Tony Blair has apologised to an 82-year-old Labour activist thrown out of the party's annual conference by stewards for heckling Jack Straw.

Walter Wolfgang, of London, was ejected after shouting "nonsense" as the foreign secretary defended Iraq policy.

The prime minister told BBC Breakfast: "I am really sorry about it, it shouldn't have happened."

Labour says Mr Wolfgang can return for the conference's final day provided he does not make further disturbances.

Police stopped Mr Wolfgang under the Terrorism Act when he tried to re-enter on Wednesday, seizing his pass.

Mr Wolfgang, who escaped Nazi Germany in 1937, is a member of the Stop the War Coalition.

His heckle came as Mr Straw told delegates: "We are in Iraq for one reason only - to help the elected Iraqi government build a secure, democratic and stable nation."

Manhandled

Mr Wolfgang, a Labour member of 57 years' standing, afterwards told BBC Two's Daily Conference Live programme: "These two toughies came round and wanted to manhandle me out.

"I said: 'Do you want me to leave? I will leave, you don't need to manhandle me.' Physically, I am not too well, so I said I would follow them.

Erith and Thamesmead constituency party chairman Steve Forrest, who was sitting next to Mr Wolfgang, was also thrown out after complaining about the stewards' response.

The plan to draw up a list of historical events that people can be prosecuted for celebrating is a sign of a leader losing his grip

At last history hits pay dirt. For years it was pap for television. The nation's rulers needed scientists for guns, linguists for trade and economists for mistakes. History was for nuts and numismatists. Now up pops Charles Clarke jingling bags of gold. The home secretary has promised the prime minister that he will lock away for five years anyone who "glorifies, exalts or celebrates" a terrorist act committed in the past 20 years. He does not care if glorification was not meant. If someone, somewhere takes anything that I say or write as encouraging to terror, even if they do not act on it, I have committed a criminal act.

Nor is this all. Lest any crackpot thinks he can dance up and down any old high street praising Hitler, Mao or Uncle Joe as outside the 20-year limit, Clarke is preparing a list of earlier terrorist acts that also render their celebrants criminals. After "listed" historic buildings we have "listed" historic terrorisms. To the glorious chronicles of our island race, Clarke is to append an open-ended catalogue of listed events. They may include any acts of violence against people, property or, bizarrely, electronic systems anywhere in the world if intended to advance a political, religious or ideological cause or to influence a government.

I am told that this astonishing bill was cobbled together not by Clarke or the lord chancellor, Charles Falconer, who were both away at the time. The author was a No 10 wonk who was trying to think up "12 points" to put in Blair's holiday press conference pack on August 5. The wording recalls the remit of the old House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington. It is born of Joe McCarthy out of 1066 and All That, with a dash of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

A sure sign of a leader losing his grip on reality is when he starts meddling with history. New Labour was born denying its past. As George Eliot said of women, happy is the one who has no history. Blair's party was not-Labour, not-Liberal, not-Tory, just "we". Hence the significance of Clarke's partial cut-off date in the mid-80s. That was the time when Blairism first oozed like ectoplasm from the guts of Orgreave and Wapping.

Terrorism as defined in law more or less covers the story of the human race. Half of Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples must qualify as a listed event. The Crown Prosecution Service must be staffed with experts in William the Conqueror, the Black Prince, the New Model Army, the Gordon rioters, the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Spin doctors must cut their teeth on Alexander the Great, Vlad the Impaler, Innocent III and the Counter-Reformation in Latin America. They must burn midnight oil over the Albigensian crusade. Blair will be heard screaming in his attic: "Beware the Da Vinci Code."

This is government by trivia and whim. Already we are told that Clarke's listed events will not include anything Irish. Why? King William's campaign is life and breath to loyalist militants, as is the 1916 Easter Rising to Blair's pet insurrectionists, the IRA. Why should these groups be excused the law? Soon anyone who visits terror on the British people will negotiate a "listed events exclusion clause" as part of their final settlement.

Even without the cliche that one man's listed event is another's act of heroism, this is a can of worms. Bomber Harris's flattening of German cities in the second world war was specifically described by Churchill as "simply for the sake of increasing terror". The bombing of Hiroshima was, to put it mildly, a politically motivated assault on people and property. Last month it was not glorified, but it was certainly celebrated.

Are Hiroshima or Dresden to be listed events? If not, how can the no less terrorist blitz be listed? Conrad was in this sense right: "The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket." I have no faith in Clarke's Stalinist historians. If Whitehall bureaucrats are so otherworldly as to find village ponds, conker trees and rare steaks awash in human hazard, there is no telling what they will find in the bloodstained pages of history. They need only to find a dodgy event and someone to praise it and they will pounce. The issue is not mens rea or intention to glorify. To convict, there need only be someone who confesses to being "encouraged" by the glorification. It is a stooge's charter.

This extension of censorship renders any apologist for any liberation struggle vulnerable to prosecution. I find it astounding that people such as Falconer, Clarke and the rest of the cabinet can sit round a cabinet table and pass a measure worthy of Joseph Goebbels.

Ministers may yet be hoist with their own petard. I might draw a moral distinction between Blair's crusade against certain Muslim states and, say, publicity for al-Qaida violence against me. I might feel that my war is in a good cause and theirs an evil one.

The courts are not free to make that distinction. Any act with terrorist connotations puts not just its perpetrator but any contributory publicity at risk. Operation Shock and Awe against Baghdad in March 2003, in which Britain participated, was intended to terrify the civilian population to the political end of toppling Saddam. The name boasted it.

Government lawyers may argue that states cannot be terrorists, yet those same lawyers apply the phrase "state terrorism" to others. Besides, the bill offers no defence of "good cause". The Crown Prosecution Service must surely apply the law impartially.

The government's defenders will argue of terror-bombing from the air that there are distinctions in targeting and collateral damage. But any self-respecting terrorist can find similar excuses for horror. At very least Downing Street is vulnerable to hypocrisy. Its crude attempt to stoke war fever in the winter of 2002/3 with briefings of "new smallpox/ricin/anthrax threat to London" was no less political. It was meant to frighten the public into supporting the rush to war. The effect was to disseminate the same fear as did the supposed terrorists. Bluntly, the government was doing the terrorists' job for them. I cannot see how this puts ministers above their own law.

Downing Street is not alone in playing this tune. This week Brussels joined in the New Orwellianism. In a document called Terrorist Recruitment: Addressing the Factors Contributing to Violent Radicalisation, the European Commission warns the media not to take a "reductionist and conspiratorial world view where inequity and oppression are dominant". It singles out journalism as offering a "specific risk" in the fight against terrorism - the risk of "oversimplification". Journalists should apparently watch themselves. The edict is the work of the commission's vice-president and ally of Silvio Berlusconi, Franco Frattini. Berlusconi is no friend of the press.

What is going on here? Blair, Clarke and Falconer are consorting with strange company. They should remember Montaigne's warning to history: "To make judgments about great and high things, a soul of the same stature is needed." Otherwise, said the great man, we drag history down to the level of our own vices. Just so.

The announcement that he had a strip of granite inside him (could it have anything to do with the heart murmur?) was unexpected; other than that, the most arresting, and perhaps most alarming, aspect of Tony Blair's Labour party conference speech on Tuesday was how preternaturally unchanged the great changemaker seems to have been by the events of the past few years - from the Iraq war and the suicide bombings of two months ago to the less dramatic, but not insignificant fact of his own party's greatly reduced majority in the last election.

To hear Blair in full, shameless flight is to listen a man whose self-esteem seems also to have survived, miraculously intact, his catastrophic adventure abroad and flagging record at home, for he told us that he is now even more convinced of his rightness - on everything - than he was before. "Every time I've ever introduced a reform in government, I wish in retrospect I had gone further." [...]

If he is correct, of course, Blair's findings present quite a challenge to the evolutionary psychologists who have told us how many aspects of human nature which originated in our evolutionary history have indeed fast-forwarded to the future: they are everywhere in evidence today. Has the human male's lust for power, for instance, and his reluctance to relinquish it once attained, changed much since our ancestors developed on the plains of Pleistocene Africa? Once you have seen that strip of granite strutting its stuff, you might think not.

The Labour conference was to hold its big debate on Iraq yesterday. So did they discuss it? Of course not! Instead, a furious woman from Unison stormed the podium. "I want to know why I have been stopped from bringing a bag of sweeties into the conference. It is bureaucracy gone mad!" she said.

The chairwoman said gravely that the matter would be referred to the Conference Arrangements Committee, where it will probably disappear like a dead rat in a Bastille oubliette.

They will spend hours on the issue and then come up with a confectionery composite which will be voted on - by 1.7m block votes to 638,000.

At the time we all looked rather puzzled, until the steward standing near my seat explained: "I'll tell you why they're banned, they could be used as missiles."

Missiles! What has Labour come to? The party of Hardie, Attlee and Bevan, afraid that its speakers might be cut down under a fusillade of Fox's Glacier mints and Fishermen's Friends!

As Hugh Gaitskell would have said: "I will fight, fight, and fight again to save the party that I love, no matter how many Liquorice Allsorts you throw at me!"

Later I learned that an old woman, a known and notorious leftie, had a bag of Mint Imperials confiscated, for fear that she might create mayhem by rolling them along the floor. (However I managed to smuggle in three of those individual Toblerone things - which, being triangular and sharp-edged, are lethal anti-personnel weapons.)

The issue may be tiny, but it is a reflection of the state of the Labour party now, combining bombast, vainglory and total paranoia.

Anyhow, Iraq. That's the big issue! But first, a debate on campaigning, and a speech from Dennis Skinner. If Tony Blair's speech on Tuesday was a reply to Gordon Brown, Mr Skinner's was a reply to Tony Blair.

Globalisation? You can keep it. Dennis harked back to the good old days, when he went on endless marches and the miners were always on strike. Glorious days, days of struggle, chaos and power cuts. "I was very happy, and still am, to participate in the class war. I say this to every young person in Britain: fight the class war, not the holy war!"

He got a standing ovation. All over the land young men and women will be seizing their Werther's Originals and marching to the barricades. What the new class war needs is tactics - and Tic-Tacs!

At last, the debate on Iraq. Except nobody mentioned it. Several people praised the magnificent work done by ministers to end world poverty and hunger. There was a video of grateful Ugandan children thanking the Labour government for the fact that they were happy and well-fed. But nothing at all about Iraq, until Barry Camfield of the T&G denounced the whole thing.

"You cannot force democracy on people by war, invasion and occupation!"

But even he was received with just muted applause. Clearly people agreed with him, but not quite enough to show it. Then we heard from Jack Straw, the foreign secretary. He did say a word or two about Iraq. Most of what he said was received by the merest polite applause, like drizzle on a tin roof.

"We are there for one reason only - to help the elected Iraqi government build a secure, democratic and stable nation!" At this point an elderly man in the gallery shouted: "That's a lie!"

Dissent, at a Labour conference! Not permitted. No way. Building democracy in Iraq is fine, but not at home. Where would it end? Two tough stewards grabbed this frail old gentleman. And rightly so - he might have been a suicide bomber, with a deadly belt containing a dozen sticks of Brighton rock

Powers pave way for secret new world. New laws raise fears of targeting, loss of rights.

Suspected terrorists as young as 16 will face house arrest for up to a year without being convicted of an offence under sweeping laws agreed to by all Australian governments.

Police will also be able to pre-emptively detain people for up to 14 days, without charge, if they suspect they are planning a terrorist offence.

State premiers and chief ministers met the Prime Minister yesterday and accepted the harsh new laws, which Queensland's Peter Beattie called draconian but necessary.

Suspects placed under house arrest would have no warning of the action until issued orders by federal police. The court orders would be issued in secret so any terrorist associates could not be tipped off about the investigation.

The premiers and chief ministers forced a sunset clause for the legislation on the Prime Minister, John Howard. This means the laws will last only 10 years unless extended by future parliaments. The premiers also won a five-year judicial review of the laws.

Meeting Mr Howard in Canberra yesterday, the political leaders were reassured by the judicial checks and balances, although they left lawyers aghast. AdvertisementAdvertisement

Mr Howard needed the states to agree because the Federal Government does not have the constitutional power on its own to bring in some of the changes.

At the heart of the legislative changes are the tough preventive detention rules and "control orders" - restrictions such as house arrest, electronic tagging and tracking, and bans on approaching certain areas or people.

A court will be able to issue a control order if it is satisfied "on the balance of probabilities" that it will substantially help in preventing a terrorist attack, or if the suspect has trained with a listed terrorist organisation. Suspects detained will be allowed to contact a lawyer. However, they will be allowed to tell only family members and their employer that they are safe but cannot be contacted. Preventive detention may also be imposed after a terrorist attack to preserve evidence.

Safeguards such as having a court approve the control orders and allowing suspects to challenge them will be built in.

Mr Howard said "these are unusual remedies for an unusual situation" to fight "this shadowy, elusive and lethal enemy".

"In other circumstances I would never have sought these new powers," he said. "But we live in very dangerous and different and threatening circumstances … I think all of these powers are needed."

This summer 2005, an immigration judge in Dallas ordered the deportation of a young man who was eligible for legal resident status because his US citizen wife had filed a petition for him, which the government had approved.  They have five small children, all native-born Texans.  His father is a US citizen.  Ayman Ismail never had  been accused, much less convicted, of doing anything wrong.  He had lived in Texas for the past 16 years.

His legal status would have been a routine matter, except for one thing:  Ayman Ismail was Muslim and Arab, and a small gang of Jewish militants in the Dallas District of the Department of Homeland Security had made him a target of their crusade to rid the US of Muslims and Arabs.  After two years of hearings, all of which he appeared at faithfully, during a hearing in the immigration court on April 12, they assaulted and arrested Ayman, and threw him into a jail in Haskell, Texas, hundreds of miles from his home, his family, and his attorney.  Nothing had changed, except that the clique of Jewish militants realized there was no basis in the law for denying legal status to him.  They accused him of having raised funds for Hamas merely by virtue of his employment by the Holy Land Foundation, which ended in December 2001 when US Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Treasury Department shut down the Muslim charity.

To achieve by force what they never could have accomplished in the law, the Jewish militants put him in jail to break his spirit, so that he would despair of justice and agree to deportation.  After the July 30 deportation hearing, in which the immigration judge specifically found that not one shred of evidence contradicted Ayman’s insistence he never had any reason to think the HLF assisted Hamas (but ordered him deported anyway) Ayman decided not to appeal the order because he could not endure continued incarceration.

The Jewish extremists argued that the HLF was assisting Hamas by alleviating some of the misery of the victims of Israeli terrorism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  The reasoning of the Jewish militants went like this.  HLF relieves misery and starvation.  If Palestinians think that they do not have to stick around to relieve the misery and starvation of their parents and siblings, they will become suicide bombers and attack Israelis.  Since some suicide bombers are affiliated with Hamas, charity for the suffering people of the Occupied Palestinian Territories encourages suicide bombing, and therefore assists Hamas.

Since Ayman had worked at the HLF designing a web site and sending letters to donors reminding them to pay what they had pledged, he was supporting Hamas suicide bombers, and so was a terrorist.  The Jewish militants argued that the reason for suicide attacks against Israel had nothing to do with the cold blooded murder of hundreds of Palestinian children and thousands of adults by Israeli soldiers, nothing to do with the bulldozing of thousands of Palestinians’ homes with the furnishings, toys, and sometimes families still inside, nothing to do with the razing of thousands of acres of Palestinians’ farms and millions of fruit trees, nothing to do with the confiscation of Palestinians’ property to build racially segregated settlements and “bypass roads” for Jews only, nothing to do with dumping tons of toxic waste from Jewish colonies and factories on Palestinian towns; nothing to do with the Israelis’ reduction of Palestinian life to such unbearable pain without hope of improvement that the only reasonable alternative for a young Palestinian might appear to be a death that would take along some of the enemy.  No, the reason for Palestinian suicide attacks against Israel was the attackers’ expectation that some charity would feed their families.

Still, the cowardice of the immigration judge Anthony Rogers in condemning a man he knew to be innocent and deporting five United States citizens to Jordan is no more appalling than the obsequiousness of the coverage of the trial by CBS News.  One who relied on the CBS broadcast was not told that Ayman never was accused of any crime, or, for that matter, that the HLF to date has never been allowed to present evidence in its own defense in a court.  On the contrary, CBS turned its report over to a government agent who ranted in the manner of Julius Streicher about getting rid of terrorists.

CBS did not mention the five US citizen children.  Although a CBS reporter had attended Ayman’s immigration court hearing, the broadcast did not mention the finding by the immigration judge that no evidence contradicted Ayman’s protestations of innocence.  The immigration judge found that Ayman’s testimony was straightforward and truthful, and held explicitly that Ayman’s deportation would cause extreme hardship to his wife and children.  He found Ayman truthfully testified that while employed at the HLF he asked his employers about accusations in the Dallas Morning News that HLF was connected to Hamas, and that his employers consistently denied them.  He said that Ayman should have done more to find out whether there was any basis to the accusations.  He did not say what more Ayman should have done to investigate the truth of accusations that even the FBI did not believe—accusations that additional investigation would have confirmed to be false.

A viewer of the CBS broadcast, however, was not given such information.  Instead, the CBS report merely regurgitated government propaganda.  Josef Goebbels would have been envious.  CBS could have balanced its report with information about the trial and about Ayman’s history, but chose instead to make its broadcast an instrument of government terrorism—to convince its viewers that there are Muslim militants under their beds but the regime will protect them if only they will accept its racist assumptions and surrender their traditional liberty.

Most of all, the CBS report ignored the total absence of any evidence linking Ayman Ismail or the Holy Land Foundation to any illegal activity.  Instead, it relied on the buck naked lies of government public relations flacks, which easily could have been investigated.  Of course, such sycophancy is par for American journalism, which cannot be troubled to seek for the truth.  Terrorism does not work by damaging military targets.  It works by creating fear.  CBS thus conspired with the Jewish militants of the Department of Homeland Security in its terrorism against anybody in America who might pity the suffering of the Arab people in the Middle East.

Writer and journalist Israel Shamir is one of the most committed Israeli personalities against the Jewish definition of the State of Israel and the system of apartheid it has created. His detractors present this former spokesperson of MAPAM (the Socialist Party of Israel) and former translator of president Herzog, as a “Self-hating Jew” whereas his supporters believe he is “one of the greatest Israeli intellectuals.” Israel Shamir answers Silvia Cattori’s questions about the defamation campaign against him and the ways of fighting racism in the state of Israel.

Note From Israel Shamir: Interesting and daring essay by an Israeli English-language writer Yael Lotan contradicts the well-meaning (but meaningless) mantra of 'Judaism is not Zionism'. Yael was the editor of Arts in the socialist zionist newspaper Al Hamishmar I had a pleasure to write for, years ago. She lived for a long time in Jamaica, and now lives in Tel Aviv.

Anyone who wishes to discuss the phenomenon of Zionism immediately runs into the problem of how to define it. Unlike the European colonization of the Americas, for example, or the British domination of Kenya or India, the Jewish settlement in Palestine has been given various and contradictory definitions. The two commonest, and conflicting, definitions are: 1. «Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people;» 2. «Zionism is one of the manifestations of European colonialism in the 20th century.» I shall return to these definitions, their sources and limitations.

I propose to show that Zionism is an essentially Jewish phenomenon, and cannot be separated from Judaism (in the religious-historical sense of the term), and therefore its resemblance to either national liberation or colonialist movements is morphological rather than taxonomic, and leaves various aspects of Zionism unexplained.

What is Judaism?

A prayer called Hamavdil (the Separator), said by observant Jews every Saturday evening as the Sabbath ends, praises God who «separates the sacred from the profane». Judaism is dominated by the idea of separation. What are the origins and rationale of this striking characteristic? - This question ought to be tackled with the tools of anthropology, psychology, history and sociology. There must be various reasons why Judaism has not been investigated with these tools, and why the few scholars who attempted to analyze the nature of Judaism tended to produce apologetics. One reason may be that some of the fathers of modern anthropology were themselves Jews (e.g., Franz Boas and Claude Levi-Strauss), and were unwilling or unable to tackle their ancestral culture with the same tools with which they tackled exotic ones. But then, neither did non-Jewish scholars apply to the religion which gave birth to Christianity the same analytical methods they applied unhesitatingly to alien cultures and religions. A rare and illuminating exception may be found in Mary Douglas' famous book Purity and Danger, in which she discusses the purity laws in the Book of Leviticus, placing them in a broad anthropological context.

But this is a rare study, and it deals only with the primeval phase of Judaism. It can no more cover the subject of latter-day Judaism than a discussion of the early days of the American republic can cover the subject of the US today. It is time that someone applied the usual anthropological methods to the Shulhan Arukh - the all-embracing rule-book for observant Jews - in comparison with other old cultures, from the Hindu Brahmins to Papuan tribes. But even without all these, it is possible to outline some of the main features of Judaism.

1. The Old Testament defines the Yahwist deity in terms of what he is not: Jehovah is not the god of other tribes; He does not share his dominion over his chosen tribe with any other deity; Being a deity of the upper air, the wind and the surface of the earth, he has no dealings with what lies under the earth, namely, the world of the dead and the chthonic powers - which accounts for such biblical assertions as «The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence,» and for the injunctions against the consumption of blood and necromancy; Jehovah requires from his followers to adopt signs to distinguish them from other people, e.g., circumcision, and the prohibition of work or lighting a fire one day a week. The Bible also lay down rules of separation between different kinds of field crops, a ban on yoking together an ass and an ox, on weaving fabrics with mixed animal and vegetable fibres, etc. In the course of time Judaism added more and more ritual separations, until it became totally dominated and obsessed by the business of keeping various categories of things apart - the pure and the impure, the sacred and the profane, kasher and taref (ritually clean and unclean meats), meat and dairy products, leavened and unleavened dough (during Passover), silk and cotton, men and women, adults and minors, and so on.

2. Judaism as we know it began to evolve in the time of the Second Temple, i.e., the fifth century BC. Thereafter, the principal separation, namely, between Jews and «Gentiles», became entrenched, as the religious leaders Ezra and Nehemiah forbade inter-marriage between Jews and other people. Even the Samaritans, who were their brothers from the northern kingdom of Samaria, were rejected. Jews who adopted some of the ways of the world around them were reviled and shunned by the traditionalists (known in the New Testament as Pharisees). A Jew who assimilated culturally and socially with the Greeks and later with the Romans was regarded as an enemy. The Hellenistic civilization of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, which was largely extinguished by Christendom until the Renaissance, was utterly rejected by the Jews who remained faithful to their tribal religion. Christianity, with its ambivalent attitude towards Judaism, which gradually turned into vicious enmity, made the separation that much easier.

(It is important to distinguish between earlier examples of Jewish hostility to strangers - e.g., the story of Moses' Ethiopian wife - which reflected ordinary xenophobia, and the later isolationism, which was anchored in religious law. The historical books of the Old Testament show that up until the time of the Second Temple there was constant inter-marriage between the Israelites and their neighbours.)

3. After the fall of Judea and the destruction of the Temple, in the year 70 AD, separateness became the hallmark of Judaism. Some other nations circumcized their sons, or worshipped a single god, sometimes even an unseen god (according to Tacitus, so did some Germanic tribes), or prohibited the eating of pigs, but these features did not lead to a spiritual or social alliance with the Jews. In later times Islam adopted the main tenets of Judaism, but was nevertheless rejected. The biblical verse «The people shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations» became the motto of the Jews. Judaism adopted the Roman principle of descent through the female, since mater semper certa est - the mother is always known - and with it the notion that Jews are not only set apart by their religion, but are actually made of a different, purer, substance, which must not be defiled by mixed marriage.

In a curious way, the religion and its rituals became almost secondary, because «A Jew, even if he transgresses, remains a Jew» - meaning, that even if he ate pork or lit a fire on the Sabbath, he was still a member of the chosen people, and could always return to the fold. On the other hand, a Gentile can be circumcized and observe all the numerous rules, yet he remains a goy, and every effort is made to discourage goyim from trying to convert to Judaism. Thus Judaism does not really claim to be a universal religion, like Christianity and Islam, otherwise it would have sought to convert everyone. This is the great paradox: that the universal deity the Jews believe in is not interested in the rest of the human race, and maintains a separate arrangement with a particular tribe.

4. The Hebrew word Yahadut, which denotes both Judaism and Jewry, demonstrates that there is no difference between the faith and the people. The familiar Jewish saying that «It is not Israel who kept the Sabbath, but the Sabbath that kept Israel», is perfectly true. The religion, with its endless prohibitions and rules of ritual purity, preserved the distinctive identity of its adherents. That was its function. At the same time, it held out an eschatological vision according to which at the End of Days the entire world will acknowledge the supremacy of Jehovah and recognize Jerusalem as his abode and the Jews as his priests - «a kingdom of priests and an holy nation.» It does not suggest that all men will become Jews! The separation is therefore a cosmic phenomenon, and will continue even in the afterworld. In this it differs from the Brahmin caste - which resembles Jewry in having strict laws of purity and separation - since in the Hindu religion the individual»s caste-identity applies only to a single incarnation, and does not have a cosmic status.

Modern Times and the Enlightenment

In the 19th century the impact of the Enlightenment began to undermine Jewish isolationism. In Europe, where the majority of Jews lived, religious observance was visibly weakening and assimilation was increasing. As the surrounding society grew more secular and open, abandoning the identification of individuals by their religion, more and more Jews came to feel uncomfortable in their isolation. But for the violent crises which rocked European societies during that period, it is possible that most Jews would have assimilated, leaving only a few small Orthodox communities to cling to their traditional way of life. But the upheavals in Europe in the late 19th century exposed all the ethnic and religious minorities to existential dangers, and Jews were traditional targets of popular discontent and frustration. At this time, antisemism, whose origins were religious and whose roots went back to the Crusades, took on a secularized and racist quality. It has been argued that Jewish separateness provoked antisemitism, or at least exacerbated it. Even if so, it may not matter any longer. What is certain, however, is that the violent outbreaks of European antisemitism stimulated the mass emigration of Jews to America and other distant lands.

At the start of the 20th century, when assimilation was spreading from Western Europe to the more tradition-bound Jewish communities in Central and even Eastern Europe, there were three options for the preservation of Jewish identity. The first was the time-honoured Orthodox way - namely, the strict observance of the ritual laws, which amounted to a physical barrier to assimilation, since you cannot assimilate among people with whom you cannot share a meal or a drink, or pass your leisure time, let alone marry them. The second option was to preserve Jewish identity by means of «cultural autonomy», as promoted by the Yiddishist movement known as the Bund - namely, by encouraging the distinctive Jewish culture in Yiddish language and literature, in music and various traditions. This popular movement could join the progressive current, support radical ideologies, and even adopt an anti-religious stance, for if there was a distinctive Jewish culture, it could help preserve their separate identity, even if the walls it built around them were not as impregnable as those of Orthodoxy. Finally, there was the territorial option - namely, Zionism.

Territorial Separation

What Zionism offered was a way of maintaining Jewish separateness in the most natural way: by a physical separation from the rest of mankind. In a Jewish State it would be possible to preserve the tribe without having constantly to resist assimilation. Moreover, it would be possible to achieve a «normalization» of the Jewish people - while living apart, it would be «a nation among nations», and like the others it would consist of different classes - workers and capitalists, religious and secular people - who would all be Jews. Furthermore, if masses of Jews gathered from all over the world to live in one place, their existence would be more secure than as minority communities in alien and sometimes hostile societies. But for this plan to succeed it had to be located in a place which would not only be empty of «Gentiles», but would also have specific Jewish associations - namely, the «Land of Israel» (the traditional Jewish name for Palestine). All attempts to create a territorial solution in another location - e.g., in the Argentine pampas, in Uganda or Birobidjan - were not Jewish solutions and remained ideologically and numerically insignificant.

During the first third of the century the Zionist option did not enjoy much success. The Orthodox option was still well entrenched, and progressive Jews were more attracted by the cultural, quasi-secular, option of the Bund. The rest were people who were not averse to assimilation, who regarded Judaism as a burden which any sensible person would prefer to drop. There is no doubt that but for the rise of Nazism and its consequences, Zionism would not have become in the latter half of the century the success story that it is.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the two definitions of Zionism quoted at the beginning of this article have been prevalent, not only in Israel but wherever the subject is raised. Secular Jews describe Zionism as one of the national liberation movements which arose around the turn of the century, and therefore define every Jewish community the world over as part of the Jewish People, or the Jewish Nation; we shall come back to the problems of this definition. Jews and non-Jews of Marxist background usually describe Zionism as a colonial manifestation, but this definition is not quite satisfactory either, as we shall