This phrase summarizes so much of why we reject Zionism. And it has a surprising history. Join Tallie and Nava as we talk about Christian Zionism and why land matters. We're still collecting diaspora stories! What does "diaspora" mean to you? Record yourself - you can use the voice memos on your phone - and email podcast@jvp.org, and we might include it in a future episode! Music in this episode: "For Our Stories" by decibelists (www.decibelists.com) "Sneaky Adventure" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ "Flight Pack 1 - 4/6 (Segeln)" by Sascha Ende Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
For more on the Jewish National Fund and pine trees in Palestine, click here.
For more on Christian Zionism, check out More Desired than our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism by Robert O. Smith.
For more on Zionism and Jewish masculinity, we recommend Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man by Daniel Boyarin
Tallie: So. when I was a child I was a huge fan of the tv show Captain Planet
Nava: of course you were, Tallie, that’s adorable
Tallie: Listen, I’m a millennial! There was one villain whose whole superpower was deforestation
Nava: the nerdiest show
Tallie: 100%. And I remember being really excited because I knew how to fight deforestation - giving money to plant a tree in israel.
Nava: reacts
Tallie: there was this small blue box on our kitchen table with the logo of the J-N-F -- the Jewish National Fund.
The idea was that you would put your money in the box and that the JNF would plant a tree in your name.
When I think about my kitchen table growing up I can picture the shape of the table, the window, salt and pepper shakers, and the blue box.
And it seemed like everyone i knew was doing it - I know people who were gifted trees for their bat mitzvahs.
It was this way to create a physical connection between US Jews and Israel.
Nava: oh yeah, those trees!
My grandparents were super involved in the Jewish National Fund.
The hallway in their house had all these 19th century family portraits and so many tree certificates. Like, “the Jewish National Fund thanks you for planting 10,000 trees,” or whatever.
Tallie: totally. And this kind of tree planting is definitely still happening. The Jewish National Fund claims it’s a way to honor your heritage and reduce your carbon footprint.
Nava: but Tallie, now we know that these trees are not neutral bits of greenery -- they're super political. And they’re specifically planted on the sites of destroyed palestinian villages, to erase the evidence that there was every anything there.
Tallie: definitely.
Nava: and they’re a disaster in a lot of ways;
they’re very flammable and they catch on fire.
And, you know, those pine forests are only there in the first place because the founders of Israel wanted to make the land look more like Europe.
Tallie: of course. Nava, one thing that strikes me about the whole planting trees in israel thing is that it’s 100% for tourists and people who don’t live there.
Nava: yeah.
Tallie: Like, there was this scandal about twenty years ago when this Israeli newspaper discovered that workers were pulling up the trees between plantings so the next group of tourists could have a turn.
Nava: That’s wild. If people are pulling up the trees so they can be re-planted, then, like, it’s impossible to ignore that it’s simply the *act* of someone in Los Angeles sponsoring that tree that matters. the whole thing is about making Jews who don’t live in Israel feel as if we’re creating the state of Israel out of the soil with our own hands.
Tallie: oh my god, yes. Zionism has some contradictory ideas about the Jewish relationship to the land. One is that Jewish people deserved the land because we would treat it better than Palestinians - we would plant trees and… make the desert bloom.
Nava: Ya. Another thing you hear is there was no one there, and there's a saying for that:
[pause for dramatic effect] "A land without a people for a people without a land."
Tallie: Gross
:Theme Music:
Nava: Welcome to Diaspora podcast! I’m Nava EtShalom, a poet and educator in Philadelphia
Tallie: Hi, I’m Tallie Ben Daniel. I’m a political educator with Jewish voice for peace, living in oakland.
Tallie: Nava, in each episode of this podcast we’ve been talking about how Zionism works - how Jews in the US become attached, what that means for Jewishness, and what the impact is on Palestinians. And we’ve really been wanting to get here, to this episode, where we can talk about land. Because understanding Zionism’s approach to land - how Zionism shapes land and is shaped by land - is one of the clearest ways to really understand what Zionism is.
And the first step on this journey is understanding a thing called…. Christian Zionism
Nava: YEAH, I’m so excited to get into that whole mess
Tallie: Yeah, it's a thing... and to understand it I talked to an evangelical Lutheran pastor
***
Tallie: Hi! Do you mind introducing yourself?
Robert O. Smith: My name is Robert Smith. I’m the director of Briarwood Leadership Center in northern Texas. Before that, I was serving in Jerusalem with the University of Notre Dame as a professor of theology and global affairs.
Tallie: He literally wrote the book about Christian Zionism
Nava: tell us more, tallie. so many people think of Zionism as *only* a Jewish political idea.
Tallie: I asked Dr. Smith to say more about what Chistian Zionism is
Smith: In the definition that I’ve come up with in my research - Christian Zionism is political action informed by specific Christian commitments to promote or preserve Jewish control over what we might call Palestine or the Holy land or Israel and Palestine. What underlies the whole tradition is a Protestant, and more broadly Western Christian dynamic of imagining the role of Jews for Christian apocalyptic hope. And so Jews become part of the pawns moved around in a Christian apocalyptic drama.
Nava: right, the end times! The christian concept of apocalypse requires all the world's Jews to be gathered in to the holy land and, you know, sent to hell, and then Jesus will return.
Tallie: So in case anyone was thinking about Christian Zionism as some kind of protection for Jewish people, Dr. Smith squashes that idea pretty quickly.
Smith: Most of the Christians who were imagining these things had never really met Jews. They didn’t know Jews, and certainly weren’t concerned for Jews as Jews. They weren’t looking out for Jewish communal wellbeing, for instance. So, this is all about Christians imagining roles for Jews, for Christian purposes, which of course, is fundamentally anti-Jewish, but these Christians didn’t see themselves as such.
Tallie: By the way I just wanna say tha there are plenty of Christians who don’t believe in Christian Zionism. Many Palestinians are Christian.
Nava: ya so…. we started out today talking about land... why are we even bringing up Christian Zionism?
Tallie It’s because of that phrase you mentioned earlier: “A land without a people for a people without a land”you know, I have really been trying to remember where i first heard that phrase - And I actually can't? Because it seems like - for me at least - it was everywhere, as a true statement about why Israel was founded.
Nava: Hmm, me neither, Tallie it’s just somewhere back in my child mind.
I’d hear that phrase, in the air, mostly in Jewish spaces.
Tallie: But that phrase - it actually isn’t a Jewish idea. It COMES from Christian Zionism!! Take it away Dr Smith:
Smith : It is associated by many people, by critics and proponents alike, with Jewish political Zionism, but in fact the phrase first appears in Christian Zionist literature - in the UK, but then in the United States. Christian Zionist history is actually the real background of the phrase, and then it was later adopted by Jewish political Zionism.
Tallie: I mean, i don’t know about you, but I did NOT know that christian zionism was responsible for “land without a people for a people without a land”
Nava: I think this is pretty mind-blowing. The idea has taken on so much importance in Jewish political Zionism but Christian Zionism was already there, it’s been there all along, saying the land was empty and denying Palestinian existence. It's easy to think "land without a people" means literally just nobody's there, but i think it’s even more gross than that.
It’s not literal, it means that there’s no such thing as Palestinians, that Palestinians have no ties to the places they live or lived.
Smith: So, when this phrase, “a land without people for a people without land,” comes around, there’s an assumption that, first of all, Palestinians are not a real people, that they are not an identity or a cultural unit, and we still hear that currently. Whether or not Palestine is real, or Palestinians are a real people. And this phrase cuts right to that question. And it also indicates that the land is empty. So, even if there are people there, they’re not properly improving the land, they’re not properly using the land, according to Eurocentric definitions of what proper use is, And so, since that’s a reality, they don’t deserve the land, we do.
Nava: I used to have political fights with friends & family where they'd just totally deny that Palestinians are a people. They’d say things like, “‘Palestinian’ is just something they made up in 1948, why don't they leave Israel alone and go to Lebanon or Saudi Arabia or whatever where their people are.” That's also a part of "a land without a people."
Tallie: Ok so i’m a little ashamed of this but - i actually took this phrase literally? I was a child, I heard the phrase, and thought there was no one there, and once Jewish people showed up, these people who didn’t live there started attacking them. So of course, it didn’t take much to learn that I was wrong - once I learned about Palestinian history I understood that Palestinian people - Muslims and Jews and Christians - had been living on the land, and had had cities and towns and farms for thousands of years.
Nava ya, this is what Nadya was talking about in our last episode - remember Nadya Tannous? She’s an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement:
Nadya Tannous: Zionism, which is a political ideology that is now being expressed through a state that’s built on top of us—in order for Zionism to maintain its legitimacy, Palestinians need to be either expunged or at least invisibilized from the realm of existence, from the realm of reality, from any form of presentation.
Tallie: that erasure isn’t just about the story of the land but about the land itself - it’s how something like planting trees becomes so political. It’s how something that seems so innocent, maybe even good? becomes a way for both Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism to erase Palestinian presence from the land.
Nava: yeah, it’s kind of wild how even just how much trees matter here. while the Jewish National Fund takes Palestinian land by planting pine trees. the Israeli army and settlers on the West Bank stop Palestinians from tending to their olive trees and harvesting them. When Palestinians try to access their own trees,often, Israeli settlers attack them. And the Israeli army uproots ancient olive trees to just literally try to sever Palestinians' connection to the land, often so they can take the land to build the wall that separates Palestinian towns from Israeli settlements.
Tallie: Yeah. This impulse to erase Palestinian presence on the land, it’s a part of both Christian and Jewish Zionist movements. Because if you remember from episode 2 - Zionism started in the late 1800s. that was during the height of European nationalism... and also colonialism. Dr. Smith explains…
Smith: So, this is part of the zeitgeist of the time, that Christian Zionism is tied to this confidence that we can basically do with whatever people and with whatever land we want, as European Christians. And so the popularization of this phrase, and the birth of jewish political zionism all go together as part of a European colonial project.
Tallie: It’s a scary idea. And it’s really still all around us - where Christian Zionists feel like they can just rearrange the land as they see fit. Like, in 2018, when Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, essentially recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. This is a big deal because both Palestinians and Israelis claim Jerusalem as their capital, and the city is holy for Christians and Muslims and Jews. So the US was taking Israel’s side in a major way when it moved the embassy. But that move wasn’t for Jewish people.
N: although it did get him some Jewish fans, unfortunately
T: yeah but it was by and for Christian Zionists, people in the Trump administration like Mike Pence, who see it as one more step closer to the end times. The largest pro-Israel lobbying organization in the United States, which claims nine million members, is an organization called Christians United for Israel. They worked hard to move the embassy and Mike Pence regularly speaks at their conferences, saying that his passion for Israel comes from his Christian faith. Dr. Smith explains how this works:
Smith: you see many Christian Zionists using Jews as props in their own end times anticipations, and then making gestures toward the State of Israel, and sometimes certain Jews within the State of Israel, like Holocaust survivors. But, not truly concerned for the wellbeing of Jews as Jews, trying to live their Jewish lives openly, proudly.
Nava: so Christian evangelicals tour Israel all the time... and they love supporting the Israel lobby in the US organizations like Christians united for israel or aipac, who want to strengthen the relationship between the US and Israel. and when they're doing that they are supporting Israel ... but they're not supporting Jews.
This is where Christianity, white supremacy, and settler colonialism all meet up: in Christian Zionism. where the idea of conquering land where indigenous people live is just fine.
Tallie: Absolutely. land and settler colonialism are core parts of Christian Zionism, because European colonists just feel entitled to remake the world. . but land is a key concept in Jewish Zionism
In Jewish political Zionism, there's this story about the relationship between Jewish people and the land. That Jewish people were pioneers, that we rescued the land… it’s a compelling story to many people
Nava: it’s a settler colonial story
Tallie: yeah that too.
Nava: I mean, it’s a thing settlers do everywhere: they see themselves as redeeming an unused land and ALSO as being redeemed by it.
One powerful Zionist story about land was that if Jews build a state in Palestine, we could escape our weak old victimized roles. Planting and defending the land would turn us into something better.
So like, there was this image of Jews in Europe as weak and mousy; the pale stooped sensitive yeshiva boy who only cared about his books and therefore let himself be victimized by his hale, strong, antisemitic neighbors.
Tallie: reacts
Nava: Working the land, owning the land, defending the land, having a physical space, that could make Jews strong, make us powerful. We’d become soldiers, productive and muscled and tanned and tough. These ideas are totally eurocentric, totally antisemitic, totally sexist.
Tallie: SO sexist.
Nava: you know what, you still see this all the time in fashion magazines and israeli PR: hot soldiers, men and women, with their big guns, showing you that Israel has sexy deadly Jews, not those brainy European wimps, They’ve been reshaped by the land and sun of Palestine and that’s how we get some respect around here.
Tallie: yeah, and on top of really erasing Palestinians, it feels like such a classic way to just blame the victim when it comes to antisemitism.
Nava: wait say more what do you mean
Tallie: Well, back in Europe Jews were being persecuted - remember European nationalism from Episode 2 and how Europeans saw Jews as something to be eliminated...? This whole idea - that Jews should find a new land and transform ourelves - implies that the people who were violent against Jews weren’t the problem, it’s actually our fault for being so weak. So we have to be strong, and muscular, and show that we made the land better somehow, and have these guns and walls, shoot first and ask questions later.
Nava: oof yeah. Plus it’s a weird fantasy where all Jews are European...which erases Jews from Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan and Morocco and Ethiopia and China and a million other places. So this land narrative is powerful.
Tallie: And it takes a lot to resist it
Nava: When I was like 22 I used to show up to protest at the Israeli embassy with my cousin Alissa and we’d sing this cheer, written by Jews Against the Occupation in New York. it has to do with land, and all the myths about land you and I grew up with.
I got us doing it on tape, want to hear?
Tallie: Duh.
Nava: ok...
Alissa and Nava: A land without a people for a people without land
Came the cry of their zionist demand
Palestinians do exist
And colonialism they will resist
Gotta shake off, shake off the racist occupation
All people deserve self-determination
Gotta shake off, shake off military rule
Kick the army out of our homes and our schools
Nava: Thank you for listening to diaspora. in the next episode, we’re going to talk about HOW the two of us came to think about the land of Palestine in a new way...
Tallie: Right, how we began to question and criticize and reject Zionism. How we started to really take diaspora seriously. And… We want to hear what you think.
What does the word “diaspora” mean to you? Do you think of yourself as living in diaspora?
Nava: Record your answer - you can use the voice memos on your phone - and email your recording to podcast@JVP.org, and we might include it in a future episode. Diaspora podcast is produced by Tallie Ben Daniel. It’s written and hosted by me, Nava EtShalom, and Tallie Ben Daniel, and edited by Jenny Asarnow.
Tallie: Our theme music is the song “for our stories” by decibelists, off their self-titled debut album.
Nava: If you like this podcast, please spread the word, and rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts! And you can follow us on twitter @diasporapodcast, or email us at podcast@jvp.org
Tallie: We’d like to thank Dr. Robert O. Smith for his insights on Christian Zionism. You can get his book,
More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism
, wherever books are sold.