November 27, 2004

The end of Zionism?

Zionism was driven by the need for Jews to disengage from Europe to ensure their safety from anti-Semitic prosecution. The hope was that all Jews would settle in the Jewish state and this would end anti-Semitism through the abolition of the Disapora.

That hope has not been realised, as there are as many Jews in America as there are in Israel. The good situation of Jews in America eases the pressures for Israel's existence.

So we are coming to the end of the Zionist era. Does that include the end of colonisation?

The political present is the bloodstained streets of the occupation and terror. As Peter Rogers in Herzl's Nightmare observes, that corpse-strewn landscape also involves a:


"...studied blindness of two people to see the other, to accept their seeming inability to act toward the other in a way that might reduce, not enlarge, the pool of hatred and violence."

It is probably too late for a two state solution. The Palestinian state may not arrive at all ,as the settler state within the State of Israel continues to expand and the extremists of Greater Israel and Greater Palestine continue to veto all progress.

And Israel? Wither Israel now that the Zionist romance has died and the Holocaust has become an ideological instrument of the state? Consider this account of Sharon's strategy by Henry Siegman in the New York Review of Books:


"For Sharon, withdrawal from Gaza is the price Israel must pay if it is to complete the cantonization of the West Bank under Israel's control. Just as important, Gaza is to be turned into a living example of why Palestinians are undeserving of an independent state. Under the conditions attached by Sharon to the disengagement, Gaza —an area that makes up only 1.25 percent of the Palestine Mandate but contains 37 percent of the Palestinian population—will exist essentially as a large prison isolated from the world, including its immediate neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and the West Bank. Its population will be denied the freedom of movement essential to any possibility of economic recovery and outside investment. Sharon's insistence that withdrawal from Gaza will be entirely an Israeli initiative and will not be negotiated with any Palestinian leaders seems designed to produce a state of anarchy in Gaza, one that will enable him to say, "Look at the violent, corrupt, and primitive people we must contend with; they can't run anything on their own."

This is about power and conquest. That is what the Likud right stands for. As Seigman observes:

"Sharon and his right-wing critics differ over whether Palestinians should be allowed to call an apartheid-like arrangement of three disconnected and isolated West Bank cantons a state. Sharon insists they should be, for otherwise the arrangement would be rejected by the United States. Many in the Likud, including Benjamin Netanyahu, argue that if Israel concedes to the Palestinians the right even to nominal statehood, this would incite a dynamic movement toward sovereignty that Israel would be unable to control."

Wither this kind of Israel?

The only geopolitical image that I can come up is the enclave of Crusader's Kingdoms: the conquest was easy, the occupation was costly and complex. They then collapsed under Muslim pressure and flagging ideological commitment.

The counter image is that Israel is a regional nuclear-armed power enjoying the almost unqualified support of the one remaining global superpower. That may well ensures its survival.

But at what cost? The breakup of the Israel's national consensus has lead to a country deeply divided around the settlement issue.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 27, 2004 05:53 PM | TrackBack
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