Lessons from a disillusioned Zionist

The year 1929 is a crucial one in the history of Zionism and Palestine. For nearly half a century already, the Zionist movement had been establishing settlements in Palestine, under Ottoman and then British rule. Those decades saw some clashes between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs, but the violence remained localised and relatively small in scale: in 1896, a dispute between the colonists of Petah Tikva and their neighbours; in 1908, a brawl between Jewish workers and Arab youths in Jaffa; in 1920, riots in Jerusalem.

The events of August 1929 were different. Over the span of a week, a Palestinian uprising spread across the entire country, killing 133 Jews – at times in gruesome acts of mob violence. They attacked the old Jewish communities of Hebron and Safed, which predated the Zionist movement, and completely destroyed six Zionist colonies. At the same time, British colonial forces and Jewish militias killed 116 Palestinians.

The British colonial authorities later established a commission to investigate the roots of the violence. The commission’s report argued that the fundamental cause of Arab animosity toward the Jews was the "disappointment of [the Arabs’] political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future". 

The report concluded that Arab animosity was due to the fear that "by Jewish immigration and land purchases they may be deprived of their livelihood and in time pass under the political domination of the Jews". In other words, the ambitions of the Zionist movement to promote mass Jewish immigration and take control of as much land in historic Palestine as possible went directly against the aspirations of Palestinian Arabs to have the right to self-determination in their own country.

The intensity and scale of the violence shook the Zionist movement. It was becoming increasingly clear that the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine was going to be a violent process. 

‘The means will have determined the goal’

One Zionist leader who was particularly shaken by the events of 1929 was Hans Kohn. Born in Prague in 1891, Kohn was a devoted Zionist by the age of 17. For a decade, he worked for Jewish and Zionist organisations in Europe, eventually immigrating to Palestine in 1925. There, he became one of the directors of the Palestine Foundation Fund (Keren Hayesod), the financial arm of the World Zionist Organization. 

Even prior to the 1929 uprising, Kohn was critical – and at times uneasy – about the direction of the Zionist movement, seeing it as overly chauvinistic and territorial. In 1928, after hearing the murder of two Arabs by Jews close to his house, a neighbour instructed him to tell the authorities that the murderers were Arabs; shocked, Kohn wrote: “We have degenerated in a horrible way due to our nationalism.” Still, he remained committed to working within the movement to steer it towards a more peaceful path. 

The events of August 1929, however, and the Zionist leadership’s reaction to those events, pushed Kohn over the edge. Just three months after the riots, Kohn wrote a scathing resignation letter to his colleagues at the Palestine Foundation Fund. Still months before the establishment of the British investigative commission into the causes of the uprising, Kohn had already reached the same conclusions. 

“We have been in Palestine for twelve years [i.e., since the Balfour Declaration] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people,” he wrote. “We have been relying exclusively upon Great Britain's military might. We have set ourselves goals which by their very nature had to lead to conflict with the Arabs. We ought to have recognized that these goals would be the cause, the just cause, of a national uprising against us. 

“Having come to this country, we were duty bound to come up with constitutional proposals which, without doing serious harm to Arab rights and liberty, would have also allowed for our free cultural and social development,” Kohn continued. “But for twelve years we pretended that the Arabs did not exist and were glad when we were not reminded of their existence.”

In these circumstances, Palestinian violence – including the more gruesome acts committed during the riots – did not surprise him. “We pretend to be innocent victims," he wrote. “Of course the Arabs attacked us in August. Since they have no armies, they could not obey the rules of war. They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt.” 

Lashing out at the Zionist movement’s inability to learn from the horror and laying his personal disillusionment at the feet of that failure, he went on: “In the midst of this crisis, it was still possible to turn over a new leaf and to adopt a fresh attitude after the shock: to reappraise the moral and spiritual foundations of Zionism and to attempt a new solution. This opportunity has been missed. The overwhelming majority of Zionists feel justified in pursuing a course which I cannot follow.”

A century on, this letter is striking for its foresight. Kohn preempts arguments that continue to be made against any kind of push towards Palestinian self-determination, including that Palestinians today are manipulated by foreign interests – just as the Zionist movement portrayed the 1929 uprising as nothing more than “the wanton agitation of a few big landowners”. Kohn also connects the emerging conflict in Palestine with the attempts by the French and English colonial empires to repress the national movements in India, Egypt and China. 

Just as aptly, Kohn foresaw that by responding to Palestinian grievances with armed force, the Zionist movement would become stuck in a downward spiral of violence and repression from which it would not be able to extricate itself. “I believe that it will be possible for us to hold Palestine and continue to grow for a long time,” his letter continued. “This will be done first with British aid and then later with the help of our own bayonets – shamefully called Haganah [defence] – clearly because we have no faith in our own policy. 

“But by that time we will not be able to do without the bayonets,” he went on. “The means will have determined the goal. Jewish Palestine will no longer have anything of that Zion for which I once put myself on the line.” Almost a century later, Israel remains a militaristic society – that can only fathom responding to Palestinian grievances not with bayonets, but with M16s and F-35s. 

What kind of nation? 

In the decades that followed, as he moved away from Zionism, Kohn became one of the most influential and prolific scholars of nationalism. In his seminal 1944 book The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background, Kohn draws a distinction between two types of nationalism: civic nationalism, based around shared political values, institutions and laws; and ethnic nationalism, based around a shared ethnicity, language or culture. 

Even without having read Kohn, this distinction is familiar to most critics of Zionism. Zionism is an archetypical form of ethnic nationalism, based on the belief that Israel is a Jewish state, i.e. a state for the Jews. By its nature, it is exclusionary of anyone outside of the Jewish group. It does not matter if this Jewish state was established to provide safety to a long-persecuted people or not; it remains ethnocentric. 

Before Israel was born – before the Nakba, military occupation or settlements –  Kohn had put a finger on why Zionism was bound to fail. From the inside of a movement still in its infancy, he described what many anti-Zionist Jews are saying today, and what millions of Palestinians have been saying for a century: that a just peace can only be achieved in the Middle East once Israel sheds ethnic nationalism and embraces civic nationalism – that is, once it becomes a state for all its citizens, not just Jewish ones. 

His resignation from Keren Hayesod was only the first step in Kohn's withdrawal from Zionism. The following year, in 1930, he left Brit Shalom, an organisation he had cofounded five years earlier to advance the idea of a binational, Jewish-Arab state in Palestine; Kohn felt that the group was too eager to compromise with the Zionist leadership and failed to offer a real alternative within Zionism. And in 1934, Kohn left Palestine for the United States, never to return. 

Leaving Zionism was not easy, as Kohn wrote in a letter to his colleagues at Keren Hayesod one month before his resignation: “Today I am almost forty years old, twenty of which – the very best years – I have devoted purely to Zionist work and thought. In a certain sense, thus, I feel orphaned. I also do not know where to begin, and integrating into a new world will not be easy for me.” 

On a more personal level, Kohn's experience will also be relevant to Jews today who may be questioning their relationship with Zionism or their upbringing in the Zionist movement. Even after investing ourselves for decades in a cause, Kohn’s story shows that we retain our freedom to step away. 

Years of work and commitment to a movement do not condemn us to perpetual loyalty, particularly if we realise it to be unjust. Our commitment to justice can always take precedence over what our past selves believed, even if our community – and our loved ones – still believe it. 

But abandoning Zionism needn’t mean abandoning hope. Just as Kohn’s analysis of the Zionist movement’s failures remains prescient, so too does his call for future Jews to forge alternatives. “The old beaten paths of national policy as they were followed by the European peoples in the nineteenth century, the Eastern peoples in the twentieth century, and now by the Jewish people, are for me no longer valid,” he concluded. “We must search for completely new and different paths. Sometimes I still retain a proud hope that the Jews – nationally conscious Jews – might forge these new paths.”

Almost a century later, we are still exploring these new and different paths, but it is starting to feel like we are slowly building – or rebuilding – a Judaism and a Jewish identity outside of Zionism. ▼

Raphael Mimoun is an activist and organiser from France, now based in Los Angeles. He writes about Zionism at One Small Detail, has published on Israel/Palestine in the Washington Post, and has appeared on Al Jazeera and the BBC.