Zionism and Racism?
Things got juicy on the BBC’s Newsnight program following the Great Walkout at the Iranian President’s speech at the UN Conference on Racism last week. Interviewer Jeremy Paxman pulled no punches as he interrogated UK Ambassador Peter Gooderham on the reasons for the walk-out.
The exchange between these two men is significant in that the journalist clearly recognizes the antics in Switzerland as a "stunt" but the Ambassador insists on calling it a "protest". As for the difference between Zionism and racism, that’s a vital question.
Jeremy Paxman: What is the difference between Zionism and racism?
Peter Gooderham: Well we see the two as being quite distinct…
Jeremy Paxman: Yeah what’s the difference?
Peter Gooderham: Well Zionism is a political movement related to the establishment of a homeland…
Jeremy Paxman: So are some forms of racism.
Peter Gooderham:…a Jewish homeland, in the er…in what is now Israel and racism is something else. I mean racism is, I think we all know it when we see it and it’s not, it’s not that, and we have fought long and hard at the United Nations to keep that, to maintain that distinction.
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What do you think? Can there be a progressive Zionism? Were the EU members right to protest some of the rhetoric of Iran? Is there a ground for progressives to stand that is neither in the camp of occupation and Zionism nor the camp of political Islam and anti-Semitism?
Zionism may not be “racism”, as the Jewish people can’t be defined as a “race” (even though all religious Jews claim a descendence from Jacob), but it’s certainly an bankrupt ideologically based upon premises not too far from other more explicitly racist states.
The Palestinian people were dispossessed due to the creation of Israel, largely along ethnic and concurrent religious lines. Of course we can’t forget that Arab, Christian, Samaritan and even indigenous Palestinian Jews were victims of Israeli statehood. A state that was built on the premise of being a “Jewish state”, and even though many of the original founders of Israeli wrapped their Zionism in a Marxist or socialist veneer the example of Kibbutzes excluding non-Jews is an analogy for the “socialist” credentials of the Jewish state. [I think Jason Schulman wrote a good article from New Politics that's somewhere in their archives on this evolution.]
Obviously from its outset Israel faced destruction by Arab states that were not democracies; obviously in an Arab state without structures to defend their rights as a people Jews would have been brutalized in their own right (there is something to right-wing claims of connection between certain nationalist Arab parties and the Germans during the 1930s).
Obviously the Jewish people faced centuries of discrimination, ghettoization in Christian Europe, culminating the the horrors of the Holocaust. (It also shouldn’t be forgotten that many of the people who first populated Israel would have rather joined Jewish communities in the United States and elsewhere had they been allowed to.)
But despite all this, in a state where one segment of the popular has been dispossessed by another part of the population–along religious lines (yes, admittedly not race), creating hundreds of thousands of refugees. These same people are subjected to blockade, checkpoints, security force brutality and curfew–it’s hard not to say that the principle of Zionism, the principle of creating a “Jewish state” instead of a secular, democratic state in which Jewish rights would be protected was the root of this dilemma. The two-state partition of Palestine was a mistake to begin with and it has continued to destabilize the region.
Does antisemitism play a role in some of the denunciations of Israel? I would not be naïve enough to deny that. Obviously the Left has has basically ignored in most quarters the plight of the Kurdish people–the largest ethnic group without a homeland, a group that had chemical warfare employed against them and had the repressive apparatuses of three states against them.But this doesn’t change the fact that Zionism from the beginning was an ideology that could have only ended in violence, dispossession and instability. Just like the creation of an Islamic state in Pakistan, the creation of a Jewish state was an abhorrent mistake.
Given the reality that we have now though, even though in a dream world I would want to see a unified secular Palestine, in this world, the best bet is a stable, viable Palestine side by side with a demilitarized Israel. The new Israeli government probably can’t be engaged to get to that goal, but despite my distaste for political Islam, I believe that the political wing of Hamas must be actively engaged with by the White House.
The article I wrote is here: http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue35/schulman35.htm
I’ll comment on this general topic some other time; for now, just mark me down as an anti-Zionist who’s very uncomfortable with current, “actually-existing” organized anti-Zionism.
I think all nationalisms have potentially racist implications.