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Zionism Is Not What Most Anti-Zionists Believe It Is

(Harvard Crimson) Gemma J. Schneider - Zionism is not what most people backing an anti-Zionist agenda in the name of justice believe they are rejecting, or likening to racism and cruelty. They are rejecting a false projection of Zionism, carefully constructed by movements like BDS, whose entire narrative is founded upon a hefty hijacking of Jewish identity and history. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not rooted in a racial struggle, nor in an ideology of superiority or hate. On the contrary, Zionism was born in 1896 as a movement of liberation, of freedom, and of resisting unfair power imbalances during a period in which Jews across Europe were persecuted. Early Zionist settlers in Palestine didn't steal or conquer the land as they came in throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, as is the case with most European settler colonialism narratives. They bought the land. In fact, early leaders of the Zionist movement, like Theodor Herzl, explicitly rejected the idea of displacing non-Jewish populations. Nonetheless, prior to 1947, Jewish people increasingly suffered violent attacks, killings, rapes, and mass lootings from neighboring non-Jewish groups. The BDS website reduces Israel's "violent establishment in 1948" to an act of "ethnic cleansing" against those "indigenous" to the region. First of all, Jews were already indigenous to the region, as archaeological and biblical evidence has underscored. Next, Israel's declaration of independence came only after a 1947 UN two-state solution was met with fierce opposition from Arab leaders. Most guttingly, this narrative subverts the post-Holocaust environment by charging Jewish people, fresh out of the Holocaust, with a "premeditated" ethnic cleansing plot. The writer is an associate editor of the Harvard Crimson.
2022-06-30 00:00:00
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