Tracing the rise of the new anti-Zionism. The wars (and the government) that serve Israel’s interests

Not all anti-Zionists are anti-Semites, but all anti-Semites are anti-Zionists. Today, three years on from the last pogrom – that of 7 October – and following three years of war against nihilistic terrorism and the popular, militant backdrop that gave rise to that pogrom, Zionism is characterised within pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli mass movements and within the vast bureaucratic subculture that is also strong in Western institutional circles, not to mention Iran and the international jihadist network, as racism, colonialism, oppression, crime, extremist nationalism, the source of genocidal practices and ideology, and an apartheid regime. The British Greens have merely codified this trend by a majority vote – this new ‘single thought’, this hyper-correctness that abolishes old, rusty discriminatory criteria such as the Holocaust and its ‘never again’. When Zionism emerged and became firmly established – even in the wake of the extermination of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis and fascists – it represented self-determination, liberation, exodus, the protection of a minority that had been discriminated against and oppressed for thousands of years, humanitarian refuge, socialism, democracy, and the aspiration for peace whilst safeguarding security. In the current mindset, following 7 October and the war in Gaza, Zionism is a dystopia, a negative utopia, a complete reversal of its ethical and historical meaning compared to its origins.

How this could have happened, and so quickly, will be a subject of study for generations to come. But it has happened. Anti-Zionist rejection strikes at the very root of the project to build a refuge for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who felt insecure in the European diaspora. Obviously, Zionism is not simply a philosophy of peace, roses and flowers, illusion and a proposal for coexistence; it also involves the taking of possession of a land inhabited by Arab-Islamic communities, and is intertwined with the violent drama of decolonisation and with the responsibilities of the West, of which Zionist Jews have been a part as a vanguard of genius and culture; in short, it is the founding of a state and the resurrection of a nation, a biblical language and an ancestral yet thoroughly modern identity – all factors which, together with a messianic and spiritual impetus so powerful as to be terrifying, have exacted a terrible toll on the inhabitants of the former British Mandate of Palestine. (continued on page four)

Hence the tragedy of communities that were neither able nor willing – nor were they pushed in this direction by neighbouring Arab states – to confront the international decision to create two states and two peoples out of a British colony, with a proposal for peaceful and secure political coexistence as in the original plan, which was precariously revived in Oslo and ultimately collapsed on 7 October. Often the outcome of a historical process – and nothing is more futile and pointless than making a moralistic scandal out of it – is sheer enmity, mutual hatred, fear and the desire for revenge for wrongs suffered. Now, however, it is in the interests of Israel and of humanity – that is, the small remnant of a dehumanising phase that remains within each of us, even as mere spectators – not to abandon the real war of flesh and blood – the one against terror, the nuclear threat and the conspiracy for the violent annihilation of the Jewish state ‘from the river to the sea’ – and to embark on a long war of truth, of historical and political clarification, of dialogue and reconciliation, in order to stem the tide of the new anti-Zionism and its murky anti-Semitic underpinning. A Netanyahu government of national unity—one of those surprises born of wise folly that are no strangers to the political history of the State of Israel—would be a possible solution for a precarious but necessary start to a moral rehabilitation of the conflict, without yielding an inch on the security conditions and justifications on the part of Israel—a democracy that exists—and of a sovereign, peaceful and democratic Palestine, which does not yet exist.

Giuliano Ferrara