WNY I AM (STILL) A ZIONIST

The flag of Israel, recognised by the UN in 1948

It is almost like admitting to being a paedophile these days – saying you are a supporter of Israel when there has been virtually universal international condemnation of their actions in Gaza, where women, children and journalists have been killed by the Israeli Defence Force. In the name of wiping out Hamas which they (rightly) see as their mortal enemy, Israel seems to be conducting a policy of ethnic cleansing in the areas they have conquered.

I should say first of all that there are two types of Zionist – those that think Israel is like any other country and can attract criticism and condemnation if it does things that are wrong. Then there are those that think everything Israel does should be defended and justified. There are similarly two types of people who believe in a Palestinian state – those who think it can coexist with Israel and those who think Israel should be abolished in order to create it. 

 

In both cases, I am a believer in the first definition of a Zionist and a supporter of a state for the Palestinians. This means I support a ‘two state solution’ (a phrase you do not hear often these days) in which Israel lives side by side with its Palestinian neighbours. If might be too much to hope that the two countries would do so in peace, but it is essential to the future of the Middle East that they each recognise the others right to exist.

 

Many Israelis are suspicious of the Palestinian desire for a separate state because they say that this will only allow them to move their rockets closer to the Israeli border. They prefer to see the Palestinians as contained in an area where they cannot threaten Israel. In that way, Israel can continue to exist in security if not in peace. Safety and security come above everything else – the rights of the oppressed and the need to make peace permanent.

 

For what it is worth, I think that what the Palestinians lack is a Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela, someone who says to his people: “We may not like these people but we have to live with them, so we had better learn to do so.” Everything that comes out of Palestinian leaders seems to say: “Burn, destroy and abolish Israel, so we can create a Palestinian nation in its place.” Is it any wonder that the Israelis have stopped listening?

 

If anyone should know about ethnic cleansing and the destruction of a people, it is the Jews. They suffered – as they often remind us – at the hands of the Nazis and were systematically and comprehensively destroyed in the Holocaust, surely the worst example of mass killing devised by man. “And now they are doing the same to us,” said a Palestinian guide to the Holocaust Museum, according to my partner, who has a lot of sympathy for their cause.

 

Even if they succeeded in destroying Israel, what would happen to the roughly six million Jewish people who live there today? This is a hugely significant number, of course, and I dare say that even those who are most vociferously anti-Zionist are not suggesting the reintroduction of Zyklon B to solve the problem. I make no apology for using it, however, as the matter of what to do about Israel’s Jews is not going to go away.

 

They are hardly going to end up in Florida, are they? Even if the USA supports Israel’s war against the Palestinians, the country would be unlikely to welcome in its people. They have an increasingly closed-border attitude and a hostile view of incomers, both legal and illegal, despite the fact that they rely on them for a badly paid and non-unionised workforce who will work at jobs that ‘real’ Americans are increasingly reluctant to do.

 

We are rapidly approaching the eightieth anniversary of the establishment of Israel by the United Nations in 1948 after the horrors of the Holocaust became clear. I am old enough to remember how (almost) everybody supported Israel in the six-day war in which it was fighting for survival and defeated the Arab - and undemocratic - enemies that surrounded it. As Howard Jacobsen has said, they should have lost that war to retain public support.

 

But this is a very western approach to the problem. Israel wanted – indeed needed – to defeat its enemies to survive. They knew that defeat would result in destruction and wanted to continue to exist rather than be loved. Everybody hates us: we don’t care, as Millwall’s sing with a bit of sarcastic pride. A country’s first duty is to protect its people and the failure to acknowledge this is what is holding the Arabs back.

For various reasons – many originating in Jewish contempt of Arabs, it has to be said – Israel has never been accepted as legitimate by the Arabs. When we saw the film about the Palestinians, there was little doubt about the wish to destroy the Jewish state by the Arab rock-throwers, who were aiming their stones at Israeli soldiers with the aim of driving them out so that a Palestinian state could be established - without any Jewish presence.

 

We seem to be no nearer a solution to the problems of the middle-East. Jews keep voting for Netanyahu, who has never accepted the idea of a Palestinian state; Palestinians want to see Israel destroyed so that this Palestinian state can be set up without Jews; believers in a two-state solution like me are dismissed as hopelessly naïve and unrealistic. Well, let idealism and naivety triumph over defeatism and a repeat of the holocaust.  

 

This explains why I am still why a Zionist, albeit an increasingly reluctant and apologetic one.

Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

ARE ZIONISTS RACIST?

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