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by M.
Shahid Alam
It is tempting to
celebrate the creation of Israel
as a great triumph, perhaps the greatest in Jewish history. Indeed, the history
of Israel
has often been read as the heroic saga of a people marked for extinction, who
emerged from Nazi death camps – from Auschwitz,
Belzec and Treblinka – to establish their own state in 1948, a Jewish haven and
a democracy that has prospered even as it has defended itself valiantly against
unceasing Arab threats and aggression. Without taking away anything from the
sufferings of European Jews, I will insist that this way of thinking about Israel – apart
from its mythologizing – has merit only as a partisan narrative. It seeks to
insulate Israel
against the charge of a devastating colonization by falsifying history, by
camouflaging the imperialist dynamics that brought it into existence, and
denying the perilous future with which it now confronts the Jews, the West and
the Islamic world.
When
we examine the consequences that have flowed from the creation of Israel, when we
contemplate the greater horrors that may yet flow from the logic of Zionism, Israel
triumphs appear in a different light. We are forced to examine these triumphs
with growing dread and incredulity. Israel’s early triumphs, though real from a
narrow Zionist standpoint, have slowly mutated by a fateful process into
ever-widening circles of conflict that now threaten to escalate into major wars
between the West and Islam. Although this conflict has its source in colonial
ambitions, the dialectics of this conflict have slowly endowed it with the
force and rhetoric of a civilizational war: and perhaps worse, a religious war.
This is the tragedy of Israel.
It is not a fortuitous tragedy. Driven by history, chance and cunning, the
Zionists wedged themselves between two historical adversaries, the West and
Islam, and by harnessing the strength of the first against the second, it has
produced the conditions of a conflict that has grown deeper over time.
Zionist
historiography describes the emergence of Israel as a triumph over Europe’s centuries-old anti-Semitism, in particular over
its twentieth-century manifestation, the demonic, industrial plan of the Nazis
to stamp out the existence of the Jewish people. But this is a tendentious reading
of Zionist history: it obscures the historic offer Zionism made to the West –
the offer to rid the West of its Jews, to lead them out of Christendom into
Islamic Palestine. In offering to ‘cleanse’ the West of the ‘hated Jews,’ the
Zionists were working with the anti-Semites, not against them.
Theodore Herzl,
the founding father of Zionism, had a clear understanding of this
complementarity between Zionism and anti-Semitism; and he was convinced
that Zionism
would prevail only if anti-Semitic Europe could
be persuaded to work for its success. It is true that Jews and
anti-Semites
have been historical adversaries, that Jews have been the victims of
Europe’s religious vendetta since Rome first embraced Christianity.
However,
Zionism would enter into a new relationship with anti-Semitism that
would work
to the advantage of Jews. The insertion of the Zionist idea in the
Western
discourse would work a profound change in the relationship between
Western Jews
and Gentiles. In order to succeed, the Zionists would have to create a
new
adversary, common to the West and the Jews. In choosing to locate their
colonial-settler
state in Palestine
– and not in Uganda
or Argentina
– the Zionists had also chosen an adversary that would deepen their
partnership
with the West. The Islamic world was a great deal more likely to
energize the
West’s imperialist ambitions and evangelical zeal than Africa
or Latin America.
Israel was the product of
a partnership that seems unlikely at first blush, between Western Jews and the
Western world. It is the powerful alchemy of the Zionist idea that created this
partnership. The Zionist project to create a Jewish state in Palestine possessed the unique power to
convert two historical antagonists, Jews and Gentiles, into allies united in a
common imperialist enterprise against the Islamic world. The Zionists harnessed
the negative energies of the Western world – its imperialism, its
anti-Semitism, its Crusading nostalgia, its anti-Islamic bigotry, and its deep
racism – and focused them on a new imperialist project, the creation of a
Western surrogate state in the Islamic heartland.
To the West’s imperialist
ambitions, this new colonial project offered a variety of strategic advantages.
Israel
would be located in the heart of the Islamic world; it would sit astride the
junction of Asia, Africa
and Europe; it would guard Europe’s
gateway to the Indian Ocean; and it could
monitor developments in the Persian Gulf with
its vast reserves of oil. For the West as well as Europe’s
Jews, this was a creative moment: indeed, it was a historical opportunity. For
European Jews, it was a stroke of brilliance. Zionism was going to leverage
Western power in their cause. As the Zionist plan would unfold, inflicting pain
on the Islamic world, evoking Islamic anger against the West and Jews, the
complementarities between the two would deepen. In time, new complementarities
would be discovered – or created – between the two antagonist strains of
Western history. In the United
States, the Zionist movement would give encouragement
to evangelical Protestants – who looked upon the birth of Israel as the
fulfillment of end-time prophecies – and convert them into fanatic partisans of
Zionism. In addition, Western civilization, which had hitherto traced its
central ideas and institutions to Rome
and Athens,
would be repackaged as a Judeo-Christian civilization. This reframing not only
underscores the Jewish roots of the Western world, it also makes a point of
emphasizing that Islam is the outsider, the adversary.
Zionism
owes its success solely to this unlikely partnership. On their own, the
Zionists
could not have gone anywhere. They could not have created Israel by
bribing or coercing the Ottomans into granting them a charter to
colonize Palestine. Despite his
offers of loans, investments, technology and diplomatic expertise,
Theodore
Herzl was repeatedly rebuffed by the Ottoman Sultan. It is even less
likely
that the Zionists could at any time have mobilized a Jewish army in
Europe to invade and occupy Palestine, against Ottoman and Arab
opposition
to the creation of a Jewish state on Islamic lands. The Zionist
partnership
with the West was indispensable for the creation of a Jewish state.
This partnership
was also fateful. It produced a powerful new dialectic, which has
encouraged Israel, both as
the political center of the Jewish Diaspora and the chief outpost of
the West
in the heart of the Islamic world, to become more daring in its designs
against
the Islamic world and beyond. In turn, a wounded and humiliated Islamic
world,
more resentful and determined after every defeat, has been driven to
embrace
increasingly radical ideas and methods to recover its dignity and power
– and
to attain this recovery on the strength of Islamic ideas. This
destabilizing
dialectic has now brought the West itself into a direct confrontation
against
the Islamic world. We are now staring
into the precipice. Yet do we possess the will to pull back from it?
M. Shahid Alam is professor of
economics at a university in Boston, and author of Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on America’s ‘War
Against Islam’ (IPI Publications: 2006). He may be reached at
alqalam02760@yahoo.com. © M. Shahid Alam
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