Zionism

INTRODUCTION

While still a word that is not quite yet officially banned, Zionism—and its fellow travelers of the forbidden and profane—emits the kind of scorn that has turned self-proclaimed Zionists into an endangered species. Despite its origins as a movement to fulfill the national aspirations of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, Zionism is roundly treated, instead, as an anomalous expression of national pride, a passing strange entitlement to self-determination, a colonialist enterprise that owes its sham existence to the Western world's post-Holocaust shame.

An ideology that should have galvanized the human rights community as a redemptive act of national revival, instead became both a synonym and stigma for a host of global ills, all directed against a tiny nation incongruously accused of being a land-grabber. Israel has always had to punch above its weight while simultaneously being pummeled with slanders against its nationhood.

Indeed, Zionism is the one nationalism that dare not speak its name. Aspersions accumulate faster than the national debt. A few examples:

• • Zionism is racism.

• • Zionism is apartheid.

• • Zionism is responsible for the ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people.

• • Zionism is the worst scourge on human rights in our planet's history—even the Huns and Nazis would have had something to learn from the insidious example set by Israel's occupation of Arab lands. Jews as invaders; Israelis as rapacious conquerors.

The vilification is bountiful and unabated. Zionism is a guaranteed conversation killer at any fashionable party. And it is a convenient cover for the reincarnation of old-school anti-Semitism suddenly masquerading as a human rights issue on behalf of Palestinians.

Even those who are agnostic about Zionism know that it is simply safer and wiser to disavow any special feeling for a Jewish state of any kind—anywhere. It is better to keep one's head down and recite the cynical platitudes and anti-Israel slogans, the ostensible tickets to entry into certain segments of respectable, intellectual life. Faculty lounges and intellectual magazines are particularly hostile to any favorable association with the Jewish state. Navigating the political sands of the Middle East as a card-carrying Zionist is career suicide. It can transform the mood of polite company faster than any ordinary faux pas. Any sympathetic word about Israel's existential dilemma is heresy. In such scripted settings, academic freedom is unrelievedly stifling—a mere mirage that is uselessly academic—when it comes to any sensible, honest, and fair conversation about Israel.¹

And, yet, this singling out for special approbation, this moral hypocrisy and magnified hysteria, is absurd. And every fair-minded, consciencedriven decent person knows it.

Any sincere discussion about Israel must begin with the recognition that it is a liberal, pluralistic, representative democracy operating within a region that otherwise features only oppressive, authoritarian, and theocratic regimes. It is a nation that celebrates and allows for freedom of thought. Arab-Israeli parties hold seats in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, and routinely engage in political debate and unleash oppositional invective that would constitute treason in most democratic societies. Freedom of the press in Israel is crowded with dissenting opinion so fierce, arguably no other democracy would allow anything approaching some of the seditious rantings found in Ha'aretz. Israel has an independent judiciary that preserves the rule of law and consistently challenges the authority of the ruling government in power. Several Arab-Israelis have served as Supreme Court justices. It is without dispute that Israel is a pluralistic society that respects equal rights for minorities and promotes gender and sexual equality for all. In its short history as a nation, two women have already served as prime minister. In 2013, an Ethiopian Israeli was crowned as Miss Israel. Arab-Israelis represent 20% of the population; Ethiopian Jews account for nearly two percent. Druze and Bedouins are included in the overall census.

And, of course, the degree of religious liberty that is practiced in Israel is unsurpassed by any other nation in the Middle East, or any other region of the world, for that matter. Christians and Ba'hai are persecuted in Arab nations, but thrive...