Summary
In David Lloyd’s account, following Jacqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion (2005), the tradition imbuing Zionism beyond its secular European nationalist models: belief in the Jews’ historical destiny to return from the diaspora to Zion, associated with the Messiah’s return and the end of times, which secular Zionism could not repress and which grounds Israel’s claim to a divine or messianic exception (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.6-7 / printed p.64-65).
Details
- Zionism “was also imbued with traditions of messianism, a belief not only in the historical destiny of the Jews both to return from the diaspora to Zion but also in the association of that return with the return of the Messiah and the inauguration of the end of times” (PDF p.6 / printed p.64).
- Rose as quoted: ‘the affinity between Zionism and messianism is too intimate and powerful to have ever been anything other than partially – and finally unsuccessfully – repressed’; even the reference to the secular Herzl as a ‘Moses’ or Messiah of Zionism betrays the interfusion (PDF p.6).
- Its consequences in Lloyd’s account: “an apocalyptic strain of divinely-sanctioned destructive violence whose counterpart is the over-wrought conviction that every conflict involves an existential threat”, and the sanctioning — in religious and secularised versions alike — of ‘a Jewish state for a Jewish people’ and of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians for the ‘ingathering of Jews’ in preparation for the Messiah’s return (PDF p.6-7 / printed p.64-65).
- Its priority in time: “this exceptional conjunction long predates the advent of the Holocaust”, and the ethno-nationalist demand “was rooted in the contradictory formation of Zionism itself”, not in a response to the genocide of Europe’s Jews or a need for sanctuary (PDF p.7 / printed p.65).
- Its institutional result: “the institutions of Israeli secular democracy rest upon the most extreme claim to a divine or messianic exception no longer allowed to any other state in the world” (PDF p.7).
Related pages
Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, Jacqueline Rose, Zionism, State of Exception, Catastrophe Zionism