Video: Zionism: An Emotional State

In Zionism: An Emotional State, author Derek J. Penslar demonstrated how the energy propelling the Zionist project originates from bundles of feeling whose elements have varied in volume, intensity, and durability across space and time. Penslar examined the emotions that have shaped Zionist sensibilities and practices throughout the movement’s history.

Featuring Derek J. Penslar, William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University

Moderated by Shaul Magid, HDS Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies

This event took place on November 4, 2024.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Zionism, An Emotional State, November 4, 2024.

DIANE MOORE: Full title-- Zionism-- An Emotional State, that alone should just win you a Pulitzer, I think. It's perfect. I'm Diane Moore. I am the Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life. And it's our pleasure to sponsor this event.

Before I introduce Derek and our moderator, my colleague, our colleague here at the Divinity School, Shaul Magid, I do want to thank my colleagues at Religion and Public Life for organizing this event. These things always take more time and energy than they seem, particularly Reem Atassi, Tammy Liaw, and Rachelle Swe. So thank you all for the work you do behind the scenes to make these kinds of events so successful.

We also do have books for sale. So if you are so inclined, please do take advantage of that opportunity. So I am simply going to introduce our speaker and our moderator tonight and then turn it over to them.

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and directs Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies. Penslar is a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, CES, and is also affiliated with Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Penslar takes a comprehensive and transnational approach to modern Jewish history, which he studies with the context of modern nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism.

He is a prolific author. His books have engaged with a variety of approaches and methods, including the history of science and technology, exhibited in his book Zionism and Technocracy-- The Engineering of the Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870 to 1918, economic history, Shylock's Children-- Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe, military history, Jews and the Military-- A History, biography, Theodore Herzl-- The Charismatic Leader, and the book that we are celebrating this evening and discussing the history of emotions, Zionism-- An Emotional State.

I just want to say, I'm personally incredibly grateful, Derek, for this work. I learned a lot and also feel like it is a nuanced and comprehensive view of this fraught topic, particularly in the last year. And so incredibly grateful for this contribution. Thank you.

Shaul Magid is a rabbi, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies here at Harvard Divinity School and Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. He's been a wonderful colleague. This is his second year with us. And it has been a pleasure to work with Shaul in a number of different programs.

Shaul is also a prolific scholar. I'm only going to read a few of his books. They include Piety and Rebellion-- Essays on Hasidism, The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament, Meir Kahane-- The Public Life and Intellectual Thought of an American Jewish Radical, and his latest book published last year, The Necessity of Exile.

So we are all incredibly fortunate to be able to be present for a conversation, I'm sure, is going to be illuminating and incredibly insightful. So I'll turn it over to both of you. Can we give round of applause for our speakers?

[APPLAUSE]

SHAUL MAGID: Thank you. Thank you, Diane. And thank you all for coming out on this eve of the election. Maybe it's just a way of distracting ourselves from the end of the world. So what I want to do is really talk to Derek about the book. I have a series of questions. I have seven or eight questions. I don't know whether we're going to get to all of them.

And it's going to be both about the book and also the way in which the book has already, in a certain sense, moved into some different space, given the realities that exist now that did not exist, obviously, when you wrote the book.

So in an essay that I published a couple of months ago on the future of the Jewish left in America, I began with this statement by Walt Whitman. He was speaking after the Civil War. And he said that anything before the Civil War is what he called the before times. And the break between what happened before the Civil War and what happened after the Civil War is this kind of categorical shift within American society.

And I wonder whether, in fact-- and I don't think that we the answer to this-- whether October 7 is a break, such that everything that happened before or is the before times, and we're living in the after times. I know I saw Yoni, a HBS student. I was talking to him today. And he said, I'm not sure we can even talk-- I'm not even sure we're living in the post-October 7 moment. We may still be living in the October 7 moment.

So my first question to you is, really, how do you view your analysis in the book from the perspective of or in light of this before time scenario? That is, has October 7 changed how you would have written the book had you written it after or how the book can be read or should be read by those of us who are living in the after times?

DEREK PENSLAR: Well, thank you. Thanks for all of you for coming. And thank you, Diane, Reem for making this possible. I mean, as a historian, I'll probably push back a little bit against the question. And then I'll answer it, which is that even if there is a great rupture-- and I think October 7 does represent a great rupture-- still, we are living in the after times of, in this case, 130, 150 years of history.

That is, there was a long history of Zionism, of the development of Zionism within diaspora Jewish communities, its opposition or the opposition it faced within many streams of American Jewish life, the development of the Jewish community in Palestine, the conflict with the Palestinians, the creation of the state, and so forth.

All of this has left a legacy that we're living with to this day. October 7 represented a vast accelerant of a process that had really begun already in the early 21st century with the Second Intifada, with the second Palestinian uprising, a process by which those aspects within Zionism that had striven for pragmatism and for some sort of comity with Palestinians. And I believe those aspects of Zionism did exist. Those aspects were severely weakened.

And I think what we see in the wake of October 7 is a strengthening of something I mentioned in the very first chapter of the book where I talk about eight varieties of Zionism. And the last one I mention is something I call Judaic Zionism, which is a Zionism that uses really aspects of the Jewish religious tradition for the purposes of a highly militant nationalism. And it's one where I would say a kind of militant nationalism and the trappings of religion can go hand in hand.

So you can have people like Itamar Ben-Gvir, for example, or Bezalel Smotrich, for whom a lot of secular Jews vote. You don't have to be Orthodox to vote for these people. So I think that October 7 represented a vast quantitative leap towards this kind of identification in the state of Israel.

Whether Israel would have headed in that direction without October 7, we'll not know. But I think there were a lot of balls up in the air before the beginning of the 21st century as to where Israel could go. Let's not forget that today we are observing the 29th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, which was another turning point and, if not accelerant, another massive point of inflection.

Again, I'm not saying that had he not been assassinated, things today would be radically different. I actually think they would be. So I tend to think more in terms of lesser or greater degrees of influence rather than the dramatic notion of rupture and then the before times and after times.

I mean, German historians now, as there's any German historians in the room, we'll know that even the notion of a qualitative break between '33 and '45 and then Stunde Null, zero hour in 1945, even that has really been challenged quite a bit over the last two or three decades in thinking of grander continuities in German history. So if you're going to do that for something as overwhelmingly vast as the chasm of 1933 to 1945, all the more so for this subject.

SPEAKER 3: Can you bring the mic in the middle? Just [INAUDIBLE].

DEREK PENSLAR: Or you can just listen out of your left ear? Or--

SHAUL MAGID: So I want to follow up and, actually, is my second question, which really touches on something. And I want to just add a wrinkle to it. In the book, in the first part of the book, you delineate eight forms of Zionism. And I don't want to go through all of them, but I want to mention two or three.

The first one I want to mention is what you call ethnic Zionism, that is, Israel as an ethnonational state. Another one is you call sacral Zionism, which is the land of Israel is sacred, but the state must be structured in a humanistic and maybe even secular fashion. And you say that a lot of conservative reform reconstructionist Zionisms have that kind of sacral Zionism.

Then the Judaic Zionism, which you just mentioned, and then there's another category that you call catastrophic Zionism. And catastrophic Zionism is coming from Max Nordau. But it's basically, you define it as-- and I'm quoting you here. It's defined as "It demands Jewish statehood to ward off an imminent cataclysm threatening the survival of the Jewish people." Those are your words. That is a kind of existential imperative.

So my question is whether, in fact, after October 7 that all of the other seven Zionism's that you delineate have all become swallowed up in a catastrophic Zionism, and that it's all now an existential threat every day, all the time. And if that's so, what kind of dangers does that pose to Zionism as a national ideology in terms of its moral obligations, in terms of its responsibility for its citizenry, in terms of the relationship between the religious and the secular?

That is, if everything has been swallowed up into a catastrophic Zionism, and that catastrophic Zionism is no longer one of eight, but it becomes the umbrella of all, what kind of future does a nationalism have in that register?

DEREK PENSLAR: Remember, the word "Zionism" cannot be conflated with Israeli identity. Your question may have done, and that you were focusing largely on the state of Israel. So let's get to that in a second. But let's first talk about diaspora Jewry, which represents 50% of world Jewry.

For diaspora Jews, some of those categories still have salience. For example, there are plenty of Jews in North America. In fact, the vast majority of Jews in North America identify, in one form or another, with the state of Israel, and that it has some meaning for them.

Exactly what varies quite a bit? Some of them are extremely committed, and they've gone to Israel several times. And some of them, it's a kind of a vague, abstract idea. I have it in the book somewhere. When my daughter was in university, I asked her if she was a Zionist, and she said, well, I'm Zion-ish.

And in other words-- but it has some kind of meaning. And I think the notion of ethnic Zionism, which has nothing to do, by the way, with the state of Israel, ethnic Zionism is simply a form of ethnic identity. And it's something that already had roots in the pre-World War II era. And I think it's been very prominent in among diaspora Jews since 1948. Israel makes you feel Jewish, and Israel becomes sort of a civil religion of American Jewry. That still exists.

The various forms of Zionism, I connected with giving money or with supporting what seems to be a vulnerable state, even if it's not in a state of postcatastrophe. Even the forms of Zionism where I talk about Zionism-- means a kind of reformation or reconstruction of what it means to be Jewish, what I call transformational Zionism, which back in the day-- and there are some people in the room old enough to remember this-- that it used to be that Zionism meant spending time, if you were a diaspora Jew, in Israel living on a collective agricultural settlement, getting a suntan, developing muscles.

And the essence of Zionism was to basically undergo a Jewish transformation. None of that has completely died out in the diaspora. However, catastrophic Zionism is certainly, I would say, the rhetorical dominant form in diaspora because of the sense that October 7 represented an unparalleled assault on the state of Israel, and that now the state of Israel is carrying out a war to protect itself and future generations, and so on. So that's diaspora Zionism.

Now, in the state of Israel, I would agree with you that the move towards catastrophic Zionism, again, everything goes back to the Second Intifada. And it's interesting how-- you've probably written about this, Shaul, because I believe you've written about everything connected with Israel usually in a very prescient way, better than anybody else for contemporary affairs.

SHAUL MAGID: Everyone does not agree with you about that. OK, go ahead.

DEREK PENSLAR: That the Second Intifada so unnerved Israeli society in a way that the first did not. When you think about it, who voted for Ben-Gvir the last election? The children of the Second Intifada. It's been 20 years.

So that sense of being unmoored, the sense of being in a state of danger, that was really created between 2000 and 2005, then went into a bit of abeyance and then came back in spades in 2023. That sense of catastrophe, yes, it is overwhelming. And it's what the prime minister and his government have been really drawing upon for support.

I don't know how long it can last. But again, I'm not a prophet. I make it very clear to people because whenever I write a book about history, people want to know what's going to happen tomorrow. And I say, well, I would have bought Apple's IPO or something.

What I can say is that we should not underestimate the capacity of the state of Israel, even in what appears to be a state of civic disintegration, combined with increasing authoritarianism, the ability of people in the state of Israel, Arab and Jewish citizens alike, but particularly as Jewish citizens, to maintain a certain kind of bizarre cohesion. When I think about what happened on October 7, where the country was not ready, completely taken by surprise, and the same people who had been leading the antijudicial demonstrations for months immediately leapt into this kind of spirit of what in Hebrew is called mobilized voluntarism.

And they started driving soldiers to the fronts and getting people to their army bases and all of this. There is a remarkable stickiness to Israeli civil society. Now, whether it can survive the coming months or even years, I don't know. I absolutely don't know.

But you're completely right that Israel is now immersed in a kind of catastrophic Manichaean worldview, one that allows for very little sense of mercy towards the enemy and a great deal of self-pity and fear for the self. To say that that is not sustainable, sure, we can say that. But I've been saying for, what are we now, 57 years?

Of course, I was nine years old in the 1967 war. But I've been saying for decades that the occupation is unsustainable. Well, here we are. So this is why historians are not prophets.

SHAUL MAGID: Thank you. I mean, one just very small caveat before I get to the next question is not only a lack of-- well, I don't mean to-- I think part of the problem is actually defining who the enemy actually is. And I think that that is part of the complex notion of understanding-- I mean, enemies are enemies, right? And one has to relate to enemies as enemies. But who is the enemy, I think, is a very salient question.

So my next question is something that you actually-- and then I want to come back to the history of emotions. But the next question is something that you don't really talk about that much in the book, which I think was surprising to me. My teacher, Eliezer Schweid, wrote in a number of places that the centerpiece of Zionism was this notion of [HEBREW], the negation of the diaspora. Somehow for Zionism as a state building project to succeed, the diaspora has to remain somewhat precarious.

And I think Ben-Gurion may have once said-- I don't know. I've heard it in his name. I've never seen it inside-- that one of the great challenges to Zionism was a robust diaspora. And in particular, he meant America. So my question is now, given the state of world Jewry, that after over 70 years of a Jewish nation-state in all its complexity, about half the Jews in the world have chosen not to move there. And increasing numbers of people born in Israel have chosen to move into the diaspora and become a kind of Israeli diaspora.

So what is the nature of a national project? A national state project that, for a variety of reasons, even though many people in the diaspora, as you said, identify as Zionists for all kinds of ways, Israel is the country they choose not to live in or the country they choose to leave. How do you see that playing itself out over the course of time?

I'm not asking you to be a prophet. But I'm just saying that this is a state project, the assumption being that if a Jewish state came into existence, Jews would come there. That's kind of what Ben-Gurion thought, which was reasonable if you look at Europe in the 1930s, right?

DEREK PENSLAR: But Ben-Gurion knew, he knew perfectly well that Western Jewry was not going to move to Israel right from the beginning of the state. He knew that. One reason why there was so much an emphasis on Middle Eastern and North African Jewry was precisely because the state of Israel was not-- first, the Soviet Union was closed to migration. Jews from the Soviet Union were trapped.

Most of the Jews who had survived the war and who wound up in the refugee camps, most of them did wind up in Israel. And then in subsequent decades, there was large-scale migration from Romania. And so there's lots and lots of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe wind up in the young state of Israel.

But I don't think Ben-Gurion or the founders of the state had any illusions that American Jews were going to move there in large numbers. What they wanted American Jews was to give money and to support the state and to basically not try to tell the Israeli government how to run their own business. And that relationship worked well.

But you're right that there has always been outmigration. I mean, even in the early 20th century when maybe 40,000 or 50,000 Jews moved to Ottoman Palestine, late Ottoman Palestine just before World War I, my guess is that at least half of them, if not more, they left. And after the state was created in 1948, there's a scholar who's written a very interesting book about this, that there were substantial numbers of Jews who had come from Eastern Europe, survived the Holocaust, to Israel, found life there very difficult, and some of them tried to leave.

Some of them tried to go back to the-- well, some of them wound up back in Europe. Some of them went to the United States or Canada. So this has actually always been an issue.

Where is the state of Israel's demographic bulk come from since 1948? It came first from-- it really comes from the immigration of those who are desperate and have nowhere else to go. I mean, it was the Eastern European Jews after World War II. Canada and the United States opened up their gates just a little bit.

It was MENA Jewry, Middle Eastern and North African Jewry, in the 1950s and early '60s, culminating with the second phase of migration from Morocco. And then it was Ethiopian Jewry, and then it was the Jews from the former Soviet Union, many of whom wound up in the United States, but a lot of whom over a million wound up in Israel. So what has sustained Israel over the years has been poverty, oppression, persecution of Jews elsewhere.

I guess there's been enough of that to go around to keep the state of Israel in business. But now the state of Israel has a robust population with, I believe, the highest fertility rates in the OECD, of any OECD country. So there's lots of things to worry about, about Israel Palestine. But some sort of demographic collapse is not one of them.

SHAUL MAGID: Right. You deploy two terms back into the book that I want to introduce to the conversation and see if you'll tease out. The two terms are "prochronic" and "parachronic." Basically, there are two approaches to this national project. The first is this prochronic approach, which basically sees Zionism as a natural project, as a continuation of the past, maybe even the ancient past.

I mean, you'll hear in some corners of the Jewish universe that Abraham was the first Zionist, that Zionism is not something new. Zionism is a continuation. And then you have this parachronic, which is, no, Zionism is a revolution. It's a break. It's a change. It's a completely paradigmatic shift from what exists before.

And in fact, the famous line by Berdichevsky, "I'm the last Jew and the first Hebrew," the very notion that Zionism as a rebellion against tradition, against the past. And the parachronic and the prochronic seem to, as you describe them, kind of live in tension with each other. So my question is-- well, I would also throw in the relationship because you do talk about Anthony Smith. You don't talk about Benedict Anderson.

But one could always pair them that the difference between Benedict Anderson's imagined community, that nation-states, that peoples are just mythic creations, that they don't have any essence to them, to Anthony Smith, who wants to make an argument that nationalism is not purely a modern project, but it extends into the premodern world. And he uses Zionism or Judaism or Jews as an example.

So my question is, how does this tension between the parachronic and the prochronic survive in light of this kind of paradigmatic, let's say, post-October 7 change where it seems like religious Zionism, even for many secular Jews, has become the dominant paradigm, which is a kind of-- it's a chronic notion, right? Religious Zionism doesn't see that Zionism is the product of Ernest Renan's What is a Nation?

And it's not a product of 19th century Western nationalism, that it goes back centuries and centuries. What happened to the revolutionary Zionism that was actually making the argument that this is new and this is different?

DEREK PENSLAR: No, the revolution ended. All revolutions end. And Zionism is no exception. The Zionist revolution ended depending on when you count either in 1948 or in 1977 or in 1994. It ended a long time ago. The sense of the end of the revolution was already clear to Ben-Gurion, who had to make the transformation from a society built on nothing but voluntarism to a state. That strange word [HEBREW] in Hebrew, which can be best translated as republicanism, but with a small r, I hasten to say.

SHAUL MAGID: I got it, yeah.

DEREK PENSLAR: The sense that we have we've got the kind of humdrum task of state building as opposed to the excitement of a volunteer-based elite society. Or what I've argued is that the revolution ended in the 1970s due to a combination of Israel's gradual entry into the first world economically.

And then the election of Menachem Begin in 1977, the end of Labor Zionist hegemony, and really, the end of the notion of the Zionist revolution, the end of transformation Zionism, the idea that you-- say, you are all Jews-- have to become Hebrews, change your names, take up agricultural pursuits or put your kids into the scouts so that they can take up agricultural pursuits, center your identity around the Israeli army, which defends the state in a way that you would never have thought about the army and the countries of the diaspora.

That revolutionary quality, which also included a social dimension, which was not entirely hypocritical of social equity, Israel in the 1950s and '60s had one of the lowest Gini income inequity coefficients in the industrialized world. Then it gradually expanded. All of that pretty much faded out in the late '70s through '80s.

And then by the time you get to the Oslo years and we have the real economic normalization of Israel, I knew the Zionist revolution had really ended when I was going back and forth to Israel in the '90s. And the airplanes from Frankfurt that used to be filled with Jewish tourists were now filled with German businessmen with cheap leather briefcases heading down to Israel to make deals. And so the Zionist revolution has been actually been dying for much longer than the revolution itself was active.

The complete diasporization, to finish with a psychological sense of identity, also goes back before October 7. This was a product, again, of Begin. When in 1982, the Israeli parliament was debating whether-- sorry-- the cabinet was debating whether or not to invade Lebanon in the wake of Palestinian missile attacks from southern Lebanon, Begin said, the only alternative to invasion is Treblinka.

So this kind of diasporization or Holocaustization or whatever, I think it's in 1981 when Shoah became a mandatory category for the Bagrut, for this national matriculation exam. So all of this goes back-- and what we're seeing now, again, it is vastly more so. But it's an accelerant rather than something creating-- so, no, the Zionist-- that whole aspect kind of died out.

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah, I mean, in some way, I agree, which created an ideological vacuum that has been actually filled by a certain kind of religious Zionism that has kind of filled that space. So there are two other questions I want-- I want to open it up to everyone. But I want to talk about the colonialism, settler colonialism. You have a whole chapter on that, which is very important. And I think you give a real nuanced understanding.

And the other one is the last chapter, Hating Zionism, Anti-Semitism as Anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. So on the colonialism question, you deal with the question in a way-- I mean, the way that the question of colonialism, settler colonialism usually gets played out, it's really an all or nothing, yes or no. Israel is a colonialist project. It's a settler colonial project.

You talk about Veracini. You talk about Patrick Wolfe and all the people that write about that. You want to do something a little different. You don't necessarily want to reject, as I read it, the colonialist nature of the project. But you don't really want to buy into it either. Can you just tease that out a little bit?

DEREK PENSLAR: I mean, it's called being a historian.

[LAUGHS]

So it's kind of hard to deny it altogether when the early Zionists talked about it so much. I mean, Theodor Herzl was quite proud of the idea of wedding the fortunes of Zionism to the protection of a great power. This was not something he hid.

He called the Zionist bank the Jewish colonial trust, although at the exact same time that he's trying to put Zionism into the service of the Western colonial powers, he's also negotiating with the Ottoman Empire for a Jewish Palestine to be a province of the empire that will do everything to shore it up in its ongoing struggle against the European powers. In other words, Herzl was an opportunist.

So yes, he's playing the colonial game. There's no question about it. But he's also trying to play another game. The fact is every game he played, he played badly. But that's not it.

But as far as the state itself, it is a product of a certain colonial mentality about the mission [NON-ENGLISH] towards the Arabs of Palestine, as they were called, by the way, until the 1950s. It is obviously based on a sense of an alliance with Western powers, at first, Britain, without which the Zionist project would have died in the cradle.

It's not just the Balfour Declaration. It's the British infrastructure. It's the legalization of immigration. It's the toleration or encouragement of the development of military institutions during World War II or even before, during the 1930s, to help suppress the Palestinian Arab revolt and then during World War II. And the British did not encourage the development of the Palmach, which was the elite Zionist military organization, out of the goodness of their own heart. They did it out of the long-standing British practice of having colonial forces do the fighting for them.

So Britain did these things for its own interests, but it did support the Zionist project. And then within a few years after the state's creation, Israel starts inching slowly towards an alliance with the West, first, with France between 1956 and '67. France is Israel's supplier of weaponry and nuclear technology, which is why Israel has the nuclear option, thanks to French technology, and then the United States.

And clearly, in the relationship with the Palestinians, Israel, it begins with a colonial mentality in terms of more advanced European Jews, bringing what they believe to be the benefits of Western technology to a backward people. But it then is combined with also a notion of return, a notion that it's actually the Arabs of Palestine who have the great wisdom that we, the Jews of Europe, do not have, and that the Middle Eastern Jews represent kind of a mix of both. So that doesn't fit very easily into a colonial paradigm.

The fact that Israel only was able to become a state through armed resistance against Britain, that is, Britain is both the colonial power that fosters Israel growth. But Israel also fights an anticolonial uprising against the colonizer. Sounds a little bit like this country.

Israel is a settler colonial state in terms of its relationship with the Palestinians who are dispossessed in 1948, remain dispossessed to this day. It also has a cult of postcolonial technological development, so much so that in the 1950s, many African countries, recently independent African countries, looked upon Israel as a model of an anticolonial project.

This was the words of leaders of countries like Senegal or Ghana in the late 1950s, who saw Israel as a model of an anticolonial movement against Britain, which had then created a postcolonial state. That image collapsed between 1967 and 1973 with the conquest of the West Bank And the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

So Israel is a little bit of both. But there's something even much more important than that, which is that I find the settler colonial paradigm only explains so much, because if you say that Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Algeria under French rule-- I see Mary in the audience-- South Africa prior to and during the era of Apartheid, these are all settler colonial states. Well, they take Brazil. They take many different forms.

So to say that a country is settler colonial means that there's a certain pattern of relations between newcomers and current residents. And then you have to start asking all kinds of other questions about how the state wound up the way it does. So to call Israel settler colonial, in a way, doesn't say very much.

And I find that the term is really used, unfortunately, not as a way to help understand what the state is and how it turned out the way it is. But it becomes simply a pejorative, becomes a way of saying, the state is illegitimate because it's settler colonial.

Now, I've spent much of my career at the University of Toronto, where I remember there was-- where the Israeli Apartheid Week was founded in 2005. And I have gone to events at those Israel Apartheid weeks where First Nations activists speak about the dissolution of Canada or Turtle Island and the complete dissolution of Canada and the complete dissolution of the United States. There are people who believe that.

I don't believe that's going to happen, at least not in that form. I think if the United States dissolves, it will because of things having to do with tomorrow's election. So I find the settler colonial paradigm very helpful as a starting point for understanding Israel and lots of other countries. But when it turns into a slogan, which is what it's become, then I find that unhelpful.

SHAUL MAGID: Right. I think part of the the reaction to the settler colonial-- or the colonial even, because the settler colonial is another wrinkle-- the colonialist accusation, the reaction is basically to say, it's not colonial because the land belongs to the Jews and always belongs to the Jews. And then it becomes an argument about indigeneity.

DEREK PENSLAR: Right. And then that is slogans versus slogans. That's not serious. What's really interesting is that the indigent, the I word, did not appear in Jewish public discourse five years ago.

SHAUL MAGID: That's right.

DEREK PENSLAR: It has intruded into the discourse just in the last couple of years. It is a response to the criticism of Israel within the framework of Indigenous rights. And I have gotten so many requests now when I give public talks.

You will, of course, address the issue of the indigeneity of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. And not wanting to be rude to my hosts, I say, I promise I will raise the issue. But this notion of indigeneity is-- I mean, this is not serious history. This is mythology. So aren't the Jews-- I would have thought they were Indigenous to [INAUDIBLE]. Would that be?

SHAUL MAGID: Right.

DEREK PENSLAR: Right?

SHAUL MAGID: OK, yeah, I have just really one more major question, and then I do want to open it up. And I'm going to try to put together a question about shame and humiliation with the discussion about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. So you write on page 115, and you're talking about Jews here. You're talking about Zionists.

"Shaming often involves practices of humiliation. But those who perceive themselves as humiliated are just as likely to react with righteous anger as with self-blame and a sense of personal worthlessness." Now, that is a comment about Zionists. It could just as easily be a comment about Palestinians.

So my question is, after October 7, we heard a lot of anger, hatred, venom in Israeli, pro-Israel circles towards Palestinians, towards Arabs, towards Palestinians as a reaction to October 7. And that anger was a reaction to humiliation.

I think one of the great emotional aspects that has not been really talked about a lot in terms of October 7 is that Israel was deeply humiliated. The whole purpose of Zionism was that this shouldn't happen, which is kind of bizarre when you think about the analogies to the Holocaust. It's almost like it's egregiously anti-Zionist because the whole purpose of Zionism was the opposite. Anyway, we can talk about that too.

But when you see the anger, humiliation, shame, violence of Palestinians towards Israelis, that's called anti-Semitism. So how do you square that? In other words, does the humiliation that Israel felt on October 7, which resulted in anger and violence, which we're seeing in the war, in a certain sense, a mirror image of its opposite? And how is one justified and the other one illegitimate?

DEREK PENSLAR: Nice thing is I'm not in the polemics game. And so I don't write in order to justify or to delegitimize. I write to understand why things happen. And I write in particular to understand how and why things didn't happen.

As the late Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi famously said, "The purpose of the historian is to keep everybody honest." Because if we don't know what actually happened, then we can't possibly move forward. I'm not here to legitimize or delegitimize. I'm here to understand something which is that you don't have to go to October 7 to understand Jewish humiliation and shame.

Think about the Holocaust, as you mentioned. Jews feel it's not just the loss and the grieving for losing 2/3 of European Jewry. It is the shame, that is, the sense of having not behaved according to certain appropriate social norms and not defending themselves and not being able to defend themselves, and the resultant humiliation, which is obviously the wellspring, the emotional wellspring of the state of Israel to overcome humiliation, to overcome shame with a-- how do you translate komemiyut? Standing tall, the term "komemiyut" from the Hebrew Bible.

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.

DEREK PENSLAR: Yeah.

SHAUL MAGID: It's pride or kind of pride

DEREK PENSLAR: Komemiyut really is the Risorgimento. Ben-Gurion liked the phrase komemiyut. The war of standing tall was actually the preferred term for Israel's war of 1948. The term [HEBREW] or [HEBREW], war of independence, war of liberation came later. Ben-Gurion liked komemiyut. What could be a better way to deal with dishonor than standing tall?

Obviously, Palestinians have gone through this same cycle over and over again. The novel Wild Thorns, I think it was the first Palestinian novel written in the West Bank, which is all about a young Palestinian man trying to overcome that sense of humiliation from the occupation, the Battle of Karameh, which I think is at '68, Battle of Karameh or 1970, in which IDF forces engaged Fatah forces and are mauled. And it's a huge victory, I mean, symbolic victory for Fatah.

So this is the kind of thing happens over and over again. And so October 7, yet again, I mean, from Hamas's point of view and from the point of view of people who support Hamas, this is an act of liberation from shame. And for Israelis who watched the state they love dearly and their loved ones be massacred in this way and they see the state overrun, yes, shame, dishonor, and of course, just panic.

I do want to make a distinction, though, between anger and hatred because I actually think they're not at all the same. Anger can be a very helpful emotion, a very healthy emotion. And it's perfectly understandable that people in conflicted situations are going to be angry at each other.

But when it petrifies out of a lack of resolution, it becomes hatred, the hatred that Israeli Jews have for Palestinians, the hatred that Palestinians have for Israeli Jews. And it's very hard to undo. And that's one thing, I think, I ended the book with is the problem of hatred.

And the fact that I ended the book, I was putting the last touches on the proofs in early 2023. And then came October 7, which brings these issues of hatred as petrified anger to a new level. Again, not completely unpredicted, not completely unknowable, but nonetheless a great tragedy. And I was hoping to end on a happier note, but I guess that's where--

SHAUL MAGID: Well, I was going to ask more a question. But it was not going to bring us to a happy note.

DEREK PENSLAR: I feel a little bit like a physician who's been telling their patient for 30 years, lose weight. Stop smoking. Cut down the sweets. And the patient has a heart attack, god forbid. And then they say, now what should I do?

And Israel, to get back to Shaul's point just now, as a society, one reason it's been so successful is through compartmentalization. And by compartmentalizing the Palestinian question, as it was called, through improvisation, in Hebrew [HEBREW]. If I ever write a book about Israel in Hebrew, I'd call it [HEBREW], The Improvised Society.

Kick the can down the road. Unfortunately, eventually the can comes back, but this notion that we can control it. We can manage the conflict. We can do this. We can do that. It will be OK. But now the country is in a state of profound crisis.

And the emotional regime based on existential fear, catastrophic fear, and not even anger, not even hatred, but something even more damaging, rage-- Shaul, I think it was you who described Israel as being overcome by prolonged road rage.

SHAUL MAGID: Road rage, yeah.

DEREK PENSLAR: The country is now in the grips of rage. I think one thing that could help bring Israel back down to Earth is going to be a more, I would say, engaged, sympathetic, but also critical diaspora community. And I don't know if this is going to happen.

But a American presidential administration that is able to combine compassion, sympathy, but also with a certain sense of limitations-- and I don't know how to say this, but I think you all know what I'm getting at-- I don't know if that's going to happen. It might be exactly the opposite.

But how do you talk Israel down from the cliff where it is right now? And yes, the Palestinians and the people of Lebanon are suffering a great deal more than the people of Israel. But in the end, this is also a very bad thing for the state of Israel, the current situation.

How do we talk them off the cliff? I would only start knowing with the little bit of knowledge I have about it with the major North American Jewish institutions, because that's all that I, as an individual, have any access to. But maybe, Shaul you have--

SHAUL MAGID: No, I have no access to anything.

[LAUGHTER]

But I do want to say, thank you so much to Diane and the RPL for sponsoring this very important event. And I think the turnout shows that--

DEREK PENSLAR: Yes, thank you.

SHAUL MAGID: --that the interest was really there, and it was a very good choice. Thank you.

DIANE MOORE: Well, thank you for those kind words. And let's give round of applause for our panelists.

DEREK PENSLAR: Thank you, everyone. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SHAUL MAGID: That's great.

DEREK PENSLAR: Thank you very much.

SPEAKER 1: Sponsor, Religion and Public Life.

SPEAKER 2: Copyright 2024, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.