Zionism Is The Enemy of Peace

“My politics are simply the Morning Star,” Richard Burgon once told me at a funeral, where everything gets done. Draw your own conclusion as to how he must therefore have voted in the EU referendum.

From the first time that I met Richard, I have known that he was a future Leader of the Labour Party. Giggling public schoolboys only serve to make my point. Clearly, I am not the only one to have come to that conclusion. So the knives are out.

Richard is a Catholic, to the extent that he even used to give his constituency address as the Presbytery of Our Lady of Good Counsel, and whereas even someone born of a Jewish mother but baptised in infancy cannot become an Israeli citizen, Palestine has an explicitly Christian identity. 

Without in any way condoning either the PFLP or the DFLP, the founder of the former was given an Orthodox funeral in accordance with his background, and there is every reason to assume that the founder of the latter will be given a Catholic one.

The Christians are the descendants of the people whom first the Israelites and then the Muslims conquered. They became Christian before or when the Roman Empire did, and they have simply remained so. Nothing in the Bible suggests that the pre-Israelite peoples went away. Quite the reverse, for the very good reason that they did not. 

The Muslims conquered a Jerusalem that had been entirely Christian for centuries, at the very time that the Anglo-Saxons were conquering the territory that thus became England. Palestine and England are as old as each other, and have appropriately come to share a Patron Saint.

Being Israeli, as distinct from being Jewish, and being Palestinian, as distinct from being Arab in general and Greater Syrian in particular, are twin identities, created by exactly the same events at exactly the same time, a time that is still within living memory.

Like Arab nationalism in general, the modern concept of Filastin was and is an expression among the oldest inhabitants of the Land of popular Catholic and Orthodox, and to an extent Anglican and Lutheran, Christianity as it organised itself politically among students at American “mainline” Protestant missionary universities. It and Zionism were both new at the time, and each had very few adherents, although of course those believed that huge numbers of other people ought to agree and identify with them. Now, in both cases, they do. 

By definition, there were no Israelis before the creation of the State of Israel. But there are now, quite distinct from Jews at large, and not all Jews in any case. Even leaving aside the large and growing Arab population, which is the majority in half of the land area within the 1948 borders, there are Russians who refuse to eat kosher food and who insist on taking their Israeli Defence Force oaths on the New Testament alone, there are the Russian Nazis, there are the East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, and there are the Peruvian Indians “converted to Judaism” and put on the plane as a single act. Even the Pashtun are now classified as a Lost Tribe with a view to airlifting them to Israel in future, since at least they are not Arabs.

If Israel does not want to become a haven for Russian Nazis, then it needs to repeal the Law of Return, thereby declaring that it is now a settled culture and society in her own right, and precluding any wildly impracticable demand for a corresponding right on the part of Palestinian refugees or their descendants.

The people who will do anything for Israel except live there, and who throw their weight around in demanding policies that suit their prejudices expressed from comfortable berths thousands of miles away, could thus be told where to go, or not to bother trying to go.

In any case, Theodor Herzl denied the possibility, once the Zionist State had been founded, that Jews, as such, could then continue to exist anywhere else. They would have lost the right to call themselves Jews, according to the founding father of Zionism.

If Hamas really can never come to terms with the existence of the State of Israel, simply as a fact of life, then with what did it imagine itself to have been negotiating, thereby scoring the significant public relations victory that was the release of hundreds of detainees in 2011? For that matter, if Israel can never deal with Hamas, then what was it doing in the case of Gilad Shalit, and would it rather that he had been left to rot?

If there cannot be a Palestinian State, contrary to the position of the last Republican President of the United States, then with whom and with what have the Israelis ever been negotiating? Those interlocutors do not seek recognition of a Muslim state; on the contrary, the Palestinian Authority already operates a Christian quota without parallel in Israel, though corresponding to similar arrangements in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. They do not even seek recognition of an Arab state.

Ever since 1993, they have recognised Israel within its borders before 1967, and, although they ought also to claim the territory to the east that a Palestinian State would rapidly come to include, they seek nothing more than recognition of Palestine within the territory captured in that year, the home of everyone who lives there, and if anything an emerging or emerged Orthodox Jewish refuge from godless Zionism.

The only problem is with recognising Israel as “a Jewish State”, condemning a fifth of the population, including the world’s most ancient Christian communities, to the second class citizenship from which the Israeli Constitution theoretically protected them, however different the practice may be, until the Nation-State Law ended even so much as the pretence.

It is wrong to tell Israelis to “go home” when the State of Israel was founded in the year that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. There are now fourth generation Israelis. There is a right to engage in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and that right is enjoyed by public bodies as well as by private individuals. 

But academic and cultural boycotts are contrary to the fundamental character of scholarship, art and science. Sporting boycotts, like wars, tend to have a disproportionate impact on very young people with no public policy-making role, and it is not clear that they made any difference against apartheid in South Africa. 

The definition of anti-Semitism in the Oxford English Dictionary is perfectly sufficient: “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews.” The adoption of a far more extensive definition by the Crown Prosecution Service, effectively criminalising dissent from it without reference to Parliament, is constitutionally monstrous. Equally reprehensible is that adoption by local authorities in order to discipline the trade union representatives of their workers. 

Every critique of the divisive and anti-democratic role of “community leaders” is applicable to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to the Jewish Leadership Council, to the Community Security Trust, to the Campaign Against Antisemitism, and to the Chief Rabbinate.

The Liberal Establishment has imported the New York practice of branding as “anti-Semitic” any uppity black or other criticism of its hegemony and of its hypocrisy, be that its hypocrisy towards integration at home or its hypocrisy towards white settler colonialism abroad. 

Israel was founded by anti-British terrorists of exceptional viciousness, and Israel armed Argentina during the Falklands War as an act of anti-British revenge. The expulsion of 700,000 people from Palestine on ethnic grounds in 1948 was as much a racist endeavour as any of the several other mass expulsions of the same period, notably those from the new states of India and Pakistan, and those of ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. 

There is nothing wrong with the dream of a single state in which human and civil rights were constitutionally protected while everyone had precisely one vote. But instead, by its enactment of the Nation-State Law, Israel has declared itself to be an apartheid state, while that Law remains in place. 

Yet anyone may convert to Judaism, so that Jews are no more a “race” than Christians or Muslims are. As my friend, the late Rabbi Lionel Blue, once said to me of the Jews, “You only have to look at us to see that we are all the descendants of converts.” Therefore, anti-Semitism is a form of religious bigotry, and not, in itself, a form of racism. That Hitler thought otherwise is not an argument.

Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.