THE ZIONIST SCARECROW
by Raphael Israeli
Benador News
July 20, 2004

Zionism, the movement of national liberation of the Jewish people, which for the past century has lent impetus to the revival of Jewish nationhood in its land, and to one of the most successful nation-building ventures of modern times, has been used and manipulated by Arab and Muslim propaganda into the status of a reviled and much abused ideology on the world stage.

Much of this distortion has unfolded within and with the assistance, or at least complicity through silence, of the United Nations, that very world organization which was supposed to legitimize emerging nations in the post-colonial world.

And so, while G-d-forsaken tribes in remote places, that only few know how to locate on the map, have attained recognition and acclaim, the national movement of the ancient Jewish people on its antique land, has become the nemesis of the Arabs, the Muslims and much of the Third World.

Worse, it has been so thoroughly demonized and de-legitimized that in Arab/Muslim circles it has grown tantamount to the paradigm of evil. The process of demonization of Zionism in the Arab/Muslim world had been embraced from the very beginnings of its inception, since it was regarded as a rival to Arab nationalism for the take-over of Palestine as the land of the Jews, at the same time that Arabs and Muslims also regarded it as an Arab homeland and part and parcel of the Islamic patrimony.

Unable to eliminate Israel which Zionism has brought about, and fearing lest direct assaults against the Jews might seem or sound anti-Semitic in Western eyes and ears, the Arabs and Muslims found it expedient to focus their attacks on the political movement which generated the re-birth of the Jewish state, and to attach to it all the attributes that may make it abhorrent in the eyes of Third World countries which had just emerged from colonial rule: imperialism, colonialism, occupation, aggression, exploitation, oppression, discrimination and such.

Pioneered by the PLO, this propaganda effort soon spread across the non-Western world and became the mainstay of Arab, Muslim and Third World rhetoric. In fact, the very Charter of the PLO, adopted in 1964 and amended in 1968 by the Palestinian National Council, far constituting a political and social blueprint for the building of Palestinian nationalism and for stating the Palestinian national dream, on the contrary focused, in 15 out of its 33 articles, on the nightmare of the destruction of Zionism, a euphemism for the politicidal annihilation of the state of Israel.

The abusive vocabulary used by the Palestinians against Israel and its national movement became so recurrent in Arab and Muslim discourse that it was soon adopted by the 22-member Arab League and then the 50-odd members of the Islamic Conference, followed by some arm-twisting which resulted in the adoption of that harsh language by the majority of the Third World countries which constitute the majority in the UN. In this situation of automatic majority for any resolution tabled by the Arabs (even if it should suggest that the earth is flat), it was not difficult to pass that infamous UN resolution in 1975 which equaled ZIonism to racism.

The fact that all democratic, developed and liberal states voted against and most dictatorial, fascist, communist, and backward nations for, said volumes about the nature of the automatic majority in the UN. That vote was to be reversed in 1991 as a result of the Madrid Conference and the tremendous efforts exerted by the US, but the Arab and Muslim countries remained recalcitrant in their negative vote. In the Palestinian public, the popularity of the Hamas Charter, which was published at the onset of the first Intifadah (1988), and where Zionism was equaled to Nazism and worse, might have been the most blatant indication of the moods among Arabs and Muslims in general.

Since then, as if the UN had no slavery and oppression of Christians in Sudan to deal with, or the abuses of Saddam Hussein and Hafiz al-Assad to rein in, or the killings of Algeria to put an end to, or the nuclear programs of Libya and Iran to contain, it concentrated its attention on annual condemnations of Israel , led by the automatic majority.

All that climaxed in the shameful UN 2001 Durban Conference against racism, where anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism was so blatant and outrageous that the US quit and the conference disbanded in disgrace. But the Arabs/Muslims had made their point: Zionism was to remain outlawed and excommunicated in spite of the vote reversal of 1991. It is easy to understand that the more the Arabs/Muslims feel frustrated by their inability to catch up with Israel in the field of development and technology, the more inclined they are to blame Zionism.

They cannot exhibit any envy from a hated, though supremely successful, ideology; therefore, they abhor it and wish to destroy it. They found unexpected new allies in their endeavor: not only Muslim leaders like Makhatir of Malaysia, who in the presence of 57 Islamic Heads of States launched a vitriolic onslaught against the Jews and Zionism and won the standing ovation of all of them, including those who had signed peace with Israel; but anti-Semitic groups among both the liberal left and the radical right in Europe and in North America, added their voices to the Arab cacophony, making their vitriol appear anti-Zionist, namely acceptable and main-stream.

For it has become bon ton in many educated circles in Europe to blame Zionism for all the evils of the world, and the "shitty little country" of Israel as the mover and shaker of the "world conspiracy" that dominates the globe. So much so that following the disaster of September 11, the Saudis who authored that horror, like other Muslims from Pakistan to Morocco, immediately sought to put the burden on the Jews or the Zionists, because only they both possessed the evil mind to produce such a harrowing plot and mastered the organizational skill to mount the attack in all its frightening detail.

Lakhdar Brahimi, that product of the military junta of Algeria, who was thrust by Kofi Annan upon the grotesque task of constructing democracy in Iraq, also blamed Zionism for all the problems of the Middle East. Whether relevant to his task or not, he could not resist the temptation to share with his fellow Muslims his inborn antipathy to Zionism, and instead of relieving him of his job, the Secretary General simply intimated that it was his envoy's "personal opinion" to gratuitously splash mud on a member state. No apology followed, of course. This had become a normative discourse after all.

No wonder, then, that Muslims, no longer satisfied with using Zionism as a punching bag, began deploying it as a scarecrow to attack each other, to blame, frighten and menace by waving it in each other's face.

Bin Laden accuses his Saudi Kingdom of yielding to Zionist America in a subservient role, while the Princes who rule that medieval country compete with each other in tracking the terrorist wave that has been shaking the foundations of their regime back to its Zionist roots.

The implication is clear: if Zionists stand behind the plot to de-stabilize the country, then they must have common cause with al-Qa'ida which seeks the same. Zionism is everywhere: exactly as the Hamas Charter accused it of scheming the founding of Communism and capitalism at the same time, it can also bear the blame of serving the two sides of the Saudi divide: the Royal House and its al-Qai'da nemesis; trembling Prince Abdallah who is no longer certain of the stability of his inherited throne, and his arch-enemy Bin Laden who is scheming his end from the mountain caves of Western Pakistan.

From now on, one should beware of using Zionism, for it can mean one thing and its reverse. If you are threatened of Zionist "collusion", it may be for or against anything imaginable; if you are accused of Zionist collaboration, it may work for or against you, it all depends upon who says it and for what purpose. The safest, it may turn out, would be to sit on the Zionist seat itself, so that no one could suspect you of collusion or collaboration with it.

Raphael Israeli, the author of eighteen books on the Middle East, Islam, and Sino-Islamic relations, is Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies as well as Chinese History, at Hebrew University. He can be reached through www.benadorassociates.com.