Network or State? International Law and the History of Jewish Self-Determination

• In Event: Negotiating Jewish Rights Between International Ideals and National Constraints, 1848-1968

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, world Jews experimented with a variety of political institutions. The Zionist movement was organized through territorial exclusivity and sought the formation of a Jewish state; however, there were also other governmental movements that did not define their political authority via international borders. In this talk, I ask why it is that Zionism ultimately triumphed while these transnational movements did not. In thinking about this query, I focus on one crucial, yet previously overlooked, aspect of this Jewish turn to statehood in the years 1880-1950s: the role of public international law. By the law, I mean here pivotal doctrines, institutions, and individual actors (judges, statemen, scholars). I explore how structural changes in the international legal regime supported territorial nationalism, and discredited transnationalism, as a sensible and effective way of organizing politics. This, I show, left Zionism a more logical and efficacious form for the organization of a viable Jewish political self.

To make my argument, I undertake a case study of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Born in 1860, the Alliance rejected a formal demarcation of Jewish political authority on territorial grounds, and was aggressively anti-Zionist. Instead of a state, the Alliance operated as a massive network that transcended territorial borders and generated, in its founders’ terminology, a Jewish “government.” For close to a century, this government completely revolutionized Jewish political life and radically improved the lives of Jews across the Islamic world. It provided Jews of the Muslim East with six types of security that are today largely associated with territorial states: physical, economic, residential, legal, political, and cultural.

This talk first describes the Alliance’s strategy to disseminate these types of security. Second, I identify specific changes in the international legal regime that ultimately undermined this transnational political strategy and normalized territorial forms of government instead.
This re-examination of Zionism and its competitors reveals that the State of Israel, despite its current clashes with the institutions of international law, is in fact also the logical and sensible product of modern international law.

Author

• Moria Paz, Stanford Law School