Israel is anything but a victim

Anyone who has read the works of Herzl, the founder of Zionism, knows what a racist he was

By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News

Published: 00:00 April 10, 2010

A little known fact about intellectual circles in the US is that these folks know what cerebral issue to make topical, and dance around, for the longest time in lectures, panel discussions, literary monthlies and the rest of it.

The subject du jour is the sensational trial in France of Alfred Dreyfus, a young artillery officer of Jewish descent, who was wrongfully convicted of treason by a military court in Paris and sent to serve his sentence in Devil's Island, France's notorious penal colony off the coast of French Guiana — and it all happened in 1895. A subject to your liking? Well, if you're in New York on Tuesday, you can attend the lecture, ‘Dreyfus in Our Time', by the noted social critic Jacqueline Rose, an event sponsored by the The London Review of Books, to be held at the Asia Society. Can't make it? Then pick up Louis Begley's recently released book, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters.

So is it really relevant to the world at large that this case be rehashed 115 years after the fact?

It is. Not only did the Dreyfus Affair expose the underbelly of French anti-Semitism (the trial unleashed a torrent of bigotry against Jews at the time) but it also demonstrated how a country with pluralist, liberal traditions and a cultured capital could descend, with facile ease, into hatred and racism. Moreover, as these American intellectuals engaged in the current public debate over the issue have suggested, the Dreyfus Affair is relevant today because America has its own Devil's Island, known as Guantanamo Bay, to which it has sent not one or two or three Dreyfuses, but hundreds, among whom many surely must be, as Alfred Dreyfus himself was later revealed to be, innocent.

Yes, to that extent, the 115th anniversary of this fin-de-siecle legal drama is indeed relevant today to the world at large.

But guess what? It is even more relevant to the Arab world, for Dreyfus was, albeit indirectly and unwittingly, the founder of Zionism.

Among the many journalists attending and reporting on the court hearings was Theodore Herzl who, like Dreyfus, was an assimilated Jew, and cared little about Jewish affairs in his native Austria. But Herzl was reportedly so shocked by the outpouring of anti-Semitic sentiment in France that he came to see Dreyfus as the symbol of the Jewish people everywhere. Herzl became convinced that what was quaintly known in those days as ‘The Jewish Problem' could only be solved by colonising Palestine and turning it into a Jewish state — and never mind that the country was not an uninhabited arid wilderness but a land already populated by a native people with a rich culture.

Whereas Dreyfus, after being exonerated and reinstated in the army in 1906, returned to his family and moved on with his life, Herzl became an ardent activist and demented colonialist hell-bent on seeing the Zionist experiment come to fruition.

Demented book

To call Herzl demented is not to resort to hyperbole, for he clearly demonstrated that mental condition when he sat down to write his quickie book, Judenstaat (A Jewish State), released in 1896, in which he tried to convince world Jewry of how worthy, and workable, the Zionist experiment was. Consider these gems from his tome, which I've had to re-read for the purpose of this column.

"The anti-Semites will become our most loyal friends [and] the anti-Semitic nations will become our allies".

I hear you, Dreyfus, for Pat Robertson will attest to that.

"We shall there form [in Palestine] a rampart of Europe against Asia ..."

Okay, I'll let that slide, because you were the product of your contemporary European culture.

"We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit out the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it employment in our country ..."

That's enough!

"Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we will not sell them anything back".

You're going overboard here.

"I incline to an aristocratic republic. This would satisfy the ambitious spirit among our people".

Didn't they have decaf in Vienna in those days?

It took Israeli academics — mostly the so-called New Historians who availed themselves of their government's newly opened archives in the mid-1980s — well over three decades to admit to the world, to themselves and to their fellow Israelis that the founder of their movement was a colonialist of the worst sort. (One of those New Historians, Ilan Pappe, left Israel altogether in 2007, calling Zionism "illegitimate and racist".)

If there are still people around in the world today who believe that Israel is a "tiny state" surrounded by vicious enemies threatening its existence, I'd like to meet these people.

No, strike that. Come to think of it, I do not want to meet these people.

And poor Dreyfus, in his day a victim of racism, must be turning in his grave to think that he, in one of those butterfly-effect type situations, had fathered the cause of Zionism.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.

http://gulfnews.com/opinions/columnists/israel-is-anything-but-a-victim-1.610118