Abstract
Settler-colonial projects often produce states that eventually turn against the purposes of those who created them. We see this in the American and Boer revolts against the British and the sabotage by British settlers in Ireland and French settlers in Algeria of efforts to integrate the native populations of those territories into the British and French states. We see it also in the relationship between the objectives of European states and Zionists to end antisemitism by exporting the Jewish problem to the Middle East and in Israel’s increasingly pariah status on the world stage and the global increase in antisemitism—both accelerated by Israel’s ferocious response to the Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks in October 2023. In the Jewish tradition this is the story of the golem—the legendary creature conjured by rabbinic skill and divine power to protect the Jews from their enemies in sixteenth-century Prague. At first successful, the golem became increasingly wild and eventually was put to death by the rabbi who created him out of fear for the welfare of the Jewish community itself. But not all golems must die. The key is to recognize they are not tied to their original purposes and can thus be transformed.
Settler colonialism takes many forms. The consequences of those different forms can be as variable as the trajectories of the United States, New Zealand, Argentina, the Crusader Kingdoms, and the Lakota/Sioux (who displaced and dispossessed the “indigenous” Omaha, among others). For those assessing the long-term ramifications of the Israel–Gaza War, one pattern within the complex array of settler colonial dynamics is of particular interest: When settlers are deployed abroad as vehicles of expansion and control, they often end up, not just destroying or displacing the indigenous inhabitants, but threatening those whose interests they were meant to serve.
For example, in North America and southern Africa, settler colonies established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped Britain and the Netherlands reap vast profits from non-European lands and peoples. Eventually, however, intent on exploiting the lands and peoples at their disposal with unfettered ruthlessness, American colonists and the Boers rose up to repudiate and expel the metropolitan states that had sponsored them. Ireland and Algeria provide additional examples. Over centuries, England and then Britain sent Anglo-Catholic and then Protestant settlers to Ireland to establish and strengthen London’s rule there. France encouraged a million Europeans to settle in Algeria to make the Mediterranean Sea no more a barrier to an enlarged French state than the Seine was to a united Paris. In both Ireland and Algeria, settlers did entrench British and French rule. In the long run, however, by massive land expropriation and by blocking political rights for natives, the settlers sabotaged British and French ambitions to integrate those territories into their states. As a result, just prior to World War I in Britain, and during the Algerian Revolution in France from 1954 to 1961, the settlement projects in Ireland and Algeria exploded into regime-shaking and regime-changing crises in London and Paris.
In Jewish tradition, the story of a tool turning on its creator has tremendous resonance. It is the legend of the golem—the monster in giant human form created by the Maharal, a sixteenth-century Prague rabbi named Judah Loew. The rabbi created the golem to defend the Jews against ferocious antisemitism. With mystical incantations he brought clay to life in the form of a being powerful enough to defeat and terrify the enemies of the Jews. At first his creation worked. After every incantation, the golem would rise and wreak havoc on the antisemites. But with repeated incantations its behavior became more and more violent, more and more destructive, and less and less controllable. Eventually, the rabbi was forced to end the life of his creation to save his community from it. He did so by removing one letter from the word “emet” (truth) emblazoned on the golem’s forehead, so instead of “truth” it read “death.”
As noted, European settlers colonizing non-European places often become, golem fashion, the authors of violent and transformative projects contradictory to the purposes that brought their communities about. One aspect of the tragedy of the current moment is the degree to which the Zionist settler colony—the State of Israel—which, with European and American support, was imagined and created by Jews as a means of salvation, retribution, and protection, now appears as probably the most dangerous threat facing Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora.
After months of war in and around the Gaza Strip, countries around the world are witnessing a sharp rise, not only in antisemitic incidents, but in baseline levels of antisemitism. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations was absolutely right when it published a full page ad in the New York Times declaring that “Hatred of Israel is Endangering American Jews” (December 17, 2023). What the advertisement does not say is that Israel’s behavior is itself fueling the hatred of Israel that is endangering American Jews. Not forgetting for a moment the atrocities of October 7, committed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad against Israeli civilians, Israel’s response to the bloody rampage, including its pulverization of Gaza and the deaths of twenty thousand innocents, has undoubtedly pushed those inclined toward hatred of Jews into escalating expressions of that hatred or into privately acknowledging and amplifying their antisemitic impulses.
Many wonder, and are even puzzled by the reactions of many American Jews to widespread criticism of Israel—reactions that often seem to border on hysteria. Despite having enough to worry about with the rising tide of antisemitism, they seem to exaggerate and thereby obscure the threat by treating nearly every vigorous criticism of, protest against, or resolution condemning, Israeli war policies as an attack on them as Jews, which is to say as “antisemitic.” To understand why so many Jews genuinely feel this way, we must appreciate the extent to which Israel, as the avatar of their identity, has become a kind of golem, menacing the community whose protection it was its purpose to provide.
Most American Jews were raised on images of the Israeli military much closer to Paul Newman (Exodus) and Kirk Douglas (Cast a Giant Shadow) than to the punishment machine for destroying Palestinian life it currently appears to be. Accordingly, for most American Jews, their Jewish identity is defined by grossly incomplete, but immensely powerful pictures of Israel as a proud Jewish response to the Holocaust of the past and a shield against a Holocaust of the future. The all-too-common transubstantiation of any sort of authentic Jewishness, or “Yiddishkeit,” into Israelism is the fundamental explanation for why so many American Jews experience any challenge to Israeli war policies—no matter how factual and no matter how aligned with their own values—as antisemitic.
Of course Israel has assiduously encouraged diaspora Jews to treat it as the essence of what it means to be Jewish after the Holocaust. Expressing its Zionist origins, but also reflecting the vital role that Israel knows is played by the political clout of American Jews, Israel proclaims itself to be the “Jewish” state, claiming responsibility for defending all Jews, including those in the United States, against their enemies. Israel claims that its army is a Jewish army, poised to defeat those in Teheran, Ramallah, Gaza, Europe, or America planning new Holocausts. For those Jews whose identity is overwhelmingly focused on the Holocaust and on Israel it is then natural to experience attacks on Israel, or even criticism of Israeli policies, as threats to them as Jews, that is, as antisemitic. Thus has the rage unleashed by Israel against Palestinians become a threat to the Jews Israel was putatively created to protect—a threat felt all the more terrifyingly by Jews because for so many of them, attachments to Israel have become the substance of their Jewishness.
At the same time, again in golem fashion, an unconstrained Israel threatens the interests of the United States and leading European countries in regional peace and respect for a rules-based international order. These are the countries, of course, whose historical domination of the Middle East enabled Zionist success. To be sure, Zionists are largely correct when they insist that Jews coming to Palestine did not do so primarily to serve as a vehicle for European control or for the extraction of resources. Yet Israel is a settler-colonial creation. Theodor Herzl promised the European leaders he importuned that the “State of the Jews” he wanted them to help build would be a civilized European bulwark against Asiatic barbarism. Vladimir Jabotinsky accurately and honestly described Jewish colonists in Palestine as “alien settlers” intent on thwarting the indigenous population’s aspiration to rule themselves and their country. At least between 1915 and 1939, many British leaders saw Zionism as useful in their pursuit of various diplomatic and geopolitical interests.
Overall, it is fair and accurate to consider Zionism, the state on the way it built, and the expanding state of Israel it established once the British left, as a settler colonialist enterprise. Its twin purposes were to solve the “Jewish problem” experienced by Europeans and the “European problem” experienced by Jews by exporting the Jews of Europe to Palestine. The model of the golem highlights the extent to which this extraordinary project of political prestadigitation can be seen to have turned upon itself. This raises the question of what can be done to protect the Jewish people, and the countries of the West that nurtured Zionism, from the wildness of the “Jewish state” they created.
We will take the model of the golem too far if we conclude that the only way to end the current war and the threat of more such wars is the extinction of Israel. That is no more realistic a solution for Palestinians and Jews than evacuation of North America by whites might be for the alleviation of the injustices and violence still suffered by Native Americans. Our world is a world populated by golems, by the unintended legacies of fantastical, immoral, grandiose, and noble projects. Contrary to the Maharal’s solution, what we need is more Emet (truth), not more Met (death), and the infusion of more humanity into the political organizations whose capacities to act will inevitably strain against the purposes they were created to serve. That is the reason why there exists no better way forward in Israel–Palestine than democratization—the freeing of all who live between the river and the sea to participate equally in the institutions that govern them and live freely in the land they cannot avoid sharing.