Last week, universities around the world marked Israeli Apartheid Week. The purpose of the event was to "contribute to this chorus of international opposition to Israeli apartheid." Israeli intellectuals participated in the cultural and media events that marked the week at campuses in more than 40 cities around the globe. The event has been criticised as anti-Zionist.
In a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defined his vision of the future as: Israel as a global technology leader, moving towards peace from a position of power, strengthened by a renewed sense of identity grounded in national values.
The latter part of Netanyahu's vision has been described and attacked as an attempt to salvage Zionism. This, commented one Israeli observer, is "an attack on the values that have shaped and defined us." If Zionism be the most fundamental value that shaped and defined Israeli society, why is it being subjected to unbridled attacks?
Zionism was founded on two basic propositions: a) Jews will always be victims of discrimination and will never be fully accepted as equal citizens in their respective societies. That is because, the early Zionists claimed, anti-Semitism is both eternal and ineradicable. b) The only solution for this Jewish predicament is for the Jewish people to constitute themselves as a nation in a territorially defined state.
From the beginning, Zionism faced formidable challenges. For one thing, most Jews were either uninterested in or opposed to Zionism for fear of endangering their newly acquired rights in their respective societies. Secondly, there was the daunting task of finding a place and establishing a Jewish state.
The early Zionist leaders considered Uganda, Argentina and Cyprus before they finally settled on Palestine because of its emotional appeal to the Jews. But Palestine was already inhabited and over 90 per cent of its population was composed of Muslim and Christian Palestinians and the Orthodox Jews living there were strongly opposed to the establishment of a Jewish state there.
The early Zionist leaders resolved these difficulties through the use of systematic deception and the use of an astute propaganda campaign. As they lobbied for support through the European corridors of power, they claimed that Zionism was supported by a majority of Jews, when it was not, and they claimed that their goal was the establishment of a home in Palestine without prejudice to the rights of the indigenous people and this was the limited promise made by Britain in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The Zionist propaganda campaign was brilliantly summed up in one misleading slogan — Palestine: a land without people for a people without land.
Under the protective umbrella of the British military occupation of Palestine and in consistent disregard towards the rights of the majority Palestinian people, Palestine was transformed and by 1948, the Zionists had accomplished the incredible feat of establishing the state of Israel.
Exclusivist ideology
Whatever the value of its accomplishments for the Jewish people, Zionism cannot escape the accusation that its exclusivist ideology had been predicated on the dispossession of the Palestinians — a feature that continues till today.
Zionism's exclusivist ideology is also embodied in the Law of Return which ensures that Israel is not the state of its citizens, but the state of the Jewish people wherever they may be. This is accomplished by granting Jews from anywhere in the world rights denied to the Palestinians. This led to several UN declarations equating Zionism with racism.
In the post-1948 Israel, Zionism justified the ethnic cleansing, the expulsion and territorial expansion. In post-1967 Israel, Zionism justified the occupation and nourished the dream of The Land of Israel.
Professor Yoseph Ben-Shlomo from Tel Aviv University argues: "The concept of the Land of Israel died at Oslo because the Accords made no outright reference to the Jewish people's historic rights to the Land of Israel …"
But there is no such thing as ‘historic rights'; historic connections yes, but historic rights is not a principle recognised in international law; it cannot therefore be the basis of peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
It was precisely to stem the decline of this fundamental but anachronistic tenet of Zionism that Knesset members of the Likud recently established The Land of Israel caucus supported by all Likud members of Knesset and ministers with the exception of Michael Eitan, Netanyahu and minister Dan Meridor.
In Joshua Cohen's review of Yitzhak Laor's book, The Myths of Liberal Zionism, in the January edition of Harper's, Laor is quoted to believe that the Myth of Liberal Zionism is Liberal Zionism itself. Liberal Zionism is a contradiction in terms: "To Laor, Liberal believes in openness and the policies of empathy; Zionist believes that millions can be denied their patrimony, dispossessed, abused and even murdered in the name of Jewish statehood."
Thus Zionism as an exclusivist ideology may still be relevant to the Jewish character of Israel (through the Law of Return) that Netanyahu wants the Palestinians to recognise. However, there is more to Zionism than that. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, believed that "within the Zionist idea is contained the aspiration to moral and spiritual perfection." It is a betrayal of such aspiration to define the Israeli national identity by reference to exclusivist ideology, dispossession, anachronism and the occupation.
Human rights are a better foundation for a national identity anchored in democratic values. They are also a better guarantor of a more relevant Zionist narrative adapted to the present and geared towards the future; a future of peace and mutual acceptance.
Adel Safty is Distinguished Professor Adjunct at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Russia. His new book, Might Over Right, is endorsed by Noam Chomsky and published in England by Garnet, 2009.
