Israelis watch Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu address the US Congress in downtown Tel Aviv, Israel, March, 2015. Oded Balilty/Press Association. All rights reserved. There is much in Jonathan Rosenhead’s reply to my article (The Contestation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism; openDemocracy, 27 July 2016) with which I agree, albeit he accuses me of wrestling with a straw person. Given that Rosenhead appears, wilfully or not, to misunderstand the main purport of my argument, I am inclined to throw the ‘straw person’ metaphor back at him.
I do not argue that, to quote him, ‘criticism of Zionism as a whole should be off limits’. Far from it; I do not regard myself as a Zionist and am highly critical of Zionism; I thought I had made that clear. However, what I posed was the issue of the right of the state of Israel to exist; an issue which is ducked by those who fail to distinguish between civil society and the state. The logic of the failure to make such a distinction would be, for example, to blame the British and US populations for the war in Iraq rather than the governments of those two countries. My point in looking at the various iterations of Zionism historically was to explain that it is not a monolithic entity and that this helps to explain why it is that many inside and outside Israel who call themselves Zionists are opposed to the expansionist policies of the current and previous Israeli governments.
Regardless of one’s views on the ‘correct’ definition of Zionism or the origins and subsequent history of the Israeli state, the question of Israel’s continued existence cannot be wished away by sloganizing nor by presuming that its Jewish inhabitants will dematerialise or meet a worse Hamas-style fate. The important matter is to agree and fight for a different kind of Israeli state; one which is non-expansionist and which guarantees the rights of Palestinians both within Israel and outside it in a state of their own. Rosenhead quotes (at length) Gideon Levy’s Ha’aretz article in which he bemoans the absence of a radical left in Israel as though this is revealed truth rather than merely a matter of opinion. Some would say the same about the state of the left in the UK, the USA and many EU countries – they are wrong, although that doesn’t mean that those of us who are active in our unions or on the left can pretend that all is well.
