[Nyclocal] Israel's Jewish Critics

[SocialistAlliances]

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mike_marqusee/2008/03/israels_jewish_critics.html
  
  Israel's Jewish critics
  
  Anti-Zionism is part of a larger opposition to racism, an expression of solidarity with the Palestinians as victims of injustice
  by Mike Marqusee
  
  As long as there has been Zionism, there have been anti-Zionist Jews.  Indeed, decades before it even came to the notice of non-Jews,  anti-Zionism was a well-established Jewish ideology, and until the  second world war commanded wide support in the diaspora. Today, as  cracks show in the presumed monolith of Jewish backing for Israel,  increasing numbers of Jews are interrogating and rejecting Zionism.  Nonetheless, the existence of anti-Zionist Jews strikes many people -  Jews and non-Jews - as an anomaly, a perversity, a violation of the  first clause in Hillel's ethical aphorism: "If I am not for myself, who  will be for me?"
  
  Zionism is an ideology and a political movement. As such, it is open to  rational dispute, and on a variety of grounds. Jews, like others, might  well view the Jewish claim to Palestine as irrational, anachronistic,  and intrinsically unjust to other inhabitants. They might consider the  Jewish state to be discriminatory or racist in theory and in practice  or might object, on political, philosophical, or even specifically  Jewish grounds, to any state based on the supremacy of a particular  religious or ethnic group. As Jews, they might reject the idea that  Jewish people constitute a "nation", or at least a "nation" of the type  that can or should become a territorial nation-state. Or they might  have concluded on the basis of an examination of Israel's treatment of  the Palestinians that the underlying cause of the conflict was the  ideology of the Israeli state.
  
  Any or all of the above should be sufficient to explain why some Jews  would become anti-Zionists. But that doesn't stop critics from placing  us firmly in the realm of the irredeemably neurotic. In their eyes, we  remain walking self-contradictions, a menace to our fellow Jews.
  
  Whenever Jews speak out against Israel, they are met with ad hominem  criticism. Their motives, their representativeness, their authenticity  as Jews are questioned. For only a psychological aberration, a neurotic  malaise, could account for our defection from Israel's cause, which is  presumed to be - whether we like it or not - our own cause. We are  pathologised. So we are either bad Jews or Jews in bad faith.
  
  Of course, being an anti-Zionist Jew is a negative identity. It's a  disavowal of a politics commonly ascribed to Jews. And if one's  anti-Zionism is made up exclusively of a rejection of Zionism, then  it's not worth much. But for myself and for the anti-Zionist Jews I  know, anti-Zionism is part of a larger opposition to racism and  inequality, an expression of a positive solidarity with the  Palestinians as victims of injustice and specifically of colonialism.
  
  It should go without saying, but unfortunately cannot, that being an  anti-Zionist by no means implies a desire to destroy the Jews who live  in Palestine. On the contrary, anti-Zionism is founded on a refusal to  countenance discrimination on racial or religious grounds. The Jews of  Israel have every right to live safely, to follow (or not) their  religious faith, to adhere (or not) to their cultural heritage, to  speak Hebrew. What they do not have is the right to continue to  dispossess and oppress another people.
  
  An edited extract from Mike Marqusee's new book, If I Am Not for Myself, appears in today's www.mg.co.za
  




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