The strange mythology of anti-Zionism.(Society)

THERE IS LITTLE DOUBT that the hardcore twenty-first-century Left has cast its political lot with those who are agitating for Israel's disappearance from the map. Yet many Leftists wish to eat their anti-Zionist cake while still retaining their claim to moral sublimity. The assertion that anti-Israel antipathy is separate from anti-Semitism constitutes a convenient means to deflect accusations that Judeophobia might lie at the core of the anti-Zionism. In recent years, variants of this argument have become increasingly popular on the Left. The shelves of better bookstores currently feature a veritable proliferation of works by Leftist authors bearing such titles as The Question of Zionism and Speaking the Truth: Zionism, Israel and Occupation.

The campaign to confer moral respectability upon the cause of Israel's eradication has lent an added level of sophistication to the conventional anti-Zionist narrative. The traditional anti-Zionist polemic typically devotes the lion's share of its attention to the task of delegitimising the cause of Jewish self-determination. When NYU historian Tony Judt argued in the New York Review of Books in 2003 for bi-national Jewish/Arab statehood, his primary focus was a direct assault on the moral validity of Israel's ethnic self-definition. While making an implicit case for the moral propriety of anti-Zionism, Judt did not mount an explicit defence against the assertion that animus towards Jewish nationalism is a form of anti-Semitism.

But others within anti-Zionist ranks stepped forward to fill the breach. These advocates contend that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are utterly dissimilar doctrines. And having supposedly neutralised any possible denunciation on the grounds of bigotry, these "Israel-phobes" proceed to gild their moral rectitude with the argument that Zionism is irredeemably unethical.

Of course, these two nuanced versions of the Israel-phobic polemic are quite closely related. Like Tony Judt, the apologists for anti-Zionism are most often Jews of a decidedly leftist political persuasion. And these champions of the Palestinian narrative share Judt's view that Israel has become more of a liability to Jewish security than an asset. But one can discern a fine, yet distinct, difference in orientation between the primary anti-Zionist thesis, and secondary arguments in defence of that philosophy's moral and intellectual virtue. I would contend that this justifies a taxonomy that recognises two distinct subsets of the anti-Zionist genre. The apologists erect the outer ram parts that buttress and protect the inner keep of the anti-Zionist polemic.

This dichotomy ensures that a simple refutation of the central anti-Zionist thesis does not fully address the moral malignancy that is inherent to this cause. In order to carry the day against this ideology, it is necessary to storm both its conceptual barbican and bastion alike. Critics who solely assail the inner core of anti-Zionist polemic end up making only half a case. Arguments confined purely to the historical inaccuracies of the anti-Zionist thesis inevitably imply that, despite its flaws, this doctrine is situated in the realm of honourable discourse. Rebuttals limited merely to the logical non-sequiturs that plague anti-Zionism intimate that this ideology should still enjoy the virtues of intellectual respectability, regardless of its imperfections.

Yet the advocates of anti-Zionism deserve no such collegial presumptions of moral decency. As the reader shall presently discover, there is nothing ethical about a worldview that would deny Jews the same rights of self-definition and self-determination that are routinely afforded to others. Anti-Zionism is simply a new form of anti-Semitism, pure and simple.

AT THE VANGUARD of this anti-Zionist cohort is an Oxford research fellow in philosophy by the name of Brian Klug. Klug is clearly a man on a mission. And the object of his quest is readily apparent from a glance at his most prominent essays on the question of Israel and the Jews. "No, Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism", blared the headline of an opinion piece by Klug that appeared in the December 3, 2003, edition of the left-leaning Guardian. And two months later the leftist weekly magazine Nation ran one of his review articles under an equally self-explanatory title: "The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism".