Another Zionism: Hugo Bergmann's Circumscription of Spiritual Territory

Abstract

From the perspective of outside observers, whether sympathetic to the State of Israel or to the proto-state of Palestinian Arabs (or both), the central issue at stake in Israeli politics is condensed into a single formula: Land for Peace, or No Land for Peace. The question of such an exchange has been at the centre of debates over Zionist ideology and Near Eastern politics at least since the Israeli occupation in 1967. But the figure of land or 'territory' was obviously a central one in Zionist discourses before the 1967 war hence the valence of the term 'Ha-Eretz Yisrael' (often translated as 'the whole land of Israel', as opposed to that circumscribed by the boundaries of the State), or the specious motto of early Zionism, 'The Land without People to the People without [a] Land'. These two examples point to a tension within early Zionism, however, in spite of the shared focus on territory: the latter smacks of the secular-nationalist and pragmatic Zionism of Theodor Herzl, the dominant strain of early Zionism, while the former links the political-territorial question to a religious legitimation rooted in the spiritual connection of the 'chosen people' to the 'promised land', to the historic borders of a lost spiritual community. No study of early Zionism could hope to explain either the Arab-Israeli conflict or contemporary inner-Israeli politics, both of which look quite different from how they looked half a century ago and more. And yet some exploration of the rhetoric of territory and spirituality in Zionist writing of the first decades of this century remains relevant to a set of problems circulating around notions of spiritual communality and territoriality. The discursive tension between the two mottos above, for instance, would appear to live on in the current struggle within Israel between so-called secular and religious Jewish citizens. As a Jerusalem graffito represents the conflict, 'The Land of Israel without [Orthodox Jewish Law] is like a Body without a Soul'. How can intellectual history help us understand the complex mutual insinuation of figures of spirit and territory in Zionist discourse? A somewhat conventional strategy would be to trace the genealogy of contemporary Zionism from its early secular forms through its more recent appropriation by religious settlers of the West Bank and Gaza, but such a strategy necessarily privileges certain Zionisms over others, and tends to reify one set of ideas and even policies as a univocal, if shifting, Zionism. The fact that Zionism was, from its inception, not a unified ideology but a site of ideological contest is rarely examined, and even more rarely considered to be of any contemporary