Posted by David Bernstein:
Avineri on "Post-Zionism":
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_07_08-2007_07_14.shtml#1183955159
Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri reminds us that
"post-Zionism" among Israeli leftist academics is, for the most part,
just anti-Zionism made more fashionable. The post-Zionists are
intellectual, and in many cases literal, heirs of the small but vocal
anti-Zionist far Left that managed to accompany the Zionist movement
to Israel. Even at the height of Stalin's persecution of Jews in the
early 1950s, there was an active pro-Stalinist Communist movement in
Israel. Avineri concludes with some extremely trenchant comments:
Some of those who call themselves "post-Zionists" also come from
the former Communist camp. There is something pathetic in that 20
years ago they believed in a new, just world that was to emerge
from Moscow or Cuba, and the only thing that is left to them of
that lofty vision today is anti-Zionism. Not the brotherhood of
nations, not the liberation of the proletariat, not universal
social justice - all of this has collapsed in a tragic way; the
only thing that remains is the hatred of Zionism.
The anti-Zionist position has accompanied Zionism from the very
outset, and it is a legitimate position even if one does not agree
with it; it led some of the Communists in the Land of Israel
(sorry, Palestine) to justify acts of murder of Jews in Hebron and
Jerusalem, committed by Palestinians in 1929, as the authentic
expression of a "popular uprising," even if its inspiration was
fanatical Islam.
There is nothing new in this moral blindness and these historical
distortions, but it is worth remembering: This is not a matter of
post-Zionists, but rather of anti-Zionists of the old school. The
absurdity is that anti-Zionists of a different breed, the people of
the ultra-Orthodox movement Agudat Yisrael, for example, have
accepted the historical fact of the existence of the State of
Israel. The other anti-Zionists, who are accustomed to calling
themselves the people of the world of tomorrow, are still captive
in the snares of the past. Indeed there is nothing new under the
sun.
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