- The essential point of M. Shahid Alam's book, Israeli
Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, comes clear upon opening
the book to the inscription in the frontispiece. From the Persian poet
and philosopher Rumi, the quote reads, "You have the light, but you
have no humanity. Seek humanity, for that is the goal." Alam, professor
of economics at Northeastern University in Boston and a CounterPunch contributor,
follows this with an explicit statement of his aims in the first paragraph
of the preface. Asking and answering the obvious question, "Why is
an economist writing a book on the geopolitics of Zionism?" he says
that he "could have written a book about the economics of Zionism,
the Israeli economy, or the economy of the West Bank and Gaza, but how
would any of that have helped me to understand the cold logic and the deep
passions that have driven Zionism?"
-
- Until recent years, the notion that Zionism was a benign,
indeed a humanitarian, political movement designed for the noble purpose
of creating a homeland and refuge for the world's stateless, persecuted
Jews was a virtually universal assumption. In the last few years, particularly
since the start of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2000, as Israel's harsh oppression
of the Palestinians has become more widely known, a great many Israelis
and friends of Israel have begun to distance themselves from and criticize
Israel's occupation policies, but they remain strong Zionists and have
been at pains to propound the view that Zionism began well and has only
lately been corrupted by the occupation. Alam demonstrates clearly, through
voluminous evidence and a carefully argued analysis, that Zionism was never
benign, never good-that from the very beginning, it operated according
to a "cold logic" and, per Rumi, had "no humanity."
Except perhaps for Jews, which is where Israel's and Zionism's exceptionalism
comes in.
-
- Alam argues convincingly that Zionism was a coldly cynical
movement from its beginnings in the nineteenth century. Not only did the
founders of Zionism know that the land on which they set their sights was
not an empty land, but they set out specifically to establish an "exclusionary
colonialism" that had no room for the Palestinians who lived there
or for any non-Jews, [http://www.counterpunch.org/israeliexcp.jpeg] and
they did this in ways that justified, and induced the West to accept, the
displacement of the Palestinian population that stood in their way. With
a simple wisdom that still escapes most analysts of Israel and Zionism,
Alam writes that a "homeless nationalism," as Zionism was for
more than half a century until the state of Israel was established in 1948,
"of necessity is a charter for conquest and-if it is exclusionary-for
ethnic cleansing."
-
- How has Zionism been able to put itself forward as exceptional
and get away with it, winning Western support for the establishment of
an exclusionary state and in the process for the deliberate dispossession
of the native population? Alam lays out three principal ways by which Zionism
has framed its claims of exceptionalism in order to justify itself and
gain world, particularly Western, support. First, the Jewish assumption
of chosenness rests on the notion that Jews have a divine right to the
land, a mandate granted by God to the Jewish people and only to them. This
divine election gives the homeless, long-persecuted Jews the historical
and legal basis by which to nullify the rights of Palestinians not so divinely
mandated and ultimately to expel them from the land. Second, Israel's often
remarkable achievements in state-building have won Western support and
provided a further justification for the displacement of "inferior"
Palestinians by "superior" Jews. Finally, Zionism has put Jews
forward as having a uniquely tragic history and as a uniquely vulnerable
country, giving Israel a special rationale for protecting itself against
supposedly unique threats to its existence and in consequence for ignoring
the dictates of international law. Against the Jews' tragedy, whatever
pain Palestinians may feel at being displaced appears minor.
-
- The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that came as
the result of Zionism's need for an exclusivist homeland was no unfortunate
consequence, and indeed had long been foreseen by Zionist thinkers and
the Western leaders who supported them. Alam quotes early Zionists, including
Theodore Herzl, who talked repeatedly of persuading the Palestinians "to
trek," or "fold their tents," or "silently steal away."
In later years, the Zionists spoke of forcible "transfer" of
the Palestinians. In the 1930s, David Ben-Gurion expressed his strong support
for compulsory transfer, crowing that "Jewish power" was growing
to the point that the Jewish community in Palestine would soon be strong
enough to carry out ethnic cleansing on a large scale (as it ultimately
did). In fact, the Zionists knew from the start that there would be no
persuading the Palestinians simply to leave voluntarily and that violent
conquest would be necessary to implant the Zionist state.
-
- The British knew this as well. Zionist supporter Winston
Churchill wrote as early as 1919 that the Zionists "take it for granted
that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience."
In a blunt affirmation of the calculated nature of Zionist plans and Western
support for them, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, like Churchill
another early supporter and also author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration,
which promised British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland
in Palestine, wrote that Zionism "is rooted in age-long traditions,
in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires
and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."
It would be hard to find a more blatant one-sided falsity.
-
- Alam traces in detail the progression of Zionist planning,
beginning with the deliberate creation in the nineteenth century of an
ethnic identity for Jews who shared only a religion and had none of the
attributes of nationhood-neither a land, nor a common language or culture,
nor arguably a common gene pool. Here Alam covers briefly the ground trod
in detail by Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, whose book The Invention of
the Jewish People, appearing in English just months before Alam's book,
shattered the myths surrounding Zionism's claim to nationhood and to an
exclusive right to Palestine. But Alam goes further, describing the Zionist
campaign to create a surrogate "mother country" that, in the
absence of a Jewish nation, would sponsor the Zionists' colonization of
Palestine and support its national project. Having gained British support
for its enterprise, Zionism then set about building a rationale for displacing
the Palestinian Arabs who were native to Palestine (who, incidentally,
did indeed possess the attributes of a nation but lay in the path of a
growing Jewish, Western-supported military machine). Zionist propaganda
then and later deliberately spread the notion that Palestinians were not
"a people," had no attachment to the land and no national aspirations,
and in the face of the Jews' supposedly divine mandate, of Israel's "miraculous"
accomplishments, and of the Jews' monumental suffering in the Holocaust,
the dispossession of the Palestinians was made to appear to a disinterested
West as nothing more than a minor misfortune.
-
- Addressing what he calls the "destabilizing logic"
of Zionism, Alam builds the argument that Zionism thrives on, and indeed
can survive only in the midst of, conflict. In the first instance, Alam
shows, Zionism actually embraced the European anti-Semitic charge that
Jews were an alien people. This was the natural result of promoting the
idea that Jews actually belonged in Palestine in a nation of their own,
and in addition, spreading fear of anti-Semitism proved to be an effective
way to attract Jews not swayed by the arguments of Zionism (who made up
the majority of Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries)
to the Zionist cause. Early Zionist leaders talked frankly of anti-Semitism
as a means of teaching many educated and assimilated Jews "the way
back to their people" and of forcing an allegiance to Zionism. Anti-Semitism
remains in many ways the cement that holds Zionism together, keeping both
Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews in thrall to Israel as their supposedly
only salvation from another Holocaust.
-
- In the same vein, Alam contends, Zionists realized that
in order to succeed in their colonial enterprise and maintain the support
of the West, they would have to create an adversary common to both the
West and the Jews. Only a Jewish state waging wars in the Middle East could
"energize the West's crusader mentality, its evangelical zeal, its
dreams of end times, its imperial ambitions." Arabs were the initial
and enduring enemy, and Zionists and Israel have continued to provoke Arab
antagonism and direct it toward radicalism, to steer Arab anger against
the United States, to provoke the Arabs into wars against Israel, and to
manufacture stories of virulent Arab anti-Semitism-all specifically in
order to sustain Jewish and Western solidarity with Israel. More recently,
Islam itself has become the common enemy, an adversary fashioned so that
what Alam calls the "Jewish-Gentile partnership" can be justified
and intensified. Focusing on Arab and Muslim hostility, always portrayed
as motivated by irrational hatred rather than by opposition to Israeli
and U.S. policies, allows Zionists to divert attention from their own expropriation
of Palestinian land and dispossession of Palestinians and allows them to
characterize Israeli actions as self-defense against anti-Semitic Arab
and Muslim resistance.
-
- Alam treats the Zionist/Israel lobby as a vital cog in
the machine that built and sustains the Jewish state. Indeed, Theodore
Herzl was the original Zionist lobbyist. During the eight years between
the launch of the Zionist movement at Basel in 1897 and his death, Herzl
had meetings with a remarkable array of power brokers in Europe and the
Middle East, including the Ottoman sultan, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Victor
Emanuel III of Italy, Pope Pius X, the noted British imperialist Lord Cromer
and the British colonial secretary of the day, and the Russian ministers
of interior and finance, as well as a long list of dukes, ambassadors,
and lesser ministers. One historian used the term "miraculous"
to describe Herzl's ability to secure audiences with the powerful who could
help Zionism.
-
- Zionist lobbyists continued to work as assiduously, with
results as "miraculous," throughout the twentieth century, gaining
influence over civil society and ultimately over policymakers and, most
importantly, shaping the public discourse that determines all thinking
about Israel and its neighbors. As Alam notes, "since their earliest
days, the Zionists have created the organizations, allies, networks, and
ideas that would translate into media, congressional, and presidential
support for the Zionist project." An increasing proportion of the
activists who lead major elements of civil society, such as the labor and
civil rights movements, are Jews, and these movements have as a natural
consequence come to embrace Zionist aims. Christian fundamentalists, who
in the last few decades have provided massive support to Israel and its
expansionist policies, grew in the first instance because they were "energized
by every Zionist success on the ground" and have continued to expand
with a considerable lobbying push from the Zionists.
-
- Alam's conclusion-a direct argument against those who
contend that the lobby has only limited influence: "It makes little
sense," in view of the pervasiveness of Zionist influence over civil
society and political discourse, "to maintain that the pro-Israeli
positions of mainstream American organizations . . . emerged independently
of the activism of the American Jewish community." In its early days,
Zionism grew only because Herzl and his colleagues employed heavy lobbying
in the European centers of power; Jewish dispersion across the Western
world-and Jewish influence in the economies, the film industries, the media,
and academia in key Western countries-are what enabled the Zionist movement
to survive and thrive in the dark years of the early twentieth century;
and Zionist lobbying and molding of public discourse are what has maintained
Israel's favored place in the hearts and minds of Americans and the policy
councils of America's politicians.
-
- This is a critically important book. It enhances and
expands on the groundbreaking message of Shlomo Sand's work. If Sand shows
that Jews were not "a people" until Zionism created them as such,
Alam shows this also and goes well beyond to show how Zionism and its manufactured
"nation" went about dispossessing and replacing the Palestinians
and winning all-important Western support for Israel and its now 60-year-old
"exclusionary colonialism."
-
- Kathleen Christison is the author of Perceptions of Palestine
and the Wound of Dispossession and co-author, with Bill Christison, of
Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation, published
last summer by Pluto Press. She can be reached at kb.christison@earthlink.net.
-
- --
- M. Shahid Alam
- Professor of Economics
- Northeastern University
- Boston, MA 02115
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- http://us.macmillan.com/israeliexceptionalism
-
- http://aslama.org
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