ESSAY
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Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled: Questioning Antisemitism (Part 2)
Antisemitism's eternal image: the yellow star. Photo: Daniel Ullrich
THE FIRST PART OF this essay ended with a distinction between the Israeli and Diaspora Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives. The writings of Akiva Orr and Uri Davis may be read as representative of the former perspective, and the writings of Jacqueline Rose as representative of the latter perspective. There are, of course, others who could have been chosen, both Israeli and Diaspora Jews.
The Inadmissibility of Israel
Akiva Orr argues that to be Jewish is to be religious; there is no such thing as a secular Jewish identity. Only those who keep the mitzvoth, or "commandments", remain "indisputably Jews;" the tenets of Judaism cannot be secularized. Zionism, which is predicated on such a project of secularization, has failed. The secular Jewish State has been unable to provide its Jewish citizens with a new, secular Jewish identity. The failure was inevitable: "Zionism" is no more than a heresy of Judaism and the ethnocentrism of Jewish Israelis. The "dominant criterion of personal and political behaviour" should instead be the "wellbeing" of "humanity as a whole and not one's self, nation, or God." The anthropocentric should take the place of the theocentric, the ethnocentric and the egocentric (1).
Akiva Orr argues that to be Jewish is to be religious; there is no such thing as a secular Jewish identity
Orr's fellow Israeli, Uri Davis, has adopted a somewhat more legalistic stance in his writings. He has three objections to Israel. First, political Zionists founded it, and political Zionism is an objectionable political ideology. Second, the circumstances of its founding caused great hardship to Palestinians. Third, its character as a "Jewish State" puts its non-Jewish citizens at a substantial juridical disadvantage .
Each of Davis's objections is to what he regards as an aspect of racism. Zionist ideology is racist; Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians in 1948 was racist; Israel's laws, especially as reflected in its treatment of the Arab citizens of Israel and its status as an occupier of Palestinian territories, are racist. It is this last aspect that for Davis justifies the term "apartheid." Apartheid is racism regulated in law, he says. In consequence, Israel does not deserve to exist; it should be "dismantled" and replaced by a "confederal, federal or unitary state for all of its citizens and Palestinian refugees," that is, a "democratic Palestine."
Davis describes political Zionism as an "abomination" and a "crime(2)." He is also a committed practitioner of the incriminating quotation (3). He engages in relentless, quarrelsome score settling with other Jewish oppositionists (4). And he works hard to keep at bay those acknowledgments of complexity and nuance that from time to time surface in his work; at some level, he may intuit that his harsh, unnuanced condemnations lack sophistication, balance, and even justice.
The British author Jacqueline Rose has written three books with an anti-Zionist perspective: States of Fantasy (1996), The Question of Zion (2005), dedicated to the memory of Edward Said, and The Last Resistance (2007). She seeks, she says, to "revive the story of internal Jewish dissent (5)." In the 1996 book, in which she describes herself as "a Jewish woman," and as a "Jewish critic who wishes to address Israel as an outsider," she writes that Israel "desires its potential citizens - exiled, diaspora Jewry - to come home, with as much fervour as it banishes the former occupants of its land from their own dream of statehood (6)."
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