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Thursday, July 17, 2008

Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism? -- Lawrence of Cyberia

Portion below; whole thing here:
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/

If it helps diffuse some of the rancor that dogs discussion of the I/P conflict, think of it this way. Most people in the world were opposed to white rule in South Africa. They weren't opposed because they were "anti-White". When the international community had to decide whether Afrikaners had a right to national self-determination in South Africa, where Afrikaner dominance could be established only by the dispossession, displacement and oppression of the existing indigenous majority and maintained only through the apartheid system of government, it decided overwhelmingly that South Africa had no right to exist as a "white and democratic" state. Outside of the immediate coterie of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, it was self-evident that the right of one ethnic group to exclusive self-determination did not outweigh the right of everybody else to equality. The Afrikaners' self-determination had to be achieved within the context of their South African nationality, which they share with fellow South Africans of all races and religions. It would have been absurd to suggest that anti-apartheid campaigners acted as they did because they were prejudiced against Afrikaners and therefore opposed to the principle of self-determination for Afrikaners. Collectively, they were motivated not by animosity toward Afrikaners, but by the belief that - in a land where other people live too - exclusive self-determination for one group impinges unacceptably on the rights of all the others. The absence of any suggestion that this might be a similar motivation for people who oppose Zionism, rather than the Jewishness of the people who benefit from it - is a huge omission.

As for your point that there have historically been prominent Zionists (you mention Martin Buber) who favored a cooperative relationship with the Palestinians - well that's certainly true. But Martin Buber was not a dominant founding father of the Jewish state. So what does it matter in practice that some individual Zionists were genuinely tolerant of Palestinians, respectful of their rights and troubled (as Buber was) about the morality of creating a Palestinian population in exile in order to solve the plight of a Jewish population in exile, if theirs was not the outlook that predominated on the ground? The dominant founding fathers of the Jewish state were people like Herzl and Ben Gurion, whose dominant brand of Zionism was based on the premise that the Palestinian population could be "spirited away across the border", that the Arab majority had to be reduced to no more than 15% of the population and saw nothing wrong with the "transfer" out of Palestine of the existing population. I'm not sure how relevant it is to cite examples of less exclusivist Zionists when the Zionism of the real world is one that created (and maintains) a Jewish majority in Israel by the forced exclusion of a large part of the non-Jewish population.

In fact I think that referring to the existence of Zionists who had problems with a Zionism that relied on transfer to create a more ethnically-homogeneous state, actually undermines the argument that people who oppose Zionism as it exists on the ground do so because they don't like Jewish people. It relies on a faulty logic that says the only possible vehicle of Jewish nationalism and self-determination is the Ben Gurion kind of Zionism that created the current state of Israel, and that as this is the only possible expression of Jewish self-determination then people who criticize it must do so out of anti-semitism. But the Zionism of Martin Buber for example, or cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha'am and then Judah Magnes, or modern post-Zionists like Avrum Burg, shows that Zionism at the point of a gun is not the only possible expression of Jewish nationalism; and that even among some Jewish Zionists there was always an understanding that realizing Jewish self-determination by creating a "Jewish state" in Palestine raised legitimate moral (and practical) concerns, which led them to try to think of ways that Jewish self-determination and nationalism might be realized without requiring the expulsion or destruction of the existing people and culture in Palestine.

Overall, I would say the problem is that the old one-liner, "Earthquake in Peru: is it good for the Jews?", is meant to be a joke, but you treat it as if it is the baseline for how everybody is allowed to think of Zionism. You have no right to assume that if people oppose anything that involves Jewish people it must be because their anti-semitism is showing through. Yet in the way you have (mis)represented the motivations of anti-Zionists, you did just that. You don't consider that there can be perfectly legitimate opposition to Zionism from both Jews and non-Jews that arises not from anti-semitism - not from anything to do with Jewishness at all - but from the belief that it is problematic to create a state for one group of people in a land that already has a people and a culture, which will have to be destroyed to create a Jewish state there. This destruction is not, as you suggest, the result of some bad decisions by successive Israeli governments, its is simply the only way to create a Jewish state in Palestine. I disagree fundamentally with Benny Morris, but when he identified the central issue of the conflict as the need to break (Palestinian) eggs so that you can make the (Israeli) omelet he was at least being honest enough to say out loud the unpalatable reality that most people who speak about I/P issues from a Zionist POV simply ignore: the Palestinians refused and still refuse to give their consent to a project that requires they take the part of the eggs in someone else's omelet.

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