Anti-Zionism is an anachronism
In this week’s UK spectator, Geoffrey Wheatcroft explains why anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism. A very interesting and persuasive read.

I had some thoughts about anti-Zionism, while reading, that don’t necessarily have anything to do with Mr. Wheatcroft’s argument.

One thing I think anti-Zionists fail to understand is that however Zionism began and whatever it meant to accomplish, and however you feel about all that on a philosophical level, it’s ancient history. There is now an Israel. The great majority of its citizens were born here. They are Israelis. They have no memories of the countries their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents came from. The Israeli nation may have been artificially created; it may have been a great mistake (I don’t believe that but I can respect others that do), but the fact is that now there is an Israeli people.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft talks of “One early Jewish opponent of Zionism, the ardently assimilationist Austrian writer Karl Kraus, thought the notion nonsensical: it was absurd to imagine that German, French, Slavonic and Turkish Jews had a common bond, or that any interest united the caftan-wearing tradesman of the Galician shtetl with the literary poseur of the Viennese cafיs”. Well today’s Israel proves him wrong. While his literary, Viennese, cafי-frequenting descendants were probably exterminated by the Nazis, this descendant of caftan-wearing tradesmen of the Galician shtetl is happily married to a descendant of Turkish rabbis and wealthy Bukharans. We get on just fine and we have a lot in common, thank you very much.

We are here. We don’t want to assimilate into a Palestinian state. We are not Palestinians. This week a whole nation held its breath as thousands searched for a lost baby. While I was waiting for my youngest daughter to finish her dancing lesson on Sunday afternoon, a man rushed past me towards the TV corner there, calling urgently, as if she was his own daughter “Have they found her? Have they found her?” A whole nation was horrified when the tiny body was finally found and the unbearable truth came to light. A father had done this to his own offspring. Fathers all over the country rushed home to hug and kiss their children, newly appreciative of their relatively normal lives.

We are here. This is our home. Our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents may have spoken many languages. We speak Hebrew, the language Karl Kraus may have known only as a language in which to utter prayers he probably couldn’t understand. Contemporary anti-Zionists, rush past Israeli inhabited areas, on entering the country, lest they be contaminated by our moral deficiencies. They hurry off to show their solidarity with the Palestinians and to console them for the great injustice of the theft of their land by the Zionists. They fail to see, in their haste, that we are not like the French in Algeria, who returned to France; and that we are not like the British in India, who went back to England. We are home. We have not transported “life at home” to a new venue. Everything that went before is gone. The Galician shtetl has gone forever, as has the Jewish neighborhood in Baghdad. Now there is something new. This is our home and I, for one, love it dearly, corrupt politicians and all.

In summing up his essay, Mr. Wheatcroft, who describes himself as an honorary Jew, asserts that “More than 100 years later, every single dispute involving Israel demonstrates that, whatever else it may be, it is not a nation like all others, and maybe never can be”. I’m not sure by which standards Mr. Wheatcroft is gauging us when he makes this claim. As I see it, the only point in which we are not a nation like all others is in the particularly harsh judgment we receive from those who arrogantly see themselves as our moral betters.

[If anti-Zionism is an anachronism, you may argue, does that not mean Zionism is an anachronism, too? My Oxford dictionary from 1969, defines Zionism as “A movement resulting in the re-establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine”. Seeing as this has already happened, Zionism could definitely be seen as an anachronism. A Jewish nation in so-called “Palestine” is a fait accompli.]