A useful distinction from philosopher Ted Honderich:
“By Zionism I mean the founding and actually necessary defence of the state of Israel in roughly its 1948 boundaries. It was justified by the Holocaust in the past and is justified by the existence of a Jewish homeland now. By neo-Zionism I mean the taking from the suffering Palestinians, the only indigenous people of historic Palestine, at least their autonomy in the last fifth of their homeland.
A decent humanity, the Principle of Humanity, ultimately justifies Zionism. It condemns neo-Zionism absolutely. There aren’t two sides to
the story of a real rape….”
I’m all for ending the violence towards the Gazans. But, in creating his dichotomy, this author implicitly justifies the actions of the ‘old’ Zionists. Then we need to know exactly what it is that makes the crimes, massacres, ethnic cleanings etc… of the ‘old’ Zionists somehow more acceptable.
This author, like so many others, invokes the holocaust to justify the creation of Israel. But the two events are not causally related. There were Zionists in Palestine doing all sorts of militant things (and being generally unpleasant) even before World War I. It was only in the aftermath of the holocaust that they were able to gain enough political traction to convince the British and the Americans to facilitate Palestine’s arbitrary division and subsequent colonization. The holocaust did not create the Zionist desire to rule Palestine. It merely rendered the desire ‘legitimate’ in the eyes of the powerful. The sad part of the story is that the Zionists capitalized on something as horrible as the holocaust and then turned around and ethnically cleansed much of the region. The numbers are debatable, but there is a general acceptance that the Zionists terrorized around 700 villages and displaced between 700,000 and 800,000 people. And this was all before the war in 1948.
I’m not sure that I understand the second justification for ‘old’ Zionism: ‘the existence of a Jewish homeland’. This seems to be saying that ‘old’ Zionism should ‘defend’ Israel because Israel exists and it is a ‘homeland’. In this case the existence itself seems to be self-legitimizing. This extremely myopic point of view would have us defend any ‘homeland’ without regard neither for how it was created nor for the things it does in order to ‘defend’ itself (if you listen to the Israelis, even today they are acting in self-defense.)
I believe that neither of these points legitimize the actions or ideologies of the ‘old’ Zionists. And, without justification for their actions, the ‘old’ Zionists look a lot like the ‘new’. Perhaps more important is that the creation of any kind of strong dichotomy here creates a confusing situation that decontextualizes the present situation and invites double standards. We must ask: where and when did the ‘neo’ Zionism begin? For example, the founder of Kadima, Ariel Sharon, was in Zionist militias before Israel was created and ‘took’ from Palestinian people for most of his life. Was he a ‘neo’ Zionist? Or does the distinction break down?
After rambling for too long, my take away point is that the author is performing a conceptual slight of hand in which the re-categorization (or re-imagining) of the Zionist ideology serves to create a barrier between the present and the past that ultimately uses present atrocities to occlude older ones. This kind of thinking is dangerous.
Note: I’m sorry if I’m being a pain. I like the blog a lot. It is full of great insights. Thank you for maintaining it so well. And for so many entries!
Hi Andrew –
I do understand the complicity of many “old” Zionist activists in crimes, including, possibly (and I hesitate here because my knowledge of the history of the founding of Israel is limited), the Holocaust. But, I also know that a Jewish homeland had to be created and the Jewish people protected….given the state system. As for the crimes committed in the name of that homeland, I think such crimes usually acompany the forcible creation of states, which is why I am opposed to or believe in a very limited and small state – preferably a city-state or a group of city states.
British disingenuity in creating Israel in Palestine, rather than, say, Uganda is another question altogether.
Time confers legitimacy and possession is nine tenths of the law…unjust but an accurate observation.
A few points:
1. A misunderstanding. I do not think the Zionists caused the holocaust or participate in it. They only capitalized on the suffering that the holocaust created in order to amass the political capital necessary to perpetrate holocaust-like crimes.
2. We probably disagree about the necessity of creating ‘states’ for the preservation of religious or ethnic groups. After all, it would be preferable for governments to create domestic social and legal systems that would welcome Jewish people as they would anyone. In fact, if we are going to put on our ‘social engineer’ glasses and decide which groups need extra preservation etc… then our imperative should be to include different groups (especially those who have been marginalized) instead of allowing and facilitating their exclusivity.
3. I agree with you that the British, as well as the Americans were inept in their colonialism when it came to Israel. But when is colonialism and social engineering by foreign powers ever a good idea? When is it ever good to give land to a militant religious group who has stated its goal as turning the region into a Jewish state when you know very well that the people who live there are not Jewish? The question is not so much about how the state was ‘forcibly created’ the very fact that a bunch of Europeans ‘forcibly created’ a state on top of living breathing people. And that kind of thing is not justified.
3. Yes. Current thinking usually suggests that time confers possession. But if we can acknowledge the injustice and if the records exist in black and white documenting the crimes that caused the dispossession, then I think that we have something to work with. After all, the Nazi hunters are still dredging up war criminals from the period. Why should they be captured when Zionist war criminals not only walk free but also keep the spoils of their plunder?
4. In his last line, the author makes a very strong point: “There aren’t two sides to the story of a real rape…” However, when it comes to Palestine, the real rape did not happen last week. It happened in 1947 when the Zionists started to ethnically cleanse the countryside of Palestine. I am merely saying that to pretend that this week (or as, the author asserts elsewhere, after the 1967 six-day war) was the beginning of the real rape is sheer fantasy.