Another Zionism: Hugo Bergmann’s Circumscription of Spiritual Territory
Author(s)
Laqueur, Walter; Mosse George L.; Drescher, Seymour
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. 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 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 relevance. I would like here to bring close readings of an early alternative Zionism to bear on questions of spirit and territory in ways which destabilize monolithic understandings of the place of spiritual unity and territorial integrity in Zionist ideology.
