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January 7, 2005
If Zionism is the founding idea of the Jewish nation state, then questioning Zionism tactitly involves questioning the national identity of Israel.
From my experience all hell often breaks loose at this point, and arguments quickly degenerate into polemics. For the religious nationalists it is the primacy of the Jewish-nationalist outlook over all other beliefs that is what needs to be defended. Hence the quetionining has to be blocked.
This is a good review of Idith Zertal's 'Death and the Nation: History, Memory, Politics'. This is an exploration of Israeli history, a history that has largely been constructed by the Zionists, whose central argument is that a Jewish state in Palestine would insure Jewish security and normalize Jewish existence. Zionism invokes the Holocaust as a catastrophe whose repetition had to be avoided by any means.
As a nation state Israel has used the memory of the Holocaust in order to define and legitimise its existence and politics. The centrality of the Holocaust to Jewish identity places an emphasis on death and redemption. This has goiven rise to a political culture that emphases death over life, the past determining the future, and Jewish sacrifice in an eternally hostile gentile world.
To have anti-Zionist opinions, or to question Zionism is to be anti-Semitic. Or anti-Zionism is a camouflage for anti-Semitism.Though there may be good reasons to criticize the policies of the Israeli government these are not the reasons many of them express such criticisms. It is the hatred of Jews--Jews in Israel, Jews in Europe, Jews everywhere and always--that accounts for the virulence of the critique.
This kind of discourse equates being 'against' Israel as being 'against' Jews, and it interprets the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe as a recidivism: as reverting to type, back to the 30s.
This has the effect of deflecting and forbiding any criticism of the conduct and policies of the Israeli state. It makes the critics of Israel vulnerable to moral blackmail from Israel's right wing defenders.
One of the major argument in the current polemics around Israel and Palestinian question is the following: The Arabs do not accept the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, therefore they are anti-Semites who want to annihilate all the Jews and to accomplish the Nazi program. This appropriates the Holocaustand transforms it into a powerful instrument of the State of Israel, not only for building the nation but for negating the national aspirations of the Palestinians by comparing them to Nazis.
This argument overlooks the way the confrontation between Arab and Jew in Palestine is a conflict of mutually exclusive interests, much like any other ethno-national conflict. The concentration on the racist undertones and expressions by the Arabs as an expression of historical anti-Semitism overlooks the Arab resistance against the Jewish presence and the gradual conquest of the land through the settlements. So resistors of occupation are equated with Nazis.
Ironically, the Zionist discourse does not just 'Nazify' the Arabs. It sees those Israeli politicians who have tried to make peace with the Arabs,or those who support a negotiated peace with the Palestinian people as appeasers.And concessions to the Arabs is interpreted in terms of the destruction of Israel, the end of Zionism and the end of the Jewish people.
The problem with this kind of reasoning is not that it instrumentalizes the Holocaust for political advantage.It overlooks the way that the recent policies of Israeli governments towards the Palestinians that has provoked widespread anti-Jewish feelings in Europe and elsewhere.
The questioning of Zionism opens up a space called post-Zionist.Post-Zionism is often interpreted by conservatives to mean thatIsrael will at best stop being a Jewish state. Post-Zionisnm is sometimes caricatured in terms of running a simple message: Israel represents the epitome of all that is evil and is the colonialist aggressor that started all the wars with the Arabs who wanted nothing more than to be left in peace. Post-Zionism means that Israel will at best stop being a Jewish state.
However, the post Zionist space discloses a space in which there is a civil and cultural conflict over the character of Israel.
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