"If the rise of Nazism brought Benjamin to recall the tradition of the oppressed, it moved Scholem toward adopting the very perspective that Benjamin warned against: he accommodated the Jewish perception of time to the triumphal narrative of national redemption," wrote Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin in a 2013 paper titled "'On the Right Side of the Barricades': Walter Benjamin, Scholem, and Zionism” (published in Comparative Literature 65:3. pp. 363-381).  

Raz-Krakotzkin contrasts the diverging perspectives of the two friends who shared a disdain for Enlightenment notions of progress, while noting that Benjamin rejected modern ideals of progress in a way that followed "the traditional Jewish rejection of the Christian perception of grace that was developed in response to the Christian notion of 'progress' from an 'old' to a 'new' testament."

In the 1920's and early 1930's, Scholem was an active member of Brit-Shalom, an organization that viewed "bi-nationalism" as an alternative to the nationalist chauvinism of the right-wing "Sabbatianists." at the time, but they rejected the colonial power for Zionism, and focused on the creation of a buy national state that based community on “the recognition of national and civic equality between Jews and Arabs.” 

When Brit-Shalom was founded, Jews made up 15% of the population in Palestine. By then, nationalism was seen as a means of encouraging Jewish immigration to continue without making the local Palestinians feel defensive. Even so, the national distinction of Jews v. Arabs was central to the idea of the binational state, and to binational thinking in general. Ammon cause this quote, a description of a colonial reality in which Jewish superiority is asserted and exercise, and countless weighs over different groups of the Palestinian people. “As such, it remains a novel claim.

And the mirrors are many, paraphrase Mahmoud Darwish —-

*

In a 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig, Scholem said of Palestine:

Fast forward to 1931, when Scholem published an article (see (“Bemai Ka’Mipalgi” 57–59) responding to attacks against Brit-Shalom group and its attitudes:

This wording—- “And if we do not win once again, and the fire of revolution consumes us, at least we will be among those standing on the right side of the barricades.”—- speaks loudly at present. Scholem would surely find himself located on the extremes of the rising political Right that have consecrated ethno-state nationalism and institutionalized genocide both technologically and politically in a way that the 20th century could never have imagined.

There is no question that Israel is a state bent on the complete annihilation of Palestinians—- for every aspect of Palestinian existence is threatening to the Israeli state, everything. No exceptions can be found.

But by the late 1930s, Scholem had become a vociferous defender of political Zionism and its nationalist aspirations. He and his friend Walter Benjamin argue about this, as Benjamin rejected the idea of progress, cementing his rejection in the Jewish perspective that refused the Christian doctrine of grace, which had redeemed the old testament through the new one. The secularism of Zionism destroyed what was unique about Judaism— and built a teleology into it that did not exist. Hebrew's secular drive collapses “the sacred into the profane – the secularization of the sacred is the sacralization of the secular,” as Raz-Krakotzkin has written. Israel’s current existence is based on the view that “the state is the realization of the expectations and longings of generations.” This is a separatist and nationalist position, and the cost is modeled on the costs of European nationalism, and what power does to the mind went enacting Carl Schmitt‘s political theology. Walter Benjamin rejected Schmitt,  and used Schmitt against himself, rejecting the assumption of historical immanence that sucks Messianic time into the idea of progress. The catch is that Orientalism enables this progressive reading to set Israel apart as western.

Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" was written in 1940 from his exile in occupied France. His ongoing dialogue with Gershom Scholem about Judaism hovers in the background, alongside the rising Nazism. Soberly, Benjamin reminds us that "whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate”:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Later in the same piece, Benjamin uses this word, amazement, in a way that resonates and constellates into the present, comprising a presence. I quote again from his “On the Concept of History”:

[Untenable that the genocide of Palestinians by imperial powers continues. Untenable, irredeemable evil.]

"The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible . . . is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable," Benjamin wrote. Raz-Krakotzkin translates this in relation to Scholem's statements, so that Benjamin could also be saying: “the current amazement that an extreme political version of messianism is ‘still’ possible, Benjamin might have said to his friend, ‘is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which [gave] rise to it’—here, the description of the present as the ‘utopian return to Zion’—’is untenable’.”

*

By the 1940's, after Benjamin's death, Gershom Scholem supported "the idea of an exclusive Jewish state." He even went so far as to deny "any Zionist responsibility for the Palestinian catastrophe," arguing that "the Arabs alone were responsible for their misfortune," Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin writes. In a footnote, he adds the following:

In "The Messianic Idea of Judaism" Scholem declares that "the predicament of Israel, then, is not a historical accident but inherent in the world being, and it is in Israel’s power to repair the universal flaw. By amending themselves, the Jewish people can also amend the world, in its visible and invisible aspects alike.” This idea of “utopian return” is what “fully integrates the holocaust into the theological narrative of return.”

(Aside: In my own writing, I tend to use the word Shoah for the same reason I use Nabka, namely, because these words have a meeting held more closely and their language of origin.)

The denial of the Nakba proceeds as the memorialization of the holocaust is mandated across states. Chauvinism has been linked to the preservation of the people and the reliance on colonial power. But Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin notices that Scholem’s list of messianism’s national-political attributes lacks a significant element, namely "the restoration of the Temple, the figure of which was certainly the main component of Jewish messianic expectations, undoubtedly more than the 'resurrection of the nation,' a term that was taken from the modern vocabulary of nationalism." The Temple is the concept that crosses all messianic accounts and visions of redemption; its absence is read as "the most important sign of the state of exile, and its restoration the expression of redemption."

Against this, Raz-Krakotzkin poses the "many Jewish sources" where "Zion" and "Temple" are taken as allegorical concepts referencing "a spiritual ideal" or providing a tutelary "metaphors for a state of human perfection."

But Scholem's Messianic Idea cannot avoid its consequent relationship to the restoration of the Temple. Its literal political project commits it to "the destruction of the mosques and their replacement by a new building." As Raz-Krakotzkin argues:

The extension of this messianism has other logic:

To repeat the clarity of the preceding statements: In Israeli discourse, the question of the refugees is considered an apocalyptic issue, and its very discussion a threat and denial of the existence of the State of Israel. The Palestinian memories of dispossession are the Israelis’ suppressed nightmares.

*

By 1959, Scholem concluded his famous essay "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea" with the warning:

“Little wonder that overtones of Messianism have accompanied the modern Jewish readiness for irrevocable action in the concrete realm, when it set out on the utopian return to Zion. This readiness no longer allows itself to be fed on hopes. Born out of the horror and destruction that was Jewish history in our own generation, it is bound to history itself and not to meta-history; it has not given itself up totally to Messianism. Whether or not Jewish history will be able to endure this entry into the concrete realm without perishing in the crisis of the Messianic claim, which has virtually been conjured up—that is the question which out of his great and dangerous past the Jew of this age poses to his present and to his future.”