We’ve heard of anti-Zionism, but what is counter-Zionism? In this review of Shaul Magid’s latest book, The Necessity of Exile, Abraham Zuraw questions the relevance of a certain Jewish-American modality of criticism of Israel, which is articulated in the name of a metaphysics of exile and whose consistency is difficult to grasp.
Over three days in May 1942, David Ben-Gurion negotiated with American Jewish leaders at the Biltmore Hotel in New York. That week, “The trajectory of American Zionism changed its course,” writes Magid. He does not refer to the Biltmore Program, the joint statement produced at the conference calling for a sovereign Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine (earlier Zionist conferences proposed the more ambiguous “national home”), but to a side agreement, that the Yishuv would consider American Jews to live in “diaspora” (Golah) instead of “exile” (Galut).
For Magid, exile is a necessary ingredient for Jewish existence. The Zionist “negation of exile” (Shlilat hagalut) is the source of all that has gone wrong since Biltmore, a thread that runs from the Nakba through Gush Emunim to Israel’s quasi-permanent occupation of the West Bank today.
Counter-Zionism is not a politics that works against Zionism. It is a Judaism that forbids politics as such, the pursuit of collective, material interests on a definite horizon.
Magid may overemphasize the Biltmore Conference. After all, in 1942 exile was negated in a murderously concrete sense across Europe. But Magid sees Jewish history as a series of covenants made and broken. At Biltmore, the Jews broke their covenant with God, their “exilic covenant,” and made one with history. Instead of being a light unto the nations, they became a nation like all others. If Jewish ethics emerge from exile, goes Magid’s deductive mechanism, the negation of exile entails the negation of Jewish ethics, which are replaced by national chauvinism. This framework excludes material, social or political contingencies from accounting for Israel’s trajectory. Naturally, conflicting Arab and Jewish aspirations require a metaphysical solution, a Peter Beinart-flavored menu of “reflecting,” “rethinking” and “reckoning” Magid calls counter-Zionism.
Counter-Zionism “reappropriates exile as productive motif for rebuilding a humble and
non-proprietary Jewish relationship to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” If counter-Zionism shares the anti-Zionist objection to Jewish sovereignty, its aims are eschatological, not political. By giving up their nation-state, the Jews might perform a “messianic act.” The Necessity of Exile is not a one-state manifesto, because counter-Zionism is not a politics that works against Zionism. It is a Judaism that forbids politics as such, the pursuit of collective, material interests on a definite horizon.
Counter-Zionism separates exile from diaspora. Diaspora is the geographic expression, exile the transcendent “way of being.” This body-soul distinction creates the possibility of a Jewish presence in the Land consistent with exile’s moral imperative, an “exile in the Land.” In a reversal of Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism, Israel would import the moral framework of exile from the diaspora. But what is exile divorced from its geographic sense, other than a bland do unto others? Magid’s is an exile from nowhere. Unmoored from its rooted, place-based reference, it loses the particularity that makes Zion and Babylon compelling metaphors, places that allude to ideas and ideas that allude to places, but not fully either.
Exile is not, then, a memory from which to draw, but an essential Jewish quality. Like the Wandering Jew, Magid’s homo exilicus is a foreigner by nature, at least until the messiah arrives.
Magid’s disembodied exile has darker implications, too. The levitical commandment to remember that you were once foreigners living in the land of Egypt bounds Jewish foreignness in place “Egypt,” and time, “once.” Magid’s exile, by contrast, is existential: “if we understand the birth of the Israelite people through their experience of servitude in Egypt, oppression is the very foundation upon which Jewish identity is founded.” Exile is not, then, a memory from which to draw, but an essential Jewish quality. Like the Wandering Jew, Magid’s homo exilicus is a foreigner by nature, at least until the messiah arrives.
What accounts for Magid’s messianism? Perhaps it stems from a kind of alienation. As the subtitle “Essays from a Distance” suggests, The Necessity of Exile is about perspective, namely an American Jewish one on Israel. American Jews live at the center of a global metropole, but when it comes to Jewish identity, they find themselves staring at Israel from the periphery and defining their politics in relation to it. Counter, anti, right, left, post…the proliferation of Zionisms shows how inescapably current, even fruitful the Zionist idea remains. In this context, Magid’s counter-Zionism is less revolutionary than countercultural, a self-conscious, symbolic orientation away from the Hebrew metropole. Magid can reject Zionism, but he cannot escape its orbit.
Magid finished The Necessity of Exile shortly before October 7, but the events of that day loom over it. For one, October 7 dominates the book’s critical reception. The review in Haaretz, published in December, begins “Exactly two months after the October 7 massacre…” In The New York Times, Magid is part of a “charged moment.” Events on the ground, in Israel, have engulfed him. “One cannot write, one cannot even think, about Israel without confronting the horrific day of October 7, 2023, and its increasingly horrifying aftermath,” he wrote after the attack. Except through no fault of his own, Magid has become the aftermath. From a distance, The Necessity of Exile may read as a primary source from within exile’s negation.
Abraham Zuraw
