Category: Zionism

Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism

This book discerns in the history of Zionism the plot of a Shakespearean tragedy. A small band of European Zionists enters the world stage in late 19th century, determined to create a Jewish state in Palestine. This is their solution to the ‘abnormal’ condition of European Jews, who are without a land and are not a nation. To achieve this, they must seize Palestine; induce Western Jews to become colonists; and, above all, recruit Western powers to sponsor their colonial project. Zionists can only succeed by creating Islamicate enemies; they need resurgent anti-Semitism to send Jewish colons to Palestine; and they must persuade/coerce the West to sponsor their colonial project. In succeeding, the Zionists merely transplant Jewish abnormality from Europe to the Middle East – and make it worse. In Europe, Jewish-Gentile frictions were local problems; in Israel, ominously, they have come to form the pivot of a global conflict that pits the West against the Islamicate.

Cover Image GIFThis is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Palgrave Macmillan, November 10, 2009). Publisher’s link

— M. Shahid Alam

Why is an economist writing a book on the geopolitics of Zionism? This is easily explained. I 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?

Zionism is a historic movement that emerges from the guts of Europe’s turbulent history. It is propelled by the dialectical interactions between two intertwined streams of Western civilization, the Jewish and Christian. And, as it has unfolded, Zionism has brought both these Western streams into a dangerous collision with the Islamicate. It would not be easy squeezing this tragic history into an economic model or a set of econometric estimations.

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Khalil Bendib interviews Shlomo Sand

(Download Mp3)

Sand Invention-of-the-Jewish-smallFollowing an interview earlier this year, Khalil Bendib once again speaks with Tel Aviv University historian Dr. Shlomo Sand about his brand-new book, The Invention of the Jewish People. The book has become a best seller both in Israel and in France: Did the world’s Jewry truly originate in Palestine, and if not, why does that myth persist to this day?

Sand is currently touring the US: see also an interesting review of Shlomo Sand’s recent NYU lecture by Philip Weiss here.

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Learning about Zionism the Goldstone Way

Richard Goldstone in Gaza
Richard Goldstone in Gaza

I waited a bit to have a complete picture of Ha’aretz (“the elite left”) coverage of the Goldstone lead UN report on Gaza. Israeli citizens could have learned something about the government and themselves through this report. Instead, I learn, yet again, how corrupted the media, the government and the people are, by the Zionist mythos.

Keeping the Myth Alive

The first Ha’aretz article (and all the subsequent articles that weren’t written by Amira Hass or Gideon Levy) about the report plays on the myth that both sides of this “conflict” (a.k.a. “occupation”) are on equal footing:

UN probe: Israel, Palestinians both guilty of Gaza war crimes

This title is, of course, misleading, as anyone who’s taken the time to read just the table of contents of the report, can see a clear ratio that puts Israel to shame. But the sillies don’t stop there; Not only is the title misleading, when reporting about the mission, it’s misleading in characterization of the article it heads! The article mentions the main points (I’ve rephrased, in order to avoid linguistic bias, such as calling a massacre “war”):

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Peace propaganda and the Israeli consensus

George Mitchell is in Israel/Palestine as the White House’s special envoy, in a visit described as “a final push to revive Middle East peace talks”. The focus remains on Israel’s so –called settlement ‘freeze’, with Mitchell reported as saying that there was still work to be done on the “Israeli-American dispute over construction in the West Bank”. Ahead of his meeting with Mitchell today, Netanyahu has confirmed that there will not be a “complete halt to building” in the settlements, telling a Knesset committee that “a reduction on building in Judea and Samaria will only be for a limited period”.

The ‘freeze’ is the latest warmed-up gimmick to be offered by the international community’s peace process’, though even by the standards of previous efforts such as the ‘Road Map’ and ‘Annapolis’, the settlement freeze is transparently lacking in seriousness. The Israeli government’s definition of a ‘freeze’ excludes: settlement activity in occupied East Jerusalem; 2,500 housing units already under construction; and, hundreds of new units just recently announced.

That the ‘freeze’ will last in the region of six to nine months is rather academic, given that it will make no difference to this year’s total settlement housing consolidation compared to previous years. As Ha’aretz pointed out, “instead of construction permits being given gradually throughout the year, the government intends to issue hundreds of permits within a few days, before the official announcement of the “freeze” is made”.

Even the PM’s spokesperson Mark Regev has found it hard to spin what Deputy PM Eli Yishai has called merely a “strategic delay”. The new construction in West Bank colonies ahead of the ‘freeze’ Regev argued was a case of doing something now to “actually make progress possible tomorrow”. MK Nissim Ze’ev, visiting a settlement outpost, felt no need to resort to such contortions, encouraging the settlers that there is “no one in the government who doesn’t want more and more construction throughout Judea and Samaria”, but that owing to tensions with the US, there are currently “limitations”. Continue reading “Peace propaganda and the Israeli consensus”

With a Shield or Upon It – Impressions from the Spartan State

With a Shield or Upon It
When Spartan men went to war, their wives (or another women of some significance) would customarily present them with their shield and say: "With this, or upon this", meaning that true Spartans could only return to Sparta either victorious (with their shield in hand) or dead (carried upon it).

Sometimes I toy with he idea of suing my government in international court. If you take a good look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, you reach a firm conclusion that, inherently, conscription is in fact illegal (I skip articles 1, 2, 28, 29 and 30, as they are unavoidably violated if any of the others are):

  • Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. [Art. 3]
  • No one shall be held in slavery or servitude [Art. 4 – a conscripted soldier earns the equivalent of $0.026 an hour (the army does provide certain services at the time of service, but I’ll leave it to you to refute this as slavery)]
  • No one shall be subjected to… degrading treatment… [Art. 5]
  • (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement… within the borders of each state.
    (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own… [Art. 13 – a conscripted soldier must be at base at designated times, otherwise considered “absentee”, which is an offense punishable by prison time]

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An Abnormal Nationalism

The ultimate goal…is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years…The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland.”—Vladimir Dubnow, 1882

Zionism is best described as an abnormal nationalism. This singular fact has engendered a history of deepening conflicts between Israel – leading an alliance of Western states – and the Islamicate more generally.

Jewish ‘nationalism’ was abnormal for two reasons. It was homeless: it did not possess a homeland. The Jews of Europe were not a majority in, or even exercised control over, any territory that could become the basis of a Jewish state. We do not know of another nationalist movement in recent memory that started with such a land deficit – that is, without a homeland.

Arguably, Jewish nationalism was without a nation too. The Jews were a religious aggregate, consisting of communities, scattered across many regions and countries, some only tenuously connected to others, but who shared the religious traditions derived from, or an identity connected to, Judaism. Over the centuries, Jews had been taught that a divinely appointed Messiah would restore them to Zion; but such a Messiah never appeared; or when he did, his failure to deliver ‘proved’ that he was false. Indeed, while the Jews prayed for the appearance of the Messiah, they had no notion about when this might happen. In addition, since the nineteenth century, Reform Jews have interpreted their chosenness metaphorically. Max Nordau complained bitterly that for the Reform Jew, “the word Zion had just as little meaning as the word dispersion…He denies that there is a Jewish people and that he is a member of it.”

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Enemies of Free Speech

Gaza police check their organs
Gaza police check their organs

Remember the Islamophobic cartoons published by the neo-con Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten? The controversy rumbled on from 2005 into 2006, and involved angry demonstrations, embassy-burnings (in countries where you can’t look at an embassy without a government permit), deaths, boycotts, and campaigns of support to counteract the boycotts. Although I found the cartoons deeply offensive, and not in the least related to free speech or constructive debate, I was more upset by the responses of some Muslims.

The cartoons were a media provocation, and should have been combatted through intelligent use of the media. The outpouring of Muslim anger at a West which insulted Muslims after slaughtering them was certainly understandable, but was aimed at the wrong target. I lived in Oman at the time, where the state-appointed Mufti as well as editorials in the state-controlled press encouraged people to boycott Danish goods. The supermarkets put up signs announcing that they no longer stocked Danish goods (although an English friend assured me that Danish bacon was still on sale in the foreigners-only pork room of one supermarket). Meanwhile the shelves groaned under American products, and Oman continued to stock  British and American military bases. American planes were incinerating Iraqi Muslims in their mosques at the time. The cartoon fuss seemed very much to be an organised distraction from more serious issues.

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Media Mis-focus – Perpetuating the Zionist Narrative, for Better or Worse

Media Mis-focus

Good propaganda isn’t constructed on lies, but rather half truths. Missing context, however, is not the only component the Israeli media employs to distort the Israeli mind. Another subtle trick is what the media focuses on. Three stories were revealed to me this week. They have little in common but a lesson on the effects of media focus.

The Irrelevance of an Israel-Born Fatah Member to the Zionist Narrative

Thank god for alternative media, because I could have completely missed this fantastic fact:

Loud applause broke out Saturday evening as it was announced that “brother” Dr Uri Davis had been elected to the Fatah movement’s largest governing body.

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Sleeping with the Enemy – Zionism and Nazism and Other Kinky Collaborations

Sleeping with the enemyOn one of my blog post’s comment sections, a mini-debate ensued about the good ole’ Mufti’s meeting with Hitler, in which I pointed out to a link, involving Zionists with The third Reich, written by the Institute for Historical Review. It was later pointed out to me that the Institute for Historical Review is headed by someone who’s written for neo-Nazi publications. I’ve made the correction on the comment section, but I was definitely dissatisfied with the simplistic shelving of a source- even if I’m disgusted by its motives- as I felt there was academic merit to it. The world is far from black and white, and just as the Zionist Benny Morris’ work is regarded in academic discussion of Palestinian history, so can the writings of the Institute for Historical Review teach us about Zionist history. The rule of thumb would be, in these cases, to tread carefully and consider only the facts and not the conclusions.

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Recapping the Twilight Zone Media

TwilightZoneI have to admit, I’ve lost touch with the Israeli mainstream media. I’ve found so many alternative medias online that there really isn’t any point to turning on the telly, or buying a newspaper. But one must travel into the alternate universe known as Israel every so often. So I put on my goggles and nose plug and sink my hands deep into Ha’aretz’s front page, knowing this is as left as the mainstream media gets down here. What does the Israeli mind preoccupy itself with while the international boycott movement is growing and Israeli citizens are turned refugees right under its upturned nose?

USA Support
The number one obsession in Israel is US support, or rather the eating-our-cake-and-having-it-too notion of what we can get away with and still have US support.

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