. This was a historic trap with no escape. Jews, no matter how much they tried to prove their undivided loyalty, could still be singled out as the weed in the national garden, a foreign and harmful element in the pure stock of Swedes or Germans, the carriers of national ambiguity and cosmopolitan ideas.

Later the issue of double loyalties became explicitly connected to Jewish solidarity with Israel. Arthur Koestler, and many Zionists as well, subscribed to this view of things and called for a final choice of loyalties. The loyalty of Jews was to be with the Jewish state of Israel. Or they should not remain Jews. Period. In time, this would solve the problem of double loyalties. I still remember asking ourselves, a bunch of Jewish kids in a Jewish summer camp outside Stockholm, whom we would support if Sweden and Israel were to play the final game in the World Cup. I don’t remember our answers, but I vividly remember myself some years later being the only person in the whole stadium of Tel Aviv cheering like a madman when Sweden scored against Israel.

Still I believe that the question – or accusation or problem – of double loyalties belongs to the past. Europe has become a society of migrations and migrants, many of its citizens have open and uninhibited ties with other countries, other religions and other cultures. The Foreigner has moved next-door. The Foreigner is you. The borders of the European nation-state have opened up. The Jew is not the only show in town anymore.

There is a genuine problem – or rather a situation – of double loyalties or multiple loyalties, but that is today a problem (or rather condition) of many people and individuals, not only Jews. It has the advantage of putting this version of the Jewish problem on par with a more general problem of the modern post-nation-state society. The problem on how to combine pluralism and diversity with decency and social order, various loyalties if you so wish, with one binding loyalty.

I addition, the Jews of the world have not accepted a national definition of their Jewishness. They have certainly not heeded Koestler’s call to choose Israel or leave Judaism. Instead they are searching again, for other ways of defining themselves, other ways of being a Jew.

Only to find an endless maze of possibilities an infinite number of new answers of what it means to be a Jew. One could perhaps see this as a natural and healthy pluralism, but the extremes of this spectrum of Jewish existences or cultures are now so distant from each other, that not only does one extreme not recognize the other as Jewish, but it is virtually impossible to find anything in common between them, except that they are made up of people who all insist on calling themselves Jewish.

So fifty years after the establishment of a Jewish nation-state the old questions crop up again – at the end of another road travelled. What is a Jewish nation? What is the purpose and character of a Jewish state? What does it mean to be a Jew? These questions have only become more burning as the national route has opened up a maze of side alleys, cul-de-sacs and cross roads. During this journey, the nationalization of Jewish life in Israel has heavily influenced the self-perception of Jews elsewhere, mainly resulting in a conspicuous ethnification of the Jewish diaspora. Surveys in several Western European countries (i.e. the Netherlands, Sweden and Britain) as well as in the US, affirm that a growing number of Jews define themselves in ethnic terms, as individuals more linked by a common national ancestry and heritage than by common values and life-styles. Their Jewishness then becomes ever more eclectic, incorporating whatever elements that come to mind or seem proper, an increasingly random selection from the growing smorgasbord of Yiddischkeit, creating a diversity in beliefs and traditions that transcends all historic limits, all held together by often purely coincidental bonds of family. As a religion Judaism is today perhaps becoming the most diverse of all major belief systems, historically lacking any common structure of authority.

This can of course most clearly be observed in the USA, where the modern smorgasbord of Jewish existence is on full display. American Jews nowadays assemble the most unlikely combinations of alleged Jewish ideas and traditions, often totally disconnected from their historical and religious contexts. To the extent that any form of religious practice is included in the package, freedom of interpretation is total. Between “Jews for Jesus“ in San Francisco and the Chabad in Crown Heights there is a Jewish dish for every taste and caprice. If not content with the first, choose a second, or cook yourself a third. Or choose a non-Jewish identity. Most American Jews today live outside any kind of Jewish congregation, and the number of mixed marriages has increased from nine to fifty per cent over thirty years.

The number people in America and Europe who see themselves as part of a Jewish community is rapidly shrinking. I present trends continue, writes Bernard Wasserstein in his study Vanishing Diaspora, “the number of Jews in Europe by the year of 2000 would be less than a million – the lowest figure since the Middle Ages.“

The situation is then ripe with paradoxes. Some of the young Swedish Jews that I have met during frequent discussions of my book Das Verlorene Land, almost defiantly demonstrate their Jewishness, but when I ask them what makes them Jewish, the answers fly apart. Many of them proudly claim to be secular and argue that being Jewish has little to do with the belief in the divinity of the Torah, and that they feel free to make of their Judaism whatever they like. Most of them claim an affinity with Israel and the Jewish people, but when asked with what Israel and with what Jewish people, they seem bewildered and irritated.

In part this phenomenon of Jewish revival can be explained by a general search for identity in postmodern society. From this perspective Jewish youngsters are often considered lucky to have an interesting identity waiting for them, a well-furnished tradition to settle in, a ready-made lifestyle to explore. The unexpected revival of Jewish music, literature and theatre, even in countries with few Jews like Sweden, often involving people who are not Jewish, shows that this a Jewishness of a new kind. Some Jewish intellectuals have tried to make a virtue out of this new reality, arguing that a modern Jewish identity might be construed from a practical tradition of multiple loyalties, from an ability to transcend national and cultural boundaries, the possibility of being many things at the same time, thus showing the way to a new era of European tolerance and coexistence. However desirable the development of such a postmodern individual identity in general might seem, it will in my opinion lead to the further trivialization of whatever once made up a Jewish civilisation in Europe. In addition, this line of discourse tends to obscure the more fundamental and somber aspects of the modern Jewish dilemma.

The hitherto most dramatic effect of the nationalization of Jewish existence has been the emergence of a rampant, national-messianic interpretation of Judaism. The potential for such an interpretation was perhaps always there, but during almost two millennia it was well checked and balanced by strong internal and external forces. The presently ongoing fusion between the secular power of a modern state and the re-awakened and unchecked fervor of a neo-Messianic Judaism, has however brought the internal conflicts and tensions of Judaism to a breaking point. These are not minor differences about how the Jewish state should be run or about the interpretative details of Jewish tradition or about the proper rules of conversion, but a full-blown war about fundamental principles and beliefs, a war paradoxically brought about and aggravated by the very nationalization of the Jewish dilemma that would to put an end to it.

The dilemma of Judaism is then clearly not the dilemma of a single nation but of something larger – perhaps, as the Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt has argued, of a small but distinct civilisation, basically facing the same challenges as it did two hundred years ago, when the walls of the ghetto came down. With the decisive difference that the national option, the long-nurtured dream of the all-solving return to Jerusalem now has been tried, explored and – for all real-life purposes – exhausted. The specifically Israeli-Jewish conflict regarding peace, Palestinians and territories, will mainly have to play itself out on the national scene, leaving the diaspora Jews as anxious but basically powerless spectators.

This does not necessarily mean that the option of discreetly fading into a growing postmodern mosaic of ethnic and cultural pebbles, is a feasible one for the non-Israeli Jews of the world. First of all, the Jewish dilemma is clearly not an ethnic one. What made Judaism resilient and creative during so many centuries was a complicated dynamics involving several other important factors. These factors are not at hand any more. Secondly, the unwritten postwar taboos of Auschwitz might very well once again yield to the revival of old, ingrained, anti-Jewish sentiments, sometimes treacherously linked to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The blatant anti-Semitism of Le Pen in France is an ominous sign, the knee-jerk reactions in Switzerland to Jewish claims for economic compensation seem to be another. Even in Sweden, with few Jews, there appear to be a potential resonance for ideas, openly and skillfully propagated by small but well-organized groups, maintaining that powerful Jews run the country, that they are behind the “sell-out“ to Brussels and that they conspire to overturn the Swedish way of life. This might in turn provoke the Jews of Europe into a new cohesion and new defensive postures.

Naturally there may be a thousand respectable reasons for wishing to define oneself as a Jew of a more ambivalent and compound variety, but it is reasonable that there should be some connection between being associated with a specific Jewish destiny and the content of such a destiny. At some degree of Jewish dilution, talk of a comprehensive Jewish fellowship and mission becomes either racist or meaningless. If “Jew“ can mean anything, logic demands that Jews cannot be expected to think and act in any particular way.

A common Jewish destiny demands a common Jewish view of the world. To what extent can and should the notion of a specific Jewish destiny be upheld, when the Jewish view of the world has cracked?

Can Judaism then be reconstructed, other than as a psycho-social smorgasbord? Or as a mosaic of more or less Jewish sects? Or as a purely national-ethnic affiliation? After two hundred years, the question remains more open than ever.

There is a story which goes like this:

“An old chassid profoundly absorbed in prayer and thought loses his way in the forest. After a week of starvation and privation, he meets a weather-beaten leather-clad man of the forest making his way through the undergrowth. Radiant with joy, the chassid walks over to him to ask him the way. I have good news and bad news, the forester replies. The bad news is that I am also a chassid that got lost in the forest. The good news is that after ten years I know of great many ways which do not lead out of it.“

Let me conclude by saying that although a good many wrong ways have been explored by now, there is no guarantee that the right one eventually will be found.

Jewish existence was for hundreds of year a precarious balance between a moral-religious covenant and a national-ethnic mission, between the book and the people, between the hope for the advent of Messiah and the halachic demands of daily life.

This balance was thoroughly upset two hundred years ago, giving raise to that persistent question: What is a Jew?

And frankly, I don’t believe that this balance can ever be restored, the road out of the forest ever found – and the question ever answered.

Judaism cannot be reduced to a national-ethnic category, albeit with a religion and a history to go with it. There can be no Judaism without an ethical core, without the mission, if you so wish, to act and live according to specific moral values and commands.

So the question can be narrowed down to the following: is there room for a specific Jewish mission in the world of today? Have the Jews, as a living collective, a coherent role to play in the world? Or are they at least bound together by the belief that they have?

If the answers to these questions are mainly negative, which I believe they are, we will see a Jewish existence characterized by ever more division and arbitrariness, by the continued dissipation of common energy and vitality, by the reduction of what was once a resilient Jewish civilization to on one hand the state of Israel and its project of nationalizing Judaism and on the other hand the continued secularization, ethnification and diversification of Judaism and Jewishness into myriads of lifestyles. Jewish orthodoxies of various denominations will certainly survive, but only in the category of social and religious sects, and only in a few concentrated spots, and mainly in Israel and the US.

This means that the questions of Jewish cultural revival and survival cannot be disconnected from the question of what we mean by being Jewish, and from the question if the Jews of the world still have more in common than a common cultural heritage, a common ethnic lineage, and a not so common national state.

When the remnants of my family, a Shoah-surviving mother, an eight-year old sister and the young teenager that was me, left Sweden for Israel in the early 1960’s, the dominant narrative about what had befallen the Jews of Europe during the Nazi era, contained a not-so-tacit assumption that they should have known better by listening to the Zionists about the looming disaster awaiting Jews in “exile”.

This was a largely false narrative. The Zionist leadership in Palestine had not only failed to see what was coming but had all-too-long been reluctant to receive “exile” Jews deemed unfit for the task of Zionist nation-building. When in 1940, the head of the Jewish Agency, Moshe Sharett (later Israel’s first foreign minister), learned that the Revisionist underground movement had landed a boat with “the blind, the crippled and an entire old people’s home,” he complained about the lack of judgment in the selection of “human material”. We must bring the “good” and leave the “rabble,” he wrote in his diary.

Neither did the Jews go “like lambs to the slaughter”, as the saying went, but were skilfully conned to believe that the future was still open. I probably owe my life to the much-maligned Nazi-appointed leader of the Jewish Council in the Łódź ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, who couldn’t imagine that the Nazis would rather murder able-bodied Jews than exploit them in the slave factories he had set up to serve them. This lack of imagination most likely contributed to the Łódź ghetto being spared liquidation long enough (August 1944) to save a tiny remnant of its inhabitants, among them my parents to be. (I tell their story in A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, Granta Books UK, Other Press, NY 2015.)

In the Israeli education of my early teenage years, the assertion that Jewish life in exile (using the Hebrew word galut, meaning captivity) was an anomaly predestined to perish, came to serve as a didactic backdrop to the state-founding vision of a Jewish future liberated from a moribund past. The role of Jewish history was to justify the present, not to burden it with doubt and remorse. This was the role of the nascent Israeli historiography as well, of course. Thus, we learnt that whatever misfortunes had befallen the Palestinian Arabs, they were largely of their own making.

They too, should have known better.

I cannot think of a historical setting in which past and present are as deeply intertwined as in Israel-Palestine; so many pasts competing for the present, so many presents competing for the past, so many narratives competing for the historical record.

When I set out to explore the ideas and events that led to the formation of Israel, and thus to the formation of myself (Israel, a Personal History, OtherPress NY, 2025, Penguin Modern Classics, UK, 2026), I was intent on not letting my knowledge of what was coming, colour my view how it all had come about. I wanted to understand the history of Zionism through the eyes of people who had been free to imagine other futures than the one yet unimaginable. I wanted to get sight of the losers of Zionist history as well as of the winners. Eventually, I would write a biography of one of former, the Lemberg-born chief-rabbi of Stockholm between 1914 and 1948, Marcus Ehrenpreis (Another Zionism, Another Judaism, Other Press NY 2021), believing that the losers of history might have just as an interesting story to tell as the winners.

In the story of the winners, the Shoah became historically linked to the creation of Israel, with the one leading to the other. The causal connection was ritually manifested in the succession order of Israel’s three national holidays in the Spring. Shoah Memorial Day, Israel Memorial Day (to Israel’s fallen soldiers), and Israel’s Independence Day were inscribed one day after another in the Israeli calendar, establishing a largely misleading causality intended to add historical and moral justification to an enterprise that had been conceived and formed well before the Shoah. When in 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed the partitioning of the Palestine Mandate in a Jewish and an Arab state, there was already a Jewish state ready to be born. The Shoah certainly changed the circumstances of the birth and the character of the newborn, but to argue that Israel was born out of the Shoah was to omit the many decades of pregnancy during which the embryo had been allowed to develop in blessed ignorance of what was to come. Writing the history of Israel-Palestine is to wade through a maze of ideological and political narratives constructed to justify, rationalize and pass moral judgement on people and events of the past, obscuring our view of how the actual protagonists understood the events as they happened in real time.

In 1972, not yet 24, I was employed by the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation (Swedish Radio) as a reporter of domestic affairs. It was a surprising advancement to the pinnacles of the Swedish media landscape at an infant stage of my journalistic career, even more so considering my not-so-distant past as a pro-Palestinian activist. How I came at that after my teenage years as a devout Zionist pioneer is a story of itself (told in “Israel, a Personal History”). How I, nevertheless, came to be considered a bona fide journalist by the Swedish equivalent to the BBC, trusted with the task of covering Swedish politics impartially and factually, must seem totally inexplicable by today’s public service institutions, operating in a climate of polarization and distrust, living in fear of political attacks and pressures.

The Swedish Radio of 1974 was not only of another time but of another kind, an editorially self-assured and publicly revered national institution with no qualms about defending its journalistic integrity, even when the target of attack happened to be a young employee with a vulnerable past. The attack came in the wake the IB-affair, a national scandal involving the extra-legal set-up of a clandestine domestic intelligence organization (IB), by the long-time ruling social democratic party. The journalist who broke the story, Jan Guillou, happened to be a friend of mine from my years in the Palestine Solidarity Movement, but as the scandal engulfed the domestic political scene it fell on me to report on it, nevertheless. When a disgruntled former IB-agent made an issue of our common past, sowing doubt on my reporting on the affair, and by association the overall coverage, the director of Swedish Radio was faced with a barrage of questions. “Is it true that Göran Rosenberg, a former pro-Palestinian activist, has produced 14 reports on the IB-affair?” “Is it true that Göran Rosenberg is an old friend of Jan Guillou?”

The fearless response by the then director of Swedish Radio, Jan-Otto Modig, was to save my career as a journalist and form my view of journalism for years to come.

“I don’t know how many reports Göran Rosenberg has produced on the IB-affair, but I know that Göran Rosenberg is a seriously working reporter.”

“And the friendship with Guillou?”

“Whom he knew is of no relevance. What matters is the quality of the reporting.”

In due time I would report on Israel-Palestine as well – for a broadcasting company where the quality of the reporting was what mattered still, not the past of the reporter.

I am reminded of this and much else, as I watch the remarkable documentary “Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989”. And even more so as I watch the director, Göran Hugo Olsson, introduce the segments of a twelve-part TV-series edited from the same material (3,5 hours extended to 6), standing in front of endless shelves of meticulously labelled boxes in the archive of Swedish Television, from which this real-time rendition of history has been conceived. I must admit that I had hoped to encounter myself somewhere along the road, perhaps in one of my reports from Israel in the early 1980’s. I was then working for a thrice-weekly current affairs program allowing for more ambitious reporting than the daily news, and I was pretty sure that some fragments of my endeavours would make it into the film, or at least into the TV-series. For instance, a twenty-five-minute story from 1980 on the “Judaization” of the Galilee, documenting the expropriation of lands belonging the Arab village of Deir al-Asad for the construction of the Jewish town of Carmiel. To refresh my memory of people and places, I extracted the film from the archives and watched it for the first time in forty-five years, which was like opening an entry in a diary I never wrote. Here I was, in Israel of the early 1980’s, in the blossoming landscape of the upper Galilee in April, the white high-rises of Carmiel shining from afar, a semi-military outpost, mitzpeh, being built on a nearby hill overlooking the Arab village, the Jewish-Israeli encroachment on Arab-Palestinian lands being played out in front of our camera.

“This is a Jewish town”, says the chain-smoking mayor of Carmiel behind his desk. “We are not allowed to add more floors to our buildings”, says the mayor of Deir al-Asad, sweeping his hand over the low houses and cramped quarters of his village.

No, my diary entry didn’t make it into the film, not even into the TV-series, but as I watched the entries that did, I was embarrassed by my self-centred expectations. The competition was overwhelming, to say the least, and the selection and editing of the material left little else to wish for.

“Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989” is a relentlessly captivating view of history as it happens, seen through the eyes of people who see it happen and make it happen, not knowing what will happen next. At times, the dissonance between past present and current present, between what could be and what has become, is heart-wrenching. As in a prologue to the film, where we are entering the dwellings of a family in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza. The year is 1984, it is 6.30 in the morning, and a mother is gently waking her five children. “The curfew is over”, she says, “it is time for school”. She brushes their hair and offers them breakfast. “I don’t want breakfast”, says one. “I hope to die.” From a nearby rooftop, armed Israeli soldiers are watching. They are leisurely uniformed, soft hats and unbuttoned shirts, almost hippie-like in appearance, smoking and joking, their guns carelessly rested against a wall. “We don’t like to be here, and they don’t want us here, but what is the solution?”, a soldier asks the Hebrew-speaking interlocutor.

“I would return it to them”, the interlocutor answers.

“To whom?”

“To the Palestinians. The West Bank and Gaza.”

“That’s what I feel too”, says the soldier.

As we are brought to Jabaliya of 1984, Jabaliya of 2026 is flattened to the ground in a genocidal war that has killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants, obliterating every other future that was once possible to imagine.

In these recurrent clashes between what we see and what we know, the film has the makings of a Greek tragedy; the hero struggling to determine a fate that has already been determined. As when, on September 17, 1978, US president Jimmy Carter, flanked by Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat and Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, announces the Camp David Accords, the historic peace deal between two former archenemies. Carter is visibly moved by the occasion and by what has been achieved, in particular with regard to the Palestinians. Within five years, Carter proclaims, “the Israeli military government will be withdrawn from the West Bank and Gaza, and a self-governing Palestinian authority will be elected with full autonomy”.

Nothing will come of it, of course, as we are witnessing the imagined future of Jimmy Carter becoming the realized future of Menachem Begin. In an interview for Swedish Television on the eve of the elections that in 1977 would bring Begin to power (featured in the TV-series only), he is unambiguous about what he wants to do. “The West Bank is not occupied but liberated”, he says. “Judea and Samaria is the land of our forefathers.”

In the wake of October 7, 2023, UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, remarked that Hamas’s attack, however indefensible, “didn’t happen in a vacuum”. For this, he was attacked by Israel, labelling him “a terror apologist” and demanding his resignation. In the Israeli version of events, no historical context was warranted. The cause of Hamas must not be allowed to have a historical cause. The Palestinians were said to have brought it all on themselves, being “human animals” that should have known better.

The historical context detailed by Guterres in his subsequent remarks, was otherwise an apt description of the context for much of the reporting by Swedish Television in the years following the war of 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 [soon 59] years of suffocating occupation”, Guterres said. “They have their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”

As the film proceeds in time, the context for reporting on Israel-Palestine is certainly shifting, but in a way that rather highlights the role of context in how events are seen and reported. “Archive material doesn’t necessarily tell us what really happened, but it says a lot about how it was told”, the film states in a caption at the outset, and on this it delivers generously.

The first program by Swedish Television on Israel-Palestine is aired on April 24, 1958, marking the tenth anniversary of the State of Israel. It is a no-frills attempt to tell the story of how Israel came about; a talking head supported by clips of film and a pointer on a map. Nevertheless, it is an effective and honest account of events so far, giving due consideration to the historical context in which the Jewish state was founded, including the emerging conflict between the Zionist settlers of the land and its Arab inhabitants. At a time, when Israel was portrayed as a wonder of sorts, the serious, bespectacled journalist talking into the camera, didn’t fail to mention that “this beautiful medal had a dark flipside”, elaborating on the dire fate of the Arabs of Palestine. The journalist, Henry Christensson, was the first foreign editor of Swedish Television, and as I started working there in 1975, a senior colleague that I would come to know and respect. Combining a somewhat drab appearance with a meticulously researched reporting, he was the embodiment of the high standards for factuality and impartiality set by the public radio- and television monopolies in Sweden. He would also come to embody the high ambitions for an independent Swedish coverage of world affairs, reflecting Sweden’s position as a neutral country outside the superpower alliances of the cold war, with a national interest of sorts in having the world seen through the eyes of its own bona fide neutral journalists. This paved the way for a golden era in the reporting by Swedish Television, stationing correspondents, dispatching reporters and crews, producing documentaries, features, news items and even multi-part program series, filling the shelves of a rapidly growing archive with the plethora of “diary entries” from which this film is made.

The second “entry” is a clip from a five-part series produced in 1960-1961 titled “Israel, the Land of Wonders”, and is a testimony to the nearly quasi-religious light in which Israel was seen and understood in wide circles in Sweden at the time. The sun-lit images of a generous social welfare state providing free healthcare, and of well-stocked cooperative stores, could certainly be interpreted as the radical, and perhaps miraculous, fulfilment of widely held political ideals in the nascent “people’s home” of social-democratic Sweden.

The segments from Israel in the early 1960’s, awake strong personal memories. These were the years when Israel was to be my country, and Hebrew was to be my language, and the cause of Israel was to be mine, and what I now would see as a highly propagandistic view of Israel, was to be the truth by which I lived – and was prepared to sacrifice for at the time. After my family had “descended” back to Sweden in 1964, my close relationship with Israel was to continue, albeit in new forms and circumstances, and in many ways this film is a memory lane to my own past. As a teenager still, I repeatedly returned to Israel, at first to confirm and strengthen my bonds with it, and then, in the aftermath the war of 1967, to have the bonds shattered by new insights and discoveries. While I was roaming the country in search of new grounds for my crumbling Israeli identity, my soon-to-be colleagues at Swedish Television were there too, reporting from newly occupied towns in the West Bank, and newly erected refugee camps in Jordan. In early 1968, at the Allenby bridge on the Jordan River, a reporter named Vanna Beckman is interviewing Palestinian family members who have been separated by the new frontline, and who have been allowed on to the bridge for five minutes to see and touch their loved ones on the other side. Vanna Beckman became a journalistic role model of sorts with her extensive reporting on the Palestinian issue, at a time when I was hoping to balance my emerging position as a vocal critic of Israel’s policy of occupation and suppression, with my very first steps into the world of journalism. Vanna was an unusual name in Sweden at the time, but it was to be the name of my first-born daughter in 1973, mostly I think, because her parents liked the sound of it, but clearly also inspired by the name of a person whose combination of moral compassion and journalistic integrity somehow embodied what I was striving for in my early endeavours in the profession. Within a few years I would become a junior colleague to many of the contributors to this film, and in due time a contributor myself to the expanding shelves of Israel-Palestine reports in the archives of Swedish Television.

In September 1970, I travelled to Amman, Jordan, in my not yet sorted-out dual capacity as an activist and a journalist in being. As an activist, I had been invited as an observer to an international conference organized by GUPS, The General Union of Palestine Students, and as a newly employed journalist at a social democratic news agency in Stockholm, I hoped to write a piece or two on the nascent Palestinian resistance movement. As I was witnessing the plethora of seemingly vibrant military and social activities put on display, I surely thought I had the makings of a good story, as well as a confirmation of sorts of my activist beliefs in a common solution to the Israel-Palestine conundrum. In a few days’ time, however, I would figure myself, invisible somewhere, in the reports by Swedish Television on the dramatic hijacking of three passenger planes being forced to land just north of Amman and the subsequent military assault on the Palestinian resistance movement by the Jordanian army. To this series of events, soon to be coined Black September, I became a close-by witness, a near-miss target, and a lucky escapee via taxi to Damascus through a maze of armed checkpoints. In the film’s entries from this period, I revisit it all again, the surreal scenes of the three passenger jets stranded in the shimmering desert heat, the improvised press conferences with self-assured chain-smoking young men, the somewhat chaotic release of the passengers, the blowing up of the aircrafts – and with them the blowing up of the Palestinian movement in Jordan. “People who were already struggling, have now lost everything”, says yet another soon-to-be colleague of mine, Mats Fagerström, as he reports from the devastation of Palestinian homes and lives in the wake of a short but brutal civil war.

Another madeleine for my personal memories is the report on the controversial visit by PLO-chairman Yassir Arafat to Stockholm in April of 1983, by invitation of the similarly controversial social-democratic Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme. This report is in the TV-series only, but I find it worth recalling nevertheless, since it embodies the confluence of Sweden’s ambition to play an independent role in world affairs, and the ambition of Sweden’s public broadcasting corporations, radio and television, to provide an independent Swedish-produced view of the world. Thus, this segment recounts the meeting between Olof Palme and Yassir Arafat, during an official visit by Palme to Algeria in November 1974, a visit I had been assigned to cover for Swedish Radio. Foreign visits by the prime minister were regarded as domestic politics, hence the assignment. At a state dinner hosted by Algeria’s president Houari Boumedienne, we journalists noticed a sudden commotion in the anterooms of the large hall, and with no pre-warnings given, there he was, Yassir Arafat, amicably chatting away with the Prime Minister of Sweden and the president of Algeria, cameras rolling, microphones registering, at a time when most Western governments regarded and treated Arafat as a terrorist and PLO as a terrorist organization. Invisible in the background, having left my heavy Nagra tape-recorder at the hotel, I am frantically taking notes while searching for a phone line to file a report on the sensational first meeting between a western European leader and Yassir Arafat.

When Arafat arrived in Stockholm in 1983, the context in which he was viewed had changed dramatically, which was reflected in the semi-official pomp by which he was received in social-democratic Sweden, and in the extensive coverage of his visit on Swedish Television. At the time, the image of Israel had been increasingly tarnished by its invasion and partial occupation of Lebanon in 1982, its complicity in the massacre of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, the accelerated colonization of occupied Palestinian lands, and the brutalization of the occupation regime itself, all while Arafat and the PLO seemed to be moving towards diplomacy and negotiations. Nevertheless, Arafat and his entourage were allowed to carry their handguns as they landed in a private jet on Arlanda airport, and on the streets of Stockholm he was cheered and jeered in separate manifestations. At the time, I served as the host of Magasinet, a thrice-weekly current affairs program, which had planned to have a live coverage of his scheduled arrival. The schedule didn’t hold of course, and things didn’t go the Swedish way, i.e. according to plan, and I was left extemporizing live on camera for what seemed an eternity, on the history of PLO, Arafat and Israel-Palestine.

Once more, in December 1988, my work for Swedish Television would coincide with the efforts by Sweden to bring Arafat and the PLO into the warm rooms of international diplomacy. Olof Palme had been murdered in 1986, and his activist role had been taken over by Sweden’s social-democratic minister of foreign affairs, Sten Andersson, who would use his close relationship with Arafat to pave the way for the US to recognize PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The role of Mr Andersson was to have Arafat publicly state that PLO would renounce terrorism and recognize “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security, alongside a Palestinian state”, which Arafat did on December 14. At the time I was based in Washington DC as the US correspondent for Swedish Television, and as a small foreign media player in town I was certainly not used to be offered a one-on-one with the US Secretary of State, which nevertheless happened that day. On a new bulgy mobile phone which I had barely learned how to operate, on my way to the morning press briefing at the White House to get a comment, the first minister at the Swedish Embassy called and asked if I could be at the State Department within fifteen minutes for an exclusive with Secretary of State George Shultz.

These were probably the last gasps of the activist role in world affairs that neutral Sweden had staked out for itself between the superpower alliances of the cold war. Not only was the cold war coming to an end, but so also the era of social-democratic dominance in determining Sweden’s foreign policy. The activist role of Sweden in bringing about negotiations between Israel and the PLO was taken up by social-democratic Norway, resulting in the Oslo Accords in 1993 and all that would follow from them.

The film ends in 1989, as yet another era comes to a close, that of the Swedish public broadcasting monopoly. Whether this affected the quality and quantity of the reports on Israel-Palestine being added to archives of Swedish Television, I don’t know. What I do know, is that the film ends at a point in time when there was good reason to anticipate a future for Israel-Palestine reminiscing of the current present. In the 1988 Israeli elections, parties emerged with one far-reaching proposal after another on how to “take care” of the Arabs. Raful Eitan, the hero of Sabra and Shatila, was elected to parliament on the promise of making Palestinian life in the occupied territories even more unbearable. With roadblocks, curfews, and deportations, Palestinian life would be shattered and the uprising stifled within days: “If they set up a roadblock, I will send ten tanks. If they throw stones, I’ll close the road from Nablus to Ramallah and let the Arab who wants to buy rice in Jenin take the road via Jericho.” Another brute, Rehavam Ze’evi, for some reason nicknamed Gandi, launched Moledet (the fatherland), a party with the sole agenda of emptying Israel and the occupied territories of Arabs. The party took as its symbol the Hebrew letter tet, as in “t” for transfer, and launched the slogan “We here, they there, and peace be upon Israel.” During most of the 1980’s the prime minister of Israel was Yitzhak Shamir, a former leader of the Stern Gang, a Jewish terrorist organization responsible for the murder of the Swedish UN mediator Folke Bernadotte in 1948. Thus, the course of events was set for a violent clash between an Israeli state intent on further occupation, colonisation and dispossession, and an increasingly encircled and suppressed Palestinian population on the cusp of a popular uprising. As the first intifada broke out in December of 1987, and the then Israeli Minister of Defence, Yitzhak Rabin, declared a policy of “break-their-bones” to quash it, there was little reason to hope for a process of Israeli Palestinian reconciliation.

In the current present we know all-too well that the process that nonetheless ensued, and the path to negotiations and coexistence that it seemed to open, would become a parenthesis in the history of Israel-Palestine. Thus, a film ending in 1989 may better explain what is happening in 2026 than a film ending on September 13, 1993. In a brief epilogue, the ceremony on the White House lawn that day is nevertheless recounted, culminating in the astonishing handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat, with the final words of Rabin ringing as an epitaph over a past future lost:

“Enough of blood and tears. Enough.”

Just as politically offensive, in fact, as all the statues of Southern politicians and generals who should reasonably have gone down in history as criminal rebels and traitors, but who were already being hailed in Faulkner’s time as noble representatives of a lost but good cause.

The Lost Cause became the name of the ‘alternative’ historiography that turned the losing South into a shattered idyll and a society based on slave labour into a society based on old-fashioned ideals of honour.

If you want to see the myth of the lost cause portrayed on film, you can spend four hours watching Gone with the Wind (1939), and if you want to see how early the myth took hold in American popular culture, you can spend three hours watching The Birth of a Nation (1915), whose epic hero is a lynching Ku Klux Klan leader.

The rest is history, as they say. The political reconstruction that was intended to heal the wounds of war and reunite the South with the Union instead became a continuation of the war by other means. Slavery was replaced by brutal racial laws (Jim Crow) and a white slave regime was replaced by a white racial regime, and instead of the wounds of war being healed, they continued to bleed, because the losers were unwilling to come to terms with their defeat, let alone with the ideals and principles that had defeated them.

Instead, the lost cause was allowed to live on in American society as a source of bitterness and hatred towards the institutions and laws of the victorious cause. The failed reconstruction soon became known as the second civil war, as did the struggles of the 1950s and 60s to desegregate the American South. The losing Southern states did not abolish their racial laws of their own accord and free will, but because the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional, and a series of American presidents, from Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson, proved willing to deploy federal troops to enforce the court’s decision.

This did not prevent the lost cause from living on as an undercurrent of self-pitying bitterness in American society, ready to rise to the surface at any moment and divide it anew. In 1968 and 1972, it got its own presidential candidate, George Wallace, and in 2016, it got its own president, Donald Trump.

The United States has fought more wars than most other modern nations. Every city in America has a memorial to the fallen, the grand mall in Washington, D.C. is lined with monuments to American wars and battles, and across the Potomac River, the white gravestones of the National Military Cemetery stretch out in straight rows across the hills of Arlington. There is a special holiday to remember the fallen and a special holiday to honour war veterans, and there is hardly a family in the United States that does not directly or indirectly have someone to remember or honour.

Nevertheless, it may be worth remembering that by far the largest and bloodiest of all the United States’ wars was a war in which Americans killed Americans on a scale and with a ruthlessness that would be unparalleled either before or since. The number of casualties on the battlefields of the Civil War (approximately 620,000, not counting civilian casualties) represented two per cent of the American population at the time and is on a par with the number of American casualties in all subsequent wars, including the two world wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

The Civil War was the great earthquake in American history, much like the First World War in Europe, a civilisational shock that led to another devastating war in Europe and to a war that is still ongoing in the United States.

If you want to find the historical roots of the polarisation in American politics and culture, you cannot ignore the Civil War.

When in 1985, I became the US correspondent of Swedish Television, I was struck by how vivid the memory of the war still was. Around Washington DC, where I was stationed, the former battlefields were within easy day-trip distance: Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and from time to time there were lively re-enactments of one or another of the bloodbaths. If you wanted to get up close and personal with the settings of the lost cause, you only had to travel an hour or so south to Charlottesville, Virginia, to see the plantation owner (and author of the Declaration of Independence) Thomas Jefferson’s self-designed mansion, Monticello, and the slave quarters that figuratively and literally supported it. The fact that Charlottesville also had a statue of the leader of the lost cause, General Robert E. Lee, somehow fit into the picture. In any case, I did not react significantly to the fact that there were statues and memorials in the United States to people who had been enemies of the United States.

When Charlottesville decided by a narrow political majority in April 2017 to remove the statue of Lee, and the city was invaded by armed extremists draped in the Confederate flag, President Trump spoke out in their defence. He called them ‘very fine people’ and Lee himself ‘a great general’. It was no coincidence that the Confederate flag appeared early on at Donald Trump’s election campaign rallies. The heirs to the lost cause, wherever they have manifested themselves in the United States, have understood how to choose their symbols.

At first, it was tempting to explain Trump’s victory as a sinkadus, an unlikely coincidence of unfortunate circumstances, but that seems less and less likely. The most troubling thing after nearly four years of Trump is his seemingly unshakeable base of core voters, estimated at around 30 per cent, and the tenacity of the alternative reality of conspiracies and lies that they have made their own.

A more reasonable explanation is that Trump was an accident waiting to happen. That an increasingly polarised United States was more than ready for a politician who would be tempted to rule by dividing, and who, to that end, would not shy away from evoking and exploiting the darkest undercurrents of the lost cause: racism, xenophobia and hatred of the federal government in Washington.

It is true that racism and xenophobia can be evoked and exploited in almost any society, and that losers do not need to have lost a civil war to be attracted by the promise of getting back what they have lost – and revenge on those who took it from them.

Nevertheless, few other countries have had such a great lost cause to rally their losers around.

Moreover, a lost cause that has never come to terms with its defeat.

When police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his white knee against George Floyd’s black neck for nine unbearable minutes, it was slavery we saw before us.

And the dark traces of an unfinished civil war.

With Donald Trump, it has become clear, if not before, that the lost cause lives on, and with it two incompatible ideas of what America is or should be: a lost paradise to be restored or a dream won to be maintained. One is a backward-looking and inward-looking America, nourished by historical collective myths and fantasies; the other is a forward-looking and outward-looking America, nourished by the dream of the individual’s right and opportunity to leave history behind and start life anew.

At times, it seemed as if the dream had prevailed, the lost cause was finally lost, and the civil war was finally over. But as the dream lost credibility (social mobility in the United States is now significantly lower than in Sweden, France and the United Kingdom, for example), the historical divide in American society has re-emerged.

When Trump, in his inauguration speech on 20 January 2017, spoke of the US capital as the enemy’s headquarters, he was speaking the language of the lost cause.

‘Their victories have not been your victories,’ he said.

Since then, tweet by tweet, he has shown that the America he promised to make great again is that of a lost cause: nationalistic, racist, xenophobic, inward-looking and backward-looking.

Even if Donald Trump were to lose the election in November, which seems likely at the time of writing**, it does not mean that the war is decided, let alone over. On the contrary, there is growing concern that it could flare up again in earnest, as there are signs that the losers do not intend to accept defeat this time either. Campaigns to sabotage the election process and cast suspicion on the election results have already begun, the executive branch has been alarmingly easily manipulated to weaken the constitutional checks and balances of the system of separation of powers, and for the first time in US history, there seems to be genuine uncertainty as to whether the transfer of power in the White House will take place peacefully and voluntarily.

What the men who drafted the founding constitution of the United States in 1787 feared most of all was a president who would make himself king and destroy the republic, and they therefore ensured that the president’s executive power was controlled and balanced by an independent legislative power and an independent judicial power.

What none of them could have imagined was that the shameful compromise on slavery that they simultaneously built into their creation would, just over seventy years later, nearly tear it apart.

What they could imagine even less was that, just over two hundred and thirty years later, a president would succeed in reviving the lost cause in an attempt to make himself king and destroy the republic.

If Trump wins the election in the autumn, it will effectively mean the end of the republic.

If he loses, the war against the republic will intensify.

In both cases, the lost cause has once again demonstrated its destructive power.
——————

*On 27 June, 2020, the Mississippi State Congress voted by a large majority to remove the Confederate symbol from the state flag.

** Yes, he lost indeed, but in the Orwellian universe of Trump 2.0 he did not. That Trump won the election he lost is now the foundational lie of an openly racist and fascist regime.

Two hundred and twenty years later, the peaceful transfer of power between political opponents is once again not a foregone conclusion.

Perhaps even less so now than then.

By the United States of America, I mean the federal union founded in 1789 and still held together by the Constitution written in 1787, which can only be changed by amendments. There have been twenty-seven amendments over the years. The first ten, the Bill of Rights, were ratified in one fell swoop in 1791. The last and twenty-seventh amendment was ratified in 1992, and there will be no more. Changing the Constitution through amendments requires a political consensus that the United States can only dream of today.

Like geological deposits, they lie on top of each other, the unchangeable original articles and the amendments: Article 1, which makes slaves two-thirds human, the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which prohibits slavery, and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment (1964), which gives equal voting rights to all. In between, layer upon layer of Supreme Court rulings, nine lifetime-appointed members who have the power to decide what the founding fathers may have meant by what they wrote, and thus which laws the federal government in Washington DC has the right to enact for the entire United States, and which laws the states have the right to enact individually.

In 1954, a Supreme Court ruling (Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka) decided that no state in the United States could segregate schools by race.

In 1973, a Supreme Court ruling (Roe vs Wade) decided that no state in the United States could ban abortions.

A Supreme Court ruling can override a previous interpretation of the Constitution. Roe v. Wade is likely to be overruled by an interpretation that makes abortion legislation a state matter, with the result that up to ten states are expected to introduce more or less strict abortion bans.

This highlights the fragility of the formal links that hold the United States of America together. Any power that the Constitution does not expressly grant to the President and Congress to exercise over the entire United States is exercised by the states separately. Some states have the death penalty, others do not. Some states have income tax, others do not. Some states allow teenagers to buy semi-automatic rifles, others do not. Some states want to make it easier to vote, others want to make it more difficult. It may seem strange that the power over voting in a presidential election should lie in the hands of the states, and perhaps even stranger that the states are allowed to have widely differing procedures for how votes are cast and counted, but this too is a consequence of the Constitution.

Until now (albeit at the cost of a civil war), it has worked, even though suspicions of electoral fraud in one state or another have been recurrent. After a bitter battle over the vote count in Florida in the 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court had to decide the matter, which it did by giving George W. Bush 537 more votes than Al Gore, which was decisive for the presidential election. Al Gore accepted the court’s ruling without complaint and conceded defeat. Perhaps the most important link in holding the United States of America together, the constitutionally regulated transfer of power from one president to another, had thus proven itself once again.

It is unlikely to do so the next time the results of a presidential election are questioned and called into suspicion, which we should expect to happen in 2024.

Perhaps the link will already break in this autumn’s midterm elections to Congress and the Senate, as confidence in the American electoral system is continually undermined by an American president who refuses to admit defeat and who, on 6 January 2021, called on his supporters to march on Congress and ‘fight like hell’ fight like hell, to stop an ongoing peaceful transfer of power.

In state after state, votes had previously been recounted, voting machines dismantled, ballots analysed (for traces of Chinese paper), election officials threatened and legal proceedings initiated to invalidate the election results. Donald Trump’s pressure on a Republican state politician to falsify the election results in Georgia is now well documented. As are his plans to order the Department of Defence to seize state vote-counting machines. As are his plans to have his vice-president, Mike Pence, override the election results and award victory to the loser.

Pence refused and Trump lost.

In the initial shock following the storming of Congress, it briefly appeared that Donald Trump had not only lost the presidency but also his power over the Republican Party, and with it the power to politically maintain the big lie about the stolen presidential election.

But that was not to be. Instead, the Republican Party embraced the big lie as its own, and its leaders began competing for an audience with Trump in Florida to bow and scrape and declare that the election victory had been stolen from him, as it soon became clear that Trump’s unwaveringly loyal base of an estimated tens of millions of Americans had not been weakened by the attack on Congress, but rather strengthened. Only one in five Republican voters today believes that Joe Biden is the legitimate president of the United States. The Republican candidates who will dare to think otherwise ahead of this autumn’s congressional elections are likely to be few and far between.

It is not difficult to predict what this will mean for confidence in future election results. If a majority of Republican candidates run on a platform of not recognising Joe Biden’s election, why should anyone recognise their own election? Not to mention the election of the next president?

If Donald Trump also becomes the Republican presidential candidate in 2024, which is entirely possible, the next constitutionally regulated transfer of power will be far from a foregone conclusion, regardless of who wins the election. Confidence in the electoral process and the election results will then be shattered by Trump’s lies, by Republican politicians who have campaigned on making his lies their own, and by all the troll factories in the brave new media world that produce fake news and conspiracy theories. And perhaps most seriously, by organised attempts by Trump-loyal Republicans at state and local level to take control of the vote-counting procedure and manipulate the election result.

The risk of armed violence in the aftermath of such an election should not be underestimated. In the Trump-loyal world, the attack on Congress is now portrayed as a patriotic act and the accused perpetrators as political martyrs. Trump himself has more or less promised to pardon them if he is re-elected. It is not difficult to imagine what kind of signals this sends to all kinds of ‘patriotic’ activists ahead of upcoming battles over vote counting and election results.

In a newly published book, How Civil Wars Start, American political scientist Barbara F. Walter argues that the United States may be closer to civil war than we might think. Of course, not a civil war like the last one, with marching armies and bloody battlefields, but what Walter warns about is that the kind of malignant internal ethnic and cultural tensions and conflicts that have escalated into civil war in other countries are now growing stronger in the United States as well. The idea of civil war is not foreign to Americans themselves; 46 per cent responded in an opinion poll last autumn that civil war was indeed likely. In any case, there are plenty of weapons available.

What is not only likely but certain is that the vicious ethnic and cultural conflicts and tensions that already exist will be further fuelled and exploited in the next presidential election, with the result that whoever is elected president of the United States (and however that may happen) runs the risk of not being recognised by the losers, whoever they may be.

It is, of course, not unimportant who, in such a situation, gets the keys to the White House and the levers of federal power. What the world and Americans must begin to prepare for is that there may be a president who will use his power to paralyse the constitutionally regulated system of power transfer, power sharing and democratic control. The American Founding Fathers did not have the imagination to conceive that such a person could ever be elected President of the United States, let alone that a majority in Congress would throw their constitutional control into the sea and fall to their knees before a new king (the Founding Fathers’ greatest fear), and in doing so they gave the president more power than the American republic may prove able to tolerate two hundred and thirty years later.

Thirty years ago (in a book about the American idea, Friare kan ingen vara, 1991, 2024), I attempted to capture in a single sentence the unique society that had begun to take shape in the United States, caught between boundless individual freedom on a small scale and a constitutionally binding community on a large scale.

‘Above the thousands of chattering sparrows of a nascent entrepreneurial capitalism hovered the all-seeing eagle of the republic,’ I wrote.

Today, I would write that the eagle is wounded and that the wolf is circling the chattering sparrows.

And that it is high time to try to imagine a different United States than the one we have so far taken for granted.

Det var avsett som ironi. År 1984 kunde det förvisso se ut som om Orwell hade tagit fel på såväl årtalet som framtiden, men det kommunistiska sovjetsamhälle vars totalitära natur han hade dragit till sin dystopiska spets, fanns ännu kvar och visade inga tecken på upplösning. Krig var fortfarande fred. Frihet var fortfarande slaveri. Okunnighet var fortfarande styrka. Den ryske författaren Aleksander Zinoviev myntade vid den här tiden begreppet homo sovieticus, sovjetmänniskan, med vilket han avsåg en människotyp utan individualitet, med anpassning till kollektivet som livets mål och mening. Detta var kanske inte riktigt detsamma som de helt språk- och tankeberövade invånarna i Storebrors Oceanien, men det kändes tillräckligt verklighetsnära för att Orwells berättelse fortsatt skulle kunna läsas som den var tänkt när den skrevs; en avskräckande vision av den totalitära anpassningens frestelse och realitet.

Det var inte bara i den totala lögnens Sovjetunionen som Orwell såg en ofri människa i vardande, utan också i den halvsanningens västvärld som han med sin bok ville väcka till insikt om den mänskliga frihetens skörhet. I ett brev till författaren Arthur Koestler skrev han 1945: ”Det är främst i form av en okritisk beundran för Sovjetunionen som totalitära idéer etablerar sig i väst. Under tiden åser vi det gradvisa förfallet av demokratiskt tänkesätt, av mänsklig anständighet, av frihetlig strävan…”

Idag vet vi att det totalitära Sovjetunionen rasade samman och för en tid kunde det se ut som om 1984 hade förpassats till historien, och så trodde nog också jag. ”Den enskilda människans horisonter och nätverk har öppnats för att rimligen aldrig mer kunna slutas på det sätt som Orwells framtid förutsatte”, skrev jag 2003, i förordet till en konkurrerande dystopi, Aldous Huxleys Du sköna nya värld, som jag då tyckte mera hade framtiden för sig.

Jag hade fel. 2026 har 1984 kommit tillbaka, och då inte som framtiden i ett totalitärt imperium någon annanstans, utan som en framtid nära oss, här och nu. Det glöms gärna bort att 1984 utspelar sig i London och att Storebrors Oceanien omfattar det forna USA, medan den europeiska kontinenten ingår i den av Ryssland dominerade överstaten Eurasien. 1984 utkämpar tre överstater (där finns också överstaten Östasien) ständiga och blodiga krig mellan sig om gränser, råvaror och makt. Ibland alla mot alla ibland två mot en.

I en tid när ett auktoritärt USA vill lägga under sig västra halvklotet (inklusive Kanada och Grönland) och ett auktoritärt Ryssland vill lägga under sig Ukraina och splittra Europa, och ett auktoritärt Kina vill erövra Taiwan och utöva makt lite här och var, känns det geopolitiska scenariet i 1984 inte längre främmande. Kanadas premiärminister Mark Carney använde inte ordet överstater i sitt tal i Davos, han talade om hegemoner, men han menade samma sak; en värld där, med Thukydides, de starka gör vad de kan och de svaga lider vad de måste.

Vilket är den värld som Orwell i 1984 driver till sin dystopiska spets. I Storebrors Oceanien har de svaga berövats sin förmåga till motstånd genom att berövas språkförmågan och tankeförmågan. Den centrala verksamheten i ”sanningsministeriet” är att göra språket oanvändbart för att skilja mellan sant och falskt, verkligt och overkligt, mellan vad som hänt och vad som inte har hänt. I Orwells värld berövas orden sin betydelse, eller kan betyda två oförenliga saker samtidigt, eller kan betyda en sak igår och en annan idag, vilket saboterar all mellanmänsklig kommunikation och etablerar ett totalitärt lögnvälde.

Metoden för kommunikationsförstörelse i Orwells 1984, ordutrensning och ordfabrikation i ett allsmäktigt sanningsministerium, hade måhända inte framtiden för sig, men bilden av ett samhälle där människor inte får lita på vad de själva ser och hör (”partiets” högsta påbud i 1984), där det är lättare att kommunicera misstro och misstänksamhet än tillit och förståelse, där lögnen har etablerat sig som norm och maktmedel, känns mer aktuell idag än när jag 1984 läste om 1984.

I vår tid är dock inte kommunikationsförstörelsen i första hand följden av ett totalitärt maktövertagande av något slag (även om det finns ett samband) utan av en framrusande digital kommunikationsrevolution som gör det allt svårare att veta vad som är sant och falskt och därför allt lättare att sprida lögn och förtal, skapa rädsla och osäkerhet, utså split och hat. Idag banar lögnen vägen för Storebror, snarare än tvärtom. När Donald Trump vann valet 2016 hade han ett nätverk av mer eller mindre dolda lögn- och förtalsproducenter i ryggen, några av dem finansierade av Putins Ryssland.

Väl vid makten 2017 gjorde Trump kommunikation av lögn och förtal till sitt främsta vapen, och väl vid makten igen 2025 gjorde han lojaliteten mot en lögn till fundamentet för sin maktutövning. Hans handplockade ministrar och ämbetsmän måste alla intyga att det var Donald Trump och inte Joe Biden som vann valet 2020. Ungefär som när partimedlemmarna i Storebrors Engsoc måste säga att svart är vitt ”när partidisciplinen så krävde”, och helst också börja tro att svart är vitt, och glömma att de någonsin trott något annat.

I sann orwellsk anda har i Trumps USA nu användningen av vissa ord förbjudits i federala dokument och sammanhang, medan användningen av vissa ord har påbjudits. I rask takt sätts nu också nya ord på saker och ting. Försvarsdepartementet har blivit Krigsdepartementet, Gulf of Mexico har blivit Gulf of America, etc. Trump-administrationen har också beordrat att den amerikanska historien ska skrivas om, exempelvis genom att federala muséer och minnesmärken rensas från påminnelser om slaveriet.

När en federal distriktsdomare, Cynthia Rufe, häromveckan beordrade att några borttagna objekt som påminde om att USA:s förste president, George Washington, var slavägare, skulle återinstalleras det gamla presidenthuset i Philadelphia, President’s House, refererade hon uttryckligen till Orwells 1984: ”Under Sanningsministeriets motto Okunnighet är Styrka tror sig den federala regeringen ha makten att dölja och förvränga historiska sanningar genom att utöva kontroll över historiska fakta. Det har den inte.”

Storebror visste vad han gjorde när han satte in stöten mot språket – och så vet hans nutida efterföljare. De globala medieplattformarna, och de globala mediefurstar som äger och kontrollerar dem, och de auktoritära ledare som vet att liera sig med dem, kan göra saker med vårt språk och våra tankar som Orwells Storebror inte kunde drömma om. Vår tids Storebror föreställer jag mig som en legering av gränslös våldsmakt, gränslös kommunikationsmakt och gränslös finansiell makt.

Det är i varjefall ett scenario som jag inte finner mer osannolikt än Orwells 1984, vilket är skälet till att 1984 är och förblir en bok som, för att citera Walter Dicksons recension i Ny Tid den 9 juni 1950, ”ingjuter ett förunderligt och värdefullt liv i de friheter vi äger”.

Once upon a time, there was something in Europe called the Jewish problem. How exactly the Jews were a problem remained unclear and shifted with time and context, but the solution always resulted in some form of expulsion, displacement, death, and destruction. The solution to the Jewish problem was the elimination of the Jews in one way or another.

Before Nazi Germany decided to solve it by physically exterminating them, its leaders toyed with the idea of deporting all Jews to Madagascar. The founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, wanted to solve it by evacuating the Jews from countries where they had lived for centuries as a vulnerable minority and making them the majority in their own state.

That this did not solve “the Jewish problem” – whatever that was – should be clear by now. At least not if the solution was to end anti-Semitism and give the world’s Jews a safe place on earth.

That this would also create a wholly new problem, let me call it “the Palestinian problem,” should have been obvious from the outset. In any case, it was clear early on that another people lived in the place where the Jewish state was to be built and that much of the land was already inhabited, settled, and cultivated. It should also have been clear that this would sooner or later lead to conflict. Or, as one of the early thinkers of Zionism, Ahad Ha’am, wrote after a visit to Palestine in 1891: “When the day comes when our existence in the Land of Israel has developed to such a level that it more or less displaces the local population, it will not give up its place so easily.”

In the historiography that subsequently prevailed, that is, that of the State of Israel, the Palestinian-Arab population’s sometimes armed resistance to displacement was described as barbaric, bloodthirsty, and terrorist, while the expulsion of 700,000 people from their homes and land and the destruction of nearly 500 Arab villages were painted in an explanatory and embellished light. Pretty soon, the image was established that the Palestinians’ misfortune was their own fault, that if only they had reconciled themselves to the Zionist project and accepted to share the land with the new colonizers, everything would have been peace and happiness.

But there were hardly any conditions for peace and happiness. With the exception of a brave but small minority who advocated a common cause with the Palestinian Arabs – union, federation or binational state – the Zionist project had no place for the Palestinian loArabs. The physical expulsion that took place in 1948, and then again after the June War in 1967, and which is now in full swing in Gaza through total destruction and genocide, and in the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria, as it is called in Israel) through state-sponsored terror, is not a consequence of the Palestinian Arabs repeatedly missing the opportunity to live in peace with the Zionist settlers, but because the Zionist settlers from the very beginning saw the Palestinian Arabs as a problem to which the solution was their displacement.

Even after the State of Israel was formed in 1948, the Palestinian Arab population continued to be treated as a problem. It was not allowed to grow too large (the demographic problem) and it was not allowed to spread (the territorial problem). The problem of the additional Palestinian Arab population in the areas occupied in the 1967 war (largely consisting of refugees from 1948) was “solved” by establishing military rule, under which new Jewish colonies could be established, Palestinian society could be kept down, and a system of legal and physical separation between Jewish settlers and Palestinian residents could be established (apartheid).

When it became clear that this was not a solution to either the Jewish or the Palestinian problem (whatever those problems may have been), the question arose in the early 1990s as to whether there could still be a path toward recognition, reconciliation, and settlement.

This eventually led to the Oslo Accords between the State of Israel and the representatives of the Palestinians, the PLO, and the breathtaking handshake in front of the White House between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat on September 13, 1993.

Regardless of the agreement’s weaknesses and unresolved issues (the most difficult ones), it seemed for a brief moment as if a historic window had opened onto a path other than the one that would lead to massacre, genocide, terror, and displacement.

Two people who witnessed at close quarters how the window both opened and closed again were Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, the former as an advisor to the Palestinians, the latter as an advisor to President Clinton. Both were present at the meeting in Camp David, USA, in July 2000, after which the Oslo Accords irrevocably collapsed and the Palestinians were once again blamed for their own misfortune.

Now they have jointly written a postmortem of sorts about what happened and how it could have happened, and the main thesis is that the Oslo Accords, and the increasingly unrealistic peace negotiations that followed in their wake, never managed to confront the historical traumas and injustices of the conflict. As a result, they also failed to address the demands for redress and recognition that have driven the Palestinian cause since the formation of the State of Israel and, ultimately, since the beginning of the Zionist nation-building project. Attempts to sweep the events of 1948 under the carpet have failed before and will fail again, the authors write. The Palestinian side saw the Oslo process as a path to full recognition and sovereignty, while the Israeli side saw it primarily as yet another solution to the “Palestinian problem.”

Hamas’ bloody attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s all-destructive response were no exceptions in the history of the conflict, but merely another staging of it, the authors write. Here, without embellishment or ideological repression, its innermost core was exposed. The State of Israel had not given up on the idea of solving the Palestinian problem by limiting the Palestinian population as far as possible within “the whole Land of Israel,” and the Palestinians had not given up their demands for their right to live as equals in the land “between the river and the sea.” The one idea was of course incompatible with the other, just as it was impossible to draw a line to the past, which was what the Oslo Accords had attempted to do. “You cannot turn a people into a demographic problem and expect their gratitude,” as the authors put it.

Malley and Agha devote a large part of the book to explaining why the Oslo process failed. In the “victorious” narrative, the Palestinians in general and Yasser Arafat in particular were held solely responsible for the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by rejecting what President Bill Clinton and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak presented as the most generous offer the Palestinians could ever receive.

It is a narrative that is effectively dismantled by Malley and Agha. They note without hesitation the weaknesses and ambiguities in Arafat’s position and character, but they nevertheless place most of the responsibility for the failure on Israel and the US by pointing to the political insensitivity of their “offer” to the Palestinians – at a stage when virtually every agreed intermediate step on the road to a final settlement had been bypassed. Here, if not before, it became clear that what the Palestinians were being offered was to end the conflict once and for all by drawing a line at the history before 1967 and finally giving up their claims to historical redress.

After October 7, 2023, it has become chillingly clear that in this story, it is impossible to draw a line anywhere. Without some form of historical reconciliation between the two peoples on the narrow strip of land between the river and the sea, there can be no end to the conflict between them. Tomorrow is indeed yesterday, as the title of the book aptly puts it.

It is difficult to see how such reconciliation can take place after a century of expulsions, humiliations, massacres, and now also genocide, and the authors are not optimistic about the possibilities. Two incompatible narratives about what happened and why still stand in opposition to each other, one for the time being all powerful, the other for the time being powerless.

—-—

Link to published article in Swedish.

https://www.expressen.se/kultur/bocker/palestinaproblemet-kommer-inte-forsvinna/

It is as though America as a whole has espoused a sect-like destiny: the immediate concretization of all perspectives of salvation. The multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacy, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also its madness and frenzy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-destruction-rose-garden-magnolia/

For Pankaj Mishra, the rupture is between an era where what we saw happening in Gaza was not allowed to happen, and en era where states who had committed themselves not to allow it to happen, had not only allowed it to happen, but had assisted in making it happen. In the world before Gaza, there were conventions and laws that the signatory states could indeed violate and pay lip-service to, but where what we all saw happening was nonetheless clearly unlawful and unjust. In the world after Gaza, there is nothing left to break and pay lip-service to, no rules that matter anymore, no laws that cannot be overridden by force and violence.

"Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, provisioned by Western democracies”, has left millions of people in a state of desperate exasperation, Mishra writes of the rapidly widening gap between empathy and impotence, between the moral imperative to prevent genocide (Pankaj Mishra embraces the term after serious consideration, and so do I), and the horrifying realization that a genocide can be committed in full view of the world with no world actor being able or willing to prevent it, or even worse, that ethnic cleansing and genocide can be considered a “solution” to a political conflict.

This is where the pre-Gaza and post-Gaza world differ, says Mishra. In the pre-Gaza world (from 1945 and on), ethnic cleansing and genocide could not be considered a “solution” to anything, which the haunting memory of the Holocaust was meant to remind us of forever. Never again.
In the post-Gaza world, however, the haunting memory of the Holocaust has been invoked to justify Israel's genocidal response to the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023 – and to vilify and silence those who have reacted in protest. Even protesting Jews have experienced the "intellectual despotism" with which criticism of Israel has been suppressed and demonized by "Israeli leaders, antisemitic politicians and Islamophobic agitators", notes Mishra.

On the problematic link between Holocaust memory and support for Israel, Pankaj Mishra wrote an important essay a few months after October 7 (Memory Failure, London Review of Books, 4.1.2024), and like the Russian-American writer of Jewish descent, Masha Gessen, who approached the same topic (In the Shadow of the Holocaust, The New Yorker, 9.12.2023), he soon learned the price: cancelled lectures and assignments, accusations of antisemitism. In Germany, the unconditional support for the state of Israel has come to be seen as a state interest, Staatsräson, creating a specifically German taboo on what can be said about Israel, and a specifically German intolerance of what can be said in support of the Palestinians (without being classified as antisemitism). Jewish writers and artists critical of Israel have been “lectured by the children and grandchildren of our relatives’ murderers, who now have the nerve to call us antisemites”, as one of them, Eyal Weizman, has put it.

Pankaj Mishra approaches the ominously interwoven issue of the Holocaust, Israel and Gaza from a partly personal point of view. Born and raised in a Brahmin Hindu nationalist family in India, marked by a “reverent” admiration for Israel and Zionism, he long felt “a strong affinity with the early 20th-century Jewish experience of alienation” and readily identified with the Jewish writers of the time who, with “psychological acumen and ironic humor,” put words on an existential experience that he recognized in people in the newly colonized world he had come from himself; to be constantly forced to see oneself through the eyes of others, to never be allowed to become a full part of the West. The "cruel Jewish experience of modernity" seemed to him "inexorably familiar" and he embraced the established narrative of the State of Israel as a result of "compelling necessities".

Pankaj Mishra's book is largely a reckoning with that narrative. The turning point for him, as for so many others, was the encounter with the brutality and humiliation of the Israeli occupation and the horror of how the memory of the Holocaust had been mobilized in support of "the crudest kind of violence and genocide" and the dawning realization of what it had done to Israel and Israelis. A people who believe they are fighting a new Holocaust will free themselves from all moral constraints, Mishra quotes Israeli journalist Boaz Evron in a 1981 article.

In the post-Gaza world, Pankaj Mishra sees an Israel that has freed itself from all moral constraints and obfuscated the memory of the Holocaust. Among the new generations who have witnessed what Israel allowed itself to do to the Palestinians, he envisages that Gaza will replace Auschwitz as a symbol of “the total collapse of human morality”.

One question Mishra's book thus raises is whether the world will be able to morally rise up after Gaza, in the same way that it once seemed to be able to rise up – with conventions, laws and a resolute "never again" - after Auschwitz

Mishra does not think so. Instead, he sees in the post-Gaza world “a growing inferno of existential horror” characterized by “barbed-wire reinforced borders” and “brutality in the name of self-preservation”, a world where ethnic cleansing and massacres will be portrayed as necessary and "just". There is no longer any reason to believe that the memory of unprecedented outbreaks of human evil will deter new ones. It is not at all difficult to imagine, Mishra writes, that what Israel did in Gaza will be justified by the historians, journalists and politicians of posterity.

After the openly proclaimed plans of Donald Trump, with the approval of a broad spectrum of the Israeli establishment, for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza (and perhaps also the West Bank), I see nothing to suggest that Pankaj Mishra is wrong.

How the United States of America could go from constitutional democracy to lawless presidential rule in the space of a few weeks is a question that will preoccupy historians for as long as history is written. Much like the question of how Adolf Hitler was able to abolish democracy, ban all opposition and make himself Führer in the space of a few weeks (January 31-March 23, 1933).

Without drawing the comparison too far, what is now happening in the United States is of similar dimensions. The mere fact that what has happened so far has been possible at all, that central parts of the US federal state apparatus have been attacked, sabotaged and partly dismantled in open violation of the law, is enough to describe it as the end of the US as a constitutional democracy. Whatever happens next – if, how and when the attack can be stopped – the damage to the American rule of law is irreparable.

In two weeks in January 2025, the United States was torn apart by its own president, a future historian might write.

The surprise raid carried out by Donald Trump and Elon Musk on the main institutions of the American rule of law, the Department of Treasury, the Department of Justice and the FBI, with purges of staff and the intrusion into strategic data bases, is nothing other than a coup aimed at turning the federal state apparatus into a loyal tool in the hands of a dictatorial president. The dimensions of the coup are not diminished by the fact that the President - with the approval of the Republican majority in the Senate - has succeeded in filling the federal power apparatus with ministers and heads of agencies whose main qualification is that they have shown themselves ready to obey his every whim and to echo his most blatant lies.

So the US now has a Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, who happily and willingly (and in defiance of both the law and his top official) handed over data on the social and economic status of millions of Americans to Elon Musk's private army of young computer hackers, none of them with the authority to access such data, some of them with strongly right-wing views

The United States now has an Attorney General, Pam Bondi, who believes that Donald Trump was robbed of his 2020 election victory and who, just hours after being sworn in, appointed a team to "review" all the prosecutors and police officers involved in the investigations and prosecutions of Donald Trump, as well as the "unethical prosecutions" of those involved in the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021.

The US now has a Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who has declared his willingness to use the military against protesters (unlike Trump's former Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, who refused).

For the second time, Mr. Trump has appointed Russell Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget, which is tasked with ensuring that the budgets passed by Congress are put into practice by the President. Mr. Vought has made no secret of his belief that the President can, in effect, do whatever he wants with the Congressional budget and "aggressively use the broad powers of the presidency to return power to ... the American people", by which Mr. Vought means the President's right to take the law into his own hands. While it is true that under the Constitution, Congress makes the laws in the name of the people, the Constitution does not seem to be an obstacle in this context (well, no laws at all). Almost every other action in the ongoing attack is a violation of the law. Which at the same time could be the very purpose. The more laws that can be broken without anyone being able to prevent it, the more profound the damage to the rule of law becomes and the more the conditions for establishing a lawless presidential regime on its ruins are strengthened.

In the past, no one could have imagined that such a radical (and patently unlawful) expansion of presidential power could occur to the submissive cheers of the Republican majority in Congress, because no one could have imagined that Congress would submissively give away its constitutional power to the President. In the past, no one could have imagined that the Constitution's third independent power center, the Supreme Court, would grant the President immunity for all acts committed "in office" (including crimes), thereby also giving away power to the President. A president granted immunity for his actions "in office" could reasonably claim immunity for defiance of court orders as well, which is likely to be the next step in the destruction. Several of the President's executive orders and decrees have been ruled unconstitutional or illegal or both and blocked or overturned by federal judges across the US, but it is entirely possible, and even likely, that Trump will ignore what the courts say

"Judges and courts have no right to judge the legality of the President's actions," wrote Vice President J.D. Vance in a post on X, which can hardly be interpreted in any other way than that the president himself has the right to judge the legality of his actions, which is the very definition of an authoritarian autocracy. If Trump, backed by a knee-bending Congress and a corrupt judiciary, were to defy the courts and interpret the laws as he sees fit, the work of destruction is complete.

For barely 250 years, the American Republic lasted, historians will be able to write. Then it destroyed itself.

So how did it happen? First and foremost, by Americans electing as president a person who had openly said he would do just that, destroy the Republic. Override the Constitution if it stood in his way, make himself dictator on day one, persecute his political opponents, pardon his political friends, crack down on critical media and journalists ('enemies of the people')

What the founding fathers could not have imagined was that such a person could be elected President. Still less could they imagine that he would be elected twice (three times if he had been allowed to count the votes himself). Nor could they imagine that the popularly elected Congress would refrain from checking the President's power (for example, by impeaching the President for "treason, bribery and other high crimes"). Nor that the lifetime elected Supreme Court would grant the President immunity for whatever he felt he had to do "in office", as far as can be understood also breaking the law.

The question remains, why did the Americans do this?

I believe they did so because one of America's two national parties has turned into a political-religious cult, the MAGA cult, with Donald J. Trump as its savior and Führer. It is today a cult large and powerful enough to fill the Republican majority in Congress with cult members and yes-men and turn Congress into a church for the adulation of a cult-leader/president.

When the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard traveled to America in the 1980s, (like his French predecessor Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s) he perhaps better than many Americans observed and understood what society they had created for themselves:

It is as though America as a whole has espoused this sect-like destiny: the immediate concretization of all perspectives of salvation. The multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacy, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also its madness and frenzy.

Sects have played a central role in American history since the Puritans (fundamentalist Protestants) fled religious persecution in England in the early 17th century to found the New Jerusalem in the New World. This established a legacy of fundamentalism that can certainly be said to have inspired the American form of religious freedom (for every fundamentalism a new church and a new society), but also the emergence of ever new political and religious sects. The movement and the opinions that Donald Trump managed to arouse and mobilize had all the characteristics of a sectarian revival: fanaticism, intolerance and contempt for reality. What the architect of the American Constitution, James Madison, could not or would not imagine was that a sect (faction) could grow large and strong enough to permeate the whole body of the Union, short-circuit the separation of powers and pave the way for a tyrannical rule

But now it has happened. A sect has permeated the entire body of society and paved the way for tyrannical rule.

At the time of this writing, the destruction continues unabated. One supporting wall after another of the American constitutional edifice is being shattered; laws, court decisions, institutions, traditions and relationships are being trampled with shocking ease.

What will rise from the ruins of the federal United States, no one yet knows.

What I know about the fragility of the federal constitution makes me fear division, disintegration, and perhaps a break-up of the Union.

A dictatorial president will have the power to tear the United States apart, not to rule it, let alone rebuild it.

That's bad enough, both for the US and for the rest of the world.

Whatever one may say about such a Judaism, shaped by two thousand years of Jewish existence as a minority among majorities, it developed and flourished in societies built on ethnic and religious diversity, and ossified and withered in societies built on ethnic and religious uniformity. A central ethical injunction of such Judaism was the Torah's exhortation to love the stranger “as thyself”, and an almost self-evident political ideal was a society in which majorities and minorities were allowed to live side by side, in which Jews were allowed to be both Jews and citizens (in accordance with the rabbinic injunction to make the law of the land your own, dina d'malkhuta dina).

It was a tradition nurtured by those parts of the Torah that emphasized the ethical-religious nature of the covenant with God. “All that the Lord has spoken we will do”, the children of Israel cried out to Moses at Sinai, establishing a Jewish community founded on an ethical obligation, not an ethnic affiliation. It is certainly true that in biblical times there were periods when the “Children of Israel” lived as an ethnic nation in ethnic kingdoms, but on the one hand the kingdoms were small and weak, and the periods short-lived and disastrous, and on the other hand they were eventually incorporated, in the Hebrew Bible, and even more so in the post-biblical Jewish interpretive tradition, into a prophetic narrative of a universal kingdom of right and righteousness that would shape Jewish life and thought far more than the longing for the restoration of King David's kingdom and the restoration of King Solomon's temple. For nearly two thousand years, 'Next year in Jerusalem', a recurring phrase in the Jewish liturgy, was interpreted more figuratively than literally. Jerusalem became the symbol of a new world, not a new kingdom.

With the creation of the State of Israel, the political conditions were again created for a more literal interpretation, and for a historically new brand of Judaism to take shape. It was a Judaism that saw in the conquest and colonization of the “holy land” a divine commandment, whose armed settler rabbis issued “religious” sanctions for oppression and murder, whose political representatives in the Israeli parliament, and later in the Israeli government, advocated ethnic supremacy, ethnic oppression, ethnic cleansing, and after October 7, 2023, mass destruction and mass murder.

This was, in short, a Judaism built on the notion that a majority has the right to oppress and expel a minority, that ethnic purity is a virtue, that the Covenant of Sinai was the foundation of an ethnic-national sect not an ethical-moral community.

Between the Judaism that was formed during two thousand years in exile (diaspora) and the territory-adulating and violence-promoting variety that has grown strong for seventy-five years under the conditions of Jewish ethnic-national majority rule, a deep chasm opens up in the view of what it means to be Jewish.

Peter Beinart is a prominent Jewish-American writer and intellectual who, over time, has come to be appalled by the gap between the Orthodox Judaism he himself was raised in and still actively practices, and the policy of colonization, oppression and expulsion that the State of Israel has come to enforce in the name of Jews and Judaism. In particular, he has been appalled by the ease with which Jewish organizations and representatives have explained away, ignored and even turned a blind eye to Israel's destruction of Gaza.

“This is a book about the story by Jews tell ourselves try to block out the screams [of the Palestinians],” Beinart writes. “It’s about the story that enables our leaders, our families, and our friends, to watch the destruction of the Gaza Strip – the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name – and shrug, if not applaud.”

It is a narrative that is prone to see Jews as victims but has a hard time seeing them as perpetrators; that tends to blame the Palestinians for their own disasters but finds ever new justifications for the right of a Jewish state to rule over them; that has few qualms about stamping Palestinians (and pro-Palestinian supporters, many of them Jewish) as Nazis and Antisemites, but reluctant to perceive Jews as racists and ethnic supremacists.

In Beinart's sharp reckoning with a Zionist narrative he himself once embraced, I recognize my own journey fifty years earlier. The turning point for Beinart, as it once was for me, was the meeting with real Palestinians (not the cardboard cut-outs we had been fed with) and discovering what was being done to them in the name of a state calling itself Jewish, and of a Judaism that had turned the Torah's admonition to love the stranger “as thyself” on its head.

Beinart's book is a passionate call to Jewish solidarity with the Palestinians, not only because he believes it is the “Jewish” thing to do, but also because the fates of Jews and Palestinians have become inextricably intertwined. Without justice for the Palestinians, there is no future for a Judaism worthy of its name, he seems to say. Just as Rabbi Abraham Heschel, a role model for Beinart, could not open a prayer book during the Vietnam War without seeing images of children burning from napalm, no Jew today should be able to open a prayer book without seeing “Gaza’s burning, starving flesh”, Beinart writes with prophetic wrath. “We will see it on the walls of our synagogues and Jewish Community Centers, at our Passover seders and Shabbat meals. The ground underneath us will grow unsteady. Maybe we’ll even fear the judgment of God. Heschel did.”

What Peter Beinart would come to learn is the personal cost for questioning a Jewish community for which affiliation with the State of Israel has become an identity marker. He begins the book with a note to a former friend, and it seems clear that many friendships have been broken in the aftermath of October 7.

“I consider your single-minded focus on Israeli security to be immoral and self-defeating,” Beinart writes to his former friend. “It justifies actions that I consider grave crimes. It blinds you to the essential connection of Jewish and Palestinian safety.”

Today, I find it difficult to see how the gap between Peter Beinart and his former friend can be bridged, just as the gap between myself and people in my Jewish community who excuse, accept, or, horror of horrors, affirm the right of the State of Israel to oppress, expel and even destroy another people in the name of Jews.

To be a Jew after the destruction of Gaza is to live with the widening gap between an ethno-national Jewish community nurtured by a minority-oppressing ethno-nationalist state, and an ethical-moral community nurtured by nearly two thousand years of Jewish existence as a minority among majorities.

Peter Beinart's book is a strong plea for the latter, and I can only hope that his former friends will take note.

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Here is a link to my new book Another Zionism, Another Judaism, Other Press, NY, 2025.