Letter on the “Encyclopedia of Race and Racism”

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The recently published ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RACE AND RACISM (Macmillan/Gale) includes only one form of nationalism, the Jewish one. It equates Zionism with racism and Nazism. Its author, a person with no scholarly standing named Noel Ignatiev, published earlier versions of his article in Alexander Cockburn’s “Counterpunch” and in something called “Race Traitor.” The most detailed and devastating critique of this encyclopedia entry is by Professor Gideon Shimoni and appears on SPME’s website

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:29:13 -0800 (PST)
From: Edward Alexander
To: Helene.potter@cengage.com, Frank.menchaca@cengage.com
Cc: paul bogdanor
Subject: “Zionism” entry in ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RACISM.

Dear Helene Potter and Frank Menchaca,

When one recalls that, over the centuries, such eminent thinkers as Denis Diderot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Henry Newman devoted much time and labor to the ideal of integrity in encyclopedias, the heart sinks in reading the desperate apologia of John Moore for the propagandistic screed on Zionism that he commissioned for your ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RACISM.

Since Ignatiev’s outrageous polemic has already been torn to shreds by a number of scholars, I shall comment only on the exculpatory remarks of the party ultimately responsible for the outrage: Mr. Moore. (If an editor of “The Natural History of Iceland” is ready to pay for a chapter on “Snakes,” he will eventually find a busy virtuoso to volunteer for the job.) Mr. Moore shifts the perspective of his appointed expert on Zionism from present to past by saying that Ignatiev “explains” how “the Zionists emphasized the chosen people theme” to gain political support.

Now Moore, unlike Ignatiev, does at least know that the claim to chosenness is by no means peculiar to the Jews. (Indeed, he makes a great show of foolish erudition to indicate this.) But since, by his own admission, he does his abstruse research into what Jewish people believe by browsing “orthodox websites,” he remains entirely ignorant of the fact that most Zionists vigorously and persistently rejected the Jewish idea of “chosenness” in favor of “normalization” and becoming “a nation like other nations.” That is precisely why a great many orthodox Jews condemned Zionism as a thinly-veiled form of assimilation. What makes the Jewish version of chosenness, like the Jewish version of
nationalism, uniquely abhorrent in Moore’s view is that, via Zionism, it has “influenced the State of Israel to divide its citizens into racial categories and grant privileges to Jews while discriminating against others.”

One feels very much like the patient schoolmaster in a school of idiots in responding to this calumny. Mapmakers must find it boring to place the Mississippi River always in the same location, flowing south from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico; alas, boring or not, it must be done. All
citizens of Israel, regardless of religion or ethnic origin, are equal before the law. That law accords full political, civil, and human rights to all its people, including the more than one million Arab citizens, some of whom serve in the Israeli parliament and cabinet. Israel also happens to be the only
country in the world to have sought out and brought to its shores, entirely on its own initiative, tens of thousands of black Africans for purposes other than slavery, granting them full citizenship.

There have never been apartheid laws in Israel. Jews and Arabs use the same buses, clinics, government offices, universities, theatres, restaurants, soccer fields, and beaches. If the charge of racism (without which people like Moore would be rendered virtually speechless) is directed specifically against Israel’s Law of Return, here are a few relevant aids to reflection and comparison.

The Armenian constitution seeks “the protection of Armenian historical and cultural values located in other countries” and permits individuals “of Armenian origin” to acquire citizenship through “a simplified procedure.” The Lithuanian constitution proclaims: “Everyone who is ethnically Lithuanian has the right to settle in Lithuania.” The Polish constitution stipulates: “Anyone whose Polish origin has been confirmed in accordance with statute may settle permanently in Poland.” And the Ukrainian constitution promotes “the consolidation and development of the Ukrainian nation” and provides for “the satisfaction of national and cultural and linguistic needs of Ukrainians
residing beyond the borders of the State.”

If the ire of Moore is aroused by Israel’s being a Jewish state, why does he not direct it also against Britain, a Christian state, with an official Protestant church, a Protestant monarch, a Protestant state education system? Other Christian states with numerous non-Christian citizens are Denmark,
Finland, Greece, and Norway. And let us not speak of all the states whose names begin with “Islamic Republic of…” or “United Arab…”

If the blackening of Israel’s name by the Ignatievs and Moores were merely another instance of what Hazlitt called “the ignorance of the learned,” we could dismiss it with a sigh of disgust. Unfortunately, in the present climate of opinion, such defamations are something worse, and their authors are
potential accessories to murder. In the aftermath of the Mumbai barbarities, the Indian police have conjectured that probably none of the killers had ever seen a Jew or an Israeli before they took pains to find them (in a city of almost twenty million souls), torture them, and murder them. But they may well have heard or read declarations, even in encyclopedias, that Jews are racists and Israel the devil’s own experiment station.

Sincerely yours,
Edward Alexander
Professor emeritus, University of Washington

Paul Bogdanor, writer

Letter on the “Encyclopedia of Race and Racism”

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