Letter to the Editor

The Editor
Holy Land Studies

Dear Editor,

Rumy Hasan argues (HLS, Vol.7, No.1, May 2007) that as Israel is based on the same ideology of separating peoples as Apartheid South Africa was, the struggle against Zionist oppression should follow in the footsteps of the anti-Apartheid movement. There is much to be said for such an approach. It puts Zionism itself in the dock, and takes us away from the chimera of a two-state solution. But is it sufficient?

The assumption behind Hasan’s argument is that Apartheid’s collapse was achieved by the anti-Apartheid movement. But it is questionable whether this was sufficient to bring about the dismantling of Apartheid inaugurated by F.W. de Klerk in his speech on 2^nd February 1990. On that day de Klerk said: ‘The year of 1989 will go down in history as the year in which Stalinist Communism expired. These developments will . . . be of decisive importance to Africa. Those who seek to force this failure of a system on South Africa should engage in a total revision of their point of view’. In other words, the end of the Cold War removed Soviet support for communist movements in southern Africa and thereby made a breakthrough possible, a point he reiterated in a radio interview on the British Radio 4 Today programme earlier this year.

Mass campaigns may well prepare the ground and exert pressure on politicians at a crucial moment, but there are usually other factors at work which make a transition sufficiently desirable to those with the power to oppose them. Who, then, has the power to oppose an anti-Zionist movement? Some say the imperialist West does, and that anti-Zionism must therefore form part of the wider anti-imperialist struggle. Others pin their hopes on a geo-political shift in favour of Chinese power. But John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have shown the inadequacy of arguing that Israel is the servant of imperialism. Indeed, they indicate that it is, at times, the tail that wags the dog.

The Palestine solidarity movement has succeeded in recent years in making ordinary people much more critical of Israel. It is therefore remarkable that this is not reflected in the public statements and actions of those with the power to put pressure on Israel. On the contrary, we have seen how senior politicians increasingly fall over each other to sign up to the Zionist agenda. The situation is little different in most parts of the media.

This may be because opposition to Israel earns those who express it the label of ‘antisemite’. And a climate has been created in which such an accusation is the stamp of death to a successful career. There was no equivalent to this ‘anti-missile shield’ in the white supremacist movement of South Africa.

But why is it so easy to use the accusation of antisemitism? Surely it is because most people find it hard to draw a clear line between ‘Jewish’ and ‘Zionist’. Akiva Orr (Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises, London: Pluto Press, 1994) suggests the reason for this. Zionism, he maintains, is not so much a response to the hatred of Jews as a rescue mission for Jewish identity at a time of assimilation, intermarriage and loss of religious faith. Hasan’s plea that we should ‘loosen and then break the seemingly impregnable grip of Zionism on Jews’ is, consequently, very problematical. It is also very necessary, and he could have added that non-Jews need to be similarly liberated.

Power rests ultimately on the ability of leaders to construct convincing narratives. If we want to undermine an oppressive power we need to take apart its narrative. But this particular narrative with its sub-narratives about the nature of Jewishness itself, will not easily yield. For as Michael Prior has pointed out (Michael Prior ed., Speaking the Truth about Zionism and Israel, London: Melisende, 2004, p.14), ‘The Zionist narrative . . . has, virtually, “canonical” . . . status . . . ’

Yours sincerely,
Dr Francis Clark-Lowes