An Israel of Pride and Shame
“Why can’t they — The Americans — give them Alaska or even Hawaii if they love Israel so much? Why do they have to force them down the throats of Palestinians? Look at the hypocrisy of the International Community? They have dumped out religion from their lives, specially in politics. Yet they want to support Zionism on purely religious grounds. What more, religious views of nineteen million people against that of one point six billion. By modern criteria of ownership of land, the Jews have no claim on Palestine. At the end of nineteenth century when the claim for Zionism was officially and publicly declared, the Jews made up only two percent of the population of Palestine. Mass and organized immigration followed. Thirty years later their ratio jumped up to thirty percent when Britain enforced a ban (mostly un-successful) on Jewish immigration.” Such were my thoughts and sentiments as a young and hot-blooded man, full of passion for the “ummah”. A lot of water has flown since; plenty of pain and anguish and humiliation. I cannot decide now what to believe and how to judge. It is easy and alluring to join the chorus of abusing and vilifying the Jews and their guardian and protector the United States of America; unfortunately that is not my style. My deen has no room for pure feelings of hate an animosity against a person or people. With this frame of mind I came across an article "An Israel of Pride and Shame" by Roger Cohen in Dec. 29, 2017 issue of the New York Times. I found it interesting and educational. T is a short and mostly objective revision of the history of this movement. It brings out the inherent hypocrisy, double standards and injustice within the theory of Zionism. Jews were persecuted and driven out. Now they are in the driving seat; they are persecuting and driving out others. I would like to share some of the important facts referred to in this article.
The article starts with a frank admission of the impracticality and inconsistency of the theory of Zionism:
“In 1919, David Ben-Gurion, who 29 years later would become the founding prime minister of Israel, dismissed the possibility of peace.
Speaking at a public discussion, he said: “Everyone sees the difficulty of relations between Jews and Arabs but not everyone sees that there is no solution to that question. There is no solution. There is an abyss and nothing can fill that abyss ... We want Palestine to be ours as a nation. The Arabs want it to be theirs, as a nation.”
An important piece of History is narrated:
“Tom Segev, a prominent Israeli historian who has just completed a biography of Ben-Gurion, told me Israel’s founding father was not much interested in Jerusalem when he first went to Ottoman Palestine in 1906. He was not drawn to “David’s capital,” preferring to stay with the Jewish pioneers in Petah Tikva and elsewhere.”
“Jerusalem had too many Orthodox Jews, who were anti-Zionist, and too many Arabs,” Segev said. Ben-Gurion was interested in forging a new Jew: the scrawny scholars of the European shtetl poring over sacred texts would become vigorous tillers of the soil. “Tel Aviv was the capital of Zionism; Jerusalem of Judaism,” Segev suggested.
To brush up our memories, the article goes on:
“The Zionist movement accepted United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947, calling for the establishment of two states — one Jewish, one Arab — in Mandate Palestine. It accepted a split that excluded Jerusalem from the nascent Jewish state, with the city as a separate entity to be administered by the United Nations.”
“Arabs, however, rejected Resolution 181, went to war, lost, and under the Armistice Israel took control of West Jerusalem, which became its capital. War erupted again in 1967, Arabs lost again, Israel captured East Jerusalem and declared the whole city reunited as its capital. Settlement of the occupied West Bank began.”
As Muslims we can understand if not appreciate the sentiment of the Jews when it is stated that “Such a victory could only be God-given. As Segev put it, “That’s when the euphoria starts, lasting until today. Strong nationalism and strong religion begin to coalesce. It was somewhere inside our collective soul.”
The author then objectively and gracefully admits that “By the mid-1970s, Israel stood at the fulcrum of its shift from brave upstart to colonialist power. The messianic push to settle the West Bank (and so the biblical Land of Israel) would shift religious Zionism from a marginal phenomenon to the heart of Israel’s politics. The nation’s culture began its steady journey from a communal to an individualist culture.”
Israel has its share of extremists: “Yitzhak Rabin, the secular general who concluded that only territorial compromise with the Palestinians would bring peace, was killed in 1995, not by a Palestinian but by an Israeli religious zealot. Since then Israel has moved steadily right.”
Then comes a justification for zionism “The Jews needed a homeland. History proves that. Assimilation never worked; the Holocaust was no more than a culmination. The United Nations, in 1947, backed such a homeland. And if I, as a Jew, have lived a privileged life in the diaspora, it is in part because of the pride and strength that the new Jew of Israel forged. “Never Again” became more than mere words through Israel’s might.”
The author ends by a frank and high minded self reproach “But the Israel hoped for by Ben-Gurion has lost itself, corrupted by overreach. “The situation is very bad in the occupied territories,” Segev said. “There’s a systematic violation of Palestinians’ human rights. Our government is more and more right wing, racist, anti-Arab. If they were members of a government in Austria, we’d recall our ambassador in protest.”
This is the government cheered on by President Trump and an American ambassador, David Friedman, who sounds like the West Bank settlers’ envoy. This is the government leading Israel nowhere. This is my shame.”
