Zionis Galau: Pilih Argentina atau Palestina (4)
Senin, 30 April 2012, 22:51 WIB
Menjual Holocaust yang laris manis
Wilayah Palestina kian menciut dan terus menciut. Yerusalem timur yang diharapkan menjadi ibu kota Palestina, kini kian dikepung dengan permukiman Yahudi. (peta)
Sejauh ini Holocaust menjadi senjata kampanye yang ampuh bagi kaum Zionis. Peran media informasi tampaknya menjadi tulang punggung keberhasilan ini. Seperti diakui oleh Edward W Said dalam bukunya, the Question of Palestine, yang menyoroti siaran televisi NBC pada musim semi 1978.
Menurut cendikiwan Amerika berdarah Palestina ini, penonton tentu menyadari bahwa ''Sekurangnya sebagian dari program tersebut ditujukan sebagai justifikasi dari Zionisme –meski pun pada saat yang nyaris bersamaan, pasukan Israel di Lebanon melakukan penghancuran, dengan ribuan korban nyawa warga sipil, dan penderitaan yang tak terucapkan namun segelintir wartawan yang berani menggambarkan aksi tersebut mirip penghancuran yang dilakukan AS di Vietnam.''
Salah satu wartawan yang disebut Said misalnya, HDS Greenway. Sang wartawan menuliskan dalam harian Washington Post pada 25 Maret 1978, berjudulVietnam-style Raids Gut South Lebanon: Israel Leaves A Path of Destruction.
Mengaburkan anti-Semit dan anti-Zionis
Tulisan menarik dapat dibaca lewat olahan Norman G Finkelstein, dalam bukuThe Holocaust Industry. Latar belakang Finkelstein cukup unik, karena kedua orang tuanya lolos dari Ghetto Warsawa dan kamp konsentrasi Nazi. Ya, ia memang seorang Yahudi.
Menurutnya, Holocaust terbukti sebagai senjata ideologi yang vital. Menyoroti Israel, Finkelstein menulis, "Lewat pengerahannya, salah satu negara dengan kekuatan militer yang mengagumkan, dengan catatan hak asasi manusia yang mengerikan, telah memotret diri sebagai negara 'korban', dan sebagai kelompok etnis yang paling berhasil di AS ini juga berhasil menyandang status sebagai korban."
Sebagai ''industri'', Finkelstein menguraikan aksi pengumpulan dana untuk ''membantu para korban yang lolos dari Holocaust''. Namun, ia pun mempertanyakan ke mana dana itu berujung.
Di sisi lain, museum Holocaust pun tersebar di berbagai negara dan jumlahnya mencapai puluhan. Di AS sendiri, sekurangnya ada 23 museum. Di Washington DC misalnya, terdapat United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Selain menyajikan film, museum ini memamerkan berbagai macam barang, seperti tumpukan sepatu-sepatu tua, gerbong kereta, hingga ratusan artefak lainnya. Keterangan tertulis menyebutkan barang-barang tersebut peninggalan para korban Holocaust.
Salah satu gagasan yang diangkat adalah istilah anti-Semit dan anti-Zionis nyaris selalu dicampur adukkan. Lagi-lagi Said menuliskan, ''Para penganut paham liberal atau radikal sekali pun tak mampu membendung kebiasaan kaum Zionis yang ''menyamakan'' anti-Semit dan anti-Zionis''. Rupanya, banyak juga yang terjerumus ke dalam jebakan kaum Zionis.
Di tengah Yahudi sendiri terdapat suara minoritas yang menentang Zionisme, terutama di kalangan ilmuwan. Sementara di kalangan akar rumput Israel, muncul kelompok seperti Matzpen. Kelompok berhaluan sosialis ini mengklaim diri sebagai anti-Israel.
Sikap anti-Zionis dan anti-Israel bahkan juga dipegang oleh sebagian kaum Yahudi Ortodoks. Di AS misalnya, Anda mungkin pernah melihat mereka berdemo mengkritisi Israel ketika Global Movement to Jerusalem (GMJ) diluncurkan baru-baru ini.
Kini, laut Mediterania seakan menjadi saksi bahwa darah dan air mata seakan berlomba tertumpah di tanah Palestina. Menurut Anda, apakah 1 Mei 1948 sebagai an-Nakhbah, ataukah hari kemenangan yang menandai berdirinya Israel? Sejarah telah bertutur. Inilah akhir rangkaian tulisan Zionis Galau: Pilih Argentina atau Palestina. Redaktur: Yeyen Rostiyani
Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims (1979)
(from The Edward Said Reader)
When Edward Said completed The Question of Palestine in 1978, publishers found it too provocative to publish. Beacon Press and Pantheon Books rejected the manuscript. When a Beirut publisher offered to bring the book out in Arabic, it asked Said to remove his criticism of Syria and Saudi Arabia. Said refused. Eventually, Time Books published it in 1979.
Said's investigation of the history and ideology of Zionism raised hackles from different quarters. Some Jewish critics, such as Robert Wistrich, protested the connections Said made between Zionism and European colonialism. As Said wrote, "There is an unmistakable coincidence between the experiences of Arab Palestinians at the hands of Zionism and the experiences of those black, yellow, and brown people who were described as inferior and subhuman by nineteenth-century imperialists." If Zionist critics tried to disavow the imperial legacies of Zionism, many Palestinians thought that Said had conceded too much. In effect, "Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims" considered the fact that the Palestinians, as "the victims of victims," have become a crucial part of Zionism's history. Said argued that they must be acknowledged within this history just as no Palestinian can ignore Zionism.
In 1978, such an approach was linked closely to strategies of "mutual recognition" and "two-state solutions" of the conflict between Palestinians and Israel. As Eqbal Ahmad observed in his review in The Nation, Said was the first Palestinian of any consequence "to argue for the necessity of a full-sca1e political encounter between Jews and Palestinians. Said explains: "[J]ust as no Jew in the last hundred or so has been untouched by Zionism, so too no Palestinian has been unmarked by it." Said "Yet it must not be forgotten, that the Palestinian was not simply a function of Zionism. His life, culture and politics have their own dynamic and ultimately their own authenticity."
I
Zionism and the Attitudes of European Colonialism
Every idea or system of ideas exists somewhere, is mixed in with historical circumstances, is part of what one may very simply call "reality." One of the enduring attributes of self-serving idealism, however, is the notion that ideas are just ideas, and that they exist only in the realm of ideas. The tendency to view ideas as pertaining only to a world of abstractions increases among people for whom an idea is essentially perfect, good, uncontaminated by human desire or will. Such a view also applies when the ideas are considered to be evil, absolutely perfect in their evil, and so forth. When an idea has become effective-that is, when its value has been proved in reality by its widespread acceptance-some revision of it will of course seem to be necessary; since the idea must be viewed as having taken on some of the characteristics of brute reality. Thus it is frequently argued that such an idea as Zionism, for all its political tribulations and the struggles on its behalf, is at bottom an unchanging idea that expresses the yearning for Jewish political and religious self-determination-for Jewish national selfhood-to be exercised on the promised land. Because Zionism seems to have culminated in the creation of the state of Israel, it is also argued that the historical realization of the idea confirms its unchanging essence and, no less important, the means used for its realization. Very little is said about what Zionism entailed for non-Jews who happened to have encountered it; for that matter, nothing is said about where (outside Jewish history) it took place, and from what in the historical context of nineteenth-century Europe Zionism drew its force. To the Palestinian, for whom Zionism was somebody else's idea imported into Palestine and for which in a very concrete way he or she was made to pay and suffer, these forgotten things about Zionism are the very things that are centrally important.
In short, effective political ideas like Zionism need to be examined historically in two ways: (I) genealogically in order that their provenance, their kinship and descent, their affiliation both with other ideas and with political institutions may be demonstrated; (2) as practical systems for accumulation (of power, land, ideological legitimacy) and displacement ( of people, other ideas, prior legitimacy). Present political and cultural actualities make such an examination extraordinarily difficult, as much because Zionism in the postindustrial West has acquired for itself an almost unchallenged hegemony in liberal "establishment" discourse, as because in keeping with one of its central ideological characteristics, Zionism has hidden, or caused to disappear, the literal historical ground of its growth, its political cost to the native inhabitants of Palestine, and its militantly oppressive discriminations between Jews and non-Jews.
Consider as a startling instance of what I mean, the symbolism of Menachem Begin, a former head of the Irgun terror organization, in whose part are numerous (and frequently admitted) acts of coldblooded murder, being honored as Israeli premier at Northwestern University in May 1978 with a doctorate of laws honoris causa; a leader whose army a scant month before had created 300,000 new refugees in South Lebanon, who spoke constantly of "Judea and Samaria" as "rightful" parts of the Jewish state (claims made on the basis of the Old Testament and without so much as a reference to the land's actual inhabitants); and all this without-on the part of the press or the intellectual community-one sign of comprehension that Menachem Begin's honored position came about literally at the expense of Palestinian Arab silence in the Western "marketplace of ideas," that the entire historical duration of a Jewish state in Palestine prior to 1948 was a sixty-year period two millennia ago, that the dispersion of the Palestinians was not a fact of nature but a result of specific force and strategies. The concealment by Zionism of its own history has by now therefore become institutionalized, and not only in Israel. To bring out its history as in a sense it was exacted from Palestine and the Palestinians, these victims on whose suppression Zionism and Israel have depended, is thus a specific intellectual/political task in the present context of discussion about "a comprehensive peace" in the Middle East.
The special, one might even call it the privileged, place in this discussion of the United States is impressive, for all sorts of reasons. In no other country, except Israel, is Zionism enshrined as an unquestioned good, and in no other country is there so strong a conjuncture of powerful institutions and interests-the press, the liberal intelligentsia, the military-industrial complex, the academic community, labor unions-for whom [. . .] uncritical support of Israel and Zionism enhances their domestic as well as international standing. Although there has recently been some modulation in this remarkable consensus-due to the influence of Arab oil, the emergence of countervailing conservative states allied to the United States (Saudi Arabia, Egypt), the redoubtable political and military visibility of the Palestinian people and their representatives the PLO-the prevailing pro-Israeli bias persists. For not only does it have deep cultural roots in the West generally and the United States in particular, but its negative, interdictory character vis-a-vis the whole historical reality is systematic.
Yet there is no getting around the formidable historical reality that in trying to deal with what Zionism has suppressed about the Palestinian people, one also abuts the entire disastrous problem of anti-Semitism on the one hand, and on the other, the complex interrelationship between the Palestinians and the Arab states. Anyone who watched the spring 1978 NBC presentation of Holocaust was aware that at least part of the program was intended as a justification for Zionism-even while at about the same time Israeli troops in Lebanon produced devastation, thousands of civilian casualties, and untold suffering of a sort likened by a few courageous reporters to the U.S. devastation of Vietnam (see, for example, H. D. S. Greenway, "Vietnam-style Raids Gut South Lebanon: Israel Leaves a Path of Destruction," Washington Post, March 25, 1978). Similarly, the furor created by the package deal in early 1978 as a result of which U . S . war planes were sold to Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia made the predicament of Arab liberation interlocking with right-wing Arab regimes even more acute. The task of criticism, or, to put it another way, the role of the critical consciousness in such cases is to be able to make distinctions, to produce differences where at present there are none. To write critically about Zionism in Palestine has therefore never meant, and does not mean now, being anti-Semitic; conversely, the struggle for Palestinian rights and self-determination does not mean support for the Saudi royal family, nor for the antiquated and oppressive state structures of most of the Arab nations.
One must admit, however, that all liberals and even most "radicals" have been unable to overcome the Zionist habit of equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Any well-meaning person can thus oppose South African or American racism and at the same time tacitly support Zionist racial discrimination against non-Jews in Palestine. The almost total absence of any handily available historical knowledge from non-Zionist sources, the dissemination by the media of malicious simplifications (e.g., Jews vs. Arabs), the cynical opportunism of various Zionist pressure groups, the tendency endemic to university intellectuals uncritically to repeat cant phrases and political cliches (this is the role Gramsci assigned to traditional intellectuals, that of being "experts in legitimation"), the fear of treading upon the highly sensitive terrain of what Jews did to their victims, in an age of genocidal extermination of Jews-all this contributes to the dulling, regulated enforcement of almost unanimous support for Israel. But, as I. F. Stone recently noted, this unanimity exceeds even the Zionism of most Israelis.
On the other hand, it would be totally unjust to neglect the power of Zionism as an idea for Jews, or to minimize the complex internal debates characterizing Zionism, its true meaning, its messianic destiny, etc. Even to speak about this subject, much less than attempting to "define" Zionism, is for an Arab quite a difficult matter, but it must honestly be looked at. Let me use myself as an example. Most of my education, and certainly all of my basic intellectual formation, are Western; in what I have read, in what I write about, even in what I do politically, I am profoundly influenced by mainstream , Western attitudes toward the history of the Jews, anti-Semitism, the destruction of European Jewry. Unlike most other Arab intellectuals, the majority of whom obviously have not had my kind of background, I have been directly exposed to those aspects of Jewish history and experience that have mattered singularly for Jews and for Western non-Jews reading and thinking about Jewish history. I know as well as any educated Western non-Jew can know, what '~ anti-Semitism has meant for the Jews, especially in this century. Consequently I can understand the intertwined terror and the exultation out of which Zionism has been nourished, and I think I can at least grasp the meaning of Israel for Jews, and even for the enlightened Western liberal. And yet, because I am an Arab Palestinian, I can also see and feel other things-and it is these things that complicate matters considerably, that cause me also to focus on Zionism's other aspects. The result is, I think, worth describing, not because what I think is crucial, but because it is useful to see the same phenomenon in two complementary ways, not normally associated with each other.
One can begin with a literary example: George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876). The unusual thing about the book is that its main subject is Zionism, although the novel's principal themes are recognizable to anyone who has read Eliiot's earlier fiction. Seen in the context of Eliot's general interest in idealism and spiritual yearning, Zionism for her was one in a series of worldly projects for the nineteenth-century mind still committed to hopes for a secular religious community. In her earlier books, Eliot had studied a variety of enthusiasms, all of them replacements for organized religion, all of them attractive to persons who would have been Saint Teresa had they lived during a period of coherent faith. The reference to Saint Teresa was originally made by Eliot in Middlemarch, an earlier novel of hers; in using it to describe the novel's heroine, Dorothea Brooke, Eliot had intended to compliment her own visionary and moral energy, sustained despite the absence in the modern world of certain assurances for faith and knowledge. Dorothea emerges at the end of Middlemarch as a chastened woman, forced to concede her grand visions of a "fulfilled" life in return for a rela tively modest domestic success as a wife and mother. It is this considerably diminished view of things that Daniel Deronda, and Zionism in particular, revise upward: toward a genuinely hopeful socioreligious project in which individual energies can be merged and identified with a collective national vision, the whole emanating out of Judaism.
The novel's plot alternates between the presentation of a bitter comedy of manners involving a surprisingly rootless segment of the British upper bourgeoisie, and the gradual revelation to Daniel Deronda-an exotic young man whose parentage is unknown but who is the ward of Sir Hugo Mallinger, a British aristocrat-of his Jewish identity and, when he becomes the spiritual disciple of Mordecai Ezra Cohen, his Jewish destiny. At the end of the novel, Daniel marries Mirah, Mordecai's sister, and commits himself to fulfilling Mordecai's hopes for the future of the Jews. Mordecai dies as the young pair get married, although it is clear well before his death that his Zionist ideas have been passed on to Daniel, so much so that among the newlyweds' "splendid wedding-gifts" is "a complete equipment for travel" provided by Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger. For Daniel and his wife will be traveling to Palestine, presumably to set the great Zionist plan in motion.
The crucial thing about the way Zionism is presented in the novel is that its backdrop is a generalized condition of homelessness. Not only the Jews, but even the well-born Englishmen and women in , the novel are portrayed as wandering and alienated beings. If the novel's poorer English people (for example, Mrs. Davilow and her daughters) seem always to be moving from one rented house to another, the wealthy aristocrats are no less cut off from some permanent home. Thus Eliot uses the plight of the Jews to make a universal statement about the nineteenth century's need for a home, given the spiritual and psychological rootlessness reflected in her characters' almost ontological physical restlessness. Her interest in Zionism therefore can be traced to her reflection, made early in the novel, that a human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kindship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.
To find the "early home" means to find the place where originally one was at home, a task to be undertaken more or less interchangeably by individuals and by "people." It becomes historically appropriate therefore that those individuals and that "people" best suited to the task are Jews. Only the Jews as a people (and consequently as individuals) have retained both a sense of their original home in Zion and an acute, always contemporary, feeling of loss. Despite the prevalence of anti-S0mitism everywhere, the Jews are a reproach to the Gentiles who have long since forsaken the "observance" of any civilizing communal belief. Thus Mordecai puts these sentiments positively as a definite program for today's Jews:
They [the Gentiles] scorn our people's ignorant observance; but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance-sunk to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down below the memory that has withered into superstition. In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West-which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will not vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts which will widen feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories.
"The illumination of great facts which widen feeling" is atypical phrase for Eliot, and there is no doubt that her approbation for her Zionists derives from her belief that they were a group almost exactly expressing her own grand ideas about an expanded life of feelings. Yet if there is a felt reality about "the peoples of the West," there is no such reality for the "peoples of the East." They are named, it is true, but are no more substantial than a phrase. The few references to the East in Daniel Deronda are always to England's Indian colonies, for whose people--as people having wishes, values, aspirations--Eliot expresses the complete indifference of absolute silence. Of the fact that Zion will be "planted" in the East, Eliot takes no very detailed account; it is as if the phrase "the people of the East and the West" covers what will, territorially at least, be a neutral inaugural reality. In turn, that reality will be replaced by a permanent accomplishment when the newly founded state becomes the "medium of transmission and understanding." For how could Eliot imagine that even Eastern people would object to such grand benefits for all?
There is, however, a disturbing insistence on these matters when Mordecai continues his speech. For him, Zionism means that "our race takes on again the character of a nationality. . . a labour which shall be a worthy fruit of the long anguish whereby our fathers maintained their separateness, refusing the ease of falsehood." Zionism is to be a dramatic lesson for mankind. But what ought to catch the reader's attention about the way Mordecai illustrates his thesis is his depiction of the land:
[The Jews] have wealth enough to redeem the soil from debauched and paupered conquerors; they have the skill of the statesman to devise, the tongue of the operator to persuade. And is there no prophet or poet among us to make the ears of Christian Europe tingle with shame at the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which the Turk gazes at [the reference here is to the long history of European disputes about the Holy Land] as at the fighting of beasts to which he has lent an arena? There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just like the old--a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotisms of the East. Then our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman or American. And the world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom; there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I know there are difficulties. But let the spirit of sublime achievement move in the great among our people, and the work will begin. [Emphasis added]
The land itself is characterized in two separate ways. On the one hand, it is associated with debauched and paupered conquerors, an arena lent by the Turk to fighting beasts, a part of the despotic East; on the other, with "the brightness of Western freedom," with nations like England and America, with the idea of neutrality (Belgium). In short, with a degraded and unworthy East and a noble, enlightened West. The bridge between those warring representatives of East and West will be Zionism.
Interestingly, Eliot cannot sustain her admiration of Zionism except by seeing it as a method for transforming the East into the West. This is not to say that she does not have sympathy for Zionism and for the Jews themselves: she obviously does. But there is a whole area of Jewish experience, lying somewhere between longing for a homeland (which everyone, including the Gentile, feels) and actually getting it, that she is dim about. Otherwise she is quite capable of seeing that Zionism can easily be accommodated to several varieties of Western (as opposed to Eastern) thought, principal among them the idea that the East is degraded, that it needs reconstruction according to enlightened Western notions about politics, that any reconstructed portion of the East can with small reservations become as "English as England" to its new inhabitants. Underlying all this, however, is the total absence of any thought about the actual inhabitants of the East, Palestine in particular. They are irrelevant both to the Zionists in Daniel Deronda and to the English characters. Brightness, freedom, and redemption-key matters for Eliot-are to be restricted to Europeans and the Jews, who are themselves European prototypes so far as colonizing the East is concerned. There is a remarkable failure when it comes to taking anything non-European into consideration although curiously all of Eliot's descriptions of Jews stress their exotic, "Eastern" aspects. Humanity and sympathy, it seems, are not endowments of anything but an Occidental mentality; to look for them in the despotic East, much less find them, is to waste one's time.
Two points need to be made immediately. One is that Eliot is no different from other European apostles of sympathy, humanity, and understanding for whom noble sentiments were either left behind in Europe, or made programmatically inapplicable outside Europe. There are the chastening examples of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx (both of whom I have discussed in Orientalism), two thinkers known doctrinally to be opponents of injustice and oppression. Yet both of them seemed to have believed that such ideas as liberty, representative government, and individual happiness must not be applied in the Orient for reasons that today we would call racist. The fact is that nineteenth-century European culture was racist with a greater or lesser degree of virulence depending on the individual: The French writer Ernest Renan, for instance, was an outright anti-Semite; Eliot was indifferent to races who could not be assimilated to European ideas.
Here we come to the second point. Eliot's account of Zionism in Daniel Deronda was intended as a sort of assenting Gentile response to prevalent Jewish-Zionist currents; the novel therefore serves as an indication of how much in Zionism was legitimated and indeed valorized by Gentile European thought. On one important issue there was complete agreement between the Gentile and Jewish versions of Zionism: their view of the Holy Land as essentially empty of inhabitants, not because there were no inhabitants--there were, and they were frequently described in numerous travel accounts, in novels like Benjamin Disrael's Tancred, even in the various nineteenth-century Baedekers--but because their status as sovereign and human inhabitants was systematically denied. While it may be possible to differentiate between Jewish and Gentile Zionists on this point (they ignored the Arab inhabitants for different reasons), the Palestinian Arab was ignored nonetheless. That is what needs emphasis: the extent to which the roots of Jewish and Gentile Zionism are in the culture of high liberal-capitalism, and how the work of its vanguard liberals like George Eliot reinforced, perhaps also completed, that culture's less attractive tendencies.
None of what I have so far said applies adequately to what Zionism meant for Jews or what it represented as an advanced idea for enthusiastic non-Jews; it applies exclusively to those less fortunate beings who happened to be living on the land, people of whom no notice was taken. What has too long been forgotten is that while important European thinkers considered the desirable and later the probable fate of Palestine, the land was being tilled, villages and towns built and lived in by thousands of natives who believed that it was their homeland. In the meantime their actual physical being was ignored; later it became a troublesome detail. Strikingly, therefore, Eliot sounds very much like Moses Hess, an early Zionist idealist who in his Rome and Jerusalem (1862) uses the same theoretical language to be given to Mordecai:
What we have to do at present for the regeneration of the Jewish nation is, first, to keep alive the hope of the political rebirth of our people, and, next, to reawaken that hope where it slumbers. When political conditions in the Orient shape themselves so as to permit the organization of a beginning of the restoration of the Jewish state, this beginning will express itself in the founding of Jewish colonies in the land of their ancestors, to which enterprise France will undoubtedly lend a hand. France, beloved friend, is the savior who will restore our people to its place in universal history. Just as we once searched in the West for a road to India, and incidentally discovered a new world, so will our lost fatherland be rediscovered on the road to India and China that is now being built in the Orient.
Hess continues his paean to France (since every Zionist saw one or another of the imperial powers as patron) by quoting at some length from Ernest Laharanne's The New Eastern Question, from which Hess draws the following passage for his peroration:
"A great calling is reserved for the Jews: to be a living channel of communication between three continents. You shall be the bearers of civilization to peoples who are still inexperienced and their teachers in the European sciences, to which your race has contributed so much. You shall be the mediators between Europe and far Asia, opening the roads that lead to India and China-those unknown regions which must ultimately be thrown open to civilisation. You will come to the land of your fathers decorated with the crown of age-long martyrdom, and there, finally, you will be completely healed from all your ills! Your capital will again bring the wide stretches of barren land under cultivation; your labor and industry will once more turn the ancient soil into fruitful valleys, reclaiming it from the encroaching sands of the desert, and the world will again pay its homage to the oldest of peoples."
Between them, Hess and Eliot concur that Zionism is to be carried out by the Jews with the assistance of major European powers; that Zionism will restore "a lost fatherland," and in so doing mediate between the various civilizations; that present-day Palestine was in need of cultivation, civilization, reconstitution; that Zionism would finally bring enlightenment and progress where at present there was neither. The three ideas that depended on one another in Hess and Eliot-and later in almost every Zionist thinker or ideologue-are (a) the nonexistent Arab inhabitants, (b) the complementary Western-Jewish attitude to an "empty" territory, and (c) the restorative Zionist project, which would repeat by rebuilding a vanished Jewish state and combine it with modern elements like disciplined, separate colonies, a special agency for land acquisition, etc. Of course, none of these ideas would have any force were it not for the additional fact of their being addressed to, shaped for, and out of an international (i.e., non-Oriental and hence European) context. This context was the reality, not only because of the ethnocentric rationale governing the whole project, but also because of the overwhelming facts of Diaspora realities and imperialist hegemony over the entire gamut of European culture. It needs to be remarked, however, that Zionism (like the view of America as an empty land held by Puritans) was a colonial vision unlike that of most other nineteenth-century European powers, for whom the natives of outlying territories were included in the redemptive mission civilisation.
From the earliest phases of its modern evolution until it culminated in the creation of Israel, Zionism appealed to a European audience for whom the classification of overseas territories and natives into various uneven classes was canonical and "natural." That is why, for example, every single state or movement in the formerly colonized territories of Africa and Asia today identifies with, fully supports, and understands the Palestinian struggle. In many instances--as I hope to show presently--there is an unmistakable coincidence between the experiences of Arab Palestinians at the hands of Zionism and the experiences of those black, yellow, and brown people who were described as inferior and subhuman by nineteenth-century imperialists. For although it coincided with an era of the most virulent Western anti-Semitism, Zionism also coincided with the period of unparalleled European territorial acquisition in Africa and Asia, and it was as part of this general movement of acquisition and occupation that Zionism was launched initially by Theodor Herzl. During the latter part of the greatest period in European colonial expansion, Zionism also made its crucial first moves along the way to getting what has now become a sizeable Asiatic territory. And it is important to remember that in joining the general Western enthusiasm for overseas territorial acquisition, Zionism never spoke of itself unambiguously as a Jewish liberation movement, but rather as a Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the Orient. To those Palestinian victims that Zionism displaced, it cannot have meant anything by way of sufficient cause that Jews were victims of European anti-Semitism and, given Israel's continued oppression of Palestinians, few Palestinians are able to see beyond their reality, namely, that once victims themselves, Occidental Jews in Israel have become oppressors (of Palestinian Arabs and Oriental Jews).
These are not intended to be backward-looking historical observations, for in a very vital way they explain and even determine much of what now happens in the Middle East. The fact that no sizeable segment of the Israeli population has as yet been able to confront the terrible social and political injustice done the native Palestinians is an indication of how deeply ingrained are the (by now) anomalous imperialist perspectives basic to Zionism, its view of the world, its sense of an inferior native Other. The fact also that no Palestinian, regardless of his political stripe, has been able to reconcile himself to Zionism suggests the extent to which, for the I Palestinian, Zionism has appeared to be an uncompromisingly exclusionary, discriminatory, colonialist praxis. So powerful, and so unhesitatingly followed, has been the radical Zionist distinction between privileged Jews in Palestine and unprivileged non-Jews there, that nothing else has emerged, no perception of suffering human existence has escaped from the two camps created thereby. As a result, it has been impossible for Jews to understand the human tragedy caused the Arab Palestinians by Zionism; and it has been impossible for Arab Palestinians to see in Zionism anything except an ideology and a practice keeping them, and Israeli Jews, imprisoned. But in order to break down the iron circle of inhumanity, we must see how it was forged, and there it is ideas and culture themselves that play the major role.
Consider Herzl. If it was the Dreyfus Affair that first brought him to Jewish consciousness, it was the idea of overseas colonial settlement for the Jews that came to him at roughly the same time as an antidote for anti-Semitism. The idea itself was current at the end of the nineteenth century, even as an idea for Jews. Herzl's first significant contact was Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a wealthy philanthropist who had for some time been behind the Jewish Colonization Association for helping Eastern Jews to emigrate to Argentina and Brazil. Later, Herzl thought generally about South America, then about Africa as places for establishing a Jewish colony. Both areas were widely acceptable as places for European colonialism, and that Herzl's mind followed along the orthodox imperialist track of his period is perhaps understandable. The impressive thing, however, is the degree to which Herzl had absorbed and internalized the imperialist perspective on "natives" and their "territory."
There could have been no doubt whatever in Herzl's mind that Palestine in the late nineteenth century was peopled. True, it was under Ottoman administration (and therefore already a colony), but it had been the subject of numerous travel accounts, most of them famous, by Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, and others. Yet even if he had not read these authors, Herzl as a journalist must surely have looked at a Baedeker to ascertain that Palestine was indeed inhabited by (in the 1880s) 650,000 mostly Arab people. This did not stop him from regarding their presence as manageable in ways that, in his diary, he spelled out with a rather chilling prescience for what later took place. The mass of poor natives were to be expropriated and, he added, "both the expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." This was to be done by "spirit[ing] the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country." With uncannily accurate cynicism, Herzl predicted that the small class of large landowners could be "had for a price"-as indeed they were. The whole scheme for displacing the native population of Palestine far outstripped any of the then current plans for taking over vast reaches of Africa. As Demond Stewart aptly says:
Herzl seems to have foreseen that in going further than any colonialist had so far gone in Mrica, he would, temporarily, alienate civilised opinion. "At first, incidentally," he writes on the pages describing "involuntary expropriation," "people will avoid us. We are in bad odor. By the time the reshaping of world opinion in our favor has been completed, we shall be firmly established in our country, no longer fearing the influx of foreigners, and receiving our visitors with aristocratic benevolence and proud amiability."
This was not a prospect to charm a peon in Argentina or a fellah in Palestine. But Herzl did not intend his Diary for immediate publication.
One need not wholly accept the conspiratorial tone of these comments (whether Herzl's or Stewart's) to grant that world opinion has not been, until during the sixties and seventies when the Palestinians forced their presence on world politics, very much concerned with the expropriation of Palestine. I said earlier that in this regard the major Zionist achievement was getting international legitimization for its own accomplishments, thereby making the Palestinian cost of these accomplishments seem to be irrelevant. But it is clear from Herzl's thinking that that could not have been done unless there was a prior European inclination to view the natives as irrelevant to begin with. That is, those natives already fit a more or less acceptable classificatory grid, which made them sui generis inferior to Western or white men-and it is this grid that Zionists like Herzl appropriated, domesticating it from the general culture of their time to the unique needs of a developing Jewish nationalism. One needs to repeat that what in Zionism served the no doubt justified ends of Jewish tradition, saving the Jews as a people from homelessness and anti-Semitism and restoring them to nationhood, also collaborated with those aspects of the dominant Western culture (in which Zionism institutionally lived) making it possible for Europeans to view non-Europeans as inferior, marginal, and irrelevant. For the Palestinian Arab, therefore, it is the collaboration that has counted, not by any means the good done to Jews. The Arab has been on the receiving end not of benign Zionism-which has been restricted to Jews-but of an essentially discriminatory and powerful culture, of which, in Palestine, Zionism has been the agent.
Here I must digress to say that the great difficulty today of writing about what has happened to the Arab Palestinian as a result of Zionism, is that Zionism has had a large number of successes. There is no doubt in my mind, for example, that most Jews do regard Zionism and Israel as urgently important facts for Jewish life, particularly because of what happened to the Jews in this century. Then too, Israel has some remarkable political and cultural achievements to its credit, quite apart from its spectacular military successes until recently. Most important, Israel is a subject about which, on the whole, one can feel positive with less reservations than the ones experienced in thinking about the Arabs, who are outlandish, strange, hostile Orientals after all; surely that is an obvious fact to anyone living in the West. Together these successes of Zionism have produced a prevailing view of the question of Palestine that almost totally favors the victor, and takes hardly any account of the victim.
Yet what did the victim feel as he watched the Zionists arriving in Palestine? What does he think as he watches Zionism described today? Where does he look in Zionism's history to locate its roots, and the origins of its practices toward him? These are the questions that are never asked-and they are precisely the ones that I am trying to raise, as well as answer, here in this examination of the links between Zionism and European imperialism. My interest is in trying to record the effects of Zionism on its victims, and these effects can only be studied genealogically in the framework provided by imperialism, even during the nineteenth century when Zionism was still an idea and not a state called Israel. For the Palestinian now who writes critically to see what his or her history has meant, and who tries-as I am now trying-to see what Zionism has been for the Palestinians, Antonio Gramsci's observation is relevant, that "the consciousness of what one really is. . . is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory." The job of producing an inventory is a first necessity, Gramsci continued, and so it must be now, when the "inventory" of what Zionism's victims (not its beneficiaries) endured is rarely exposed to public view.
If we have become accustomed to making fastidious distinctions between ideology (or theory) and practice, we shall be more accurate historically if we do not do so glibly in the case of the European imperialism that actually annexed most of the world during the nineteenth century. Imperialism was and still is a political philosophy whose aim and purpose for being is territorial expansion and its legitimization. A serious underestimation of imperialism, however, would be to consider territory in too literal a way. Gaining and holding an imperium means gaining and holding a domain, which includes a variety of operations, among them constituting an area, accumulating its inhabitants, having power over its ideas, people, and of course, its land, converting people, land, and ideas to the purposes and for the use of a hegemonic imperial design; all this as a result of being able to treat reality appropriatively. Thus the distinction between an idea that one feels to be one's own and apiece of land that one claims by right to be one's own (despite the presence on the land of its working native inhabitants) is really nonexistent, at least in the world of nineteenth-century culture out of which imperialism developed. Laying claim to an idea and laying claim to a territory-given the extraordinarily current idea that the non-European world was there to be claimed, occupied, and ruled by Europe-were considered to be different sides of the same, essentially constitutive activity, which had the force, the prestige, and the authority of science. Moreover, because in such fields as biology, philology, and geology the scientific consciousness was principally a reconstituting, restoring, and transforming activity turning old fields into new ones, the link between an outright imperialist attitude toward distant lands in the Orient and a scientific attitude to the "inequalities" of race was that both attitudes depended on the European will, on the determining force necessary to change confusing or useless realities into an orderly, disciplined set of new classifications useful to Europe. Thus in the works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier the white races became scientifically different from reds, yellows, blacks, and browns, and, consequently, territories occupied by those races also newly became vacant, open to Western colonies, developments, plantations, and settlers. Additionally, the less equal races were made useful by being turned into what the white race studied and came to understand as a part of its racial and cultural hegemony (as in Joseph de Gobineau and Oswald Spengler); or, following the impulse of outright colonialism, these lesser races were put to direct use in the empire. When in 1918, Georges Clemenceau stated that he believed he had "an unlimited right of levying black troops to assist in the defense of French territory in Europe if France were attacked in the future by Germany," he was saying that by some scientific right France had the knowledge and the power to convert blacks into what Raymond Poincare called an economic form of gunfodder for the white Frenchman. Imperialism, of course, cannot be blamed on science, but what needs to be seen is the relative ease with which science could be deformed into a rationalization for imperial domination.
Supporting the taxonomy of a natural history deformed into a social anthropology whose real purpose was social control, was the taxonomy of linguistics. With the discovery of a structural affinity between groups or families of languages by such linguists as Franz Bopp, William Jones, and Freidrich von Schlegel, there began as well the unwarranted extension of an idea about language families into theories of human types having determined ethnocultural and racial characteristics. In 1808, as an instance, Schlegel discerned a clear rift between the Indo-Germanic (or Aryan) languages on the one hand and, on the other, the Semitic-African languages. The former he said were creative, regenerative, lively, and aesthetically pleasing; the latter were mechanical in their operations, unregenerate, passive. From this kind of distinction, Schlegel, and later Renan, went on to generalize about the great distance separating a superior Aryan and an inferior non-Aryan mind, culture, and society.
Perhaps the most effective deformation or translation of science into something more accurately resembling political administration took place in the amorphous field assembling together jurisprudence, social philosophy; and political theory. First of all, a fairly influential tradition in philosophic empiricism (recently studied by Harry Bracken) seriously advocated a type of racial distinction that divided humankind into lesser and greater breeds of men. The actual problems (in England, mainly) of dealing with a 300-year-old Indian empire, as well as numerous voyages of discovery, made it possible "scientifically" to show that some cultures were advanced and civilized, others backward and uncivilized; these ideas, plus the lasting social meaning imparted to the fact of color (and hence of race) by philosophers like John Locke and David Hume, made it axiomatic by the middle of the nineteenth century that Europeans always ought to rule non-Europeans.
This doctrine was reinforced in other ways, some of which had a direct bearing, I think, on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. Among the supposed juridical distinctions between civilized and noncivilized peoples was an attitude toward land, almost a doxology about land, which non civilized people supposedly lacked. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he bred useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For an uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly (i.e., inefficiently by Western standards) or it was left to rot. From this string of ideas, by which whole native societies who lived on American, African, and Asian territories for centuries were suddenly denied their right to live on that land, came the great dispossessing movements of modern European colonialism, and with them all the schemes for redeeming the land, resettling the natives, civilizing them, taming their savage customs, turning them into useful beings under European rule. Land in Asia, Africa, and the Americas was there for European exploitation, because Europe understood the value of land in away impossible for the natives. At the end of the century, Joseph Conrad dramatized this philosophy in Heart of Darkness, and embodied it powerfully in the figure of Kurtz, a man whose colonial dreams for the earth's "dark places" were made by "all Europe." But what Conrad drew on, as indeed the Zionists drew on also, was the kind of philosophy set forth by Robert Knox in his work The Races of Man, in which men were divided into white and advanced (the producers) and dark, inferior wasters. Similarly, thinkers like John Westlake and before him, Emer de Vat tel divided the world's territories into empty (though inhabited by nomads, and a low kind of society) and civilized-and the former were then "revised" as being ready for takeover on the basis of a higher, civilized right to them.
I very greatly simplify the transformation in perspective by which millions of acres outside metropolitan Europe were thus declared empty, their people and societies decreed to be obstacles of progress and development, their space just as assertively declared open to European white settlers and their civilizing exploitation. During the 1870s in particular, new European geographical societies mushroomed as a sign that geography had become, according to Lord Curzon, "the most cosmopolitan of all the sciences." Not for nothing in Heart of Darkness did Marlow admit to his passion for maps.
I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces [populated by natives, that is] on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all looked like that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.
Geography and a passion for maps developed into an organized matter mainly devoted to acquiring vast overseas territories. And, Conrad also said, this
. . . conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea-something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . .
Conrad makes the point better than anyone, I think. The power to conquer territory is only in part a matter of physical force: there is the strong moral and intellectual component making the conquest itself secondary to an idea, which dignifies (and indeed hastens) pure force with arguments drawn from science, morality, ethics, and a general philosophy. Everything in Western culture potentially capable of dignifying the acquisition of new domainsas anew science, for example, acquires new intellectual territory for itself--could be put at the service of colonial adventures. And was put, the "idea" always informing the conquest, making it entirely palatable. One example of such an idea spoken about openly as a quite normal justification for what today would be called colonial aggression, is to be found in these passages by Paul Leroy- Beaulieu, a leading French geographer in the 1870s:
A society colonizes, when having itself reached a high degree of maturity and of strength, it procreates, it protects, it places in good condition of development, and it brings to virility anew society to which it has given birth. Colonization is one of the most complex and delicate phenomena of social physiology.
There is no question of consulting the natives of the territory where the new society is to be given birth. What counts is that a modern European society has enough vitality and intellect to be "magnified by this pouring out of its exuberant activity on the outside." Such activity must be good since it is believed in, and since it also carries within itself the healthy current of an entire advanced civilization. Therefore, Leroy- Beaulieu added,
Colonization is the expansive force of a people; it is its power of reproduction; it is its enlargement and its multiplication through space; it is the subjugation of the universe or avast part of it to that people's language, customs, ideas, and laws.
Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of the European metropolitan society. Everything in those territories that suggested waste, disorder, uncounted resources, was to be converted into productivity, order, taxable, potentially developed wealth. You get rid of most of the offending human and animal blight"--whether because it simply sprawls untidily allover the place or because it roams around unproductively and uncounted-and you confine the rest to reservations, compounds, native homelands, where you can count, tax, use them profitably, and you build anew society on the vacated space. Thus was Europe reconstituted abroad, its "multiplication in space" successfully projected and managed. The result was a widely varied group of little Europes scattered throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas, each reflecting the circumstances, the specific instrumentalities of the parent culture, its pioneers, its vanguard settlers.20 All of them were similar in one other major respect--despite the differences, which were considerable-- and that was that their life was carried on with an air of normality. The most grotesque reproductions of Europe (South Africa, Rhodesia, etc.) were considered appropriate; the worst discrimination against and exclusions of the natives were thought to be normal because "scientifically" legitimate; the sheer contradiction of living a foreign life in an enclave many physical and cultural miles from Europe, in the midst of hostile and uncomprehending natives, gave rise to a sense of history, a stubborn kind of logic, asocial and political state decreeing the present colonial venture as normal, justified, good.
With specific reference to Palestine, what were to become institutional Zionist attitudes to the Arab Palestinian natives and their supposed calms to a normal existence, were more than prepared for in the attitudes and the practices of British scholars, administrators, and experts who were officially involved in the exploitation and government of Palestine since the mid-nineteenth century. Consider that in 1903 the Bishop of Salisbury told members of the Palestine Exploration Fund that
Nothing, I think, that has been discovered makes us feel any regret at the suppression of Canaanite civilisation [the euphemism for native Arab Palestinians] by Israelite civilisation. . . . [The excavations show how] the Bible has not misrepresented at all the abomination of the Canaanite culture which was superseded by the Israelite culture.
Miriam Rosen, a young American scholar, has compiled a spinetingling collection of typical British attitudes to the Palestinians, attitudes which in extraordinary ways prepare for the official Zionist view, from Weizmann to Begin, of the native Palestinian. Here are some citations from Ms. Rosen's important work:
Tyrwhitt Drake, who wrote in a survey of Western Palestine:
The fear of the fellahin that we have secret designs of re-conquering the country is a fruitful source of difficulty. This got over, remains the crass stupidity which cannot give a direct answer to a simple question, the exact object of which it does not understand; for why should a Frank wish to know the name of an insignificant wady or hill in their land?The fellahin are all in the worst type of humanity that I have come across in the east. . . . The fellah is totally destitute of all moral sense. . . .
The Dean of Westminster, on the "obstacles" before the Palestine Exploration Fund Survey:
And these labours had to be carried out, not with the assistance of those on the spot, but in spite of the absurd obstacles thrown in the way of work by that singular union of craft, ignorance and stupidity, which can only be found in Orientals.
Lord Kitchener on the Survey of Galilee:
We hope to rescue from the hands of that ruthless destroyer, the uneducated Arab, one of the most interesting ruins in Palestine, hallowed by footprints of our Lord. I allude to the synagogue of Capernaum, which is rapidly disappearing owing to the stones being burnt for lime.
One C. R. Conder in his "Present Condition of Palestine":
The native peasantry are well worth a few words of description. They are brutally ignorant, fanatical, and above all, inveterate liars; yet they have qualities which would, if developed, render them a useful population. [He cites their cleverness, energy, and endurance for pain, heat, etc.]
Sir Flinders Petrie:
The Arab has a vast balance of romance put to his credit very needlessly. He is as disgustingly incapable as most other savages, and no more worth romancing about than Red Indians or Maoris. I shall be glad to return to the comparatively shrewd and sensible Egyptians.
Charles Clermont-Ganneau's reflections on "The Arabs in Palestine":
Arab civilization is a mere deception--it no more exists than the horrors of Arab conquest. It is but the last gleam of Greek and Roman civilization gradually dying out in the powerless but respectful hands of Islam.
Or Stanley Cook's view of the country:
. . . rapid deterioration, which (it would seem) was only temporarily stopped by the energetic Crusaders. Modern travellers have often noticed the inherent weakness of the characters of the inhabitants and, like Robinson, have realized that, for the return of prosperity, "nothing is wanted but the hand of the man to till the ground."
Or, finally, R. A. S. Macalister:
It is no exaggeration to say that throughout these long centuries the native inhabitants of Palestine do not appear to have made a single contribution of any kind whatsoever to material civilization. It was perhaps the most unprogressive country on the face of the earth. Its entire culture was derivative. . .
These, then, are some of the main points that must be made about the background of Zionism in European imperialist or colonialist attitudes. For whatever it may have done for Jews, Zionism essentially saw Palestine as the European imperialist did, as an empty territory paradoxically "filled" with ignoble or perhaps even dispensable natives; it allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann quite clearly said after World War I, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing anew Jewish state in Palestine, and it did not think except in negative terms of "the natives," who were passively supposed to accept the plans made for their land; as even Zionist historians like Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine (well before World War I) always met with unmistakable native resistance, not because the natives thought that Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners; moreover, in formulating the concept of a . Jewish nation "reclaiming" its own territory, Zionism not only accepted the generic racial concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually peopled not by an advanced but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominant. Thus that implicit assumption of domination led specifically in the case of Zionism to the practice of ignoring the natives for the most part as not entitled to serious consideration. Zionism therefore developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. Maxime Rodinson is perfectly correct in saying that Zionist indifference to the Palestinian natives was an indifference linked to European supremacy, which benefited even Europe's proletarians and oppressed minorities. In fact, there can be no doubt that if the ancestral homeland had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world at the time, one that had thoroughly settled down in a territory it had infused with a powerful national consciousness, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists.
In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of "native people" in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their "nonplace," Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the most consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism-at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. Rodinson again:
The element that made it possible to connect these aspirations of Jewish shopkeepers, peddlers, craftsmen, and intellectuals in Russia and elsewhere to the conceptual orbit of imperialism was one small detail that seemed to be of no importance: Palestine was inhabited by another people
Zionis Galau: Pilih Argentina atau Palestina (3)
Senin, 30 April 2012, 22:18 WIB. http://www.republika.co.id/berita/internasional/palestina-israel/12/05/01/m3at6f-zionis-galau-pilih-argentina-atau-palestina-3
Pembagian Palestina, wilayah Yahudi, dan Yerusalem sebagai wilayah internasional (peta)
Manuver Balfour
Masih ingat Deklarasi Balfour, bukan? Di hadapan Kabinet Perang, Balfour berdalih bahwa dukungan ini akan membantu propaganda di Rusia dan Amerika Serikat, agar kedua negara itu mendukung Inggris untuk memenangkan Perang Dunia I.
Secara politis, Balfour berharap mendulang simpati sehingga populasi Yahudi di kedua negara itu mendesak pemerintah mereka untuk mendukung Inggris. Ramalan ini cukup jitu, terutama lobi kaum Zionis di Amerika Serikat amat kuat.
Namun pada 1919, dukungan pada Zionisme di Inggris makin melemah. Banyak pendukung Zionisme menyadari bahwa tujuan Zionisme adalah mendirikan negara di atas Palestina. Sebutan national home dalam deklarasi Balfour diterjemahkan menjadi state atau negara. Imigrasi kaum Yahudi ke tanah Palestina pun terus dimobilisasi.
Seiring munculnya gejolak perlawanan di Palestina dan Negara Arab sekitarnya, Inggris memutuskan untuk mulai menjauh dari Zionisme. Mereka juga melihat, bahwa lahan yang tersedia tak lagi mencukupi bagi kedatangan kaum Yahudi. Inggris juga menilai, mereka telah memenuhi janji pada Deklarasi Balfour.
Naiknya Adolf Hitler menjadi Kanselir Jerman pada 1933 meningkatkan imigrasi kaum Yahudi Jerman ke Palestina. Aksi ini mengundang perlawanan bangsa Arab, namun ditumpas pasukan Inggris.
Teroris yang jadi Perdana Menteri
Kepentingan atas minyak dunia Arab juga membuat Inggris berpikir ulang mengenai Zionisme. Pada 1939, Inggris mengeluarkan “buku putih” yang menyebutkan bahwa kebijakan Inggris bukanlah menjadikan Palestina sebagai negara bagi kaum Yahudi.
Langkah ini mengundang reaksi baru dari kaum Zionis. Aksi lewat jalan teror pun dilakukan. Mengutip tulisan Ritchie Ovendale (2002) dalam jurnal akademis yang beredar di Amerika Serikat dan Inggris, Historian, disebutkan bahwa Zionis mendirikan Irgun Zvai Leumi yang bertujuan “melancarkan kampanye teror terhadap populasi Arab”. Hmm... jadi siapakah yang disebut teroris ya?
Pada 1942, Irgun dipimpin Manachem Begin –kelak ia mendapat posisi terhormat sebagai perdana menteri Israel. Serangan pun mulai diarahkan pula kepada lambang-lambang kekuasaan Inggris di Timur Tengah. Inggris pun makin terdesak karena dukungannya pada Zionisme menjadi bumerang. Sementara lobi Zionis terhadap pemerintah AS semakin ditingkatkan, misalnya electoral punishment yang mengancam akan menarik dukungan mereka pada pemilu.
Kemenangan kaum Zionis memang telah di atas angin. Hal ini, tulis Ovendale, didukung oleh mesin propaganda serta akses pada media yang mudah bagi mereka. Bandingkan dengan bangsa Arab yang tak memiliki jalur informasi untuk menyuarakan aspirasi mereka. Kelebihan lainnya adalah dengan menggunakan Holocaust untuk mendulang simpati.
Setelah menyerahkan mandat Palestina kepada PBB, pada 1947 Majelis Umum PBB pun melakukan voting pemecahan wilayah Palestina. Zionisme meraih kemenangan lewat Resolusi 181 yang dikenal dengan Partition Plan. Tanah Palestina pun terbagi menjadi tiga: wilayah Arab, wilayah Yahudi, dan status Yerusalem di bawah pengawasan internasional.
Partition Plan mendorong kaum Zionis mendeklarasikan berdirinya negara Israel pada 14 Mei 1948. Hanya butuh waktu 12 menit sejak Israel dideklarasikan, Presiden AS saat itu, Harry S Truman, langsung menghubungi Israel dan menyatakan pengakuan atas berdirinya negara tersebut.
Namun bagi bangsa Arab, Palestina adalah tanah air mereka, sehingga mereka menolak Resolusi nomor 181. Hingga kini, terlepas dari pengakuan politik dari negara lain, kedudukan Palestina dan Israel tetap tak setara, mengingat secara hukum, status Palestina hingga kini bukan sebuah negara.
Sementara hingga 1949, angka resmi pengungsi Palestina yang terusir dari negerinya nyaris mencapai 1 juta jiwa. Mereka tertahan di negeri sekitarnya setelah lahan yang mereka tinggali selama ini berada di tangan Israel.
Bagaimana aksi Israel selanjutnya? Holocaust ternyata menjadi komoditas yang laris "dijual" oleh Israel. Negara yang ternasuk di jajaran pemilik militer terkuat di dunia ini berhasil memotret diri sebagai "korban". Gemas? Ulasannya ada di bagian terakhir rangkaian tulisan ini. Redaktur: Yeyen Rostiyani
Zionis Galau: Pilih Argentina atau Palestina (2)
Monday, 30 April 2012, 22:04 WIB
Lahirnya lagu Hatiqfa
Palestina di bawah Mandat Inggris 1920-1948 (peta)
Kongres Zionis pertama di Basel pada 1897 diikuti manuver taktis dari Max Nordau, mengubah istilah tanah air ini menjadi heimmstatte, yang diadopsi sebagai sinonim dari "negara". Sepulang dari Basel inilah perkembangan pun pesat. Muncullah World Zionist Organisation, bendera negara, Hatiqfa sebagai lagu kebangsaan, dan Jewish National Fund.
Herzl meninggal pada 1904. Ia pun menjadi mitos yang diagung-agungkan para pendukung Zionisme. Rupanya pada akhir konferensi di Basel, ia mencatat dalam diarinya, bahwa di Basel ia berhasil mendirikan negara Yahudi. Setengah abad kemudian, orang menyadari ambisinya menjadi kenyataan.
Penerus Herzl, Chaim Weizzman, tinggal di Manchester, Inggris. Pada 1906 ia melakukan pendekatan ke berbagai pihak, termasuk Arthur John Balfour. Meski berstatus mantan perdana menteri, namun Balfour masih berada dalam lingkaran kekuasaan Inggris. Sementara populasi Yahudi di Palestina masih belum mencapai 10 persen dibanding bangsa Arab.
Pada 2 November 1917, Kabinet Perang Inggris mengizinkan Balfour yang saat itu menjadi menteri luar negeri, memberikan surat simpati kepada tujuan Zionisme. Surat yang dikenal sebagai Deklarasi Balfour ini menyebutkan,
"His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish People, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non Jewish communitie in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
Terjemahan surat itu kurang lebih berbunyi, "Pemerintahan Yang Mulia bersimpati bagi berdirinya sebuah national home di Palestina bagi bangsa Yahudi dan akan mengerahkan daya upaya untuk mendukung tercapiainya tujuan ini, juga jelas dipahami bahwa tidak boleh ada tindakan yang dapat menimbulkan prasangka mengenai hak sipil dan religius bagi masyarakat non-Yahudi yang berada di Palestina atau pun hak dan status politik yang sudah dimiliki kaum Yahudi di negara lain."
Bagaimana kelanjutan Deklarasi Balfour? Apa pula manuver Balfou yang akhirnya mengantarkan kaum Zionis pada berdirinya Israel pada 14 Mei 1948? Kisah itu dapat Anda ikuti pada bab berikut. Redaktur: Yeyen Rostiyani
Zionis Galau: Pilih Argentina atau Palestina (1)
Senin, 30 April 2012, 21:52 WIB
Palestina di bawah Mandat Inggris 1920-1948 (peta)
Pada 64 tahun silam, tepatnya 14 Mei 1948, Israel resmi berdiri di tanah Palestina. Bagi mereka, inilah kemenangan. Bagi Palestina ini adalah bencana besar atau an-Nakba- yang mengiris hati. Sedang umat Islam harus menyaksikan kaum Zionis menggerogoti selangkah demi selangkah tanah suci tempat Rasullullah saw ber-miraj ke langit.
Dalam jurnal akademis yang beredar di Amerika Serikat dan Inggris, Historian, Ritchie Ovendale (2002) pernah memaparkan asal-muasal konflik antara Arab dan Israel. Mantan Profesor Politik Internasional di University of Wales, Aberystwyth, di Inggris ini menyebutkan sikap anti-Semit –menurutnya, istilah ini muncul 1860-- di kawasan Eropa menjadi cikal-bakal pergerakan kaum Yahudi. Di Rusia, sikap anti-Semit ini disebut pogroms.
Periode Dreyfus menandai imigrasi kaum Yahudi Eropa yang kemudian menetap di Kanada, Inggris, Australia, dan Afrika Selatan. Sebagian lagi berimigrasi ke wilayah Kekhalifahan Utsmaniyyah, yang disebut Palestina. Namun jumlah terbesar mendarat di Amerika Serikat (AS). Hingga kini, AS dikenal memiliki komunitas Yahudi terbesar di luar Israel. Itu sebabnya, merangkul Yahudi adalah tugas penting bagi siapa saja yang ingin meraih kekuasaan di AS.
Argentina atau Palestina?
Ide mengenai “tanah air” (homeland –red) bagi kaum Yahudi menggelinding pertama kali dari tangan Leon Pinsker pada 1882, lewat buku Auto-Emancipation. Menurutnya, kaum Yahudi harus memiliki “tanah air” sendiri.
Kata Zionis pertama kali mungkin digunakan Nathan Birnbaum dalam artikel pada 1886. Maknanya, kurang lebih dipahami mereka sebagai “pendirian kembali” tanah air Yahudi di Palestina atau yang digagas Birnbaum sebagai Eretz-Israel.
Secara politis, Zionisme diadopsi Theodore Herzl. Tulisannya, Der Judenstaat(Negeri Kaum Yahudi -Red) terbit pertama kali di Wina, Austria, pada 1896. Ia semakin mengristalkan ide pendirian tanah air bagi kaum Yahudi. Hingga saat itu, istilah tanah air masih digunakan, dan belum menyebut istilah “negara”. Di manakah lokasi tanah air itu? Herzl memiliki dua pilihan tempat: Argentina atau Palestina.
Mengapa Argentina? Alasannya cukup sederhana, karena menurut Herzl, ''kondisi alamnya sebagai salah satu negara terkaya di dunia, wilayahnya yang luas, populasi yang sedikit dan cuaca yang sedang.''
Namun pilihan akhirnya jatuh kepada Palestina. Pilihan ini bersandar pada Kitab Perjanjian Lama. Di dalamnya, wilayah Palestina –yang jatuh ke tangan Romawi kemudian berakhir di kekhalifahan Utsmaniyyah-- disebut sebagai the Promised Land atau tanah yang dijanjikan.
Sekadar gambaran, tidak semua kelompok Yahudi menyakini Israel sebagai manifestasi dari the Promised Land. Kelompok Yahudi Ortodoks di AS misalnya, mereka justru menentang Israel. Mereka percaya, the Promised Land tidak diraih dengan cara perebutan dan penjajahan seperti yang dilakukan kaum Zionis. Jadi? Nantikan tulisan berikutnya. Redaktur: Yeyen Rostiyani
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