I f antisemitism exists without anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism also clearly exists without antisemitism. Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. Neither is Avrum Burg. Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, in declared that settlement growth in the West Bank had rendered the two-state solution impossible. Israel must belong to all of its residents, including Arabs, not to the Jews alone. Other Jewish Israeli progressives, including the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy and the activists of the Federation Movement, have followed a similar path.
Can one question their proposals? Of course. Are they antisemites? Of course not. To be sure, some anti-Zionists really are antisemites: David Duke, Louis Farrakhan and the authors of the Hamas Covenant certainly qualify. People who care about the moral health of the American left will be fighting this prejudice for years to come. But while anti-Zionist antisemitism is likely to be on the rise, so is Zionist antisemitism.
And, in the US, at least, it is not clear that anti-Zionists are any more likely to harbour antisemitic attitudes than people who support the Jewish state.
Age is also a strong predictor of antisemitic propensities. Younger Americans — under 39 — are also remarkably free of prejudicial views. By contrast, Americans under 30, who according to the ADL harboured the least antisemitism, were least sympathetic to Israel. It was the same with education.
Americans who possessed a high school degree or less — the most antisemitic educational cohort — were the most pro-Israel.
As statistical evidence goes, this is hardly airtight. But it confirms what anyone who listens to progressive and conservative political commentary can grasp: younger progressives are highly universalistic. That universalism makes them suspicious of both Zionism and the white Christian nationalism that in the US sometimes shades into antisemitism.
If antisemitism and anti-Zionism are both conceptually different and, in practice, often espoused by different people, why are politicians such as Macron responding to rising antisemitism by calling anti-Zionism a form of bigotry?
I t is an understandable impulse: let the people threatened by antisemitism define antisemitism. The problem is that, in many countries, Jewish leaders serve both as defenders of local Jewish interests and defenders of the Israeli government. And the Israeli government wants to define anti-Zionism as bigotry because doing so helps Israel kill the two-state solution with impunity. For years, Barack Obama and John Kerry warned that if Israel continued the settlement growth in the West Bank that made a Palestinian state impossible, Palestinians would stop demanding a Palestinian state alongside Israel and instead demand one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, that replaces Israel.
Defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism reduces that threat. Almost every country has its own Jewish minority. Two countries have a large Jewish community: Israel and the United States both around 6 million people. But out of a population of more than million, the 6 million Jews in the United States are but a small minority.
The state of Israel was founded after the Second World War, in In the Middle East, in a place where Jews had lived for thousands of years with their Arab neighbours.
Because of their history and religion, Jews had felt a strong connection with this region for generations. Many European Jews who had survived the Holocaust, went to live in Israel after the war. Many Jews from Arab Muslim countries also fled or migrated to Israel. The United Nations supported the division of what was then still called Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab part.
And they supported the creation of the new state of Israel. Among the Arab population, however, there was a lot of resistance. Immediately after the creation of the State of Israel, five neighbouring Arab countries declared war on Israel. Israel won that war. As Abulof frames his case study of Judaism and Zionism into the above presented four models of religion and nationalism, he lacks to capture the settler colonialist nature of Zionism.
Moreover, a few years later in , the former Organization of African Unity now the African Union adopted a charter ratified by 35 member-states that reaffirms the duty of African states to eliminate colonialism, apartheid and Zionism Oxford Reference, s.
Today, the current state of research offers a new understanding of the essence of Zionism, which was achieved by the study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of settler colonial studies. In other words, as the often-cited Patrick Wolfe puts it, settler colonialism is a structure with no intended end, rather than an event Following this definition of settler colonialism, Israeli ongoing occupation of Palestine can be categorized as such.
Israel continues to bereave Arab-Palestinian citizens of not only the status of an indigenous national minority but also of equal civic status and rights Ibid. Two different perspectives lie at the basis of any analysis and interpretation of the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a religious approach and a political one.
The latter perspective perceives the conflict as a nationalist struggle, consisting mainly of security, sovereignty and self-determination. The old one focusses on the Six-Day-War of and the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as the beginning of the conflict, whereas the new approach focusses on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in as both a departure point and a subject that has to be addressed in order to achieve peace and reconciliation.
In addition to this, the old approach advocates a two-state-solution. In contrast to this, the new one seeks a one-state solution and prefers to focus on decolonization, change of regime and the return of the refugees as means of reconciliation Ibid.
In contrast to this, advocates of the religious approach base their argumentation on the fact that the region which is today Israel and Palestine is holy to the three monotheistic world religions Judaism, Islam and Christianity; focussing especially on Judaism and Islam, and see religious motives as the origins of the conflict, often without regarding the political history of Israel and Palestine.
Speaking for Judaism and Christianity, the fact that a significant part of Judaic ritual and teachings focusses specifically on the region which is nowadays Israel and Palestine forms the basic argument for this religious approach to the conflict. This is our charter. In addition to this, the employment of religious symbols by the Zionists themselves indicates a clear reference to ancient Israel of biblical times, regardless of the fact that Zionism emerged as a predominantly secular and political movement.
As will be shown in the analysis in a more detailed way, religion and religious efforts have also had a significant impact in the course of the conflict and have intensified it.
The injection of religion in the form of radical groups on the ground rejecting compromise and dialogue for religious reasons can be observed on both sides of the conflict.
When regarding the Palestinian side, the initial response of the Palestinians after the Arab defeat of and was secularist and political. His historical analysis shows that the expulsion did not happen on an ad hoc basis, but constituted a systematic ethnic cleansing 5 in accordance with several official plans, namely the Plan Dalet Plan D worked out by the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah in Mandatory Palestine in March The execution of the plan meant the destruction of villages and 11 urban centers as well as several massacres Ibid.
Since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the ongoing colonization of Palestine, the struggle of the Palestinians mainly concerns the status of the refugees and the right to return to their homes or compensation.
Yet, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the successful attacks by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon against Israel, the growth of Jewish extremism expressed by the rise of power of the Israeli right Likud party in , and especially the Iranian Revolution in and the corruption and inefficiency of the Palestinian Authority PA provoked the search for alternatives to secularism in Palestine Abusada Its military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, was founded in the midst of the first Palestinian Intifada against the Zionist occupation in order to.
Still, this religious discourse holds a nationalist position of Hamas, namely the political goals of stopping the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the establishment of a Palestinian state and a solution to the refugee problem.
The Hamas movement was set up in December as the political wing by the Muslim Brotherhood and represents Palestinian Political Islam 6. A detailed description of the ideological and political development of Hamas since its creation would go beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is important to notice its process of deradicalization during the Oslo period before the outbreak of the second Intifada in September , which meant the shift towards socio-political activities as a form of struggle against the occupier.
The building of an Islamic value system as well as the reestablishment of military and political power were required as a form of protection. Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians as it became an efficient part of the Palestinian social welfare system, providing services that the Palestinian Authority PA was unable to provide, as well as a vocal and institutionalized part of the Palestinian political landscape.
Yet, the outbreak of the second Intifada in reversed the process of deradicalization within the Islamic movement, which results from increasing brutality of the occupier against the Palestinian society and economy, even though the social core of the Islamic movement remains strong until today Ibid. Unlike Fatah or Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad PIJ is a Palestinian nationalist organization that does not participate in the political process and seeks to re-establish a sovereign Islamic Palestinian state with the geographic borders of the pre mandate Palestine; sanctifying the land due to its historical significance to Islam.
The highly secretive organization operates underground and receives limited popular support, as it opposes violently the existence of Israel, mostly by carrying out suicide bombings Fletcher In addition to this, according to general interpretations of the Quran, Muslims in general are required to not give up any land which was Muslim in the past and was part of dar-al Islam and to defend land, if necessary, by force against non-believers and enemies Khoury Religious motives also play a role in the conflict outside Israel in another respect: a factor that must not be underestimated is the support of Israel by the United States of America.
The central element in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the axis USA-Israel, is thus not only sustained by the interests in oil and the Jewish lobby in the USA, but also by evangelical convictions, which will be presented in the last chapter of the analysis.
The question whether Judaism is a religion, a culture, a nationality or a mixture of all three has been central in the development of Jewish thought since the 18th century. In order to address the above raised question, it is crucial to address the major underlying ancient questions concerning Jewish identity, as Judaism is connected to the Jews 7. It is not possible to refer to the meaning of Judaism without referring to the meaning of Jewish origins and the Jewish people, as the individual understanding of these questions shape world Jewry and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a great extent.
A holistic approach to the history of Judaism would go beyond the scope of this dissertation. Thus, the most relevant principal points will be briefly outlined, that are needed for the understanding of the analysis. Shakak distinguishes four major phases of history of Judaism: The first phase refers to the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah until the destruction of the first Temple BCE and the Babylonian exile.
The knowledge about Jews and Jewish society during this time is very slight and based on external non-Jewish sources Shakak 44f. As he could not find any literature supporting the forced exile of Jews from the region that is nowadays Israel as a result of the Bar Kokhba, he argues against popular opinion, that Jews were simply not exiled around 70 CE by the Romans. He explains the appearance of millions of Jews in the Mediterranean region and elsewhere with the mass conversions to Judaism among the Khazar in Central Asia and Berber tribes in the Maghreb; stating that Judaism was a very converting religion in the past.
0コメント