It's not racism, it's colonialism
Attempts to use a United Nations conference to brand Zionism racist are missing the point
Special report: Israel and the Middle East
Geoffrey Wheatcroft Wednesday August 8, 2001 The Guardian
A United Nations conference against racism, due to open in Durban on August 31, may collapse because Arab countries are trying to use it once more to condemn Zionism as a form of racism. The American government has said that it will boycott the conference unless any such resolution is withdrawn, and Mary Robinson, the UN high commissioner for human rights, says the UN "has already dealt with this issue at great length".
She is not exaggerating. A resolution equating Zionism with racism was passed by the General Assembly on November 10 1975; as the Israeli delegate, Chaim Herzog, bitterly pointed out at the time, this was the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1938. For years, the Israelis - or more to the point their American allies - fought to have the resolution expunged, as it eventually was in 1991. Even without Herzog's sombre allusion, the resolution was obviously offensive, and meant to be. Given Jewish history, and the shadow in which the country was born, to compare Israel with Nazi Germany (as in Tom Paulin's recent doggerel about Palestinian children "gunned down by the Zionist SS"), or to use the word "racist", is peculiarly stinging.
But is there any truth in the term? A cynical Israeli could point out that in some measure all national movements are racist. They are all too often exclusive and brutal, as oppressed nationalities became oppressors in their turn. Offspring of broader European nationalism, Zionism was the strangest flowering of all, because it was such a pure and platonic version: a people who did not have a land were looking for one (which did not, alas, turn out to be "a land without people"), while that group, by no means universally recognised as a nation, was told it must become one. In the event, it didn't prove quite as simple as that, and Zionism turned out to create as many difficulties as it resolved.
Different nationalisms indulge in different forms of evasion or denial. Sometimes this stems from the crucial distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism. At its best, French republican nationalism was genuinely civic, extended to anyone of whatever origin, while German " blut und boden " nationalism didn't pretend to be anything but definitively ethnic. In Ireland, another "republican" movement, which is in truth more a form of ethnic nationalism, pretended to be a civic nationalism - not surprisingly producing neurotic symptoms.
To be fair to Zionism, it never claimed to be a civic nationalism. The object of the Jewish state was not to provide fulfilment for Jew and Arab alike, and "who is a Jew" was defined for Zionist purposes in terms of ethnic descent. To be fair again, the definition was pretty loose. A hundred years ago, a Jewish anti-Zionist like Karl Kraus could deride the very idea that any "common bond ought to hold together the interests of the German, English, French, Slavonic and Turkish Jews". He did not foresee a common bond holding them together with Jews from Morocco or Ethiopia. The extravagant physical variety in the streets of Israel suggests that the idea of "Zionist racism" is quaint.
But if that is a malicious accusation, there is a deeper problem for Israel. The truth is that Zionism is not racism, it is colonialism. More than that, while it isn't ethnic nationalism posing as civic, it is colonialism posing as anti-colonialism.
Zionism was a product of the heyday of European nationalism and imperialism and emerged at a time, it should be remembered, when those were both widely seen as progressive forces. Only in the 20th century did imperialism and "Eurocentricity", come to be thought the gravest of evils - and Zionism is inescapably Eurocentric.
During the later years of British mandatory Palestine, Zionists really did persuade themselves that they were freedom fighters struggling against the British empire. That was one reason - along with the traditional liberal philo-semitism, and then horror at the fate of the European Jews - why much of the left was once so sympathetic to Zionism, to the point where, in 1945, our own Labour party could advocate the establishment of a Jewish national home by means of transfer of population: "Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in" (as the Arabs were indeed encouraged not long after).
That contradiction was always going to to catch up with the Jewish state. The man who saw this in advance was George Orwell. As the conflict in Palestine came to the boil in 1945, the liberal left in Europe and America was still, as Orwell observed, "strongly committed to support the Arabs against the Jews". And yet, Orwell went on, "the Palestine issue is partly a colour issue", in which "an Indian nationalist, for instance, would probably side with the Arabs".
In that one sentence you can find half of Israel's woes to this day. We no longer talk of "colour questions", but that's what the great Kulturkampf of the age between "the north" and the developing world comes down to. And Israel found itself on the wrong side of that struggle. "Racism" isn't the real problem: Zionism got its timing wrong.