In his penetrating new book Language of War, Language of Peace, the celebrated Palestinian lawyer and author, Raja Shehadeh anatomizes the many ways in which Zionism has sought to will the disappearance of the Palestinian people.
In Israeli legal jargon, Palestinians cast out of their homes by Israel in 1947 were systematically de-personalized. They became simply “absentees.” Those who remained within Israel were known as “present absentees,” or otherwise stigmatized as “internal infiltrators.”
Shehadeh portrays these linguistic sophistries as weapons in the psychological war that, in the name of world Jewry, Israel has waged against Palestinians since its inception. Central to that war, he argues, has been Israel’s projection of itself as a Jewish state that was the only possible response to the Nazi holocaust and that enjoys the active support of Jews everywhere. It is useless, Zionism has relentlessly insisted, for Palestinians to resist Israel’s mission of settling historic Palestine, so-called “greater Israel,” with Jews. They must accept that the occupied territories belong not to them but to Jews all over the world.
The pertinence of this to recent events needs little elaboration. Following the recent anti-Semitic murders in Paris and Copenhagen, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has urged Europe’s Jews to seek refuge in Israel. Fighting to be returned to power in Israel’s March general election, Netanyahu presents himself as a knight-errant rushing to the rescue of diaspora Jews in distress. Yet to Palestinians (and not just to Palestinians), his gesture is an all too blatant fresh sally in the long Zionist campaign to persuade them to abandon all claims to their ancestral land. It comes moreover at a time when that campaign is intensifying, with ever more Jewish settlement building in defiance of international law, and it has ensured that for the moment at least the issue of Palestine has vanished from the western news agenda.
That anti-Semitism is resurgent across Europe is undeniable. Nevertheless, the idea that European Jews worried about their safety have no rational alternative but to clasp Netanyahu’s outstretched hand is more than a little questionable. As it happens, many diaspora Jews strenuously object to the way in which not only Netanyahu but Israelis in general view their predicament, though you would hardly guess this from most media coverage.
Writing in the UK weekly newspaper the Jewish Chronicle, the columnist Miriam Shaviv voiced impatience with the Israeli belief that British Jews such as herself are facing a 21st century holocaust. She finds it ludicrous that Israelis who live in a country where terror attacks are routine think that a British Jew is safer in Israel than in Britain. Last summer an Israeli relative repeatedly phoned her from her bomb shelter “to make sure we were safe from the anti-Semites.” Shaviv points out that Israelis have little conception of the daily realities of life in the diaspora and that Israelis who live outside Israel are no better informed since they seldom mingle with local communities. Israel’s one-dimensional perception of the Jewish diaspora is, she feels, threatening the fabric of Israeli-diaspora relations.
The historian, David Cesarani, is another British Jew who has not welcomed Netanyahu’s overtures. Disposed to believe that diaspora Jews are at risk of losing all sense of proportion, Cesarani himself has no thought of fleeing to Israel. At the same time, he dislikes the implication that Jews alone are the targets of terrorism. Interviewed on BBC television, Cesarani spoke of the threat posed to all by terrorism and of the need for Jews to stand together with the rest of society in refusing to be cowed by it. His principled stance shames the cynicism of Israel’s prime minister, with his self-serving efforts to goad diaspora Jews into believing that Israel offers their only guarantee of safety.
These British Jews are hardly foes of Zionism like Raja Shehadeh. Yet their dissent regarding the panic rife among European Jewry highlights the extent to which Jews and Palestinians alike are targets of a coercive ideology that feeds on fear and promotes discord. It seems ever more astonishing that for many decades western progressive opinion lauded Zionism as a noble cause.
