The Myth of Anti-Zionism
Steven Menashi :: 1/17/2004

In the latest Nation, a philosophy professor named Brian Klug disputes the idea that anti-Zionism -- that is, opposition to the existence of the Jewish state -- can be equated with antisemitism by writing:

To argue that hostility to Israel and hostility to Jews are one and the same thing is to conflate the Jewish state with the Jewish people. In fact, Israel is one thing, Jewry another. Accordingly, anti-Zionism is one thing, anti-Semitism another. They are separate.

Now, I suppose there are many French people living around the world -- to take another example -- who have never been to France, don't speak French, and don't especially like the French government. So it's true to say that France is one thing, the French people another. But it isn't quite right to say they are "separate." Nor would you get very far by arguing, "I have nothing against French people; I am merely opposed to the existence of France. In fact, I rather like the French, provided they exercise no self-determination in their own homeland." Certainly, one could be excused for detecting an anti-French bias in that sentiment.

Israel is the Jewish state just like France is the French state. (The semantics of this would be clearer if the Jewish state were called "Judea," one suspects, though the Jews have always called themselves "Israel.") Klug is shocked to hear Ariel Sharon call Israel "a national and spiritual center for all Jews of the world." It's only reasonable, Klug argues, that if Israel claims to be "the sovereign state of the Jewish people as a whole," that young Arabs and Muslims living around the world would attack German Jews or firebomb Turkish synagogues, or burn down French Jewish schools -- as a way of protesting Israeli government policies. If Israel identifies itself with the Jewish people, Klug argues, it's only reasonable that Muslim militants do so as well. (Klug says this doesn't justify the attacks; it just provides "context.")

But Jacques Chirac speaks on behalf of "the French people" all the time, nor would one be surprised to find that France is widely considered a national and cultural center for all French people around the world. But this would do little to explain why an American of French descent should be attacked by youth dissatisfied with Chirac's policies.

Indeed, the Arab Summit in 1974 (along with the PLO itself) recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the "sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" living in exile. Yet attacks on Palestinian Arabs living in Europe or America remain hate crimes rather than political statements.

Klug's horror at Israel's solidarity with the Jewish people is another example of a double standard applied to Israel and the Jews. For some reason, it's scandalous that the Jews should have a nation-state -- even when it is commonplace for everyone else. Somehow, no one seems to confuse the statements of Ireland's president with the sentiments of Irish-Americans in Boston. But with Israel and the Jews, it's murky.

To clear up some of this murkiness, Klug contends that "the Jews" don't really exist -- that they don't "constitute a nation in the relevant sense." (An argument similar to this one used to be employed against the Palestinians: Since the idea of "the Palestinian people" didn't exist until around the 1960s -- remember that no one called for Palestinian self-determination when Egypt and Jordan occupied Gaza and the West Bank -- Palestinian nationalism was considered fictious. But today this argument seems to fail empirically -- as does the even more bizarre one about the Jews.) Klug writes:

Certainly, mainstream Zionism...saw itself as a national movement. But it was unlike other national movements in one crucial respect: There was no pre-existing nation, not in the modern sense of the word, where both territory and language are already in place. Traditionally, the idea of the Jewish people was centered not on a state but on a book, the Torah, and the culture (or cultures) that developed around that book.

Within this book, it is true, there is a narrative about a people, Am Yisrael (the people of Israel) in a land, Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel) or Tzion (Zion), from which they are exiled and to which they will eventually return. But traditionally, this was regarded as a sacred story, not as a political blueprint.

This latter point is a bit of sophistry. Annually, the Jews intoned "Next year in Jerusalem" -- in Hebrew, their own language, anticipating a return to the territory from which that language originated, Israel. The early Zionists were secular, but they didn't invent the idea of the Jews as a nation in exile. For the two thousand years after they lost sovereignty in Israel, the Jews prayed for their speedy restoration in the land (always facing Jerusalem during prayer).

I'm not really sure why the Jews, who shared common origins, customs, and language, didn't qualify as a nation according to Klug. But if it's being exiled from their territory that disqualifies them, then surely the Palestinian nationalist movement, which grew up in the wake of 1948, and the African American nationalist movement don't correspond to nations, either.

In any case, Klug's idea that the Jews never qualified as a "nation" also ignores the context in which the Zionist movement was born -- namely, that even if the Jews themselves didn't consider themselves a separate nation, everyone else did. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her study of Rahel Varnhagen, "Although being born a Jewess might seem to Rahel a mere reference to something out of the remote past, and although she may have entirely eradicated the fact from her thinking, it remained a nasty present reality as a prejudice in the minds of others." (Arendt herself, though born and raised in Germany, never "considered myself a German -- in the sense of belonging to the people as opposed to being a citizen.")

Herzl's experience of the Dreyfus affair led him to a similar conclusion about France. Surely, it's not necessary to recount the history of Europeans refusing to accept their Jewish neighbors as full members of their respective nations. Even today, as John Rosenthal has noted, German authorities classify Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union as "of Jewish nationality" -- and, unlike those "of German nationality," they do not receive German citizenship when they immigrate. Even if the Jews lacked a national consciouness before, they would not be the only group to have nationalism thrust upon them. It's rather hard to argue that the Jews don't exist as a distinct people today -- whether in their own minds or the minds of others.

Jewish nationalism is about as settled a question as history provides. The only open question is whether that nation will be treated like all the others.