Breaking up is never easy. But saying goodbye to your old clunky work tools? Well, that's easy. Just repeat after me. It's not me, it's definitely you. You rigid, unfriendly software. It's time to freshen things up with Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. With stunning dashboards, customizable templates, and built-in AI that actually works, switching to a new work platform has never felt this good.
So move on to Monday.com. The land has been thrown into disorder. Are you feeling a touch lost right now? Like global institutions don't work and politicians aren't collaborating to solve the world's most pressing issues. There is this big space of disorder and we're just kind of holding up our hands and going, well, don't know what we could do. then the Disorder Podcast is the right place for you. My name is Jason Pack. I worked in D.C. during the first Trump administration.
lived in Libya during the revolution against Gaddafi, been kidnapped twice in Syria. So it's fair to say that I've lived through just a wee bit of disorder. So I want to work on understanding how did we get to here? Why is the global enduring disorder spreading. And more importantly, how do we restore a semblance of order to our mad, mad, mad, mad world? Democracy has to be defended every single day in a proactive way.
Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hi everyone, my name is Amir Engel and I'm the chair of the German department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I'm currently also a visiting professor at the Theologische Facultet at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Today I'm talking with Derek Penzler about his new book, or relatively new book, Zionism and Emotional State, which came out with Rutgers University Press.
2023. Is this correct? That's right. So Derek, it's wonderful to see you, to have you on the show. Maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are. Introduce yourself first to our listeners. Well, like most historians, I would rather talk about other people than myself. But I teach Jewish history at Harvard. I also direct Harvard Center for Jewish Studies.
I'm an American by birth, a Canadian by choice. Born and raised in California, went to university in California, taught in the States for many years, then wound up in Canada, where I probably spent most of my teaching career at the University of Toronto. Went to Oxford for a while. And here I am at Harvard. I work on Jewish history in a global and comparative context. I was originally a German historian. My PhD was actually in German history from Berkeley.
Back in the day, worked with Jerry Feldman and Marty Jay and Amos von Kestein. So that's where it all started. But I got interested in Jewish history. even as an undergrad to some extent and more so as a graduate student. And my whole career, really, ever since the dissertation, which is now 40 years ago.
I've always tried to look at Zionism and Israel in a global and comparative context, whether it's the context of European history, Middle Eastern history, international history, history of colonialism, economic history, you name it. So the book is called Zionism, an Emotional State, which I thought is a wonderful title. What made you want to write this book? Or what are the circumstances that brought you to write this book? Maybe I should mention that you did write...
You did write also a book on Theodor Herzl not so many years ago. So Zionism and Emotional State, what made you want to write the book? Well, in some ways, the Herzl book led to the emotions book because I was asked by Yale University Press to write a short interpretive biography of Herzl for their series of what's called Jewish Lives.
and i centered it very much around himself as a psychologically complicated troubled human being and his emotional structure was something that really interested me And I hadn't planned really on writing a book after that in the history of emotions, but my curiosity was piqued. And then I was asked by Rutgers to write a book for their series on what they call.
key words in Jewish studies, so books that deal with certain key concepts in Jewish studies. And they wanted me to do one on Zionism. And at first, I was just going to do a kind of straightforward interpretive study. I didn't have a particularly interesting hook. And then, of all places, I was at Oxford at lunch in my college talking to a colleague who works on international relations. And I said, you know, what do you do? And he says, I work on emotion.
in statecraft and in international relations. And I said, is that a thing? Like, I'd never heard of it. And he said, yeah, it is a thing. And I asked him to send me his work. I read his work and... I remember he wrote an essay about American political culture after 9-11. And as I read it, I realized this explained Israel better than anything I'd read about Israel in a long time. So I started reading, you know.
a great curiosity in the literature on the politics and international relations and emotions, and then the history of emotions as a field. I didn't know anything about it, and I was just absolutely fascinated by it. You know, an academic always learns about things by teaching. So I started teaching courses on the history of emotions. And I realized that there is no better way to understand the Zionist project, any kind of political movement, any kind of national movement.
other than through the lens of political emotion. So it was pure serendipity, but that's how it really happened. Here we are. So in the introduction, you write... I'm going to quote a couple of sentences as you write. This book relates the history of Zionism through the lens of emotion. It argues that energy propelling the Zionist project comes from a series of emotional states, bundles of feelings whose
elements vary in volume, intensity, and durability across space and time. So this is what I read quite nicely formulated, but maybe you can parse it a little bit and tell us what you mean by this. Well, again, whenever I talk about... Israel. I always tell my students, if you want to understand Israel, look at everywhere else. So this is a general phenomenon. First, there's the history of emotion in terms of individual emotion, which varies across time and space. It is like all aspects of our...
you know, of our cognition. It is socially constructed. Cognition, any psychologist will tell you cognition and emotion are completely intertwined. You can't, this notion of being either, quote, reasonable or emotional, this is a... This might be a colloquialism, but it doesn't express the way our minds really work. So that's one way of approaching emotion. But what I was interested in, excuse me, is political emotion.
which is emotional states that are generated by and that surround collectives where you as an individual feel that your well-being your desire broadly understood depends upon the well-being and the desire of a collective. It might be a totally imagined collective, like a nation, because as Benedict Anderson famously wrote decades ago, you know, we don't really know all the people in our alleged national community.
But it's a very powerful force in most of our lives. So I was interested in the study of political emotion, again, for national movements, political and social movements throughout the world.
And then, you know, mutandus mutandus, then applying that to the case of Zionism. One of the key concepts in the book, and I think one of my, hopefully, or innovations from a methodological point of view, is that scholars of emotion all too often will write a history of say love or fear or shame i have lots of books on my shelf here with fear in the title scholars like to write about fear but this is not how human beings work
Human beings are like operating systems and computers with many applications running simultaneously. And so we might be feeling a kind of overall contentment. Maybe a bit of anxiety. There might be a tiny bit of guilt or shame. I mean, there could be hundreds of different emotional states that I argue form emotion bundles. And the intensity does vary. You know, in a certain situation, you're going to be very afraid.
In another situation, you might be overwhelmingly joyful. But our emotional structures are quite complicated. And so I try to understand emotion in the book as a bundle. Even though I might focus on a particular emotional structure, I always acknowledge that there's lots of other things at work. And then I trace the different, as it were, emotion bundles.
as they develop over the history of the Zionist project and the State of Israel. So we're going to get in a little bit to these bundles because you discussed it in the second part of the book. But the first... chapter is really kind of an attempt to stage what Zionism is, both historically and conceptually, and you kind of try to draw the context from which, the historical context.
But also you try to make some kind of a novel categorization to what are the subcategories that make up this movement. I want you to tell us a little bit more about that and maybe you can...
I found it quite interesting, this new categorization and also the historical context. What is for you the most important, or not most important, but most interesting, most kind of rewarding aspect of the historical context that you think is... is that you kind of worked through when you did this chapter and what is the most interesting categories that you and you the most the ones that you're most proud of the one that you think are most telling
um in this kind of new attempt to categorize the sub movements within zionism well the way these all of these books in this series that rutgers publishes they they all have a certain common structure that the first chapter kind of lays out
here's the way the field is conceived and then there's a second part that's supposed to lay out here's a problem or a kind of interesting controversial issue and then the third part is supposed to be something new so we'll start with then this first part which is here's what we know so far
So what I do is I lay out, here's how most people define Zionism and here's how most people categorize it. And the problem I have with the existing literature is it uses ways to think about what Zionism is, many of which were actually... developed and employed by the people who were Zionist actors themselves, say, you know, someone like Herzl or Jabotinsky or Ben-Gurion and so forth. And as scholars, it's our obligation to come up with classificatory, you know,
systems, taxonomies, that explain phenomena rather than simply import categories that were invented by our sources. And I think one thing that I've done thereby is the difference between like labor and revisionist Zionism, which featured quite prominently in classical thinking about Zionism, the differences aren't that great.
When you think of the commonality of what I call a transformative Zionism, a Zionism that wants to transform Jews into something fundamentally different. Labor Zionism had its ideals about productivity and work. Revisionist Zionism had its ideals about, well, militarism for some, or just simply cutting a bold and impressive figure. what jabotinsky called hadar which i think is best translated as uh you know in italian this kind of uh strong uh virtuous and so forth um
You know, a lot of people compare revisionists and labor Zionism, arguing that they all had the same military goals and they had the same political goals. I'm saying something else. I'm saying that they were both transformative. They wanted to transform the Jewish people to something else. did there that was useful is to understand that religious Zionism has very different categories. There are forms of religious Zionism that are really based in messianism.
And there are other forms that are based kind of in daily life, simply being in an environment where you can live a Jewish life easily. There is the sense of the sanctity of Eretz Israel, but for the most part, it's actually rather pedestrian. And I talk about a kind of pedestrian orthodox approach to Zionism. I also talk about the more messianic aspects. And maybe the most complicated form of Zionism that I didn't develop as fully as I should have, because the book came out.
I finished writing it in 2022, just as Israel was having its elections that brought... the Jewish Power Party and the Religious Zionism Party, far-right parties, into the coalition. I talked about a form of Zionism that I called Judaic Zionism, which uses the as it were, the symbols and the signs of religious Zionism, but is actually deeply secular and ethnocentric and irredentist. And so it's very different from, say, the...
messianic wing of the settler movement. It's overtly anti-democratic. It's overtly illiberal. And, you know, these qualities, maybe they were present in certain forms of Zionism beforehand, but they were kept under wraps. And there were certain things that were just not considered appropriate to say or to do.
And in German, we talk about something being salonfähig, you know, being kind of worthy of public display. And then just in the last few years, a lot of these elements have come out in full force. And yet it uses symbols of, as in someone like Itamar Ben-Gvir, the head of the Jewish power party, you know, he wears a kippah, he's nominally Orthodox.
But it's a very, very different kind of Zionism than religious Zionism, I think. Even the religious Zionism of the settler movement as it existed, say, in the 20th century. Yes, I think... For me, another one that kind of struck a chord that I never quite thought about but enabled something was this idea of philanthropic Zionism, which I became kind of aware of when I moved to the States to study.
people who are deeply zionist but are somehow also very remote from the state of israel or some strange kind of unfulfilled relation towards israel i thought that was quite interesting Well, it's what one scholar has called perhaps derisively checkbook Zionism, but it's nothing to sneeze at. I mean, it's a form of Jewish ethnic, assertion of Jewish ethnic identity.
and its identification with Israel in two contradictory ways that are both involved with familial emotion. One is the sense of Israel as the vulnerable child. You know, we are the safe, secure... American Jews. Israel is a small state surrounded by enemies. It needs our support. It needs our help and so forth. So that's Israel as the vulnerable child. But there's also Israel as the really sexy cool big brother.
Israel is the one who knows how to take care of bullies. Israel is the one who will have my back. Israel is the one who I will turn to when I have with God forbid I have a real problem. Israel will always be there for me. And I will always be there for Israel. So this kind of... as opposed to a parental relationship it's much more of a sibling relationship and one that is quite adoring and this is but in both cases whether it's parental or sibling based it is it assumes difference
profound difference between, let's say, the Jew in North America and the Jew in Israel. And it's something that a sociologist named Danny Leiner Voss wrote about many years ago about how American Zionism depends on that sense. of difference, because then that is what enables awe, the feeling of awe at the state of Israel. You know, American Jews don't feel awe at the city of Los Angeles.
Shaker Heights or Highland Park, Illinois. But Israel fills them with awe. It's different, and yet it is somehow intensely familiar. And that dissonance, it's delicious. It's inspiring and it arouses feelings really of awe. So that, yeah, that's very powerful. So yes, it involves giving money and, you know. second-order activism, and yet, and yet, it's very serious and very powerful. Yeah, I completely agree. So, in the second chapter, as you mentioned, discusses a problem.
And the problem has become even more problematic over the last couple of years, and that is the relationship between Zionism and colonialism. This has been, I mean... debated ad nauseum somehow on the press in the last year or so. But I think you try to make a kind of an interesting argument, correctly if I'm wrong, but if I understood correctly,
There are some aspects under which it is useful to think of Zionism within the paradigm of colonialism. Some aspect is not useful. Did I understand this correctly? Yeah. I mean, to me, this is just common sense that.
he writes our state will be a bastion of civilization in the face of barbarism he works with european leaders to try to gain their support for what would be essentially a western toehold in the middle east hertzel privately or not privately but in his non zionist writings wrote glowingly about colonialism Okay. The bank, the Zionist bank in the early 20th century, the ancestor of Bank Lumi, was called the Jewish Colonial Trust. The Zionist movement was full of people who opened openly.
proudly, excitedly about colonialism. They believed that Zionism was part of a European mission and, you know, this was fine. They had no qualms about it whatsoever. Clearly, the relationship then between Zionism and Britain was a classic colonial relationship. The British provide... opportunity, protection, and so forth. And at least for the British, they hoped that the Zionists would be useful for them in their grander imperial strategy from the Suez Canal to India.
It's a colonial relationship. So, and attitudes that Zionists or Jews in Palestine had towards Arabs. Whether it's a kind of noble savage admiration or whether it's scorn or contempt, I mean, these are classic colonial attitudes. However, number one, one thing I mentioned in the chapter that I think is really important is that...
Settler colonialism is a global phenomenon. It's not just Europeans. It happens everywhere in the world. And the Ottoman Empire had its colonialist dimensions and Egypt had its historic colonial attitudes towards Sudan. And so to say that Zionism is, you know, a settler colonial enterprise is basically saying it's part of the world. And so, you know, this happens everywhere. It happens to this day. As I tell my students, the most...
spectacular case of settlement colonialism in history was in Kazakhstan. You know, the Soviet Union, like a third of the people of Kazakhstan died, millions of people. So this is the world. Now, Zionism has that quality. And of course, that quality is embodied in particularly since 1967 and colonization of the West Bank and so forth. But also, the Jews are historically an oppressed people.
to use post-colonial language, a colonized people. And they were seeking agency and self-emancipation, to quote Lev Pinsker.
and in many ways they saw themselves as and they were perceived by others as anti-colonial freedom fighters it wasn't just the zionists who used that term in africa in the nineteen fifties and sixties israel was the darling of a number of sub-Saharan African states as a kind of symbol of a post-colonial state that had beaten the British and had established independence and was now making its own way.
developing agriculture and technology and so forth. Israel was a kind of a post-colonial model until the 1967 war. And then there was a great deal of hostility towards Israel and the Palestinian cause. became politically much more powerful than it had been so i'm just saying that to me it just seems like common sense that of course zionism is in some ways a settler colonial enterprise in some ways
It's an anti-colonial law. And in some ways, Israel's a post-colonial state. And to the extent it is settler-colonial, fine. Settler-colonialism has happened all over the world. And people who draw... I think people can draw mistaken conclusions from associating Israel with settler colonialism. They might say, oh, well, Algeria was a settler colonial state under France and the Algerian Muslims drove them out.
or south africa was a settler colonial state under white rule and we can therefore put an end to israeli supremacy well maybe maybe not the conditions of israel's production the nature of jewish history The trauma of the Holocaust, which is the, you know, 50 megaton bomb of history in terms of its long-term impact. Simply saying that Israel's colonial only explains so much. It also doesn't really explain future scenarios if and how various forms of occupation can be combated or ended.
A lot of this, I think, is just political sloganeering rather than serious scholarly analysis. The next chapter, you turn to what I think is the heart of the book, which is the emotional history of Zionism.
and you write emotions such as love pride and the desire for honor were also present in jewish politics and future-oriented emotion such as yearning and hope formed the base of socialist movements including but dionism would distinct in the prominence of passionate embodied love and the interweaving of territory with collective solidarity help us out here i mean
Oh, you're right. The third part of the book, which has four chapters and each chapter deals with an emotion bundle. So the first chapter focuses on, say, the 1870s to 1948. That's a big, big period in one chapter. And the emotion bundle is broadly understood as positive attachment, love. But I deconstruct love because love can mean a million different things. I'm talking about.
in a way, an idealized sentimental love. I mean, you think about the term hibation, which described the very first... jewish zionist organizations they didn't use the word zionist the word hadn't been invented yet but they called themselves lovers of zion and what does the word It is love, but it's a very specific kind of love. It's a cherishing. It's something you hold dear. It's sentimental love.
And after all, this is the 1870s and 1880s. This is an era of sentimentality. And so that kind of... love of the land of israel really is what inspires the very beginnings of the zionist movement and then it becomes more sensual and erotic and embodied with the early twentieth century
The so-called Halutsim were pioneers from Eastern Europe celebrating productive labor, transforming themselves and the land, developing the first communal settlements and so forth, and literally transforming their bodies. bronze, tanned, muscular, this sort of thing. The very first book I ever read in Hebrew was a gift from my kibbutz family when I lived as a young man on a kibbutz. And it was a biography of one of the founders of Hashomer.
the first militias that were guard association of guards and in in ottoman palestine and i still remember i remember the nikud in the chapter because it was a kid's book and it was a man who knows how to make use of repair but also make use of yeah weapons you know guns this is So that's a very different kind of love and the love of the second aliyah haludzim for the soil, a passionate, erotic love. And then for Jews the world over, a kind of erotic admiration.
of the new Jewish body. And this is something which the late Boaz Neumann wrote about so beautifully. Brilliant, brilliant German historian at Tel Aviv University who died for two. Far too young. Did you study with him or did you? No, I was at Jerusalem, but I knew his work and I knew him a little bit. Yeah, that's right. And also you were at Stanford, my friend.
that that kind of love and then as the chapter moves on and then explore a third kind of the 1948 love which is solidarity and solidarity is a little bit less passionate right solidarity assumes a sense of commonality and common purpose. But as I said earlier, there's also some distance. I mean, Jews in America were, over half of them had been born in Eastern Europe in the 1940s. For most of them, Yiddish was a native language. They were very close to European Jewry.
They felt some, most of them felt some connection with the Zionist project. There were opponents, obviously, opponents of Zionism. It only became a mass movement during the 1940s. But when it did become a mass movement in the 40s during the Holocaust, the overwhelming emotion was one of solidarity. And it wasn't necessarily solidarity with Israel per se.
or solidarity with what's called the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. It was solidarity with the Jews in Europe. It was solidarity with Holocaust survivors, with people in the displaced persons camps after the war. And because emotions are bundled... and not separate it was solidarity laced with guilt survivor guilt that american jews had made it through the war and two-thirds of the jews of europe hadn't so when you look at the
fundraising literature and the fundraising projects the philanthropic zionism we mentioned earlier the overwhelming emphasis was not on the tanned heroic bodies of jews in the land of israel It was on getting Holocaust survivors to a new home, giving them hope, giving them new lives, and not bringing them for the most part to America.
There were immigration restrictions. There were fears of anti-Semitism. There were a lot of reasons. So the overwhelming emphasis is give these Holocaust survivors a new home in the Jewish state. where they will become bronzed and strong and proud and all of that. So it is vicarious. It is... based on solidarity rather than complete identification, and there's no small undercurrent of guilt.
This reminds me of two kind of famous historical moments. One is Hans Kohn, who is a German Jew, who is a Zionist activist. You know, Adi Golden wrote a book, A Biography in Intellectobiography, and the title of the book is It is but a broken heart or something of the sort. And it refers to a moment where Hans Kohn decides that the Jewish issue in Palestine is unsalvable and he leaves to the United States to pursue his career.
So it's kind of heartbroken. It's like a relationship that ended up badly. Yeah, well, you know, relationships don't always work out. And something I write about in that chapter is that really powerful embodied erotic love.
could lead to profound disappointment and disappointment can lead to despair and despair means as in french the loss of hope right the lack of hope and then you and and you give up i mean there's the the famous case at the bethanya commune of hashomer hadzair a particularly idealistic um a zionist faction of the labor movement in which the emotional intensity of the group actually led to madness and at least in one famous case to suicide
There was a member of that group who shot himself to death with a copy of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov at his side, opened to the chapter, The Grand Inquisitor. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. So, yeah, they could feel very powerful disappointment, frustration, despair, because the higher your hopes, the more you can crash. Yeah, but also it kind of maintains through life. People feel this broken heart for many, many years.
Just one more short example, and that is, of course, the famous letter that Geshu Sholem writes on Arendt after the Eichmann trial or after the report on the Eichmann trial. And he writes with her dismissively.
you know maybe you make some some important points but how could you how could you i mean you you lack of you lack the love right and then you know the famous response that i love i love people will not you know peoples or the people and yet in real life many human beings not all but human beings tend to love or have feelings of very deep attachment and solidarity for collectives
And I would even argue that Hannah Arendt's really nasty remarks come from the same kind of sense of disappointment more than the tzatzis. The next chapter is devoted to Zionism since 1948.
creation of the state of israel and it has the title subtitle a great romance then you write the relationship between post-48 jewry and israel may be described as as a romance in simplest form it is the love of zion with possessive and erotic element yet on another level it is a romance in the shakespearian sense of the word it is a tale of great quests and adventures neither wholly tragic nor comic in which extraordinary miraculous events brings about
unification of loved ones across great distances and the worst designs of evil-doers are foiled yet lost on sorrow and never completely absent wonderful maybe you can take us through some of A couple of kind of highs and lows in this exterior and tail of love about jury, world jury in Israel after 1948. I think that the feelings of love...
that, as I said, had been relatively distant solidarity, mutate, particularly in the 1960s, when diaspora Jews don't just love Israel, they fall in love with Israel. And love turns into infatuation.
And, you know, you see this already in the 1958 novel Exodus, written by Leon Uris, which was, sure, it was a bestseller across the English-speaking world. Jews, and I actually, I have a student who went and like looked at the reception history of exodus you know the jewish jewish world loved that book because it presented israel in such a positive light and it presented the main character ari ben canaan as the kind of hunky
sabra i mean he's not a sabra but in any case he's he is the ultimate israeli macho figure and and and in true diasporic and also Israeli, I think, idealization of the new Israeli body. Ari Ben Kanan is also sensitive. He's soulful, right? Underneath the tough exterior is the soft interior. You know, the kind of proverbial Sabra. I think I describe him in the book somewhere as Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester, but with a stand gun. You know, this kind of tragic, deep, melancholic figure.
But the feeling of infatuation became very clear all over the Jewish world after the 67 war, after Israel's victory. the identification with Israel, the incorporation of Israel into school curricula, making Israel central to Jewish synagogue life, and largely centered around the... again the kind of love of the impetuous young israeli state of israel embodied in its beautiful that word shows up over and over again its beautiful people its beautiful women its handsome men and so forth however
However, there's more to it than that. Israel continues to feel threatened. There's the war of attrition. There's the 1973 war, which once again... brings diaspora jews to mobilize to give large amounts of money but also to be genuinely afraid genuinely fearful and terrified for israel's very existence And concomitantly with in the 1970s in the United States, the rise of third world identities and in the United States, the black power movement and a lot of forces that are critical of Israel.
and the condemnation of Israel and the United Nations in a number of settings, culminating in 1975 in the notorious Zionism as Racism Resolution. All of these things instill into a lot of American Jews feelings of profound anxiety and worry. about Israel, but also about themselves. And that's one of the things I'm arguing in the chapter is that infatuation with Israel, that love of Israel, that all-consuming love was really a way for American Jews, and I think also Canadian Jews.
even more so because they were even more closely tied to Europe being a newer community. It really gave them a sense of identity. The same thing was true for Jews in Australia. Jews in France who were much closer to the Middle East, so many of them of Middle East origin, identified so powerfully with Israel. And the sense that Israel is like the salvation of the Jewish people,
And yet diaspora Jews have an obligation to protect Israel. All of those things were present in the third chapter, as it were, but they become much stronger as you get into the 1960s, 70s, 80s. Again, infatuation, erotic love, and it only begins to fade. In the 90s, as Israel becomes a first world country, it becomes economically much more prosperous. And then, as it were, grapefruit nation or citrus fruit nation becomes startup nation. And Israel develops a whole new kind of cool.
It's not the cool of the kibbutz and the sexy kibbutznik. It's the cool of Tel Aviv and the sexy nightlife of Tel Aviv. So that...
notion of Israel as sort of representing the fulfillment of Jewish desire in all kinds of ways. It survives into the 21st century. Then... come the real challenges that i argue towards the end of the chapter that in that world where israel is so loved there are certain feeling rules to use a term coined by the sociologist arlie hochchild there are certain feeling rules of ways you are allowed to and not allowed to speak about israel emotionally in the jewish public community
And you have to express love of Israel. And even if you say something critical of Israel, it has to be from love. And then what happens, especially with the Second Intifada and beyond, is you get more and more voices in Jewish communities all over the world that are troubled by Israel. And then the argument is, well, you don't love Israel. And then the critics are saying, no, no, we do love Israel.
Or then you get the critics who are, as it were, beyond the Jewish conventional pale, like Jewish Voices for Peace, who abandon any pretense of saying they love Israel. So the language of love becomes much more disputed. much more contentious in the early 21st century. And that's where we are now, where the whole concept of loving Israel, yes, there are people who still adhere to that completely, but it's much more problematic, especially for younger people.
younger Jewish people than it was say 30 years ago. In my imagination, following the discussion of American Jewry about Israel from afar, it seems that Peter Beinart is kind of a figure. who kind of symbolizes a breaking point because, but correct me if I'm mistaken, he seemed to have been saying, hey, Israel, you should take a look at what's going on here with the younger generation of Jewish growing up. And then he said, oh, well, it's too late.
Can you say a few words about about this kind of discussion? Is it a generational thing or what is the role of the generational issue within this kind of public? Yeah, well, Peter is both an analyst of the issue and a primary source. because he first wrote an article about this phenomenon 12 years ago. And I think it has increased quite a bit in the last dozen years.
So what happened is originally it was some Jewish students at places like Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, very elite schools. I still think that the vast majority of Americans...
believe there should be a Jewish state. A vast majority of Americans are emotionally attached to Israel. Public opinion polls show that. But clearly, among North American Jews, to a lesser extent, Canadian Jews, Australian Jews, French Jews, but to particularly the United States, which is the world's largest diaspora Jewish community, there's definitely been a process of emotional cooling by people under the age of 35 towards Israel.
And it's accelerating, so far as I can tell. The events of the last year and a half have, I'd say, accelerated that process, but it was already well underway. And part of it has to do with embarrassment or discomfort about or shame about Israel's own actions in Gaza. A lot of it, though, is just because these are young people who not only do they have no memory. of Israel as an embattled state. Their parents have no memory of Israel as an embattled state.
When you grow up in a completely different environment from the people who had memories of 48 or 67 or 73, I mean, these young people are living in an entirely different world now. So they view Israel in a totally different way. And what I find my own students are doing is they're groping towards new forms of Jewishness in which Israel, it's not that they're hostile necessarily to Israel. They're just looking for something else.
So the Zionism slash anti-Zionism dichotomy is actually not terribly helpful. It's not that what I call Peter Beinart's kids, that is the kind of people he writes about in his book. It's not that they're all becoming anti-Zionist activists. Some are. You know, at Harvard, we had a fair number of Jewish students in our pro-Palestinian encampment, and same is true at other universities. But I'm finding much more what I would call anti-Zionist curious, Zionist adjacent,
or what my daughter said many years ago, Zionish. There's a lot of questioning. With that questioning comes a decline of the infatuation, the solidarity, that very powerful feeling of love. There's still a connection. But it's more attenuated, much more attenuated. Now, still, even today, I mean, large numbers of younger North American Jews are attached to Israel, and not every American Jewish kid goes to Harvard, Yale, Princeton.
I do think the phenomenon is, it is accelerating. And in that sense, although I wasn't sure about Peter's argument in 2013, I think it's becoming more clear now in 2025 that he was really onto something. Interesting. I want to pick up on something you said earlier very quickly. You talked about the citrus Israel. Do you have anything?
to say about this kind of symbol of Israeli infatuation and the, I mean, for me, it's an orange, but I don't know. I didn't see anything in the book, but maybe I've missed it. Maybe I read over it. Or maybe you have some thoughts about this. How does this play into this whole infatuation story? Well, it begins in Israel itself. So one could argue that the term post-Zionism, which is often ascribed to the 1990s and to the Oslo era.
and to certain left-wing intellectuals who wanted to see Israel become a, quote, normal democratic state, you know, like the United States. Well, the less said about that, the better. The fact is, the term post-Zionism was coined already in the 1940s. It was used by people on the right wing, like Ari Jabotinsky, Jabotinsky's son, or what was his name? Hillel Cooke.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Cook's son wrote about how, you know, the state of Israel has been created. He writes this in 48. He says, we're now in the era of post-Zionism. If you want to come and be part of Israel, you're welcome. And if not, we're done with you. Goodbye. So that kind of post-Zionism actually goes back pretty far, but a different kind of post-Zionism in the sense that Zionism is no longer revolutionary.
it's no longer going to transform the jewish people that goes back to the late seventies that goes back to the mahapach the election of nineteen seventy seven where labor was thrown out menachem vegan came into power this very in some ways stereotypical diaspora jew
And, you know, the idea of Zionism as a revolutionary movement, socially or economically, that all began to go into abeyance, you know, already in the 1980s, certainly in the 1990s. Israel became, I mentioned, it became much more prosperous. the 1990s this is when fdi foreign direct investment began to pour into israel american jewish philanthropists began to worry that israel no longer needed their money
Because as one philanthropist said, well, we should just like give the money to them, even if they burn it, because it's the act of giving money that keeps us Jewish, right? The philanthropic Zionism. So Israel. lost its orange you know citrus zionism orange zionism the orange symbolizing of course nature agriculture the return to the soil romance the romance of the return to the soil the new jew
simplicity, authenticity, all of that was what was symbolized by the orange. They also taste good. And so, yeah, I mentioned the book. This gets replaced then by Startup Nation. which is a very different kind of emotion bundle. So yeah, that change happens already in the later 20th century. The last chapter of the book, it zooms out a little bit. It addresses the relationship between Zionism from its inception. So it goes also back in time a little bit.
by the international community. So the international community and Zionism. And it aims to set the history of this relationship under the emotional framework of gratitude and betrayal. So my question is, obviously, What are we talking about? How is it different than the Jewish? What are the feelings? Why is it interesting for us to learn about the history of Zionism through betrayal? I'm sorry, gratitude and betrayal from this perspective.
So I have to admit, so this is the penultimate chapter. It's the fifth chapter of the book. I have to admit, this is by far my favorite chapter. I think it's the most sophisticated because it uses a framework from international relations about notions of diplomacy of sympathy or diplomacy of frustration, these kind of public displays of emotion and the role they play in international relations.
And the fact is that the Zionist movement from the beginning was dependent upon great powers. We talked about that earlier. So you have a relationship of dependence, which leads to gratitude. Gratitude, especially towards Britain. during the late nineteen teens nineteen twenties but what happens when the party to whom you owe gratitude as a small player in the international community as a state-seeking actor what happens when your patron behaves in ways you don't like
then you feel betrayed because you can only be betrayed by a friend. You can't be betrayed by a stranger. The very nature of the concept of betrayal.
And I trace in the chapter how the Zionist movement's anger against Britain in the 1930s and 40s and so forth is based on its fundamental weakness, its dependence, which leads to... both expressions of gratitude and betrayal and i show how after nineteen forty eight and its relations with the united states there's been the same oscillation between gratitude and betrayal but as israel has grown more and more independent and stronger and stronger the intensity of that language has decreased
Israel, simply put, expects less from the world than it used to. It is deeply distrustful. And so it's less grateful. And it's less likely to feel betrayed. And I should just mention that this concept of betrayal, I'm now working it into a side research project, not a major book. That's something else I'm doing, but really on... the experience of American Jews and universities in the last couple of years. So I've just written a paper on Jews, universities, and the discourse of betrayal.
so the sense that quote harvard betrayed its jews or columbia betrayed its jews that there was such a feeling of identification and gratitude You know, and then what happens when that bond is broken? So for IR people, people in international relations, that's, I think that's the chapter to read. Fascinating. So this kind of culminates the book and it offers a new perspective.
Maybe you could tell us what are you working on now? Well, there's actually a final chapter on hatred. Oh, tell us. I'm sorry. I must have overlooked this. This is funny because usually, I mean, whenever I talk about the book, the chapter that people read, the one chapter that people read in the book. And that's assigned in classes is the chapter on hatred. Because this is what, you know, people are attracted to. And it's timely because the chapter deals with both hatred of Zionism.
And the question that has now become, you know, just universal of the relationship between hating Jews and hating Israel. So how do anti-Semites become anti-Zionists? How do anti-Zionists become anti-Semites? What's the overlap? What's the distinction? All of that. And then I look at how Zionism itself, like any national movement, Zionism, of course, can develop hatred of its own. And how Zionism and the state of Israel both developed certain forms of hatred, tried to suppress it.
particularly in the state of israel's early decades where hatred of arabs was regardless of what people felt inside their hearts it was not publicly tolerated it could not be publicly expressed instead you use the language of You know, the Arab minority in the state of Israel, good relations. I mean, there was this whole language that in some ways was euphemistic and misleading.
I think public language matters. And I mentioned earlier how in the 2000s, that language fell aside in favor of a much more hostile language towards Palestinians outside of the state of Israel, Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel. So the section of that chapter about Zionism is called When Zionism...
begins to hate, which is actually taken from a book written by a guy named Brian Porter called When Nationalism Begins to Hate. And it's a book about Poland in the early 20th century. So I use his framework and apply it to Zionism in Israel. So, you know, I begin with love and I end with hate, which in a way is kind of sad, although in the conclusion of the book, then I talk about hope.
But I kind of subvert the reader because I criticize Hope. Following Hannah Arendt, I actually criticize Hope as a form of escape. Because if you're just hoping and hoping, you don't have to do anything. You just wait for things to get better. And I actually invoke, instead of hope, I invoke resolve, determination, perseverance.
resilience these are the emotions ultimately that made the zionist project possible that made the creation of the state of israel possible and that i believe could again if divested from hatred could lead the state of Israel to a very positive and very different direction from the one that is taken. So I do try to end the book on at least a slightly positive note.
Can you say a few more words about what you think is a decisive moment in the kind of eruption of hate onto the public sphere where it's suddenly allowed to speak? Oh, sure, sure. The second intifada. 2000 to 2005. It is the source of Israel as we know it now. I mean, the young people who voted for Ben Gvir, the soldiers who voted for Ben Gvir in 2022 were born during the Second Intifada.
The Second Intifada fundamentally changed Israeli political culture. And it made possible, on the one hand, a kind of an attempt to rid Israel of the Palestinian issue through the unilateral... disengagement from Gaza, which was, this was an initiative that was not going to work well or end well, and it didn't. And then it leads a few years later to the now perpetual prime ministership of Benjamin Netanyahu. and the scotching of the possibilities of Palestinian statehood, the ongoing seething.
conflict with Hamas and now the last year and a half of warfare and bombardment. So the second intifat is the key point. for understanding the, as it were, intrusion of, or I'd say domination, of a discourse of hatred into the state of Israel. Of course, we're not going to speak about the future because... We're historians, but it seems that Israel is kind of at the eye of the storm right now with all these very strong emotions around it and very powerful discourse, extremely loaded language.
And the last few days, we've seen President Trump kind of ignore Israel on the international stage, coming to the Gulf without taking seriously Netanyahu. If I think about your proposal to think about Zionism and the history of Zionism and the history of Israel through these lens of emotions, I fear there is a chance that Israel will be...
unimportant emotionally, will lose its emotional stronghold in the hearts of people in the United States, in Europe, in other places. What do you think about that? Well, I think that... There is no sliver of territory on the planet that is more emotionally volcanic than the state of Israel, or to be more accurate, Israel-Palestine. You know, that this little strip, which is, you know, the...
Smaller than Kruger National Park in South Africa. The size of Wales. Everybody finds a way of talking about how small it is. The size of New Jersey. It's also, by the way, about the size of Massachusetts. No one ever mentions that. See? Now, the feelings vary. That is, the feelings of spiritual and emotional connection with the Palestinians, with Palestine as a waqf, as an Islamic.
as it were charitable trust christian conceptions of palestine as a holy land terra sancta obviously the jewish conceptions that go back even further because for both christians and Muslims, really the concept of holy land is largely from around the beginning of the second millennium. For Jews, it goes back further. This is very powerful, and this will never go away.
And I think as long as humanity is humanity, this sliver of territory will be the most emotionally volcanic on the planet. However, the emotional attachments to the state of Israel as such are quite variable. Just as they are with the Palestinians. I mean, how many people in the world outside of, say, the Arab world, how many people were deeply invested in the fate of the Palestinians in the 1950s?
The 60s, not many. And then it changed. It changed particularly after the 67 war. Israel was the darling of the Western world. in the 1950s and 60s. It was a model of socialism, a model of development, a model of all kinds of things. And then Israel began to fall into ill repute. These things are all changeable. So I don't think that...
that love of Israel in the eyes of the international community will be transformed into indifference towards Israel. Love of Israel can turn into frustration, anger, hostility, hatred of Israel. But I think that Israel will continue to be an object of very strong emotion, negative or positive. And the same thing is true for the Palestinians. So, you know, indifference.
for good or for bad. And difference is not something I see on the horizon. On the cards. Yeah. Thank you so much. Tell us a little bit about your current project. Oh, well, I'm writing a book that in some ways... unintentionally grows out of this one. It's called The War for Palestine, A Global History, 1947-1949. It's a global history of the 1948 war.
The argument being that when the post-war order was reconfigured, you know, after 1945, Palestine just happened to be caught up in, as it were, a web of... overlapping forces, decline of imperial power, decolonization, the early Cold War, you name it. And so what happened is that the Palestine issue, which had certainly been important before 1948,
The League of Nations had dealt with this issue. But in 1947-48, even before the Nakba, even before Israel's creation, Palestine became the most important diplomatic... question in the world. And that's what it was called. They always referred to the Palestine question. And it's not just that the United Nations devoted a lot of attention to it, which I'll write about.
It also became central in individual countries' foreign policies. Everybody had to form a policy about Israel-Palestine, even countries like India, Pakistan, newly formed countries like that, or China. So it's a truly global history. on one level about state policy. But then, and this is what relates the book to my last book, it's also very much about public opinion. And there it's very much about emotion. So I'm looking at journalism, novels.
nonfiction books uh pamphlets social organizations that just all over the world that sprung up to make statements about law before one side or the other in the War of 1948. And you simply don't find that level of mobilization, emotional mobilization for, say, I don't know, the Indonesian War of Independence against the Netherlands or something, or the Greek Civil War. I mean, it's just different.
And so it's a big project, you know, many archives all over the world, many languages, but I'm having huge fun with it. And I've just published a couple of smaller things, what they call in Hebrew, or like unripe fruit, first fruits. And I'm hoping next year to write the book. Wonderful. So maybe we get to speak again about the new book in a few, well, a year or two. Okay, thanks so much. We were talking with Derek Pencer about his not so recent, but quite recent still,
book, Zionism and Emotional State. Derek, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Amir. It was a pleasure.