Jim Farmelant wrote:
>That's been a problem with Zionism from the very beginning.
>The Labor Zionists, in particular, were over the years
>quite successful in sowing illusions among progressives,
>by no means limited to progressive Jews, that the Zionist
>project was compatible with progressive and even socialist
>values and ideals. Thus support for Zionism was among other
>things portrayed as being compatible with support for
>anti-imperialism for instance, which is clearly nonsensical.
>
Avenry echoed this in last week's column:
When our Zionist fathers decided to set up a 'safe haven' in Palestine, they had a choice between two ways:
"They could appear in West Asia as a European conqueror, who sees himself as a bridge-head of the 'white' race and a master of the 'natives', like the Spanish Conquistadores and the Anglo-Saxon colonists in America. That is what the Crusaders did in Palestine.
"The second way was to consider themselves as an Asian nation returning to its home - a nation that sees itself as an heir to the political and cultural heritage of the Semitic race, and which is prepared to join the peoples of the Semitic region in their war of liberation from European exploitation."
As is well known, the State of Israel, which was established a few months later, chose the first way. It gave its hand to colonial France, tried to help Britain to return to the Suez Canal and, since 1967, has become the little sister of the United States.
---------- I don't know whether the labor zionists were indeed deluded. Clearly if a socialist path could have been made anywhere, Palestine would have been a good place to start. There were the material conditions of a fertile land populated by multiple ethnic/religious groups that had, all in all, gotten along together. A Jewish state would have been impossible...but one state, whose jewish population could have increased gradually over time -- as it had from the late ninteenth to the mid twentieth century -- would have been possible. And there would have been the absence of oil, which would have helped keep it under the radar. But as you and Avnery point out, that was not the chosen path and given who the zionists were mostly, that is not surprising.
As for this next article of faith:
>"Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or
>savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will
>always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only
>a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs.
>Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some
>kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals,
>or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to
>Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this
>assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind
>us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will,
>but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as
>we want about our good intentions;
>but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look
>upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any
>Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To
>think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of
>Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on
>them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our "Arabo-philes" comes from
>some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view
>of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their
>homeland for a railroad network."
>
I seriously question the propsed 500 year lag between Arab and Jewish
culture. Let us remember that the Jews who lined up behind political
zionism were those who were threatened by the enfranchisement (and
assimilation ) of the jews in Europe and who wished to have their
ghettos and their domination of their peoples assured. (Shahak speaks of
this, Hal Draper speaks of this.)
Also, as Avenry points out:
"After every single one of the war aims put forward by our government had evaporated, one after the other, another reason was brought up: this war was a part of the "clash of civilizations", the great campaign of the Western world and its lofty values against the barbarian darkness of the Islamic world.
That reminds one, of course, of the words written 110 years ago by the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in the founding document of the Zionist movement: "In Palestine...we shall constitute for Europe a part of the wall against Asia, and serve as the vanguard of civilization against barbarism." Without knowing, Olmert almost repeated this formula in his justification of his war, in order to please President Bush.
It happens from time to time in the United States that somebody invents an empty but easily digested slogan, which then dominates the public discourse for some time. It seems that the more stupid the slogan is, the better its chances of becoming the guiding light for academia and the media - until another slogan appears and supersedes it. The latest example is the slogan "Clash of Civilizations", coined by Samuel P. Huntington in 1993 (taking over from the "End of History").
What clash of ideas is there between Muslim Indonesia and Christian Chile? What eternal struggle between Poland and Morocco? What is it that unifies Malaysia and Kosovo, two Muslim nations? Or two Christian nations like Sweden and Ethiopia?
In what way are the ideas of the West more sublime than those of the East? The Jews that fled the flames of the auto-da-fe of the Christian Inquisition in Spain were received with open arms by the Muslim Ottoman Empire.
The most cultured of European nations democratically elected Adolf Hitler as its leader and perpetrated the Holocaust, without the Pope raising his voice in protest.
In what way are the spiritual values of the United States, today's Empire of the West, superior to those of India and China, the rising stars of the East? Huntington himself was compelled to admit: "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." In the West, too, women won the vote only in the 20th century, and slavery was abolished there only in the second half of the 19th. And in the leading nation of the West, fundamentalism is now also raising its head.
What interest, for goodness sake, have we in volunteering to be a political and military vanguard of the West in this imagined clash?"
What interest indeed?
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