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| The "perfect" picture of the anti-Israeli protest (Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) |
The radical left and its allies in North America and Europe that identify themselves with the "Critical Social Justice" denounce Israel as the oppressor of the Palestinians. The most recent clashes between the Islamist movement Hamas (that controls the Gaza Strip territory) and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sparked mobilizations in several Western cities in protest against the Israeli army bombings.
The struggle of the Palestinians has become one of the central causes of the radical left and its Islamist fellow travellers who are more or less close to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran (I wrote here in Spanish about this postmodern fascination with Iranian Shiism). Events against "Zionist apartheid" are organized in North American universities. Student associations and professor unions propose motions to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli institutions, including its universities and scholars.
Professors and students from the radical left have adopted the perspective of anti-Zionist critics like Noam Chomsky (the star of Critical Social Justice), or Ilan Pappe and Shlomo Sand, two Israeli historians who have become activists of the Palestinian cause, or Norman Finkelstein, a researcher who denounced the so-called "Holocaust industry.”
Note that all of those I just mentioned are Jews (or “ex-Jews” like Sand), which supposedly would give their criticisms more legitimacy, especially for those who argue that Zionism and the State of Israel can be criticized without necessarily being anti-Jewish. According to this argument, neither Chomsky, Pappe, Sand or Finkelstein could be classified as anti-Semitic. By the way, the notion "anti-Semitic" refers to the European origin of the term, and its historical and recent use as an antagonism and rejection of the Jews.
Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, who have been critical of the traditional Zionist narrative about the 1948 war of independence that left the Palestinian refugee problem, opened up new perspectives on the origin and consequences of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Morris has questioned Pappe for his lack of historiographical rigour (that is, his inability or lack of interest in proving his claims based on period sources as required by historical science). In an article in The New Republic commenting three of Pappe's books, Morris states that “At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two."
In his article, Morris shows how Pappe's claims about the alleged purpose of "gassing" the Palestinians by the Zionist authorities (led by Ben-Gurion) are not supported by verifiable evidence, and there was never any moment in the conflict of 1948 in which the Israelis used gas against the Arabs (either Palestinians or from neighbouring countries that attacked the nascent Jewish state).
Pappe also makes claims that are in line with his political motivations but not supported by factual evidence. In his book about the Husaynis dynasty (which includes the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Al-Husseini, a collaborator of the Nazis in World War II), Pappe claims that the Zionist leaders said that they were going to build the Third Jewish Temple in the Temple Mount (where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are located). Morris assures that there is no document that contains that affirmation on the part of the Zionists. According to him, the reconstruction of the Temple in what is called in Arabic the Haram was never planned in the 20s or 30s of the 20th century, or during the war of independence of 1948.
The other problematic character is the linguist and polemicist Noam Chomsky. In the book The Lion’s Den. Zionism and the Left. From Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, Susie Linfield writes that “when it comes to Israel, Chomsky’s inaccuracies are so numerous and ideologically consistent that one wonders whether to consider them errors in the traditional sense of the word…Chomsky views himself as an objective disseminator of facts, but some of his facts are not facts…” (p. 286).
Although Chomsky prefers to ignore the facts when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it seems that the facts are far less important to him when it comes to the history of the Holocaust. Chomsky signed a preface that was published in the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson's book, in which the linguist stated that “the defense of the right of free expression is not restricted to ideas one approves of, and that it is precisely in the case of ideas found most offensive that these rights must be most vigorously defended.” Chomsky does not support Faurisson's thesis that the Shoah is a "myth" that never happened, but he does support the right of the denier of Holocaust to present his views even if they do not correspond at all with the truth or facts.
The historian Shlomo Sand, author of the books The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel, has taken his anti-Zionist activism to the realm of defining his own identity. Sand announced a few years ago that he no longer considered himself Jewish, which, according to him, is consistent with his political vision of Israel that it would be, as a Jewish state, one of the “as one of the most racist societies in the western world.” The historian sees himself as an Israeli citizen, the reality created by political Zionism, but rejects any connection with his Jewish past that is, according to him, the cause of the discriminating ethnocentrism that would prevail in his country.
Norman Finkelstein's case has some special elements. In addition to being an anti-Zionist activist, the former professor (he did not get tenure at DePaul University, in a controversial case) is the son of Holocaust survivors who hold unorthodox positions about the Shoah. In his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, he argued that the Holocaust has become an industry exploited by people like the late writer Elie Wiesel (Nobel Peace Prize) and others, who for ideological purposes to justify actions of the State of Israel against the Palestinians. Finkelstein wrote in an article that David Irving, another Holocaust denier like Faurisson, "has also made indispensable contributions towards explaining Nazism." (sic)
After having reviewed some of the ideas of these academic luminaries of the pro-Palestinian movement, we can see that we are facing characters who have complex relationships with respect to their own identities. Although they pretend to deny that their personal conflicts regarding their Judaism, Zionism and Israel do not influence their supposed search for the “truth” in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, their Jewish origins have turned them into figures with a claimed moral authority that others would not have to criticize the policies of Israel, and even the very idea of the existence of a Jewish state.
Radicalism is gaining ground
We are living in a time when perceptions are changing. The radical left advances in its purpose of introducing identity politics, its ideology of the "cancel culture" and its "victimizing" vision of history in the universities and other institutions of the West, including governments and corporations. What is known as Wokeism is militantly anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian. In the United States there are those who want to draw parallels between Black Lives Matter and the struggle of the Palestinians. In the Democratic Party dissident voices express their criticism of Israeli policy, support the Palestinian cause, and want to block the sale of weapons to Israel.
An opinion climate is crystallizing in several countries in which Palestine-Israel has become the focus of national demands (the Palestinian one), of defence of human rights (of the Palestinians and those who support their cause), and of questions against Israel as the regional power that would have imposed itself by blood and fire.
While the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and his political partners on the Israeli right deserve to be criticized, as indeed is the case in Israel, it is no less true that there are facts that the radical left omits or prefers to forget. For example, anti-Zionists forget that Hamas postulates the disappearance of the Jewish state (the “Zionist entity” according to them), and an Arab-Muslim sovereignty over what they consider the entire territory of Palestine (“from the river to the sea,” as their slogan says). Or they prefer to omit that the 1948 conflict also generated a problem of Jewish refugees from Arab countries who suffered intimidation and persecution that led them to leave Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Tunisia, where they had lived for hundreds of years (the number of these Jewish refugees is estimated at about 800,000). And to the extent that the foundations of the Oslo accords (1993) initiated by Rabin and Arafat are crumbling, the idea of a two-state solution is fading out, giving rise to the proposal of one state that would have a Muslim Palestinian majority in which Jews would be a “tolerated” minority (in the best style of Jewish status in Muslim countries in the past).
An old hatred that lives on
The Palestinian cause is a glue and mobilizing factor for the radical left and its fellow Islamists. Israel's close relationship with its main ally, the United States, is probably one explanation for their special interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (they are less vocal when it comes to other conflicts affecting Muslims in China, Myanmar or Siria). The very long history of Western and Arab-Muslim anti-Judaism must also be considered. Centuries of propaganda and indoctrination leave their marks on the consciences of people and societies, and even more so when the Jew represented by the image that Israel projects, is no longer that of the eternal victim of pogroms, extermination, expulsions and bonfires. The "good" Jew was the one killed or persecuted. The Jew who has an army to defend himself/herself is no longer so "nice."
In his pamphlet The Jewish State, the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote in 1896: “Modern Anti-Semitism is not to be confounded with the religious persecution of the Jews of former times. It does occasionally take a religious bias in some countries, but the main current of the aggressive movement has now changed. In the principal countries where Anti-Semitism prevails, it does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews.” Herzl, a journalist who covered in Paris the trial against Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1894), falsely accused of spying for the Germans, had in mind the affair of this assimilated (“emancipated”) French Jewish military man who became the expiatory goat of French anti-Semites. A more contemporary reading of this assertion by Herzl could be that to the extent that Jews became emancipated by achieving national sovereignty beginning in 1948 (the founding year of the State of Israel), anti-Semitism acquires a new impetus. This does not excuse human rights violations or discrimination against Israeli Arabs, nor the negative consequences of the occupation of the West Bank, as explained by the Israeli professor and diplomat Shlomo Ben-Amí. However, there has been an increase in attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions in the world in recent years. The old anti-Jewish hatred lives on. This time the Palestinian cause is the new alibi.
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