Anti-Zionism: Encyclopedia II - Anti-Zionism - Western anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionism - Western anti-Zionism

Before the 1970s, serious criticism of Israel, let alone opposition to its existence, was almost unknown in the western countries, except to some extent in the Communist parties. Indeed there was an almost completely uncritical acceptance of Israel's projected image of itself as a nation of brave pioneers making the desert bloom. This was partly motivated by genuine admiration for the efforts of the pioneering Israelis, partly by a sense of guilt about the failure of the west to prevent the Holocaust or to take in the Jewish refugees of the 1930s and 1940s, and partly by relief that the "Jewish question" had now finally been solved by the creation of a Jewish state. Pro-Zionist sentiment in the west peaked in the 1960s, epitomised by the Hollywood epic Exodus (1960) and by support (except of France) for "plucky little Israel" in the Six-Day War.

The tide of opinion turned after 1970, however, as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), formed in 1964, began to conduct its campaign of "armed struggle" against Israel, through terrorism in Europe against Jewish and Western targets. These acts included the hijacking and destruction of passenger airliners and the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics. These events coincided with the wave of radicalism which swept through the western intellectual world in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s (see The Sixties). Many Western radicals and Third World activists came to see the Palestinians as an oppressed people like the South Vietnamese or the black South Africans, and the PLO as a national liberation movement of the type they supported in other places.

This wave of radicalism soon passed, but it left an intellectual climate in most western countries much less sympathetic to Israel than had existed before 1967. This anti-Israeli sentiment might have faded had there been an Arab-Israeli settlement, as seemed possible for example after President Anwar Sadat's visit to Israel and the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979. But the repeated disappointments of Middle East diplomacy, and the spread of the opinion that the Palestinians were the victims of western neo-colonialism in the form of a Jewish settler state planted in the Arab world, created a permanent reservoir of anti-Zionist sentiment among western intellectuals, including some Jews. Maxime Rodinson's 1973 book Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? was influential in promoting this view.

The active expression of western anti-Zionism has tended to ebb and flow in relation to events in the Middle East. When developments seem positive, such as during the period of the Oslo Accords and the prime ministership of Yitzhak Rabin, and again during the Barak-Arafat negotiations in 1999-2000, western opinion, even on the anti-Zionist left, welcomes the reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians. When events turn out badly, such as after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and again with the launching of the Second Intifada and the election of the Sharon government, western anti-Zionism flares up again.

Most Western anti-Zionism is of the second or the third type described above, advocating coexistence rather than expulsion: very few western intellectuals actively desire the physical destruction of Israel, and most would welcome any settlement if it was acceptable to the Palestinians.

Most western anti-Zionists deny vehemently that they are anti-Semites or that anti-Zionism can be equated with anti-Semitism. Israelis and Zionists outside Israel often respond that a demand to destroy or abolish the state of Israel is intrinsically anti-Semitic, since Israel represents the fulfillment of the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination. Both these positions are in most cases sincerely held, and the conflict arises from the absence of an agreed definition of key terms such as "anti-Semitism" and "Zionism," and the fact that many western anti-Zionists either do not accept the concept of a right to national self-determination (for any nation, not just a Jewish nation) or do not accept that Israel represents its fulfillment. This debate is complicated by two further factors: the habit of genuine anti-Semites of using the term "Zionist" as a synonym and/or euphemism for "Jew," and the tendency for radical Islamist elements to use the rhetoric of traditional European anti-Semitism. These rhetorical cross-currents make it almost impossible for Zionists and anti-Zionists to converse across the gulf of hostility and incomprehension which has grown up over the past decades.

The distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is, however, recognised by some Jewish commentators. Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, said in 2002: "I see three distinct positions: legitimate criticism of Israel, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism can certainly become a form of anti-semitism when it becomes an attack on the collective right of the Jewish people to defensible space. If any people in history have earned the right to defensible space it is the Jewish people. But anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are different things. We're hearing more voices in Britain now who are denying Israel's right to exist and I have to fight that - but I don't confuse that with an assault on me as the bearer of a religious tradition." [5] However, in 2003 he said "Today’s anti-Semitism has three components: The first is anti-Zionism, the notion that Jews alone have no right to a nation of their own, a place in which to govern themselves. No. 2—all Jews are Zionists and therefore legitimate targets like Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl. No. 3, Israel and the Jewish people are responsible for all the troubles in the world, from AIDS to globalization. Put those three propositions together and you have the new anti-Semitism." [6]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Western anti-Zionism", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki