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Anti-Zionism in Australia's Academia? « Previous | |Next »
July 18, 2006

In an article in Quadant Ted Lapkin, the Director of Policy Analysis for AIJAC, a member of Australia's pro-Likud Israeli lobby (along with the Executive Council of Australian Jewry) offers a description of the state of Australia's political culture in academia.

Lapkin's article, Anti-Zionism in Australian Academia, is not online, but it can be accessed here. Lapkin says that:

...all the pernicious norms of politicized academy have taken root with a vengenance. When it comes to Marxist dogma, queer theory--and yes, anti-Zionism--Australian campuses are like most other western universities, only more so.

Lapkin's article highlights Australian academics who he considers anti-Zionist --Evan Jones at Sydney University who writes Alert and Alarmed, Amail Saikal from the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at ANU, Scott Burchill at Deakin University, Andrew Vincent of the Centre for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Macquarie University, and Anthony Lowenstein, an independent journalist who runs his own weblog.

The whole exercise reminds me of the pro- Israeli Lobby in action --an early version of campus watch. Campus Watch, in the US, is an organization responsible for repressing academic discussion of Middle East issues at U.S. universities. It compiles profiles on professors who criticize Israel. A major purpose is to identify key faculty who teach and write about contemporary affairs at university Middle East Studies departments in order to analyze and critique the work of these specialists for errors or biases. Why the errors or biases in Lapkins case are Marxism and anti-Zionism is not stated.

What implications does Lapkin draw from his account of 'a rogues gallery of anti-Zionists'? They are emblematic of the monolithic dominance of radical leftist ideology in the Australian academy; an ideology that is hostile to Jewish self-determination. Lapkin then says:

The best and brightest of Australia's youth are exposed to virulent anti-Zionism throughout their university years. It remains to be seen what effect this indoctrination will have on the next generation of Aussie leaders.

Wow. 'Radical leftist ideology in the Australian academy' was an ideology that was supportive, not hostile, to Jewish self-determination, given the nearly-successful genocide of the Jewish people in Germany. It is the expansionist actions of the Israeli state that is being questioned and criticised.

Not the words 'indoctrination' and 'virulent' instead of a critical thinking in the form of a questioning of Zionism. Lapkin's language--of exposing intellectual rot---suggests that the criticism of Israel on university campuses should be prevented.

Anti-Zionism is simply assumed to be bad by Lapkin, rather than the article assessing the questioning Zionism as an ethnocentric nationalism. Isn't it the job of Australian academics to raise questions about, and critically assess, Zionism?

After all, Zionism holds that Israeli as modern democratic state should be defined by an religious and ethnic identity. Should Israel in the 21st century be based on a 19th-century ethno-nationalism, as distinct from a civic nationalism based on the equality of citizens? An Israel based on ethnocentric nationalism would reject secularism, liberalism, and religious tolerance because Israel is for Jews. Promoting a theologically based ethnocentric nationalism as a conservative ideal leads to contradications: religious intolerance is good when Jews do it to Muslims but bad when Catholics do it to Jews.

So there are good reasons to question Zionism openly accepts a national/ethnic conceptualization of Judaism and melds faith and fatherland into one. Why is questioning Zionism, as a form of ethnocentric nationalism, seen as something bad? Isn't the enlightnment ethos of academia opposed to a chauvinistic, ethnocentric nationalism?

A political Zionism, which understands the Jewish situation in terms of an eternal conflict between Jews and non-Jews (gentiles will always be anti-Semitic), advocates the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to Jordan. ForZionism support for Israel demands support for the settlements, that "reclaim" the territory of Israel, by seizing it from the existing non-Jewish population. The agenda of modern Zionism from its inception, is one of Jewish immigration (mostly from Europe) into Israel with large enough numbers to be able to seize the land from the existing, non-Jewish populations, expel these, and to establish a homogeneous Jewish state. Isn't it the task of academia to critically engage with the political ideologies of the present?

Zionism has become the ideology of the Israeli expansionists (the Jabotinskyists, the Likud Party, fundamentalists and West Bank settlers), who have continued to push for territorial expansion for a Greater Israel (a “maximalist” state that would include the entire Palestine Mandate) and advocated military force as a means of obtaining such a Jewish state. The Zionist dream of a Jewish state as it is inherited, exemplifies the worst aspects of nationalism that comes when nationhood is pursued in terms of chauvinism, aggression and xenophobia.

Shouldn't the agenda of political Zionism be questioned as well as its ideology?

The thread that runs through the Lapkin article is the neoconservatism of the Likud pro-Israel lobby; a neoconservatism that represents a fundamentally new version of Australian conservatism. This is one that works in terms of a confrontation with the entire Arab-Muslim world; a confrontation that is understood in terms of existential struggle with an different enemy defined as Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom. Militant Islam is seen to be the greatest threat to the West since the Cold War.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:40 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
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