to engage in the process of analogy. And on this the Zionists place a priori restrictions.
Israel demands exemptions: on refugees’ right to return or compensation, on seizure and settlement of land acquired by military conquest, on torture and assassinations, on the indiscriminate use of violence in densely populated areas, on nuclear proliferation. These exemptions are embodied in hundreds of US vetoes on Israel’s behalf at the Security Council. So who is really doing the “singling out”?
Of course, Israel is not the only offender in today’s world. The US and Britain are both guilty of unspeakable crimes in Iraq; Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and far too many other states are committing crimes that need “singling out.” But if no protest against a particular crime is to be admitted unless all crimes are equally and presumably simultaneously protested against, then there will be no protest at all, against any crimes. This is an acute form of moral relativism masquerading as its opposite. The upshot is to minimize or relativize Israel’s crimes and to attempt to delegitimize those who would judge Israel by universal standards of human decency.
Anti-Zionists, of course, do reject the idea that there should be a Jewish state in Palestine. In doing so it’s said that we are “singling out” Jews by denying their right to the statehood that others enjoy. Here the Zionists move from objecting to inappropriate analogies to insisting on analogous status with other national groups. A rejection of that particular analogy, and the preference for other analogies—other readings of history—is ruled anti-semitic, either in motive or effect.
“Why should Jews be the only people denied the right to national self-determination?” The historical selectivity lies with the accusers. There can be no doubt that very large numbers of Tibetans, Western Saharans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Chechens, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Mizos, Nagas and Assamese in India, Aceh in Indonesia, Pushtoon, Baloch, and Sindhis in Pakistan, Ibo people in Nigeria, not to mention Palestinians, believe their right to self-determination is being actively denied, not merely in theory but in practice.
By all the usually accepted definitions—language, culture, territorial contiguity and widespread national consciousness—the Kurds have long qualified as a nation, but none of the great powers has ever recognized Kurdish national aspirations. As a key backer of Turkey, the US helped suppress Kurdish revolt, and only discovered the cruelties inflicted by Saddam on the Kurds of Iraq when it became useful to do so. The subsequent suborning of the Kurdish leaders in Iraq by the occupation has, in turn, made it clear that even in such a relatively clear case, national self-determination throws up awkward questions, not least in regard to cities with mixed populations, like Kirkuk. Even just claims for national self-determination can be turned into pretexts for ethnic cleansing. At the moment, Kurdish politics is marked by cavernous divides, and a free and independent Kurdistan seems to be on no one’s agenda. Are those Kurds who support the pursuit of autonomy, not nationhood, within a larger national framework, those who consider themselves Iraqi nationalists and support resistance to occupation, “self-hating Kurds”?
In Sri Lanka, there has been a long and violent struggle for an independent Tamil homeland, but that demand is not supported by all Tamils, and many democratically minded people do not see it as a wise, just or feasible solution to the island’s ethnic conflict. Does that make them anti-Tamil racists? The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam think so, and seek to eliminate, physically, those “self-hating” Tamils who advocate another path. Like Zionism, the Tamil Tigers’ brand of Tamil nationalism secures vital support from a diaspora imbued with a memory of racism, in this case the institutional and sometimes violent racism of the Sri Lankan state.
Were those who opposed national self-determination for Afrikaaners and Zulus in post-apartheid South Africa “singling out” these ethnic groups by denying them this universal right? Both groups could boast their own language and culture, and the Afrikaaners could boast a distinctive religion. Yet their claims were universally rejected by liberal and left opinion. They were recognized as undemocratic, exclusivist nationalisms, either preserving or seeking to establish ethnic privileges. In the end, the bulk of the South African population decided that only majority rule across the country, not separatism, could guarantee minority rights. World opinion was in complete accord, yet to advocate that self-same solution for Palestine is deemed—officially—anti-semitic.
None of these examples, it will be argued, compare precisely with the Jews. After all, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus all have their own countries, why not the Jews? But what about the Sikhs? There are 23 million Sikhs globally, of whom 15 million live in the Indian state of Punjab. In the 1980s, Sikh militants seeking to convert Punjab into a separate Sikh homeland, Khalistan, fought a war with the Indian state (one of whose casualties was Indira Gandhi and the thousands of Sikhs murdered in Delhi in revenge for her death in 1984). Although the Khalistan movement received support from the Sikh diaspora, the demand divided Sikhs in the Punjab itself, and no longer enjoys widespread support. No one seriously claims that to oppose Khalistan—and wish to remain within a secular India—is tantamount to being anti-Sikh.
There are currently no Protestant or Catholic or Hindu or even Muslim states that legally privilege members of those religions in the way that the state of Israel privileges Jews. There are Muslim states that give privileges to Islam and to Muslim citizens, but there is no Muslim state that offers all Muslims worldwide a homeland, or that endows foreigners with full (indeed privileged) citizenship, simply because they are Muslims. While religion may affect citizenship rights, it is not the determinant—which is birth or long residence within the borders of the state. Paradoxically, although the Jewish state is said to belong to Jews everywhere, it does not define Jewishness by religious observance. It claims to be a secular state, unlike those Muslim states that require public observance of specific forms of Islam.
The founder of Pakistan, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, envisaged his Muslim homeland as a secular state; he was not personally devout and his contempt for mullahs was very much in keeping with the Labor Zionists’ contempt for rabbis. His Two Nations Theory defined Muslims in the subcontinent as a separate nation with the right to a separate state in a defined territory where they would comprise the majority. Was it Islamophobic to oppose the Two Nations Theory? That would make Islamophobes of the Congress, Gandhi, Nehru, the entire Indian left, not to mention the majority of Indian Muslims, who chose not to emigrate. Jinnah’s secular promise was not borne out by history. The birth of the state was accompanied by murderous ethnic cleansing (on both sides of the border). Over the following decades, minorities were persecuted and mullah-ism of the sort Jinnah disdained ran rampant; like a number of Israel’s founders, he would be appalled at the role clerical obscurantism plays in his country today. The marriage of the secular and confessional under the banner of “nationhood” is invariably uneasy, and in this sense Israeli experience is not unique.
Nations, nationalism, and national self-determination are the building blocks of the modern world, powerful social realities, but they remain analytically elusive. Nationalisms run the gamut from exclusive to inclusive, from territorial, transparent and democratic to transcendental, opaque and authoritarian. There are racial, linguistic, cultural, and religious nationalisms, often in combination. There’s Nazi blood-and-soil nationalism; there’s French Revolutionary nationalism; there’s an internationalist nationalism—preached by Garibaldi or Castro or Hugo Chávez or an earlier generation of Palestinian and Arab leaders. Where does Zionism sit in this constellation? The measurement must be—as for all other nationalisms—the democratic content of the national demand and the national identity in question. (When the Nazis annexed Sudetenland, Hitler cited in his defense the German-speaking Czechs’ right to national self-determination.) In many situations it is unclear where the balance lies. But in the case of Zionism the verdict is dramatically stark: Zionism involves, unavoidably, a denial to others of democratic and equal rights. It is an obscurantist claim dressed in the garb of secular modernity, underpinned from the beginning by naked power.
If there were as many states as there are ethnic identities, or even putative nationalities, the UN would have to be enlarged several times over. Crucially, even in the most clear-cut
