Saturday, October 29, 2011
Quotable: Jewish Question/Zionist Question
The anti-Zionist struggle must not encage itself in too simplistic a link between the Jewish Question with the Zionist Question-–a simplistic link that in fact craves to sever the deeper ontological connection that might persist between the two questions. Such a dominant, and far too quick, paradigm that by and large dominates the anti-Zionist struggle has been that Zionism's misuse of the Holocaust is somehow an aberration of Jewish thinking. Thus portrayed, Zionism can be successfully isolated and fought against by Jews as Jews.
It is this very denial of the existential link between the Jewish Question and the Zionist Question–a link that is suppressed by formulations such as "Jews Against Zionism" or, more broadly, by many attempts of "Jews" to become anti-Zionist--that needs to be questioned and destabilised.To be an anti-Zionist without due regard to that being and thinking that Zionism may so tragically continues, may well be to confuse symptom and cause, thus perpetuating that history that leaves the symptom–Zionism–intact. There is need to fathom the extent to which the slogan "Jews against Zionism" may be an oxymoron. Such an oxymoron may be at the heart of the denial, and protection bestowed upon the denial, of the oxymoronic nature of another notion, namely that of a "Jewish and democratic state".
Source: "The Silencing of Gilad Atzmon" by Oren Ben-Dor in CounterPunch, March 15-17, 2008.
It is this very denial of the existential link between the Jewish Question and the Zionist Question–a link that is suppressed by formulations such as "Jews Against Zionism" or, more broadly, by many attempts of "Jews" to become anti-Zionist--that needs to be questioned and destabilised.To be an anti-Zionist without due regard to that being and thinking that Zionism may so tragically continues, may well be to confuse symptom and cause, thus perpetuating that history that leaves the symptom–Zionism–intact. There is need to fathom the extent to which the slogan "Jews against Zionism" may be an oxymoron. Such an oxymoron may be at the heart of the denial, and protection bestowed upon the denial, of the oxymoronic nature of another notion, namely that of a "Jewish and democratic state".
Source: "The Silencing of Gilad Atzmon" by Oren Ben-Dor in CounterPunch, March 15-17, 2008.
Labels: anti-Zionism, holocaust, identity, Jews
