Moshé Machover:
The Guardian has not published my letter, which I circulated on 29 November, replying to E Ottolenghi’s Zionist propaganda article printed on that date. However, it did publish a good reply by Mike Rosen, below. A further point I made in my brief letter (but which Mike does not make) is that by equating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, Zionist propagandists hope to de-legitimize the former, but in fact also help to legitimize the latter.
MM
Dear Editor,
Emanuele Ottolenghi’s claim (“Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism”, 29 November) that the Jews all over the world constitute a single nation is debatable. It is largely a matter of how you define “nation”.
But his claim that Zionism is merely an assertion of the right of that alleged nation to self-determination is disingenuous. Zionism is nothing if not a colonising project, claiming a God-given “right” to colonise the land inhabited by the Palestinian Arab people. This colonisation, started under an imperial British charter – the Balfour Declaration – is still proceeding apace.
Zionists such as Dr Ottolenghi seek to legitimize Zionism by equating opposition to it with anti-semitism. In this they actually help to legitimise anti-semitism, by falsely equating this abhorrent form of racism with the perfectly legitimate and amply justified political position of anti-Zionism.
(Professor) Moshé Machover
London
Michael Rosen
Trying it on over anti-semitism
Monday December 1, 2003
The Guardian
source
Emanuele Ottolenghi is trying it on (Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, November 29). He knows full well that it is false logic to argue that because some anti-Zionists are anti-semitic therefore anti-Zionism is anti-semitic. His other proposition, that all anti-Zionists must be anti-semitic simply because we deny the right of “the Jews” to have a nation is more complicated.
It’s Zionists, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who wanted “the Jews” to have a nation, not “the Jews”. That’s to say, it has never been the case that all Jews were, or are, Zionists. Ottolenghi is, quite rightly, hot on the tracks of anti-semitism. One problem with the Zionist project is that it has done some stereotyping of its own, claiming nationhood even for those of us who don’t want it. There is also something peculiar about the idea that millions of Jewish Zionists would rather not live in the nation that they keep telling us was founded for them.
The serious side of this is that the Zionist project demands of non-Israeli Jews to support the existence and policies of a state other than the one they live in. If this was simply a matter of holidays and football teams, it wouldn’t matter very much. But we’re talking here about a sequence of terrible events. “The Jewish Nation”, which Mr Ottolenghi mistakenly thinks belongs to an entity called “the Jews”, was founded on the naqba, the catastrophe of massacre and forcible removal of the Palestinians. The daily death toll today reminds us that the naqba hasn’t gone away simply because liberal Zionists repeatedly cite the right of self-determination.
Mr Ottolenghi pushes his luck even further when he accuses anti-Zionism of wishing “national suicide”. The anti-Zionists I know wish for solutions in the Middle East that encompass notions of secularism, multiculturalism and federalism. However, many Zionists do indeed call these ideas “suicide” and anti-semitism, because they demand something that very few nations demand in the world today: a nation state that must always rule in favour of one self-defined ethnic or religious or racial group. And that is precisely where that nice-sounding phrase “self-determination” turns into something else, isn’t it?
Michael Rosen
London
Tony Greenstein
Circulated by Roland Rance to “Jews Against Zionism” jaz@yahoogroups.com
and “Al-Awda-Unity” al-awda-unity@lists.riseup.net
Dear Sir or Madam:
As someone who is both Jewish and a founder of Palestine Solidarity Campaign, I find there is just one problem with Emanuele Ottolenghi’s argument (’Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, Guardian, 29th November). How does he account for the fact that traditionally, the most vociferous and ardent opponents of Zionism have themselves been Jewish?
When the founder of Political Zionism, Theodore Herzl, called the first Zionist Congress in 1897, it had to be moved at the last moment to Basle because of the opposition of Munich’s Jewish community. The only member of Lloyd George’s Cabinet to object to the Balfour Declaration was its sole Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu - on the grounds of anti-Semitism. The hero of the Zionism, Arthur Balfour, as Home Secretary introduced the Aliens Bill in 1906 with the specific purpose of preventing Jewish victims of the pogroms from coming to Britain.
The reasons for Jewish opposition to Zionism were best summed up by Isaac Deutscher. When the anti-Semites were shouting ‘Jews to Palestine’ it was the Zionists who agreed with them. Zionism represented the legitimation of anti-Semitism. In his Diaries (p. 6), Herzl had written that ‘In Paris. I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which now began to understand historically and to pardon. ‘
Mr Ottolenghi states that the negation of Zionism and denying that Jews constitutes a nation is in itself anti-Semitic. This is utter nonsense. It is the anti-Semites who deny that Jews are part of the nations amongst whom they live, that they are a separate nation unto themselves. Judaism is a religion and just like other religions, its adherents belong to a multitude of nations.
There is certainly nothing anti-Semitic in the comparison between the apartheid treatment of the Palestinians and the Nazi attitude towards the Jews but there is also an ideological affinity that goes further. Just as the Nazis and the founders of Apartheid were obsessed with definitions of race, so too the Israeli State has been embroiled since its inception with the question ‘Who is a Jew’.
Even today, if someone says that Jews do not belong in the country of their birth, they are either an anti-Semite or a Zionist. Labelling anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism is the defamatory argument of those who can no longer defend the indefensible.
Yours sincerely,
Tony Greenstein
