 |
| The Star of David - a Jewish and Israeli symbol |
‘All Zionists are racists. Every single one.” So said the t-shirt of a man I saw recently at the Tower of London. He was there with his daughter and looked like a right-on person rather than a right-wing one – long-hair, jeans and boots, the typical left-winger’s uniform and the last person you would expect to be a sympathiser with anti-Semitism or Nazism. Nevertheless he identified Zionism with racism utterly, completely and without exception.
I looked up Zionism in Wikipedia and it identified the movement as supportive of a Jewish homeland, a concept that was recognised by the United Nations in 1948 after the Holocaust had killed six million Jews, many in gas chambers but others just gunned down – men, women and children – and left to die. It is said that the piles of dead bodies kept moving and breathing after the killing until death came, perhaps mercifully, to the victims.
If you are an anti-Zionist therfore that surely means you are automatically in favour of the abolition of Israel as a nation state and the relocation of its Jewish population elsewhere. That means seven million Jews will have to find new homes or else be absorbed into a non-Jewish state which would probably not welcome them with open arms. Israel has not been shy about attacking Arab countries who have been quite open about wanting to destroy it.
An increase in the size of Israel’s population to nine and a half million today – around three quarters of whom are Jewish – means that the figure of Jews who will be effectively homeless is no longer that potent number of six million but, in any case, it is a large number of people to rehouse, certainly not all of whom would fit into Florida or anywhere else that will take them in. It looks as if they will stay where they are - for the time being at least.
There is surely a difference between disagreeing with Israel’s aggressive policy of defending itself, which all too often involves killing innocent Arab children and destroying their family homes, and accepting that Israel exists as a state and here is to stay. If the latter attitude constitutes Zionism, which I assume it does, then I would have to be a Zionist and, according to the man’s t-shirt, automatically a racist. This, not surprisingly, is a charge I reject.
The first duty of any state is surely to protect its citizens. Israel does this aggressively, probably inspired by the memory of how Jews were killed by the Nazis, who led their victims into believing that they were being given showers when they were being taken to the gas chambers. This was not out of compassion but because non-panicking people were easier to kill than those who knew what was happening to them and were more likely to resist.
The policy of many who sympathise with the Palestinians, who were often ruthlessly driven from their land, is to undermine sympathy with Israel and to make anti-Zionism fashionable. They would surely deny it but there is an element of anti-Semitism in this. It is a prejudice is thought of as punching up rather than punching down - although you cannot be much further down than when you are in a gas chamber and the taps are about to be turned on.
Jews throughout the world have a tendency to succeed. They have won an astonishingly high proportion of Nobel prizes – nearly a quarter from a fifth of a per cent of the world population. This represents a far higher proportion than people from Arab and Moslem backgrounds who tend to be anti-Zionist. Likewise, Israel is a successful modern country with the highest number of patents in the world by the size of its population.
Israel will remain isolated an unpopular in many circles. They are losing what I call the saloon bar in the west: moderate middle-class opinion which would normally favour a small country that struggled to survive among hostile neighbours. Unpopularity does not mean extinction, however, and most Israelis would choose survival in their own sphere over popularity in the west, which did little to protect the Jews while the Nazis killed them.
It seems to me that what the Palestinians lack is a Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela, someone who realises that their enemies must be adapted to rather than conquered. The best way to do this is surely through non-violence rather than an attempt at annihilation, which will never realistically happen. It may make a good slogan or a song but Israel is going nowhere and the sooner the Palestinians realise this, the better their chance of statehood.
At present, most Israelis believe that granting the Palestinians their own state will simply move the rocket launchers closer to the borders with Israel. They put survival for their own people above justice for their enemies and are prepared to live in a state of perpetual semi-warfare in order to ensure that survival rather than give up hard-won territory in exchange for a nebulous – and almost certainly mistaken – hope that it might bring them peace.
Most people want to live peacefully with their neighbours but need those neighbours to recognise their right to exist in order to do so. As long as Palestinians and their supporters want to see Israel destroyed, its inhabitants will not believe that the country will be allowed to continue. Calling someone who believes in the right of Israel to continue to exist a racist is not the way to convince them that of the rightness of your arguments.
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
Edwin Lerner
