Zionist attitudes to Palestine inverted between cultural romantics and territorial maximalists

Evidence

Many, but not all: Arnold Zweig, whose work is explored here by Noah Isenberg, is typical of the group of German-Jewish intellectuals we have mentioned earlier who, galvanized by encounters with their Russo-Polish brethren during the First World War, romanticized the Ostjude as the soul of Jewish authenticity and the source of Jewish cultural renewal. For them, Palestine was distant but not outlandish; the oriental was already embodied in the Ostjude, and Palestine represented merely a natural extension of the cultural sphere in which Jewish renewal was taking place. It is noteworthy that Martin Buber, who made few actual territorial claims on Palestine and favored binationalism, expressed little orientalist anxiety about the traumatic effects of Western settlement in an Eastern land, whereas the territorially maximalist Vladimir Jabotinsky (as we learn from Eran Kaplan’s essay) was in many ways terrified of the land he sought so desperately to conquer in the name of the Jews. Like Herzl, Jabotinsky associated the Orient with barbarism. Jabotinsky and other Revisionist thinkers saw Palestine not as a ruined garden awaiting restoration but rather as an unredeemable desert, a physical and psychic challenge to the Western Jewish soul. To reverse the wording of one of Yehuda Halevi’s most famous poems, the Revisionists’ hearts were in the uttermost West even when their bodies were in the East. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 144

Categorization

• DEFINE: Ostjude here names the East European Jew whose supposed authenticity the German-Jewish intellectuals romanticized — a key term for the whole volume’s thesis.
• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive inversion — hermetic binationalist Buber felt no orientalist terror of the East while territorial maximalist Jabotinsky was the one ‘terrified of the land he sought to conquer’ — is a genuinely dense insight about how spatial desire and cultural repulsion interlock, worth sitting with.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the conqueror who fears the land’ — how maximalist territorial claims in settler movements often mask deep cultural contempt for the place being claimed, and what that says about who actually belongs.