Joseph Massad (via Electronic Intifada):
In his recent book, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, famed Slovenian socialist intellectual Slavoj Zizek tackles the Palestinian question in a most unoriginal manner. What concerns him most is not the foundational racism of Zionism and its concrete offspring, a racist Jewish state, nor the racist curricula of Israeli Jewish schools, the racist Israeli Jewish media representations of Palestinians, the racist declarations of Israeli Jewish leaders on the right and on the left, or the Jewish supremacist rights and privileges guiding Zionism and Israeli state laws and policies – all of which seem of little concern to him – but rather Arab “anti-Semitism” which should not be “tolerated”.
Zizek makes Zionist-inspired propagandistic claims that have no bearing on reality, namely that “Hitler is still considered a hero” in “most” Arab countries, and that The Elders of the Protocols of Zion and other anti-Semitic myths are found in Arab primary school textbooks. While he seems to note Israeli discriminatory policies against Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli daily terror visited upon the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the conflict, for Zizek, seems like one of competing nationalisms and can be solved by possible NATO intervention. It is not Zionist Jewish colonialism and its commitment to European white supremacy in Jewish guise that the Arabs are reacting to and resisting; rather, it is Islam’s rejection of “modernity” triggered by a Jewish “cosmopolitanism” that characterises this conflict. “Israel’s stand for the principle of Western liberal tolerance” is attenuated in his essay by noting its neocolonial role, but this clearly does not prevent Zizek from visiting the racist Jewish state where he was a week ago delivering four lectures in which, according to Ha’aretzhe never mentioned the Palestinians or Israeli racism and terror once. Such is the legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre on many European leftist intellectuals.]
[Lila: I couldn’t find any proof that Sartre himself was of ethnic Jewish descent, although several websites referred to him as Jewish. However, at the end of his life, this infamous apologist for communist atrocities and outspoken atheist, whose theories poisoned the lives of millions of young minds, converted to Messianic Judaism, allegedly under the influence of his Jewish secretary. Again, my point in bringing up Judaism or Jewish ethnicity is not a racist one. It is because the Anglo-American Zionist establishment very often uses Jewish people and their concerns as the front behind which they operate. Thus it is important to identify mouthpieces of the Central Controllers. Sartre was one such mouthpiece.]
If Sartre failed to see how European Jews who left Europe as holocaust refugees arrived in Palestine as armed colonisers, Zizek’s approach is more insidious. While he insists that the holocaust is not connected to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he proceeds in viewing the Jewish colonists as still remaining holocaust refugees and possible victims of some alleged Arab anti-Semitism. Herein lies his obsession with opposing the alleged anti-Semitism to which these Jews are subjected by those who resist their racist violence. n,Zizek’s own anti-Semitism which manifests in reducing Judaism to the anti-Semitic notion of a “Judeo-Christian” tradition and which identifies Jews anti-Semitically as “cosmopolitan”,
[Lila: Of course, Judaism cannot be reduced to Judeo-Christian, but neither can Christianity. Indeed, there is a far better defense for Christianity being the legitimate development of historical Judaism, then there is of current Judaism being the antecedent of Christianity.]
is never clear to Zizek who projects it onto the Palestinians.
While suspending the status of European Jews as holocaust survivors, these European intellectuals fail to see that much of Zionist colonialism began half a century before the holocaust and that Jewish colonists were part of the British colonial death squads that murdered Palestinian revolutionaries between 1936 and 1939 while Hitler unleashed kristallnacht against German Jews. Zionism’s anti-Semitic project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the diaspora in the interest of an invented Hebrew that none of them spoke, and in the interest of evicting them from Europe and transporting them to an Asian land to which they had never been, is never examined by these intellectuals. Nor do they ever examine the ideological and practical collusion between Zionism and anti-Semitism since the inception of the movement.
Zizek seems observant enough, in another essay, to note that Zionist Jews are employing anti-Semitic notions to describe the Palestinians. His conclusion is not, however, that Zionism has always been predicated on anti-Semitism and on an alliance between Zionists and anti-Semitic imperialists, rather he perceives the alliance that today’s Zionists have with anti-Semitism might as the “ultimate price of the establishment of a Jewish State”.
When these European intellectuals worry about anti-Semitism harming the Israeli settler’s colony, they are being blind to the ultimate achievement of Israel: the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew. Unless their stance is one that opposes the racist basis of the Jewish State, their support for Palestinian resistance will always ring hollow. As the late Gilles Deleuze once put it, the cry of the Zionists to justify their racist violence has always been “we are not a people like any other,” while the Palestinian cry of resistance has always been “we are a people like all others.” European intellectuals must choose which cry to heed when addressing the question of Palestine.”