Zionism, Arab Nationalism, and Islamic Fundamentalism

Zionism Religious and Political

The word Zionism has been used by Jews in two very different ways. Religious Zionism is the ancient belief among Jews that one day the Messiah would appear and lead the dispersed Jews of the world to return to Zion, or the land of Israel, the land the ancient Hebrews called Zion or the land of Mount Zion. This is essentially a religious and theological belief held among religious Jews for thousands of years, ever since the Jews were expelled by the ancient Romans from their land (variously called the land of the Hebrews, Palestine, the land of Cannan, the Holy Land, the Levant, Israel) for rebelling against the authority of the Roman Empire and refusing to embrace the Roman pantheon of Gods. Jews living outside of the land of Israel in North Africa, Europe, and the Middle-East, and much later in North and South America were members of a landless civilization know as the Diaspora. These Diaspora Jews in their prayers and religious ceremonies expressed their longing to one day return to Zion.

Political Zionism is rooted in religious Zionism to some extent, but it is interesting to note that many of the early political Zionists were more secular than religious, and in fact more than a few, including the socialist and communist divisions of the Zionist movement were atheist. Rather than wait for the Messiah to return the Jews to Palestine, the political Zionists believed Jews must take matters into their own hands and build a Jewish state in Palestine themselves without waiting for divine assistance. These Zionists concluded from their examination of European history both ancient and modern that Jews would never be able to escape the centuries old bigotry and persecution known as anti-Semitism unless they physically removed themselves from Europe. The Zionist movement emerged as part of a larger trend of ethnic nationalism sweeping through Europe in the mid 1800s and at the same time that violent massacres of Jews in Eastern Europe, and particularly in Russian controlled areas, known as pogroms, convinced the Zionists that the position of the Jewish minority in Europe would always be precarious and tenuous, and that the Jews of Europe would continually face arbitrary violence and discrimination.

Theodore Herzel is the man credited with launching the modern Zionist movement and organized the first international Zionist assembly in Vienna in 1897. As the situation for Jews worsened in Eastern Europe, and as Jews in Western Europe responded to the French Dreyfus Case, those Jews committed to the Zionist movement began to leave Europe in the late 1800s and emigrate to Palestine, which was controlled by the Ottoman Turks. These early Zionist pioneers purchased their land from Turks and Arab landowners and began the difficult work of building Jewish institutions and establishing communal based agricultural societies called Kibbutzim which were based on communist principles.

After World War I the British gained control of Palestine and with the Balfour Declaration promised to the Jewish people that the British would support the creation of a homeland for Jews in Palestine. At this time Arab residents of Palestine began to protest as Jewish immigration increased, and the violent Arab-Israeli conflict began to take its first forms.

During World War II as millions of Jews were being exterminated, and even after the war as the survivors of the Nazi genocide were facing atrocious conditions in refugee camps, the British, under pressure from Arabs who opposed the immigration of Jews into Palestine, restricted the number of Jews who could enter the British controlled area known as the mandate. This convinced many Jews that only Jews themselves could be trusted to look out for the interest of and to protect and defend other Jews. Earlier during the War, shiploads of Jewish refugees from Nazi controlled Europe had been denied the right to land in foreign ports, returned to Europe, and eventually executed by the Nazis. This also convinced the Zionists that only they, in control of a Jewish state with a strong military, could protect the Jewish victims of anti-Semitism.

One of the core Zionist beliefs is that stateless and landless peoples are doomed to suffer from persecution and bigotry. The Zionist contended that only with their own land, state apparatus, and military force, could the Jews defend themselves. Whereas the traditional age old religious Zionists placed all of their faith and hope in the coming of the Messiah to deliver the Jewish people to their homeland and restore the ancient Kingdom of David, the modern political Zionists placed their faith in politics, land, and the attempt to provide Jews with enough political and military power to defend themselves from their persecutors.

Arab Nationalism

Arab nationalism was a response to European colonialism in the Middle-East and also part of a larger trend of rising national feeling which impacted Europe and other parts of the world in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The key colonial powers in the Middle-East after Ottoman Turks were defeated in World War I were the French and the British. Both the French and the British promised Arab residents throughout the Middle-East that they would support the creation of autonomous Arab controlled states. However, as the British and French colonial authorities drew the boundaries for these states, they failed to address the prevailing allegiances and conflicts in the Arab and Muslim world, and consequently created states whose boundaries did not coincide with the pre-existing ethnic and religious communities which had existed for centuries in the Middle-East. Consequently the French and the British supported the installation of strong leaders in countries like Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon who could begin the task of nation building, that is forging nation states with national identities from the diverse conglomeration of ethnic and religious sects and family and clan based systems of tribal allegiances.

Important Arab nationalists believed that the European colonization of the Middle-East set up a system of economic exploitation whereby Europeans dominated the political and economic life of the colonized areas and extracted valuable mineral resources, without leaving much for the native people of the region to profit by. All of the advantages and economic benefits of these systems were channeled to the Europeans, leaving the Arab and Muslim masses to remain poor, disenfranchised, and without political power or opportunity. The solution to this problem according to the nationalists was to throw off the influence of the colonial powers, place Arabs and Muslims into positions of political and economic power and influence, and rid the Middle-East of the European influence. To escape political, economic, and cultural dependence on the European West, the Arab and Muslims of the Middle-East would have to develop strong and autonomous governments, military capabilities, gain control of their natural resources, and foster the development of national consciousness among the Arab masses in order to overcome the divisive clannishness of the Middle-Eastern society.

Much of the nation building in the Arab world took place at the level of the nation state, that is within the borders of one country. Advocates of Pan-Arab nationalism contended that the Arab world would remain weak and divided unless all Arabs of different regions and locales came together to unite in order throw off the yoke of European domination. Leaders like Nasser of Egypt vied for ascendancy in the Arab world as they attempted to claim leadership over and beyond the border of the nation states.

The Arab nationalists viewed the Zionist movement and the State of Israel established in 1948, as simply another case of European colonialism, even though Zionism as a nationalist movement had much in common with Arab nationalism and even though almost half of the Jewish population of Israel were Sephardim or Middle-Eastern and North African Jews. Many Arab nationalists, and especially the Bathists, embraced the Marxist critique of imperialism and neo-imperialism, and so there was a close identification within many Arab national movements with the left and secular Marxism. At the same time the deep religious convictions of the Arab and Muslim masses led the Arab nationalists to incorporate religious themes into their ideology and rhetoric.

Islamic Fundamentalism

Islamic fundamentalism has been a reaction against the secularism of modernity. Deeply rooted in the religious past of the Muslim world, the Islamic fundamentalists, unlike the nationalists who embraced modernity and radical social change in order to bring the Arab world on par with the modern West, reject the secular solutions to the problems that beset the Arab and Muslim world such as poverty, lack of education, economic dependency, and the inability to defeat the Zionists militarily. Rather than try to imitate either the capitalist or Marxist models of economic development in the West, the fundamentalists see the solution to their problems in a return to the traditional culture of the Middle East with Islamic Law or the Sharia at the core of their theological system. The fundamentalists believe that the leadership of the modern Arab states is corrupted by the influence of the West and neocolonialism, and they are particularly suspicious and infuriated by the United States whose modern, pluralistic, and permissive culture offends their traditional sensibilities.

The Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s was a key development in the progression and ascendancy of Fundamentalism in the Middle-East. The governments of Egypt and Saudi-Arabia have struggled to resist fundamentalism as the fundamentalists attacked these governments for their corruption and close association with Israel’s key ally in the region, the United States. The willingness of the fundamentalists to use political violence, hostage taking, and terrorism, makes the issues they present for the region and for targets of political violence outside the region all the more salient.

The core belief of the fundamentalists is that a return to a traditional religious theocratic government and organization of society is the solution to the problems of poverty, corruption, powerlessness, neo-imperialism, and dependency which beset the Arab and Muslim world. It is a rejection of the permissive relativistic open culture of the West in favor of an attempt to revive an organization of society based on theocratic principles.