Reading and listening to the anti-Zionists of our time is simply astounding. The irrational and convoluted messaging they purvey, combined with untruths as well as the method of inversing history and reality, has become a potent form of black magic. Worse, it is a vicious and violent opposition. It is a theory seeking destructive action.
In late May, in Vienna, the First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress was held. A Kentucky University law professor, Ramsi Woodcock, has been promoting, on the anti-Zionist Legal Studies Movement web site, the “ending of Israel.” We’ve heard demands for Zionism’s elimination and, of course, the efforts of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
An online magazine covering the current situation of European Jews called “K.” has published Matthew Bolton’s essay dealing with the theory of “settler-colonialism” as constructed by anthropologist Patrick Wolfe. Bolton makes the point that the main advantage of the settler-colonialism theory wielded against Israel and Zionism is that, essentially, “historical ‘detail’ is rendered irrelevant” while it demands for itself a “totalizing logic.”
He quotes half-Jewish academic Patrick Wolfe and points out that in Wolfe’s treatment of the Nakba (Arabic for the “catastrophe” in Israel since it’s founding in 1948), he pleads that “one should not submit to the tyranny of [historical] detail” as it “lessens the explanatory power of the structure.” That, for sure, is one way of intellectualizing falsehood.
Zionism as colonialism
This nonchalance, if not outright travesty of truth when applied to Zionism, is predicated on Wolfe’s view that “settlers,” those external, use their colonial rule to displace indigenous people, replacing them and thereby intentionally create a new society and a new environment on the conquered territory.
Actually, he was simply improving on the 1965 work of the Syrian-born Lebanese diplomat Fayez Sayegh as well as the Jewish Marxist Maxim Rodinson’s 1967 “Israel, fait colonial” (Israel, a colonial fact) who suggested that “The Arabs of Palestine used to have the same rights over Palestinian territory as the French exercise in France and the English in England.” That is entirely false.
Sayegh defined Zionism as racist, violent, and expansionist. He saw Jewish clannishness as a policy of segregation and, therefore, Zionism then had to be a form of apartheid. Sayegh’s Historical Setting chapter begins: “The frenzied ‘Scramble for Africa’ of the 1880’s stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in Palestine.” The Jewish resettlement of Eretz Yisrael never stopped with Jewish repatriation occurring throughout the centuries. Petah Tikva and Rosh Pina were anyway founded in 1878.
Zionism was never colonialist. It never sought to replace local residents. Bolton quotes Benjamin Wexler, among the many critics of Wolfe, who have noted a series of features that distinguished Zionism from European settler colonialism elsewhere.
He points out that Jews had no one colonial “mother country” from which they came. But Jews possessed a 3,000-year-old national identity shaped by a historical narrative of prior expulsion from the very land in which they now sought to resettle. Jews were living in urban areas for many centuries in the country prior to Zionism’s “beginning.” Jews purchased land and did not take land by military force.
The choice of the specific territory was not based on economic or political factors but was deeply connected to the identity of the Jewish people – and in most cases, the land was barren and underdeveloped. Much of the ownership of the land, until the 1950s, was characterized as being mainly collective rather than private property.
Moreover, seeing the Nakba as a “genocidal expulsion” – while ignoring all Arab terror violence from 1920 on and labeling all killing, raping, pillaging, and destruction done by Arabs as “resistance” – reveals the foundational hate that drives their anti-Zionism theorizing, besides disregarding the Arabs’ rejection of the two partition offers of 1937 and 1947.
All the pseudo-intellectualizing done by anti-Zionists, Jews as well as non-Jews – and their theorized inability to accept and recognize Jews, their unique history and culture and, ultimately, their exceptional nationalism – is a display of their puerile thinking.
Unfortunately, as the “Mossad: Satirical and Awesome” account posted on June 21, “The problem with Israeli PR is that it takes a stupid person to believe a lie and a smart person to understand the truth, and we’re hopelessly outnumbered.”
The shifting nature of anti-Zionism
Anti-Zionism's advantage is that it is shift changing in its character. It adapts itself to whatever trend of political thought becomes the topic of the day – Left, Right, and/or Center - and it assumes the rhetoric language of various ideologies and trends.
Bob Vylan can shout “Death to the IDF” at the Glastonbury Festival in England and American conservative isolationist Steve Bannon can demand “There needs to be a thorough FARA investigation into Fox’s relationship with a foreign power” and call its Jewish show host Mark Levin, “Tel Aviv Levin.”
On the other hand, the concept of an Arab country of Palestine, with a distinct people, never truly existed, neither in the minds of outside observers nor the Muslims themselves. It was a conquered land occupied by Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Mamluks, and Ottoman Turks.
The region of Palestine was never a defined geopolitical entity, but was fought over by two tribal confederations. Throughout the 16th century, there were frequent clashes between families across Palestine based on Qays–Yaman divisions and there was civil strife involving peasant fellahin, Bedouins, and townspeople well into the 18th century. An “Arab Palestine people” never truly existed, even in the mid-20th century.
The anti-Zionists are violent by nature, seeking to “globalize the intifada.” In Berlin this past week, pro-Gaza demonstrators demanded the return of the Islamist Caliphate.
Commenting on that campaign, pro-Israel British-Palestinian John Aziz said that whereas “Socialism was once the battle cry of factory workers and coal miners… today, it’s increasingly the pet ideology of upper-middle-class urbanites sipping fair trade soy lattes and chanting of their wish to globalize an intifada that they know little or nothing about.”
Anti-Zionism, moreover, is a wave that potentially will submerge more than just the Jews.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.