Nathan Birbaum,(1864 – 1937) Austrian writer, Jewish thinker and nationalist. Wikicommons/ Zionist Archive. Some rights reserved.‘Objectivity has ceased to be a goal not only
of popular writing on the subject but also of scholarship, and the line between
intellectual engagement and political activism hardly exists today’
– Michael Stanislawski, Zionism: A Very Short
Introduction, p.1
Written in German in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Theodor
Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (The Jewish
State) (1896) is widely considered Zionism’s founding document. It was in the
same country, six years earlier, that the term was coined by Nathan Birnbaum, the
founder of the first Jewish student association in Vienna, Kadimah.
The philosophy was barely fledged before it evoked an
impassioned backlash from the 1885 Pittsburgh
Platform, where Reform Judaism was essentially founded, and the
anti-Zionist Bundists in Russia, who, along with many other Jews, believed
Zionism jeopardised the prospects of integration into their host nations.
This controversy has not ceased since. Jewish anti-Zionism
has a diverse history, ranging from Satmar Hasidim, who perceived secular
Zionism as an abomination and a forced pre-emption of redemption before God’s
will, to many Iraqi Jews, who understood growing resentment in their own country
as a response to Zionism. But anti-Zionism is not simply confined to Jewish
infighting – it is now a staple of leftist thinking and movements. But anti-Zionism is not simply confined to Jewish
infighting – it is now a staple of leftist thinking and movements.
Anti-Zionism is a negative ideology, and is therefore
contingent on the definition of its positive counterpart. The word Zionism,
however, is so ambiguous and varied in its meaning and so imbued with emotion, so firmly tied to
identity, that invoking it stifles any productive conversation.
Could you
expect a Holocaust survivor who found succour in Israel to disavow Zionism
entirely? Could you expect a Palestinian expelled from their home and prevented
from ever entering it again to be anything but an anti-Zionist?
To move forward, we need to abandon these terms when it comes
to discussing Israel-Palestine.
Ideology in flux
Zionism consists of many heterogeneous variants and has
changed so dramatically over time that what was once considered Zionism is now
considered anti-Zionism.
In the early nineteenth century, the dominant strand of
Zionism was Labour Zionism, which sought the redemption of the Jewish people
through a renewed connection with the land and the subsequent creation of a
socialist haven. At the time, secular bi-nationalism was an acceptable and even
mainstream Zionist belief, and there were even several visions for the
realisation of this model, spanning from a joint Jewish-Arab commonwealth, to
the division of Mandate Palestine into cantons. Mapam, who were the second
biggest Zionist party before 1948, believed in a binational solution. Mapam, who were the second biggest Zionist party before
1948, believed in a binational solution.
Yet today, one of the main proponents of this model, the
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), are, by their own definition
and that of Israel, perhaps the most prominent anti-Zionist organisation
around. The State of Israel considers
their goals and intentions so utterly anathema that they have a blacklist of
groups who are active with BDS and their members are banned from entering the
country.
For some, Zionism means the right to Jewish
self-determination, a national liberation movement, but for others, it conjures
violent dispossession and continued policies of occupation and colonisation. It
is, of course, both, born out of a unique set of historical circumstances.
Yet there are also several positions in between, with no
paucity of subscribers. On one side, you have liberal Zionism, which some take
to be a paradox, and others consider a marriage of pro-Palestinian activism to
their vision of a more just Jewish Israel. On the other extreme, you have a
religious Zionism and neo-Zionism that uses Judaism to justify uncompromising
expansionist nationalism. Like
most philosophies, there was and is a war (in many cases, literally) for its
definition.
J Street, an
American liberal Zionist organisation, who ‘believe that the Jewish people have
the right to a national home of their own’, were at the forefront of the
(failed) battle to stop the demolition of Susya, a Palestinian village in Area
C, gathering over 12,000 signatures. It was up against a government and the
settler movement it supports, who are rigorous adherents to Neo-Zionism, which
considers itself the true heir to the pioneering spirit that underpinned the
foundation of the State of Israel in the first place. This was just one of many
examples of two groups fighting completely opposing causes in the name of
Zionism. This was just one of many examples
of two groups fighting completely opposing causes in the name of Zionism.
Though Zionism is often qualified with an appended
adjective, it seems be changing as a catch-all term too. A joint 2015 Yachad-Ipsos
Mori survey found that while 90% of Jews in the UK believe in Israel’s
right to exist as a Jewish state, just 59% would identify themselves as
Zionists, down from 72% in 2010. In the past, these two items would have been
synonymous. The survey goes on to observe that ‘people who are critical of
Israel’s current policies should not describe themselves as Zionists even if
they are fully supportive of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state’ and that ‘this
apparently rapid change in the use of the term merits further examination.’ It
is no longer clear in the Jewish community whether the term Zionism means
support for Israel’s government, or simply a belief in its right to exist; the
anxieties surrounding this definition seem to have encouraged many to drop this
association altogether.
But with the
settlement enterprise ineluctably entrenched in the Palestinian OPT, and Israel
shifting further to the right, can a voice of diaspora protest, alongside near
indifference within Israel itself, claim to act as a representative voice for
their hijacked Zionism? In other words, has the battle for the soul of Zionism
already ended?
To what extent can you disentangle an
ideology from its practical realisation?
Many claim
that the bona fide resurgence of anti-Semitism, notably in France, where a Holocaust survivor was brutally
murdered just last month and from where there has been a mass exodus of Jews, Zionism, in
the form of a national home and haven for the Jewish people, is as relevant as
ever.
Yet in the
fiftieth year of its short seventy-year history, the occupation, which has
surely been a turning point in public opinion on Israel (and therefore Zionism),
cannot be interpreted as a temporary malaise, but a fundamental feature of
Israel as a state, bound up in all the human rights abuses this includes.
The
separation of ideology and its political manifestation seems practicable for
many proponents of communism, who detach ideology from the atrocities of its
realisation which have transpired on almost every occasion. The brutality of
Stalin and Mao, it is claimed, are a perversion of this vision. Can Zionism attempt
to redeem itself through abstraction?
Certainly, liberal
Zionists believe it can. Israel’s Declaration of Independence espoused certain
values of ‘complete equality of social and political rights to all its
inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex’ and ‘guarantee freedom of
religion, conscience, language, education and culture’. The modern state of
Israel, according to them, is a deviation from this founding vision, and it
must be saved – for the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians.
But if Zionism
derives much of its validity from the historical circumstances of Jewish
persecution, and the language employed by its proponents is not only one of
‘rights’, but ‘needs’, then it seems wilfully selective to de-historicise
Zionism. Reification, however, renders Zionism untenable by introducing the
indigenous Palestinian population into the equation. As Ari Shavit
argued in his best-selling book My
Promised Land when discussing the expulsion of Palestinians from the town
of Lydda, the action and legacy of expulsion is something that every Zionist must reckon with – it is
inextricable from the ideology that produced it. As
Ari Shavit argued… the action and legacy of expulsion is something that every Zionist must reckon with – it is
inextricable from the ideology that produced it.
There is a glaring blind spot to the Zionist invocation of
‘need’ when it comes to the right of return: the Palestinian population who
were expelled in 1948 and their descendants often would’ve benefited from such
succour.
In Syria, where the Palestinian population numbers at around
half a million, most Palestinians have been caught up in the bloody civil war.
Chris Gunness, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), claimed
that 95% of the 438,000 Palestinians are in ‘critical need of sustained
humanitarian assistance’. The humanitarian ‘need’ in this situation pales in
comparison to the brutal shelling of Yarmouk by regime forces. Today, just hundreds of Palestinians
remain in what was one of the biggest diaspora communities of Palestinians in
the world.
Just before and during the Gulf War, 400,000 Palestinians
fled Kuwait for several reasons, all of which were rooted in this existential
category of ‘need’. Even in times of peace, the situations of Palestinians –
denied citizenship and therefore basic amenities, living in refugee camps, and
often subject to political (and frequently racialised) violence – highlights
the inherent contradiction of managing a state on ethnic lines: can you have a
Jewish and democratic state, which, as part of its national logic, denies the
right of return to the indigenous population, but extends the right of return
to Jews who often aren’t in need?
That doesn’t mean that they never will be, and sometimes
they certainly are, but these contradictions at the heart of Zionism must be
unpacked. It certainly seems unreasonable to abstract Zionism in order to avoid
confronting such questions.
Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism
This
discussion has implications for ongoing debates today. The flaring (and
ostensibly contradictory) arguments that ‘anti-Zionism constitutes
anti-Semitism’ or that ‘anti-Zionism is being deliberately conflated with
anti-Semitism to stifle criticism of Israel’ are both true and absurd in equal
measure; they required more precise terminology to test their validity.
If we cannot
grant Zionism a distinction from its practical manifestation, then anti-Zionism
must be subjected to the same scrutiny. Efraim Perlmutter’s openDemocracy
article argued that article
20 of the PLO charter is anti-Semitic:
‘The
Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has
been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or
religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of
history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a
religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single
nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which
they belong.’
Do the cultural and religious ties of Jewish people give them a right
to the land? No, but that doesn’t excuse a denial of the existence of those
ties and their importance to Jewish identity. Indeed, Israel was the homeland of the Jewish people at
several intervals in history. The exclusive negation of national rights for
Jews is anti-Semitic, especially in a world where nation states
still construct and legitimate our identity and that such a state already
exists.
The exclusive negation of national rights
for Jews is often construed as anti-Semitic – and it certainly can be – especially in a world where
nation states still construct and legitimate our identity and where such a
state already exists, and where Israel itself is often singled out for interrogation
of its legitimacy. Yet this position ignores the historical contingency of
national rights; it presupposes that all national rights were allocated justly,
and did not simply emerge from circumstance. It just so happens that Jewish
national aspirations today are built on the ruins of another people, and the
absence of a resolution to this conflict, at least partially, explains such
negation.
However, what Perlmutter failed to mention was that this
article, along with many others which were deemed inconsistent with the
principles of Oslo Accords, was repealed in 1998. Indeed, the Oslo Accords have
established a framework by which the right of Jewish national
self-determination does not inherently contradict the same right for Palestinians.
( This doesn’t mean that the PLO are immune from
anti-Semitism; we just need to look as far as earlier this month to Abbas’s
comments apportioning blame for the Holocaust to the ‘social function’ of Jews.) In fact, a two-state solution, which accommodates the national rights of both
Israelis and Palestinians separately, remains the preference of both parties in
uniquely adverse conditions.
Hamas, who
are the predominant self-proclaimed anti-Zionist actor within Palestine, still
call for the destruction of the State of Israel. Although they too have altered
their charter, their foundational charter, which calls for the killing of Jews
based on a fundamentalist understanding of religion in article 7, and refers to
one of the most infamous anti-Semitic forgeries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in article 32, goes beyond anything conjured up by the PLO. It is
dubious to what extent their new charter, which does not nullify their 1988
charter, changes the substance of this violent anti-Semitism, and it has yet to
recognise Israel as a legitimate entity.
Returning to the relationship between anti-Semitism and
anti-Zionism, Perlmutter is right to identify that ‘the real problem is that
anti-Semitism has become an integral part of Palestinian and Arab nationalism.
Therefore the real question becomes how does one support the Palestinian cause
without being infected with Palestinian anti-Semitism.’
In fact, this problem runs deeper than Palestinian
nationalism. Although Zionism certainly exacerbated anti-Semitism in the Middle
East, it predates the establishment of the State of Israel, and was also
abetted and enforced by colonial politics and culture. The infamous
relationship between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Nazism is a fertile
example of this combination in play: his alliance with the Nazis was a
statement against the interference of Britain and France in the region, as well
as the role of Israel, as was the case in Iraq, but this did not inoculate him
from anti-Semitism.
In the Middle East, anti-Semitism is commonplace, and this also
has ramifications in the UK. A poll conducted by the Institute for Jewish
Policy Research (JPR) in September 2017 found that Muslims disproportionately
held anti-Semitic attitudes, though it made a concerted and careful distinction
between holding an anti-Semitic belief and being
anti-Semitic. The poll found that 55% of Muslims held anti-Semitic
attitudes, as opposed to 30% of the general population, while 27% of the
Muslims surveyed believed that “Jews get rich at the expense of others”,
compared with the national average of 12%.
The
centrality of anti-imperialism to leftist discourses and movements today,
especially those tied to identity politics, can generate such ludicrous claims
from people as intelligent as Judith Butler that ‘Hamas, Hezbollah as social
movements that are progressive […] are part of a global Left’. The
anti-Semitism of these groups is therefore downplayed or ignored, and they (and
their anti-Semitic, homophobic, and sexist beliefs and violent actions) are given
credence and legitimacy in progressive circles. If anti-Semitism is a
part of pro-Palestinian movements (in the same way that Islamophobia is also
associated with certain forms of Zionism), that doesn’t prohibit involvement
with these movements; it simply means there must be a robust and assiduous effort
to distinguish support for Palestinian rights from many of their
representatives.
Somewhat differently, anti-Zionism can provide a convenient
excuse and space to express anti-Semitism. While the line between the two
beliefs can be abundantly clear, Israel today is often incorporated into an
older and deeper scourge of anti-Semitism. The 2001 World Conference Against
Racism in Durban, which marked a notable shift in the stigmatisation of
Zionism, was notoriously rife with unequivocal classical anti-Semitic
literature, such as people handing out The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion and leaflets of Hitler, entitled ‘What if I
had won?’ Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland and the UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights, said that ‘there was horrible antisemitism present –
particularly in some of the NGO discussions. A number of people said they’ve
never been so hurt or so harassed or been so blatantly faced with an
antisemitism.’
Yet the claim that anti-Zionism is being conflated with
anti-Semitism is also true. Despite the self-evident connection which many Jews
have to Israel, its government has deliberately attempted to conflate Jews with
Israel, calling for migration to their true home whenever a crisis strikes. As
such, after the synagogue shooting in Copenhagen in 2015, Netanyahu proclaimed
that ‘Israel is the home of every Jew … Israel awaits you with open
arms’. There are consequently incredibly close ties between organisations such
as the Anti-Defamation League and the Israeli Foreign Ministry (MFA) because anti-Semitism legitimates the State
of Israel. Israel’s government has
deliberately attempted to conflate Jews with Israel, calling for migration to
their true home whenever a crisis strikes.
Indeed, the
MFA, alongside the covert
Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the only ministry which you incidentally cannot
find further information about via the Israeli government website, has made a concerted financial, strategic and even legal effort, under the
conceptual framework of ‘new anti-Semitism’, to attack BDS as anti-Semitic. Events
such as the Global Forum for Combatting
Antisemitism seem to be more about challenging BDS than anything
else.
This is not
to say that the BDS Movement, the main non-violent embodiment of anti-Zionism,
is devoid of problems: it has not been firm enough in opposing anti-Semitism
within its ranks, and in fact, has often indulged in grotesque anti-Semitism.
Just look at the violent
anti-Semitism of the BDS
Movement at the University of Witwatersrand. The movement is also deliberately
vague about its aims. Some of the staunchest defenders of Palestinian rights,
such as Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, have therefore criticised the
movement for demanding the right of return, which would mean an end to the
Jewish character of the State of Israel.
However, it
is the biggest non-violent movement in support of Palestinian rights, and to
deny it breathing space is therefore to invalidate Palestinian non-violence. If
Palestinians have a right to protest (which they clearly do) and if violence
should rightfully be condemned, then there at least should be an engagement
with BDS as a movement.
In previous
debates on the subject on openDemocacy, Mary Davis was right to identify
that certain types of boycotts fail to distinguish between civil society and
the government and therefore
constitute a sort of collective punishment. The Israeli government is taking
bolder steps to blur the boundaries between Israel and the West Bank, ignoring
EU recommendations to distinguish settlement goods from those produced in the
main body of Israel.
More significantly, a new law recently bypassed the Knesset
which required each piece of new legislation to include a clause about
implementation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, an abandonment of any
pretence that the occupation is temporary.
Netanyahu is spearheading a campaign to make a distinction
between Israel-proper and the OPT, and therefore a distinction between
complicity and non-complicity, increasingly
difficult. He is polarising the debate further by making it impossible for
those who support targeted boycotts of settlement goods or companies directly
involved in the occupation.
Conclusion
A broad church of competing movements which have changed
over time, all of which are construed and misconstrued many times over, a
unique set of historical circumstances in which liberation was colonisation, and the weaponisation
of Zionism/anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism for diverging political interests means
it is almost impossible to conduct a debate on these terms.
An Israeli
professor told me that he was gently encouraged by Palestinian groups to
preface his contributions to public discussions by identifying himself as an
‘anti-Zionist’, almost as a prerequisite to be given a platform, while, in an
attempted overture to the Jewish community amidst Corbyn’s refusal to celebrate
the Balfour Centenary, the Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry told the
Jewish community that Jeremy is a ‘Zionist’.
These badges
are ultimately meaningless, and often hinder discussion about methods and
solidarity between those attempting to address the most critical situations in
the conflict: the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the occupation of and
settlement on the West Bank.
For so many, identification
as a Zionist is a red line: the person in question is immediately considered
racist. Yet so many of these so-called Zionists are at the forefront of the
fight for justice for Palestinians. Similarly, anti-Zionism is also loaded with
nasty connotations of anti-Semitism. These polarising terms should
therefore be shelved, and taken out only when we are discussing political
philosophy, which most of the time, we are not. It is too charged, and too
ambiguous, to lead to any productive dialogue.