ESSAY
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Conspiracies and Colonialism
Back in February 1984, A.Q. Khan, the self-styled father of Pakistan's nuclear program, made a phone call to the editor of a major Pakistani newspaper. Khan had a simple message to convey. "The Islamic bomb," he told the editor, "is a figment of the Zionist mind."
Of course, the Islamic bomb turned out to be all too real. Khan himself was eventually exposed as the key node in a secret network which facilitated the development of nuclear weapons among rogue tyrannies like Libya, Iran and North Korea. As someone embedded in the clandestine trade of weapons of mass destruction, he could hardly be expected to be anything other than deceitful. But what is striking, for our purposes, is the phrase Khan deployed to communicate his lie.
To talk of a ‘Zionist mind' is to merge conspiracy theory with psychobabble. The ‘Zionist mind' fabricates an Islamic bomb because ‘Zionists' invent enemies where none exist. And they do so because ‘Zionists' are bent on global domination, rarely by fair means, almost always by foul ones.
Khan's phrase provides a window onto a universe where language and meaning bear no relation to context and reality. A formulation like the ‘Zionist mind' emanates from the same antisemitic tradition as the notorious Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which details a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. That the allegations contained within The Protocols and similar works are demonstrably false - indeed, utterly ridiculous by the standards of any rational enquiry - is besides the point. What matters is the extraordinary appeal and remarkable persistence of a worldview which places a small minority - call them Jews, or rename them ‘Zionists' - at the center of a global plot. The ‘Zionist mind' is just one of several ways to express an abiding theme of modern antisemitism: that of ‘Jewish power' lurking in the shadows, a force so strong that it overpowers everything else.
There is, though, an important historical evolution to account for here. When The Protocols first appeared during the early twentieth century, there was a vast distance between Jews as a people on the one hand and what could reasonably be termed power on the other. In an era of declining empires and brutal wars, and in an environment where the demand for national self-determination was the driving force of politics, the Jewish people were essentially stateless, powerless and, in many of the places where they lived, actively persecuted.
But by the time A.Q. Khan spoke of the ‘Zionist mind', that was no longer the case. With the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jewish state took its place within an international system based upon sovereign states. On the domestic front, Israel, a democracy from the outset, shared the features of other states, among them a parliament, a government and an army. Internationally, Israel's legitimacy was enshrined in its membership of the United Nations - even if, as a result of the refusal of states in the Arab and Islamic world to recognize it, it wasn't quite equal to the other states in the world.
The overriding point, though, is this: Israel presented the Jewish people with an opportunity to become empowered in the form of an independent state. An opportunity, in other words, to be like everybody else. Leo Pinsker, one of the early Zionist thinkers, put it thus: "(G)ive us but a little strip of land like that of the Serbians and Romanians..." Looked at from this perspective, Zionism, the movement to build a Jewish state, was a thoroughly modern solution to the centuries of persecution which reached its nadir with the Holocaust.
At the same time, the arrival of a Jewish state did not herald the end of suspicion and hatred towards the Jews: history is rarely so simple. For antisemites, the new age of Jewish empowerment provided, for the first time, a tangible symbol of the timeless, nefarious connection between Jews and power. Until this point, the conspiracy theorists determined that Jews had exercised their power from the shadows, lurking in merchant banks or agitating through revolutionary parties. With the advent of the State of Israel, there was now a visible center of Jewish power, and the conspiracy theorists detected its influence extending across the globe, and especially to the United States.
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