The Jewish state will be 60 in May. Cause for celebration or mourning? Depends on whether you are a Palestinian or a Jew, some would say – but it’s not as simple as that. Not every Jew regards the Jewish state as a triumph, and not every Palestinian views it as nakba, a catastrophe.
Two slogans have attempted to reduce complexities to digestible formulas since the Six Day War of 1967. The Left came up with the equation “Zionism=Racism.” It was certainly simple-minded enough for the United Nations to adopt it in the mid-70s until repudiating it again, half-heartedly, in the early 90s – then acting as though it hadn’t repudiated it. An opposing equation, developed in recent years by Prof. Judea Pearl, father of the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, essentially postulates: “Anti-Zionism=anti-Semitism=Racism.”
The first equation is as flawed as if it said: “Hot=Cold.” Zionism doesn’t equal racism. The second equation isn’t quite as flawed because anti-Semitism is undoubtedly a kind of racism, but anti-Zionism isn’t necessarily anti-Semitism. My own father, a Jew, was an anti-Zionist. I expect he would still be, were he alive today. But he certainly wouldn’t be an anti-Semite.
Not every anti-Zionist is an anti-Semite, but that’s no news; many are, and that’s no news either. Here’s something more interesting. The obverse, which used to be true, isn’t true any longer.
In the 21st century all anti-Semites are foes of the Jewish state. They would all dismantle Israel if they could. If there’s an anti-Semite left who isn’t an anti-Zionist, he or she is hiding in a closet. This hasn’t always been the case.
It may sound counter-intuitive, but there used to be anti-Semites, especially in Europe, who wanted to induce their Jewish neighbours to return to Zion. Some virtually became Zionist activists, in a manner of speaking. The anti-Semitic promoters of a Jewish homeland – a Jewish penal colony, really – weren’t particular about where “Zion” was built, just as long as it wasn’t in their neck of the woods. Let Jews build their “Jerusalem” anywhere except – to paraphrase the poet William Blake – “in England’s green and pleasant land.” Or America’s, or France’s, or, God forbid, Canada’s. Such “Zionists” would have been just as prepared to exile Jews to al-Arish in the Sinai desert, or to British East Africa (the “Uganda Project” of the 1900s), or to Madagascar – there were actual plans drawn up for all these lame-brained schemes at one point – as to have them return to the ancestral region of their own history in the Holy Land. Anti-Semites didn’t care, as long as the Jews were out of their hair. But even so, when they saw that only a return to the land of the Old Testament, Theodore Herzl’s original Zionist vision, stood an actual chance of being realized, many – all, really, except some Lawrence of Arabia-types in the British Foreign Office – continued promoting the idea of a Jewish state.
In other words, there were anti-Semitic “Zionists”. They wanted Jews to have a country of their own, not because they liked them but because they didn’t. Today these “Zionists” are gone. Show me an anti-Semite today, and I’ll show you an enemy not only of the Jews but of Israel.
For today’s anti-Semites Israel, the state; Israelis, the people; the Jews of the Diaspora; soldiers, shoppers, office workers, journalists, are all the same. The post-9/11 generation of anti-Semites, the people of the random bomb, aren’t there to distinguish but to extinguish. They no longer want to exclude or exile or excommunicate. They want to exterminate.
Some anti-Zionists, though, are no more anti-Semitic than my father was who used to debate endlessly the merits of a future Israel with my Zionist uncle in Nazi-occupied Budapest. My father wasn’t worried that a Jewish state in Palestine might be bad for Arabs; he never thought it would be. His concern was that it might be bad for the Jews.
“A lifeboat,” my uncle would say. “Think of me as Noah. Israel is the Ark.”
“What do I need a lifeboat for? It’s 1944. The waters are receding. I’m on dry land.”
“Until the next Flood.”
“Miraculously, the Gestapo misses shooting me by the Danube,” my father said. “Am I to rush to Palestine now, so some camel drivers can stone me by the Jordan?”
“Camel drivers,” my Zionist uncle replied, “don’t stone people who bring them irrigation and electricity. But the Gestapo will be back.”
“You don’t know camel drivers,” my father replied.
“And you don’t know Gestapos,” was my uncle’s comeback.
Now, 64 years later, the bad news is they were both right. What’s the good news? I can’t think of any.
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George Jonas is a Canadian journalist, who has also written novels, plays, and poetry. He is the author of Reflections on Islam: Ideas, Opinions, Arguments and “Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team”