2. ZIONISM—OR THE FOSSIL AS THE ARCH-CRIMINAL OF HISTORY
1.
Whatever the exact meaning of the fossil theory may be, there is no doubt in the mind of Mr. Toynbee as to the proper significance of Diaspora Jewry. It alone is the “historic Jewry,” and the “essence of Jewishness” is a masterly adaptation to a Diaspora environment, which is achieved by “a meticulous devotion to the Mosaic Law”—a rather inferior code—“and a consummate virtuosity in commerce and finance.”23VIII/309. Jewry has been embedded as “a fossil of alien origin … in the body of Western Christendom since its pre-natal days”; it does not belong to the West and it is not part of it. It does not really belong anywhere, and therefore it is “at home” only in the isolation of the Czarist “Pale” or the Ghetto. Final and irrevocable disappearance of Jewry through assimilation might have been the best that could have happened to it. Unfortunately, this was prevented by Zionism, which adopted an archaistic imitation of the idol of Western nationalism.24See VI/64, VIII/533-4, ibid., 287, 291-301. Worst of all, by its establishment of the state of Israel, Zionism has even been successful. From the standpoint of the Toynbean philosophy of history, the Diaspora is a bothersome nuisance; but a Zionism that has actually led to the re-emergence of ancient Judea as a modern state drives Toynbee to exasperation. The annals of human history are, unfortunately, crowded with the most sordid crimes imaginable; yet Mr. Toynbee’s righteous indignation is nowhere as intense as in his unqualified condemnation of the Zionists. According to him, the Zionists, acting on “the principle of making the defenseless pay,” on the 14th of May, 1948, set up “a state of Israel in Palestine by force of arms in a war that had resulted in more than half a million Palestinian Arabs losing their homes, in compensation for atrocities committed against Jews in … 1933-1945, not in the Levant, but in Europe, and not by Arabs, but by Germans.” It was because of “the sympathy of the Western World with the Jews over their sufferings at Germany’s hands” that the Zionists were able to obtain “a retrospective condonation from the UNO for their violation of the rights of the Arab people of Palestine.”25VIII/258-9.
The truth is that in 1948 Zionism had already been in existence for more than fifty years, and therefore its aspiration could not have been to seek compensation for the German atrocities of 1933-1945. The Jewish state came into being because it had been in the process of being built for more than half a century, with an unprecedented heroism of peaceful colonizing and with Jewish sweat, Jewish blood, and Jewish tears. Zionism sought the answer to the problem of the “fossil” that, as Toynbee so eloquently proves, belonged nowhere; it strove to put an end to many centuries of Jewish martyrdom, suffered not only at German hands but at the hands of both Christendom and Islam. The Jewish state was established not by force of arms but by the will of the highest international authority ever known in history, by the U.N. decision on the partition of Palestine of November 29, 1947 (which is not even mentioned in the Study); it was defended by the force of arms. The “Zionists” were the men and women of the Yishuv, together with their children and old people, surrounded by half a dozen independent Arab states. Seven Arab armies, among them the British-trained, British-equipped, and British-officered Arab Legion, were preparing for the invasion of Palestine. The “Zionists” staked their entire existence, their own lives and those of their wives and children, in a conflict which was forced upon them and in which all the odds were against them. It was indeed a miracle of faith and heroism that the Arab armies were defeated in their publicly avowed intention of repeating the Hitlerite German massacres on Palestinian Jewry. The statement that, in establishing the Jewish state, the Zionists acted on “the principle of making the defenceless pay” is among the meanest and most despicable pronouncements that have ever issued from the pen of a historian.
It is, however, not our intention to line up all the facts in order to disprove Mr. Toynbee. They cannot be unknown to him. There was a time when he wrote with sanity about Zionism. In the second volume of the Study he recognized that in the Eastern European countries assimilation was not possible, and that even in Western Europe it was “an essential part of the Jew’s identity” that he was “a member of the living Jewish community and an heir to the ancient Jewish tradition.” He realized that Zionism was opposed to assimilationism because the Jew “cannot cut off his Jewishness and cast it from him without self-mutilation …”; its ultimate aim was “to liberate the Jewish people from the peculiar psychological complex induced by the penalization to which they have been subject for centuries in the Gentile World.” About Nazism he wrote that “it still further strengthened the already strong Zionist case.…” The social philosophy of the Zionist movement he thought “has already been justified by results.” While he appreciated even in that earlier volume that there was a tragic element in the inability of the Zionists to reach an understanding with the Arabs, he was still fair enough to concede that, as always, two parties were needed to reach an understanding. At that stage of the Study Toynbee still acknowledged that “the very spirit of Western Nationalism which has been the inspiration of Zionism itself” had captured the Arabs too and roused them to resistance.26II/252-54. It is noteworthy that a vestige of Toynbee’s earlier and fairer position to the conflict in Palestine may still be found even in Volume VIII of his work. Discussing the havoc wrought in the East by that foreign intruder, Western nationalism, he points ot the divisions of India and of Palestine. See VIII/539. No doubt the Western ideology of nationalism had “a destructively explosive effect” in the East; however, as in India so in Palestine, its destructiveness was not due to a Zionist monopoly of nationalism.
2.
Mr. Toynbee’s change of attitude toward Zionism might be, in itself, a matter of small significance. It does, however, require closer scrutiny on account of the very fury of his moral indignation. After saying some very moving words about the “lasting infamy of Western Man,” as revealed in the Western crime toward the Negroes and in the extermination of the Jewish Diaspora in the European homeland of Western Christendom, Mr. Toynbee proceeds to the unveiling of the most original discovery of his entire Study—the one for which he will be remembered long after his extensive writings will have fallen into oblivion. Indeed, it required a genius of a sort to see, as clearly as Toynbee does, that “the Nazi Gentile’s fall was less tragic than the Zionist Jews’.” This is how the statement is justified:
On the morrow of a persecution in Europe in which they had been the victims of the worst atrocities ever known to have been suffered by Jews or indeed by any other human beings, the Jews’ immediate reaction to their own experience was to become persecutors in their turn for the first time since … 135 [C.E.]—and this at the first opportunity that had since arisen for them to inflict on other human beings who had done the Jews no injury.… In … 1948 some 684,000 out of some 859,000 Arab inhabitants of the territory of Palestine which the Zionist Jews conquered by force of arms in that year lost their homes and property and became destitute “displaced persons.”27VIII/289.
It is a well-known streak in the Gentile mentality to inflate any wrong done by the Jews and to minimize the wrong done to them. The reference to the year 135 C.E., the previous occasion when Jews were persecutors, is a psychologically revealing slip of memory. The date is that of the collapse of the Bar Kokba rebellion against Rome. In the mind of Mr. Toynbee, an act of rebellion against oppression by a foreign invader, when it is undertaken by Jews, becomes associated with persecution. Those wicked Jews were persecuting the poor defenseless Roman Empire, which had done them no injury. To quote one of Mr. Toynbee’s own quotations:
Cet animal est tres méchant:
Quand on l’attaque, il se defend.28V/337. “This animal is very vicious; when one attacks it, it defends itself.”
While this natural propensity of the Gentile mentality is unmistakably present in Toynbee, it does not suffice to explain his inexhaustible originality. Not only are the Zionists worse than the Nazis, but they are actually the arch-criminals of all history. Says Toynbee:
If the heinousness of sin is to be measured by the degree to which the sinner is sinning against the light that God has vouchsafed to him, the Jews had even less excuse in … 1948 for evicting Palestinian Arabs from their homes than Nebuchadnezzar and Titus and Hadrian and the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition had had for uprooting, persecuting, and exterminating Jews in Palestine and elsewhere at divers times in the past. In … 1948 the Jews knew, from personal experience, what they were doing; and it was their supreme tragedy that the lesson learnt by them from their encounter with the Nazi German Gentiles should have been not to eschew but to imitate some of the evil deeds that the Nazis had committed against the Jews.29VIII/290.
CHAPTER V
When it comes to the moral evaluation of a deed, and its comparison with other deeds in the same category, all discussion comes to a standstill. Value judgments are subjective affirmations, which can be neither proved nor disproved. From the point of view of a person who does not accept Toynbee’s evaluation, his sweeping condemnation of the Zionist Jews is tantamount to a “debauchery” of righteous indignation. Since, however, in so far as it has any relation to the world of facts, the Toynbean judgment is based on the Toynbean premise that the Jews set up a state in Palestine by force of arms, that the immediate reaction to their own experience was “to become persecutors in their turn,” that they acted on “the principle of making the defenseless pay,” it is obvious that Mr. Toynbee badly needs his righteous indignation. No one makes such fanatically wild accusations against others without some inner compulsion. Mr. Toynbee clings to his distortions and to his indignation against the “Zionists” for the sake of his own peace of mind.