DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION

The autistic rabbi who became an antisemite:

Zionism, statehood and the politics of preju-
dice
By Rabbi Anthony C. Mitelman

Part 1
‫ברוך אתה יהוה אלהינו מלך העולם שחלק מחכמתו ליראיו‬
In the 1880s, as the Zionist movement was becoming what it is today, my
ancestor was one of the most renowned rabbis in Jerusalem. Rabbi Joshua Lieb
Diskin was born in 1818 and is considered something of a hero in Israel today
with streets named in his honour, but he would have been horrified by what
has happened there - indeed he was horrified by secular Zionism at its very in-
ception. This is the story of one of the giants of Jewish thought, offered in hon-
our of his blessed memory and as a testament to his intelligence and foresight.
It is for Jews and others who want to understand the relationship between Zion-
ism and Judaism, and to equip people on both sides of the argument with de-
tails of history, scripture and tradition.
Rabbi Diskin's peculiar way of thinking was sometimes inspiring, sometimes
challenging, and often suggestive of autism. This biography is also written with
neurodiversity in mind, as an exploration of the particular gifts that a neurodi-
vergent perspective can bring to the world - and what happens when they are
ignored.
Fanatical, uncompromising and very pedantic

The hagiographies of great rabbis (rabbiographies?) often read like legends,

and picking out fact from fantasy is not simple. The accounts of Rabbi Diskin
counting the bricks in a wall or the leaves on a tree with a single glance, for ex-
ample, seem to evidence supernatural powers, but if true we would call him an
autistic savant today. His biography describes him as "fanatical, uncompromis-
ing and very pedantic", all common autistic traits, as was his encyclopaedic
knowledge of Jewish law, and the fact that he followed that system meticu-
lously without concern for consequences. At 25, he took over from his father as
the rabbi of his native Lomza in Poland, which he did with zeal; shortly after-
wards he learned that a community member planned to open his shop on the
Sabbath, so he immediately ran to his house to shout at him.
After seven years, his style got him kicked out of town, and that became a
pattern for the next 25 years. He would arrive at a Jewish community, impress
the locals with his wisdom, and serve as a rabbi until he inevitably offended so
many people that he had to leave again. After Mezritch, Kovno and Shklov, he
spent four years in Brisk before criminal accusations were made against him.
His defence lawyer interviewed him for two hours, during which he refused to
look at him, and when finally asked why he commented from behind closed
eyes that “it is forbidden to look at the face of a wicked man, and you told me
that you do not observe Torah and mitzvot (commandments).” The lawyer con-
cluded that a man who would not relax his moral code, even when it might help
him into jail, could do no wrong, so the accusations had to be lies.
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
Rabbi Diskin narrowly escaped jail but was forced into exile. He moved to
British-controlled Palestine in 1877, where he was welcomed by other beardy
pedants and began setting up soup kitchens, centres of learning and an
orphanage that bears his name today. He became the leading rabbinical au-
thority there, turning down the position of Chief Rabbi of New York in order to
serve Jerusalem during a turbulent moment in its history. After his passing, he
was given the honorific title of "the Maharil Diskin".
Another reason to believe that he was autistic is more personal. There are
many ways to diverge, of course, but my family tree tends to bear fruit of the
fanatical, uncompromising and extremely pedantic variety. Many of the men, in
particular, had sharp minds that blossomed early and developed hyperfocus
and encyclopaedic knowledge in some particular area. Many also developed a
reputation for being extremely difficult, and left a trail of frazzled relationships
behind them. In many ways, I have more in common with the lawyer than the
Maharil himself, but like him I'd rather not look at someone if I feel that they
are being hypocritical. Difficulty maintaining eye contact is a classic autistic
trait that my mother helped me overcome, but it is still too much if I'm dis-
gusted with someone, and sadly this is not an uncommon situation (though I
never had the chutzpah to justify my shifty side-glance with scripture).
I'm not recommending any of this as a way of life. One day I hope to stop
collecting enemies and getting kicked out of organisations because it doesn't
get any easier with time. Rabbi Diskin couldn't help but rub people up the
wrong way, endlessly throughout his long life, and he was accused of all sorts
including indictable crime. But as far as I'm aware no one ever accused him of
being incorrect. My point is that Rabbi Diskin knew the Torah as well as anyone
else in history, and those who disagree with him on matters of fact regarding
Jewish law are - to put it bluntly, as people with my lineage are wont to do -
wrong.
With that in mind, the Maharil's perspective on Zionism is worth considering,
regardless of your position on the matter and especially if you are Jewish.
"Excommunicate the Zionists"

His response to Zionism was as follows:

“Write letters in my name to three of the gedolei hador [the most prominent
Torah scholars], asking them to call a meeting of rabbis to decide how to stop
this movement before it is too late. There is a fearful danger looming on the
horizon of Judaism, a danger the likes of which never existed before. This
movement is likely to bring destruction on the Jewish people! Write that in my
opinion, the rabbis should get together and excommunicate the Zionists from
the Jewish people. They should forbid their bread, their wine, and intermarriage
with them, just as Chazal did to the Kuthites. I am certain that if we do not take
this step, the Jewish people will eventually regret it.”
There are a few points to consider here. Firstly, this wasn't an opinion voiced
between sips of borsht; he was suggesting a psak halakha, a formal public in-
terpretation of ancient Jewish law in response to modern questions (like a Papal
bull or Shi'ite fatwa) - and he was in a position to issue one. Had his wishes
been followed, it would have become a matter of religious observance for the
international Jewish community.
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
Secondly, he was not expressing a radical viewpoint - quite the opposite. He
was drawing upon Jewish norms first recorded around the 5th century which
prohibit ending the exile “ahead of time” (ie. before the return of the Messiah).
Jewish law covers minute details to deal with every moral question and every
aspect of life, when to say which blessing, and exactly when to not say a bless-
ing over fire because the smouldering coals have become dimming coals. The
Talmud alone runs to over 5000 pages, but this whole corpus only mentions
two oaths beyond those in the Bible: (i) Jews may not enter the land of Israel en
masse ("as a wall"), and (ii) they may not fight against the nations of the world.
Rabbi Diskin was a traditionalist explaining the details of his tradition to its
adherents, and his perspective was shared with the overwhelming majority of
Jews in the late nineteenth century (with the exception of a few radical mod-
ernisers). One reason the rabbis chose not to issue this psak is because they
didn't believe that believe that such an unpopular idea would catch on amongst
Jews anyway.
Finally, he was responding to "political Zionism", which is different to "reli-
gious Zionism" - the reason the Maharil himself went to Palestine and raised
money for other Jews to join him. It was also different to "labour Zionism", a
movement among communist and anarchist idealists who wanted to grow mel-
ons unencumbered by the evils of capitalism. Neither of those groups sought a
state for the Jews, in the early days at least. Palestine was to be a home for the
Jews, and they envisioned sharing their home with Palestinians as they had
done for centuries.
The communists and anarchists were not generally motivated by religion -
many were atheists. The only religious tradition at that time that proposed a
pre-Messianic Jewish state as the fulfilment of a prophecy was Christian Zion-
ism. This movement in the 1800s was as theologically confused about Jewish
scripture as it is in the modern day, and it was weaponised by ethno-national-
ists and imperialists in a similar way.
Race, religion and Herzl's Christmas tree

Political Zionism was outlined in 1896 by Theodore Herzl in his manifesto Der
Judenstaat (The Jewish State), and he founded the World Zionist Organisation
the following year. The idea was his response to "the Jewish question", namely:
what is to be done with a people who refuse to assimilate? This was a pressing
question in the 19th century, partly because Enlightenment science and its
racial theories were redefining people as bloodlines with attributes. Also, the
newly coagulated European nations such as France, Germany and Italy were
constructing their constitutions and defining their national identities by con-
trasting themselves with the foreigners beyond their borders and the Jews and
Gypsies within. This led to a new type of prejudice and a new term "anti-
semitism", coined by an antisemite as we shall see in the next part of the se-
ries.
In the light of these new national, racial and political realities (or unrealities),
Herzl took it upon himself to answer the Jewish question from his own perspec-
tive. He is mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence as the vision-
ary who outlined the Jewish state, but given that he was speaking on behalf of
a whole religion, we might ask what kind of a Jew he was.
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
Herzl was an atheist whose vision was that his fellow Hungarian Jews of a
more traditional bent would leave behind what he called their "shameful Jewish
characteristics" (he was speaking about people like my peasant grandmother,
Elsa Kupferschmied, one of 24 children, most of whom were killed by Nazis in
Dachau). To this end, Herzl refused to circumcise his son born in 1891, and four
years later he "was just lighting the Christmas tree for my children when Gude-
mann [the Chief Rabbi of Vianna] arrived" to pay him a visit. It was 1895, three
months before he published his manifesto.
Der Judenstaat was, however, the second solution Herzl came up with - the
year before publishing it he slammed a playwright for his naivety in suggesting
that a return to Israel was possible. His original brainwave was that he would
personally persuade his community, and the Pope, that the Jews should be con-
verted en masse to Catholicism "on a Sunday, in St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in the
middle of the day, with music and pride, publicly."
In part 2: Antisemitism and the politics of oppression
Break?
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION

Part 2
Antisemitism and the politics of oppression

The idea of a Jewish state was first proposed by Theodore Herzl in his mani-
festo Der Judenstaat, in response to the brutal antisemitism he saw around
him. It blames Jews themselves for antisemitism and his solution was that they
should leave - the same conclusion the Nazis would come to the following cen-
tury.
Herzl's progressive vision didn't serve Hans, the son whom he refused to cir-
cumcise. Hans felt that “religion is essential to me” but he struggled for the en-
tirety of his short and tragic life over which one to follow. Neither the circumci-
sion he subjected himself to later nor his Baptism relieved his crushing depres-
sion, and he took his own life in 1924, just days after his sister Pauline's death
from drug abuse. His final diary entry notes that "my life was badly lived, and it
is taking a bad end." Perhaps the same will be said of Der Judenstaat.
Anti-Jewish sentiment is ancient. It was a political matter for the Romans be-
cause the Judeans refused to bow to Caesar and accept imperial law, but in the
Christian world it became a religious injunction. Popes throughout the middle
ages ordered that the Talmud be burned and forced Christ-killers into ghettoes.
Hating Jews was an act of devotion for many Christians, but things were chang-
ing in Rabbi Diskin's time. In 1879, Wilhelm Marr coined the term antisemitism
(antisemitismus in German) when he founded the League of Antisemitism (Anti-
semiten-Liga) to support Germans in the struggle against the degenerate Jew-
ish race. In doing so, he was updating this ancient prejudice from religious su-
perstition to "scientific" social Darwinism, while ignoring the fact that there are
Jews with millennial lineages of every shade from black Ethiopians to Arab
Yemenis to white Eastern Europeans. Though the Antisemiten-Liga dissolved
within a few years, Marr's terminology (and its implicit racial theory) is re-
peated all over the world, often by Jews or politicians claiming to care about
them.
Whatever the reasoning, prejudice was a brutal reality for European Jews,
who were generally forbidden from owning land until the early 20th century,
and lived under threat of expulsions and pogroms that killed thousands. My
grandmother grew up being beaten up and spat at on the way to school, well
before the Nazis arrived in Hungary, and in Herzl's time incidents like the
French League of Antisemites crashing a Jewish wedding and flinging around
acid were common. Being commonplace does not make it any less awful, but
note that Rabbi Diskin did not consider antisemitism a threat. Purges, prohibi-
tions and conspiracy theories abounded about Jews poisoning wells, spreading
Black Death and eating the blood of Christian babies, but none of them harmed
Jewish culture, which outlived all of its oppressors from Babylon to Rome to the
Third Reich. For Rabbi Joshua Diskin, the threat that could destroy the Jewish
people came from Zionists.
In contrast to Europe, Jews lived in Palestine relatively unmolested most of
the time, in harmony with the Indigenous populations. Small Jewish communi-
ties existed there continuously for three millennia, trading and working to-
gether with Arab Muslims, sometimes worshipping together too. The early non-
secular settlers also fared well, on the whole, working together with their Arab
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
neighbours in agriculture and attending each other's schools and hospitals. A
Jewish memoirist reports how "the Muslim women cooperated respectfully with
the customs of the Jewish religion…the Muslim neighbours allowed the Jewish
women to pump water necessary before the Sabbath.”
Where clashes did happen it was in settlements like Gederah, founded by the
radical Bilu movement. They were nationalists who, according to one of their
members, humiliated local Arabs and made no attempt to integrate or under-
stand their customs. They also attacked Arab villagers grazing animals on the
land they had used for centuries. Part of the strategy of Bilu was to adopt He-
brew as vernacular, which proved highly divisive. Rabbi Diskin, for his part,
threw a man out of his house for addressing him in the language that had long
been reserved for prayer. As Moroccan-Israeli author Sara Shilo put it: “Along
came the knife of Hebrew and cut us in two.”
Even when tensions were rising, non-political Zionists and major Arab leaders
called for unity. Raghib al-Nashashibi, for example, who served as mayor of
Jerusalem into the 1930s, insisted that both Jews and Arabs should be consid-
ered Palestinians. Though he was a devout Muslim, his first wife was Christian
and his second was Jewish. Mizrahi (Arab) Jews generally supported Palestini-
ans against the incoming political Zionists. In the 1950s, they were publishing
joint magazines with Palestinians and organising street protests together, and
in the 1970s many joined the Israeli Black Panther movement to fight what
they saw as colonialism. In this they were in agreement with Herzl, for whom
"the Zionist idea... was a colonial idea".
The hatred Herzl endured in Hungary despite concerted attempts to assimi-
late was surely painful, and being on the sharp end of bigotry can twist a per-
son in terrible ways. For him, antisemitism became a political tool. When he
wrote, “the antisemites will become our most dependable friends", he was cor-
rect. Israel's greatest friend in the British government was Foreign Minister, for-
mer Prime Minister and jew-hater Arthur Balfour, who sponsored legislation in
1905 preventing Jews fleeing pogroms from entering England. He was the ar-
chitect of the Balfour Declaration promising Palestine to the Zionists in 1917.
Along with Herzl's, his is the only other name recorded in the Israeli Declaration
of Independence.
Many other openly antisemitic politicians were pro-Zionist, including Mus-
solini, Stalin and Churchill. Alfred Rosenberg, chief ideologue of the Nazi party,
wrote that: "Zionism must be vigorously supported", and Deputy Führer Rudolf
Hess and Commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring were vocal in
doing so. Leopold von Mildenstein visited Zionist settlements in Palestine in
1933 with a delegation of other SS officers and Zionist Jews, and published a
12-part series called "A Nazi visits Palestine" in the Nazi press. Albert Eich-
mann, who managed the logistics of the death camps, followed his footsteps to
Palestine in 1937.
Agendas aligned

Zionists were an insignificant minority before Hitler took power, with a promi-
nent Zionist complaining that "we have to reckon not only with the indifference
of extensive Jewish circles but also with their hostility." The movement grew,
however, as Zionist and Nazi organisations worked together. In 1933, for exam-
ple, the year Hitler took power, the German branch of the World Zionist Organi-
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
sation made the Ha’avara agreement with the Nazis. Until then, emigrating
Jews were not able to take their wealth with them, but the agreement allowed
Jews to transfer assets to Palestine and over 50,000 did. The Zionist Federation
of Germany was also the only party still allowed to publish a newspaper after
Kristallnacht in 1938. Perhaps it was political expediency, but I wonder how
they could look into the faces of Nazis for long enough to broker these deals.
The World Zionist Organisation also lobbied both the UK and the USA govern-
ments to put quotas on the number of Jews entering, making emigration to
Palestine the only escape for many. Yitzhak Gruenbaum, leader of the World
Zionist Movement and later First Immigration Minister of Israel, opposed Jews
sending relief packages to Jews in occupied Europe, partly because intensifying
their misery advanced his political goals and partly because he didn't want
them wasting their money. His response to the United Jewish Appeal raising
funds to rescue Jews was vehement:
"''NO!' and I say again, 'NO!' Not one cow here for ten thousand Jews in Ger-
many. One should bravely resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities
to secondary importance." As Zionist official Eliezer Livneh put it in 1966, "for
the Zionist leadership the rescue of Jews was not an aim in itself, but only a
means [for settling Palestine]"
Rhetoric about antisemitism was politically useful, but the reality was that it
may have been at its lowest point in history just before Israel was founded. Few
celebrated the Holocaust when the Third Reich collapsed and the horror of the
death camps was exposed - the idea of the master-race had been proved to be
hubris, and sharing views with the Nazis just wasn't cool. Pope Pius XII's 1943
Encyclical overturned centuries of Catholic theology by declaring that modern
Jews were not responsible for murdering Christ, the 50s saw anti-Semitic lines
removed from Christian worship, and in the 60s the charge of deicide was for-
mally dropped by not just the Catholics but also the Episcopal Church and oth-
ers. Of course, antisemitism would not disappear overnight, but a huge major-
ity of Catholic bishops voted to promote "a fraternal dialogue, of Biblical and
theological studies, to favor the mutual understanding and esteem between
Jews and Christians."
Israeli Major General Matityahu Peled understood how cynical the game was,
noting that "the thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June
1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff." Abba
Eban, first Permanent Representative of Israel to the UN commented regarding
his duties that "one of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is
to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a
distinction at all". During the 1982 war with Lebanon, journalists reporting the
massacre of thousands of Palestinians in refugee camps were accused of anti-
semitism, including Jewish journalists. The charge has also been levelled at
Jewish Voice for Peace by Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt,
who also called people advocating for equal rights for Palestinians “extrem-
ists”, and stated that anti-Zionists are guilty of a "willful denial of even a super-
ficial history of Judaism and the vast history of the Jewish people".
Jewish history would suggest otherwise, and most rabbis expressed vehe-
ment opposition to nationalism. Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, who (unlike
Rabbi Diskin) was renowned for his tolerant stance towards Zionism, believed
that creating Jewish agricultural colonies would arouse divine mercy and lead
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
to the establishment of the Jewish state by the Messiah. But no rabbi was so
bold as to overrule the Talmud, and no psak supporting the state of Israel was
issued until after the state was established.
"Furtive and cunning"

The only time in recent years a British politician with sympathies for Pales-
tinians found his way into power, the smear was deployed to devastating ef-
fect. As soon as Jeremy Corbyn took control of the Labour party, there were al-
most daily attacks from both left and right in the media. Party members were
suspended on grounds of antisemitism for criticising Israeli aggression against
Palestinians.
Around this time the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)
published a new definition of antisemitism, where "anti-Zionism can be a form
of antisemitism when it... seeks to delegitimize the state of Israel", making the
Maharil himself an antisemite. Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai also falls
foul with his 2008 comment promising to visit "a Shoah [Holocaust]" on Gaza,
because drawing comparisons between Israeli and Nazi policy is also anti-
semitic according to the new definition (he said this before violating interna-
tional law by using white phosphorous in a civilian area). Ze'ev Jabotinsky was
a leading Zionist thinker who explicitly drew the same comparison during the
Third Reich, when outlining the plan to oust the Palestinians; regarding ethnic
cleansing, he said that "Hitler—odious as he is to us—has given this idea a
good name in the world."
The IHRA's Orwellian word game, in only 11 points, manages to categorise
the most zealous rabbis of history and the secular founders of Zionism as anti-
semites, and yet it was adopted by various governments including the US, the
UK and Germany; this effectively makes it impossible for politicians to criticise
Israel without fearing reprisals. None of this does anything to reduce anti-
semitism or protect Jews, it just confuses an already issue which is already be-
yond confusing. For example, regarding comments made about “ugly little Jews
and Jewesses", and their "audacious and unfortunate faces, furtive and cunning
eyes", or their "miserable stunted jargons": is this antisemitic? What about writ-
ings describing how "the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum... trodden upon
and easily frightened". They sound antisemitic, but the first was Herzl and the
second was Jabotinsky - two of the most important Jewish Zionists in history.
Gentiles using such rhetoric would be called antisemites, and potentially be
charged with hate speech. Perhaps, like many of the progressives of their time,
these early Zionists felt that primitive people were an obstacle to progress,
whether Jews or Palestinians. Jabotinsky commented that the Arabs were "five
hundred years behind us", and Herzl felt that Jews in Palestine would serve as
"a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to bar-
barism." His progressive agenda would be served by dispossessing the Arabs of
their land; "spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it em-
ployment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must
be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
A psychoanalyst might surmise that the "furtive and cunning eyes" of the
people in a local synagogue were simply Herzl's projection - the unintegrated
shadow of a furtive and cunning man who spent most of his life denying and
unsuccessfully hiding what he was. I've spoken to analysts who see Zionism as
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
a trauma response to the Holocaust making the victim turn perpetrator. The
Maharil Diskin might not have been so sympathetic - after all, a moral code is
designed precisely to limit the damage we do when we are angry, hurt or oth-
erwise off-balance. Perhaps he would have commented that the mitzvot them-
selves are the means of healing from trauma. As the Talmud puts it, Jews
should observe the mitzvot in order to "repair the world" (tikkun olam). Break-
ing the code might be an error, a failing, or a lapse of religious conviction. But
it was certainly never conceived of as a virtue until Zionists sought to har-
monise their ancient religion with the areligious modern ethno-nationalism of
Herzl.
Any Jew with the courage to voice reservations about Zionism will likely have
been called a "self-hating Jew" by their community, perhaps by their family too.
The charge might be better applied to the architects of Zionism, both for their
rhetoric and the disastrous impacts of their politics on Jewish people.
BREAK?
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION

Part 3
Fanatical, uncompromising and wrong

Whatever was going on in Herzl's psyche, it was no foundation for a healthy

political ideology, but perhaps Judaism due for a change. Christianity had its
Reformation in the 16th century and the Jewish religion had changed radically
in the past, notably during the Babylonian exile and then again after the Ro-
mans destroyed the second temple. The Holocaust was a catastrophe of similar
magnitude.
Even before the Nazis, the new thinking of the 19th century had started
pushing many Jews towards something more modern. Though most Jews (in-
cluding his own son) were not willing to follow Herzl's example by abandoning
nearly everything, other modern expressions of Judaism were on the table. The
Reform Jewish movement published of a Declaration of Principles in 1885,
shortly before Der Judenstaat. Embracing the 19th century spirit of progress
also seen in Mill's On Liberty and Marx's Communist Manifesto, the founding
principles reframe the Messiah not as a ruler but a "modern era of universal
culture of heart and intellect." The Reform movement also let go of a great deal
of Mosaic and rabbinical law, "as in our days [it] is apt rather to obstruct than
to further modern spiritual elevation". My childhood synagogue offers Jewish
film nights, cookery classes and history courses, but no Talmud.
One thing Reform Judaism kept, however, was an explicit rejection of the
idea of a return to Palestine; it was anti-Zionist at its inception. That all
changed with the political fact of the state of Israel, and perhaps more impor-
tantly the fact that the post-war allies were fully behind it. Jewish communities
have long avoided any political position in opposition to the states they live in,
for obvious reasons, and even built a prayer in support for government into the
morning service on the Sabbath. Soon a prayer for the state of Israel was also
incorporated into the Reform liturgy, and the apologetics began. I remember
my rabbi when I was about six years old, sermonising about Israel as a nation
in its adolescence, and how we should forgive the mistakes of adolescents. He
was talking about the massacres of thousands of Palestinians in the Shatila and
Sabra refugee camps during the war with Lebanon.
Orthodox Jews, for their part, still study Talmud; the many Zionists among
them presumably ignore the oaths about founding a state and raising an army
to focus on questions of more practical importance as what prayer to say when
one sees an unusually large animal. Those who still follow Jewish norms are
called "ultra-orthodox" or Haredi today, and they reject the state of Israel.
Aside from their slightly quirkier clothing, this is their main point of difference
from the less-ultra-orthodox.
Given that "orthodox" means "correct/straight (ortho-) doctrine/teaching
(doxa)" (and ultra-orthodox means "extremely correct teaching"), we seem to
be deep into Orwellian territory here. It's not complicated: Jewish scripture for-
bids a Jewish nation, it is as "correct" as pulled pork for Shabbat dinner. Rabbi
Diskin was a zealot who felt a profound responsibility for the religion and cul-
ture he represented, and he saw where things were going, so he was appalled.
I have less skin in the game. While any manhandling of language makes me
wince a little, I don't really care how people relate to old books, how convoluted
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
their logic is, or how psychologically damaged the authors of their ideas are.
From my perspective - and please don't take this personally - that's just how
neurotypicals tend to behave when social norms demand it.
Zionists could be every bit as fanatical and uncompromising as the Maharil
Diskin, but they lacked his gift for extreme pedantry. It's an annoying character
trait, for sure, but one thing about pedants is that they are often correct. When
my own pedantry flowered I started looking into the stories I'd been told grow-
ing up, for example at Reform Synagogue Youth (RSY) Summer Camp in my
summer holidays. One game we played recreated the journey of Jews fleeing
Germany by following clues around a room. I remember my team being turned
away at England due to antisemitic quotas, then again by the USA, and finally
we arrived in Palestine, starving from lack of provisions but home. Only when I
went looking did I learn that the story was disingenuous, and Zionists had lob-
bied for those quotas.
Zionism represents a complete break from conventional Jewish thought. The
salvation Jews had been waiting for for thousands of years was to be brought
about by the Messiah himself, who would establish the promised land and
usher in an era of peace where people would hammer swords into
ploughshares. The state of Israel, by contrast, was at war within minutes of its
birth. The internal tensions lead to violence too. The "ultra-orthodox", who live
there in communities that predate Zionism and never recognised the state, re-
ceive regular savage beatings during peaceful protests against the abuses of
the state - a quick scan of Twitter will furnish hours of sickening violence meted
out by Israeli cops to black-hatted Jews. Recently the ultra-orthodox neighbour-
hood of Mea Shearim was invaded by soldiers and the Palestinian flags they
had raised in solidarity were torn down. Rabbi Shoshana Menahem describes
how the Israeli media views "the Haredis [ultra-orthodox] as a threat: you do
not work, you’re not in the Israeli Defence Force, you don’t take care of the se-
curity of the nation, and you have so many children, and so on." In many ways
this rhetoric, and the violence, echo the experience of traditional Jews in the
ghettos of 19th and 20th century Europe.
A different way of thinking

Rabbi Menahem is one of several autistic rabbis who are critical of Zionism;
according to her, the Zionist dream "is what is causing the chaos we are expe-
riencing now". Rabbi Tzemah Yoreh is another autist, whose experience in what
he calls the IDF " propaganda department" disabused him of his Zionism. It also
left him an atheist (this is not an obstacle to being a rabbi, because Jewish ob-
servance is concerned with how you behave rather than what you believe.)
While autism is probably no more common among Jews than other people,
Jewish history seems unique in elevating the most finikity neurodivergent peo-
ple to positions of leadership. The Talmud, as an encyclopaedia to guide every
imaginable detail of life, is a singularly autistic text, recording arguments be-
tween rabbis over how to interpret scripture and later arguments over how to
interpret the interpretations made in earlier centuries. It is designed to be read
by two Torah geeks who would then argue with each other and the rabbis on
the page centuries and millennia before them. A later commentator may not
overrule the decision made by earlier commentators, but he may employ the
most spectacular logical summersaults in order to further complexify the tradi-
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
tion - as long as his conclusion is consistent with the principles of kindness and
leniency.
It is comforting for neurodivergent people to have rules to navigate the com-
plexity of social living and morality, and that those rules have been thoroughly
examined for their consistency. Furthermore, the rulings themselves often
seem designed to preserve neurodivergent people from stress. One argument
that continued even after the Talmud was finished, for example, finally codified
in the 16th century exactly how a mezuzah (a little prayer box) should be posi-
tioned on the door post. One rabbi says vertical, another says horizontal, and
the text concludes that it should be placed at an angle. This respects the logic
of both and exalts the principle of compromise. It also deals with the powerful
compulsion of some neurodivergent people to correct things that are meant to
be straight.
Unlike the law codes of nations, there is no punishment for most lapses - no
one is going to jail for eating a prawn or sneezing during prayer. The conse-
quence of a moral lapse is separation from God (and if that doesn't move you
then the searing disapproval of the rabbi might). What does it mean to be sep-
arated from God?
Autistics tend to be concrete in their thinking; abstractions are alien con-
cepts, and so "separation from God" may refer to something quite real and ur-
gent (even though the language may be unfamiliar). When a neurodivergent
person freaks out about something that seems minor to other people, they are
likely responding to a powerful sense of disharmony - the same itch for order
that drives some autists to tap their left knee if they unwittingly tap their right,
or to line up their things neatly. Personally, I don't care about order in my vis-
ual environment, as you would know if you visited my flat, but if you are play-
ing a guitar out of tune you have to tune it or I have to move out of earshot.
That need for harmony also invades my conceptual sphere: if your behaviour is
out of tune with your moral code, and I care about the moral code you claim to
follow, it gnaws at my brain. Like Rabbi Diskin, I can't look at you without it
troubling me - as if you had some spaghetti on your chin and insisted that you
didn't. My autism is manageable, and I can look at you if I have to - I just abso-
lutely hate it, and even if I try to hide it my displeasure is obvious in every ges-
ture and syllable. I don't know enough about God to know what being separate
means, but I know when I feel alienated from myself and it is when I act
against something deep within me. I have destroyed relationships with several
of my dearest friends to resolve the tension.
I suspect that the internal contradictions that disturb autists also disturb neu-
rotypicals, though they may be less hung up about it. They may not even no-
tice, but regardless, internal disharmonies affect us all negatively. They can be
detected in various ways too: galvanic skin response, the fluidity of gesture,
Freudian slips, halting responses to word association tests, self-sabotage.
Unchecked, these contradictions may develop into complexes that the psyche
hides from itself but projects onto other people, and that can lead to all kinds
of problems for everyone involved; Herzl is a case in point.
There may be wisdom in this strange Jewish custom of making a certain type
of awkward fanatic into an arbitrator of moral conduct. It might be wise to lis-
ten to autists when they challenge you, even if it is challenging when they do.
They certainly aren't doing it for fun. What might have happened if people had
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
listened to the Maharil's suggestion "to stop this movement before it is too
late" and excommunicated the Zionists? Why didn't they act on his suggestion?
According to Torah Jews, a Jewish anti-Zionist movement:
"Some people questioned the need for such an extreme step – the Zionist
leaders were known to be irreligious and heretical, and so in any case no good
Jew would pay any attention to them. Others warned that the Zionists had sup-
port in the gentile world, and fighting them would only backfire. Still others said
that it would be impossible to organize such a gathering because the Maskilim
(Jews who believed in assimilation) had connections in the governments and
they would work hard to prevent the gathering. So in the end, the gathering
never took place. Reb Yehoshua Leib was always upset about this and he
warned, “A day will come when they will realize the correctness of my sugges-
tion."
After his death, the Maharil's anti-Zionist legacy was continued by the man
he mentored - Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, founder of an anti-Zionist, tradi-
tionalist movement. I wonder what Rabbi Diskin would have been doing today,
were he alive to see the events of 2024. perhaps he would be flying Palestinian
flags in defiance among the Haredi Jews of Mea Shearim or speaking against
the occupation on behalf of an anti-Zionist Jewish movement like Neturei Karta.
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION

Part 4
The fall and rise of the Jewish state

Rabbi Diskin's foresight was to view political Zionism as a threat to take seri-
ously, and it seems that his worst fear has come to pass: ethno-nationalism has
damaged Judaism more than any of its traditional enemies. If there is any good
news in the horror of the last year, it is that hindsight is kicking in and Diaspora
Jews are turning against Israel.
Many Jews do not feel that Israel protects Jews from anti-Semitism, that the
actions of the Jewish state in fact make anti-Semitism worse, and statistics sug-
gest that this perspective is common outside of my bubble. A 2024 poll found
that 90% of American Jews think "discrimination against Jews has risen in the
United States since the Israel-Hamas war began." The poll also found that
American Jews under 30 find more fault with Israel than Hamas. Given that
Hamas is almost uniformly attacked in the media as a terrorist organisation,
and does undeniably terrible things to innocent people, this shows colossal dis-
satisfaction with recent policies of the state of Isreal.
The critical camp is growing, particularly amongst younger people. A 2021
poll found that 32% of Jews under 40 believed that Israel is committing geno-
cide, compared with 18% of 40-64 year-olds and 15% of those over 64. In
2023, while 68% of those over 64 expressed sympathy toward Israel, only 43%
of 18-29 year olds did. Partly this is because of changes in communications
technology. In Stalin's time, it may have been true that "one death is a
tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic", but not when your instagram feed deliv-
ers bloodstains and neighbourhoods in ruins. The casual racism Zionist leaders
have unleashed in their speeches is also available for all to see, collated into
web pages a mere click away, and defending racism is not very popular these
days.
In many cases our work also bring us into contact with a wider range of peo-
ple than before. For my job in regenerative agriculture, I was talking over
WhatsApp with a contact in the West Bank one evening about a potential
project (as well as her baby and Palestinian band 47Soul). The following morn-
ing I received a message about how five of her neighbours had been killed by
IDF soldiers during the night. That same new media environment is putting
close relationships under strain as long-distance connections are made. For ex-
ample, 47% of Jews under 35 have stopped talking to someone because of
something they said about the current war.
Most Jews outside of the Haredi movement were raised in Zionist families
and synagogues, and those critical of ethno-nationalism will not be surprised if
their elders are sticking to their guns. This can be extremely frustrating, but
getting angry doesn't help; as Jewish writer Charles Eisenstein puts it, "by en-
tering into war mentality we strengthen the field of war". Jews are famously ar-
gumentative, but hopefully the cultural values of eloquence and logic still per-
vade those arguments. Though Talmud may not have featured much in a Jew-
ish upbringing in the last 50 years, I'd like to think that the principles of dispute
still hold sway around the dinner table - namely that opposing views be ac-
knowledged, that disputants remain open-minded to the weight of the evi-
dence, and that cordial relations are maintained. A tradition of respectful dis-
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
pute that goes back to the Second Temple period should not be given up too
easily. Even if you think that your friend is condoning genocide, or revealing
himself as a self-hating Jew, there can be nothing more goyish than making
that into a reason for a personal attack.
How odd of God to choose the Jews

Rabbi Diskin felt that the Jewish state would replace observance of the
mitzvot as the main concern of Jews and he was (characteristically) correct. I've
seen several Jews with a strong Zionist ethic giving their children bacon for
breakfast and it always blows my mind - not that they could be so immoral, but
that the idea of a state could supplant the idea of a covenant that had survived
intact since the 14th century BC when pig bones drop out of the archaeological
record in the hilltops of Canaan. Countries, gods and covenants are all funda-
mentally immaterial ideas and products of the imagination - why has such a
bad idea been so widely adopted?
Those imaginative souls who identify with their religious traditions must, I
believe, wrestle with the problematic lines of their scriptures, and Jewish scrip-
ture presents a particular problem with its conception of a Chosen People. This
idea has long been used to justify Jewish racism, and that remains the case to-
day, but in Isaiah the chosen people are chosen for a special mission to benefit
the world: to be "a light unto the nations". This is no less racist, but it does
raise certain interesting questions which I think about in a few different ways.
Firstly, it seems logically sketchy to me that something can be both a light
unto the nations and a nation. Isaiah uses the word goyim to refer to both the
heathen/gentile nations and also to denote the Israelite nation. At that point
the Jewish nation had been destroyed by the Babylonians, however, and the
poetry suggests the former.
It also seems to be bourn out in history. Many, such as the Chief Rabbi
Jonathan Sacks, have argued that the profound contribution Jews have made to
world culture is precisely because they were culturally outside of the empires
and countries they lived in. For one thing, most people for most of history in
most cultures were illiterate, but Jewish culture has always valued literacy;
Jews learned to read in several languages going in different directions and were
expected to rationally argue their thinking from the age of 13. I don't believe
that Jews are naturally cleverer than other people but that kind of tradition
moulds the human in a certain way. Another thing is that the Jews always had
their own philosophies to think with, so they could observe the cultures around
them obliquely, from their own perspective. My favourite Jewish joke evokes
this, regarding the four thinkers who did the most to advance human under-
standing in the modern world: Darwin, Einstein, Marx and Freud. Three of them
were Jewish and one of them was wrong, goes the punchline.
The third reason is not funny. By establishing a nation, the Jews have re-
vealed the ugly truth of nationhood - that colonialism is necessarily an act of
asymmetric warfare against people who have been othered. This was the case
for the Babylonians and the Romans, the Mongols and the Incas, the Caliphate
and the Holy Roman Empire, for Hitler's Reich, Hirohito's Empire and the British
Empire led by Winston Churchill starving Bengalis by the million (because they
"breed like rabbits"). It is the case for every power that ever seized inhabited
land, but our thinking has moved on since WWII. More "enlightened" empires
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
have to clothe self-interest and realpolitik in some kind of political ideology,
and that becomes even less tenable than racism and nationalism when the ide-
ology fails.
When Prime Minister Menahim Begin calls Palestinians as "beasts walking on
two legs", or Prime Minister Ehud Barak talks about them as greedy "croco-
diles", or Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir describes them as "grasshoppers" and
fantasises about their "heads smashed against the boulders and walls", these
people reveal themselves to be monsters. The author of the Koenig Memoran-
dum in 1976 is like the baddy in a Bond film when advocating the use of "ter-
ror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social
services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population". And now, as the plan rolls on
and the death toll climbs, we in nations allied to Israel are all made complicit,
particularly in the US, where taxpayers pay 70% of Israel’s war costs. As one
American voter put it when forced to choose between two pro-Zionist options,
"If I see a shredded child on my timeline again, I don’t know what I’m expected
to do, like, vote for that?". In the most awful way imaginable, the prophesy of
Isaiah to be "a light unto the nations" is being fulfilled by illuminating the na-
ture of nationhood itself.
The Holy Land is in trouble, and not just the Palestinians. A 2003 study found
that 44% of Israelis sampled had either been exposed to a terrorist attack
themselves or had a relative who had, that 9.4% presented with full-blown
PTSD and 55% exhibited at least one of its symptoms. Even tiny amounts of
stress have a huge impact on how we think - reducing our skill at problem solv-
ing and creative thinking by up to 50%. Israelis have grown up with war, under
attack both from enemy rockets and their own media. Many I know have left,
and some who remain don't seem to be thinking straight.
Towards peace

Anti-Zionists expressing a critique are often called upon to propose solutions

to the problems generated by Zionism. This is like asking a chef to fix the faulty
landing gear on your imaginary spaceship, but I'll make an attempt. As an an-
archist, I think Israelis and the rest of us should disabuse ourselves of the no-
tion that the nation-state is a good idea and then rethink our entire political
economy. In the meantime, however, if I ever found myself doing something
that killed innocent people I'd like to think I'd stop first and work out my next
moves afterwards. Perhaps funding hospitals, schools and farms rather than
bombs would be a good start. The people I was talking to in the West Bank and
in Shatila refugee camp all had great ideas about regenerative projects. They
are on hold now, for obvious reasons.
Zionists also ask me what to do about Hamas, which is easier: Israel should
stop supporting them. My Palestinian friends uniformly detest Hamas as much
as Israelis do, though they tend to be better informed about the history.
Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev was well informed too, as the Israeli military
governor in Gaza in the 1980s responsible for transferring funds to Hamas at
its inception; according to him Israel supported Hamas in order to challenge
the secular PLO. Israeli support did not cease when tensions increased and
Hamas violently seized power from the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. In 2014,
Netanyahu ignored Mossad intelligence which would have prevented millions of
dollars from reaching Hamas, and in 2018 he approved the transfer of millions
of dollars from Qatar to Hamas. As Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Knes-
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
set channel, "the Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset".
"Netanyahu's strategy is to prevent the two-state option," according to General
Gershon HaCohen, "and that is why he made Hamas his closest partner."
Divide and rule has been the strategy of empire since at least Alexander of
Macedon, and in the context of 21st-century politics that means funding and
goading people into killing your own people. The aspirations of the founding fa-
thers of Der Judenstaat, and the goals of the Koenig Memorandum, are ethnic
cleansing, and that requires more than just race pride in the 21st century. It re-
quires an organisation like Hamas.
If there is any hope, it is that trends amongst Diaspora Jews continue the
way they are going, that they withdraw their financial and political support for
that regime and the policies that fund it; billions of dollars of military pocket
money isn't doing that wayward adolescent any good at all. Perhaps Zionism
will be remembered as a bad idea that appealed to a generation of Jews in
shock from the Holocaust, to apocalyptic Christians who don't understand the
Bible, and to an army of rapacious politicians exploiting both. I sincerely hope
that this happens before the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Indigenous
population is complete, but I am fearful that Israel may light the fuse of WW3
first.
Shalom

Israelis say "peace" a lot - shalom is used as a greeting for hello and good-
bye in modern Hebrew. In Biblical Hebrew it means "complete" as well as
"peace", and the root shalam refers to reparations paid to resolve something:
an ox that replaces the ox that was lost, or the money a thief pays to his victim
when he is caught. Shalom is not peace as in the absence of conflict. It is the
peace of completion once a problem is resolved.
The word shalam is also found in the story of Jacob. Jacob's name means
"supplanter" and he is just that, a man who schemes against his older brother
Esau for his birthright. Jacob is a man of the fields, a smooth and cultivated
person, whereas Esau is a hairy man of the wilderness. When Esau returns one
day from hunting, Jacob tricks him out of his birthright for a bowl of stew. Later
the brothers form rival contingents and the weaker Jacob flees the anger of
Esau, but on the path he meets an angel who wrestles him and dislocates his
thigh. Jacob pins the angel and is given a new name. Jacob's new name will be
Israel "for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed". The
name Israel is about the focusing of power; it is related to words like javelin
and lightning bolt. In this case the power-up comes with a limitation, as Israel's
injury means that he can no longer outrun his brother. Esau soon catches up
with him, but though Jacob is terrified for his life, Esau greets him with friend-
ship. The enemies are reunited, they hang out for a while and part in peace.
Then Jacob goes on his way and settles in Shalem (from the same root meaning
complete).
In modern Hebrew, the root of the word shalom also means "to pay", an ab-
beration which have likely driven the Maharil into a rage. This whole word
game may seem rather esoteric and outside of the concerns of a secular Jew in
the modern world, but if so then the same can be said for a promise concerning
a strip of desert made by an imaginary storm god to a man who never existed.
Perhaps the Jews might have a richer culture and a better understanding of
 DO NOT SHARE - COPY FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
themselves if they had hung onto their "miserable stunted jargons" rather than
stunting the holy language - not only by using it to buy toilet brushes in the su-
permarket but in a general sense, by redefining the words of a 3000 year old
wisdom tradition to meet the demands of a 20th century political movement.
My Hebrew is extremely basic but at least its not wrong, as it is for many
speakers of modern Hebrew.
One option for peace in the Holy Land is to finish the job started by Herzl, but
believing this man's vision will work seems even crazier than believing that the
Messiah himself will do it. Perhaps this strategy should be dropped before it is
too late. Judging by the events of the 20th century, things don't go well for
ethno-nationalists that invade their weaker neighbours for living space.
Perhaps some things should remain sacred, and there is wisdom in the words
of the rabbis. Perhaps there is something to be said for cutting your fingernails
thoughtfully or remembering to praise God when you see an unusually large
animal, or in resting for a whole day each week or averting your gaze when an
evil-doer is trying to catch your eye. Perhaps peace should be grounded in re-
solving disputes rather than making purchases. Perhaps the Holy Land itself
should remain sacred to Jews: visited, cultivated, regenerated perhaps to being
a land of milk and honey - but not claimed.
Shalom!

Name is "shem" in Hebrew, from a root meaning "to fix/place"; it is signifi-

cant that the angel refuses to reveal his own name, even though he is pinned,
as if that power in its divine form cannot be contained for long.