WHAT IS “PROGRESSIVE” ABOUT BEING ANTI-ISRAEL? PETRA MARQUARDT BIGMAN
Sunday Apr 25, 2010
The Warped Mirror: The (not so) progressive anti-Zionist agenda
Posted by Petra Marquardt-Bigman
While Zionist groups are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Herzl’s birthday, opponents of Zionism seem to feel rather upbeat. The sense that the anti-Zionists’ dream of a world without a Jewish state will eventually come true was conveyed in a recent Foreign Policy article by Israeli writer Dmitry Reider, who confidently claimed that “an increasing number of Israeli voices are beginning to inquire whether the one-state idea is more than just a bogeyman.” The mere fact that an influential mainstream magazine like Foreign Policy would publish such an article was noted with great satisfaction on several virulently anti-Zionist blogs.
Indeed, Herzl’s 150th birthday seems to have inspired some of the major media outlets to mark the occasion by exploring “alternatives” for Zionism. The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” website evoked the vision of “An Israel-Palestine like no other nation” in an article that supposedly reflected “progressive” Zionist efforts to come up with “a new model of statehood”. Similarly, an article in the Christian Science Monitor proposed to subject Israel and the Palestinians to some “radical” political experiment with a “parallel states scenario” that would give the world a chance to explore ways to overcome “the territorially based, zero-sum notion of sovereignty that has grounded the nation-state for at least three centuries.”
All of these articles justify the quest for “solutions” that would put an end to Israel as a Jewish state with the argument that the peace process has failed to achieve a two-state solution that would provide for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Implicit in this reasoning is the notion that the fact that Israel is one of the few successful states established in modern times is irrelevant. Instead, Israel is held responsible for creating a Palestinian state, and Israel’s failure to do so is apparently thought to justify the notion that the Jewish state has forfeited its right to exist.
Supposedly, this line of reasoning reflects a “progressive” political orientation, and its proponents would naturally object to any suggestion that their stance is precariously similar to the views of anti-Semitic and reactionary political forces like Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran’s regime and Syria. But of course all of these forces want exactly the same thing as the anti-Zionist “progressives”: to get rid of Israel as a Jewish state.
It is arguably also quite revealing that the “progressive” anti-Zionist reasoning is never applied to states other than Israel – which explains why nobody is calling for the dissolution of Pakistan. But all the arguments that the oh-so progressive anti-Zionists like to advance to make their case that the establishment of a Jewish state was a deplorable mistake that caused much suffering, and that therefore needs to be rectified, apply most definitely to Pakistan.
Created in 1947 as a state for Muslims, Pakistan’s establishment resulted in the displacement of millions and, as a BBC series of historic photographs documents, the new border with India quickly became “a river of blood”. Pakistan’s military has fought wars over the disputed territory of Kashmir and attempted to prevent the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Some three million Bengalis lost their lives; more than 200,000 women were raped or sexually assaulted, and about 10 million people fled to India.
In the meantime, India has secured its border with an eight-foot-high barbed wire fence that “cuts villages in two and divides agricultural lands and markets. It separates families and communities, cutting across mangrove swamps, forests and mountains.” The completed fence will be “longer than the US/Mexico border fence, the Israel/Palestine wall [sic] and the old Berlin Wall put together.”
Aside from achieving the status of a nuclear power, Pakistan hasn’t accomplished much for its citizens in terms of economic development or social and educational advancement; indeed, Saudi-funded madrassas that focus on religion and teach the intolerant Wahabi view of the world are seen by many of Pakistan’s poor as the only way to provide an education for their children.
Pakistan’s nuclear program is primarily directed against India, but illicit proliferation activities of Pakistani officials have helped Libya, North Korea and Iran to acquire nuclear technologies. Moreover, given that Pakistan is teetering on the brink of becoming a failed state and is host to the Taliban and al-Qaida, there is plenty of reason to worry about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
In “progressive” circles, the obsessive focus on Israel and the quest to find “alternatives” that would do away with the Jewish state is usually justified with a range of arguments that include Western responsibilities arising from colonialism, human rights concerns and the political implications and potential dangers of the failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Obviously enough, very similar arguments could also be made for Pakistan – and in Pakistan’s case, the number of people who stand to be negatively affected is much larger: Pakistan’s establishment resulted in about one million dead and many millions displaced; the country continues to be a source of instability in a volatile region where extremism and terrorism threaten millions.
Yet, it’s much more likely that a reader of the liberal Western media will come across an article lamenting the extremism of Israel’s right-wing fringe – which can hardly hope to mobilize more than a few tens of thousands of supporters – than an article that addresses Pakistan’s state-sponsored religious radicalization, which affects many millions.
But there is, of course, nothing progressive about the obsessive focus on Israel and the equally obsessive preoccupation with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the notion that it should be resolved even at the price of destroying one of the most successful states to be founded in the wake of World War II. And there is absolutely nothing progressive about the quest to eliminate the world’s only Jewish state in order to create yet another Muslim-majority state.
It’s worthwhile to recall that Pakistan was created “on the basis of the two-nation theory,” i.e. the “belief that Muslims and Hindus were separate peoples who could never live together.” Unsurprisingly, when the just established Muslim state had the chance to vote on the UN’s partition plan for Palestine, which envisaged the creation of a Jewish state, Pakistan voted against the plan.
Some six decades later, Pakistan ranks as number 10 on the list of failed states, yet it is not Pakistan but Israel that has become the world’s most controversial country – and progressives agree on that point with even the most reactionary political forces.
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/warpedmirror/entry/the_not_so_progressive_anti
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