|
April 21, 2009
I wasn't surprised that Australia didn't have the courage to attend the UN conference on racism (known as the Durban Review ) and then debate the views of those it disagreed with, namely President Ahmadinejad's interpretation of Zionist history. They just stayed away---boycotted it along with Germany, New Zealand, the US, Canada, Italy, Holland, Sweden and Israel, rather than making the arguments that need to be made against Ahmadinejad and his followers. Zionism is contested territory.
The realpolitik is that Israel currently has one of the world’s strongest armies, without peer in the Middle East, and its 200 or so nuclear warheads give it the last word in any military showdown with any of its neighbors. Israel’s security doctrine is based on maintaining an overwhelming strategic advantage over all challengers. Israel is here to stay and the Palestinians do not have the fire power to to confront the settlers, let alone even dismantle most of the 600 or so roadblocks that choke life in the West Bank.
The rights of Israel have been given priority over the rights of Arabs, and this skewed perception has been backed by US might, which since the Cold War exercised regional dominance.The US now has a huge and permanent physical military concentration in the region.
If the Zionist movement has managed to successfully create a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East against considerable odds, then whither Zionism today? Has Zionism itself become an obstacle to Israel's future as a cosmopolitan liberal democratic market society in a globalzed world? Zionism has made the Holocaust the centerpiece of Israel's national story, and states that anti-Semitism is inevitable and immutable when Jews live among gentiles. Yet the majority of Jews live in the wider world outside Israel.
However, the assumption is that Zionism does need to be questioned because this form of nationalism rationalizes conquest and colonization and occupation as “redemption” of Jewish territory on behalf of the world’s Jews. It treats the Palestinians only as an obstacle and threat to its own purposes, not as people with the same rights as Jews and with legitimate claim to the land on which they were born. It sees the Arabs and Iran as pits of Islamic terror and anti-Semitic savagery that want only to kill Jews and annihilate Israel.
Contesting fundamentalist Islamic interpretations of Zionism in the context of a questioning of Zionism is one way of engaging with the Muslim world.
|
The global war on terrorism has replaced the Cold War as a defining frame of reference, acting as justification for the massively increased U.S. military role. Islamofascists have taken the place of Reds, and being "soft on terrorism" has become as terrifying a political accusation as being "soft on communism" once was.