A Durable Peace (16 page)

This is the true and only meaning of Zionism. At the close of World War I, and again after World War II, it had been so understood
not only by the Jewish people but by virtually the entire world. Many nations and peoples had admired the tenacity, courage,
and moral strength of the Zionist movement. They had marveled at Israel’s achievement in rebuilding a modern state on
the ruins of an ancient homeland. They had applauded the ingathering of the exiles from a hundred lands and the seemingly
miraculous revival of an ancient tongue. And they had thrilled at Israel’s ability to maintain its democratic and human ethic
in the face of one of the most remorseless campaigns of hatred in history. All this had been appreciated by people not only
in Europe and America but in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, where Israel and Zionism had served as a shining
example of the independence and progress that so many other nations, coming out from under the heel of empire, hoped to achieve.

These realities were not lost on the Arab regimes or on the Soviets. Indeed, their attack on Israel was not driven by political
interest alone. Deep down, they experienced an unforgiving resentment. For nothing so effectively unmasks dictators and despots
who hide behind the rhetoric of “liberation” and “self-determination” as a genuine movement of national liberation. Israel
and Zionism, by their very existence, exposed the claims of the tyrants and totalitarians for the sham that they are.

But the sham was particularly preposterous in labeling so completely color-blind a movement racist. Theodor Herzl, the founder
of modern Zionism, had himself declared the plight of blacks to be a cause of fundamental concern to him, like that of the
Jews:

There is still one problem of racial misfortune unresolved. The depths of that problem, in all their horror, only a Jew can
fathom.… I mean the Negro problem. Think of the hair-raising horrors of the slave trade. Human beings, because their skins
are black, are stolen, carried off, and sold…. Now that I have lived to see the restoration of the Jews, I should like to
pave the way for the restoration of the Negroes.
⁷⁹

Almost a century later, Israel’s rescue of Ethiopia’s Jews showed Zionism to be the only movement in history to transport
blacks out of Africa not to enslave them but to liberate them.

In 1985, on the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the resolution defaming Zionism, I organized a symposium on the United
Nations premises to attack this infamy. The Arab states and the PLO were especially irked by this affront (how dared we convene
a conference on “their” ground?), and they tried unsuccessfully to block it. But what irritated them even more was that one
of the speakers, Rahamin Elazar, was an Ethiopian Jew. He described in moving terms his own personal salvation in coming to
Israel. Since then, tens of thousands of members of his community have followed in their great exodus from Ethiopia. An accusation
of racism against the Zionists by the Arab world—whose contemporary customs include the keeping of indentured black servants
in the Gulf states and a prolific history of trading along the slave coast of Africa, as well as the repeated massacres of
blacks by the Sudanese Arabs—should have been received like a witless joke.

It wasn’t. The combined power of the Arab and Soviet blocs gave them complete control of the UN, its microphones, and its
printing presses. To be sure, even without the campaign against Israel, one would have been hard pressed to consider the UN
General Assembly a pure arbiter of moral truth. Indeed, what can be said of an institution that failed to curb in even the
slightest way the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, a war that claimed a million lives and turned five million people into
refugees; that for seven years did not lift a finger to stop the sickening carnage of the Iran-Iraq War, in which another
million perished; that did not even address, much less remedy, such outrages as the genocide in Cambodia, the horrific slaughter
of the Ibo in Biafra, and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Uganda under Idi Amin, all in flagrant violation
of the UN’s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
⁸⁰

Yet despite all these and other enormous affronts to conscience, nothing injected such calumny into the arteries of international
opinion as the Zionism-racism resolution did against Israel. It may be tempting to dismiss this resolution as a meaningless
absurdity, especially after its belated renunciation in December
1991.
⁸¹
But that would be a mistake. We must remember that the Arabs had a full sixteen years to drive home their racism message,
and that even after its formal renunciation, this defamation lives on in the minds of many nations and their leaders. I stress
again that, for the first time in history, a world body had given its stamp of approval to the libeling of an entire people.
In the very century of the Holocaust, one must not forget the insidious power of uninhibited libel. Without the torrents of
slander poured on the Jews by the Nazis, the Holocaust would never have been possible. Had the Nazis not succeeded in brainwashing
Germans and non-Germans alike into believing that the Jews were reprehensible, subhuman, and in fact a different species,
they would not have secured the collaboration of thousands upon thousands of ordinary people in moving the machinery of genocide.

We know that in the two or three European countries where such collaboration did not take place the majority of Jews were
saved. Well known is the example of Denmark, in which the king himself declared that if any of his subjects wore the yellow
badge, then he too would wear it; Denmark’s Jews were successfully smuggled to safety in Sweden. Less well known but equally
dramatic is the case of Bulgaria, where the entire educated elite of the country opposed the implementation of official anti-Semitism.
Thus, the Union of Bulgarian Lawyers and the Union of Writers respectively denounced the German-imposed anti-Jewish legislation
as “socially damaging” and “very harmful.” The head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church described the directives as “thunder
from a clear sky.” A German report attributed Bulgarian disobedience of these laws to the “inactivity of the police and the
complete indifference of the majority of the Bulgarian people.” Particularly telling is the explanation that the German ambassador
in Sofia offered to his superiors in Berlin: He told them that the “Bulgarian public lacks the understanding of the Jewish
question in historical terms.” This failure of understanding was in fact directly due to the stubborn refusal of the country’s
leadership—writers, clergy,
teachers, politicians—to spread the Nazi slander, as a consequence of which Bulgarian Jewry was saved.
⁸²

In other words, libel is the prelude to murder. It is a license to kill. The libeling of an entire people separates that people
from the rest of humanity, making the lives of its members dispensable, its oppressors and murderers immune to blame.

Appearances notwithstanding, the libel of “Zionism equals racism” is the very same libel that was preached by the Nazis. It
is the same anti-Semitism dressed up in trendy terminology. For the bitter truth is that the horrors of the Holocaust did
not make anti-Semitism unfashionable; they only made some of the old terminology embarrassing. Zionism
and
Zionist
now serve as euphemisms for
Judaism and Jew.
And since there is no worse epithet in today’s lexicon than
racist,
it is the term that is used to replace the whole range of old-fashioned invective. It is the contemporary equivalent of
Christ-killer, traitor, usurer, international conspirator All this has stolen into vogue under the sham disclaimer of “I’m
not anti-Semitic, I’m just anti-Zionist”—the equivalent of “I’m not anti-American, I just think the United States shouldn’t
exist.”

Building on the Zionism-racism resolution, the Arab propaganda machine has now been at work for a quarter of a century, ever
since the Six Day War, spinning a web of falsehoods that have permeated every issue and colored every opinion on the subject
of Israel. Even now, with the resolution overturned, the spires of untruth that it erected and buttressed remain standing,
having taken on a terrible life of their own. So successful has been the demonization of the Jewish state that many people
are willing to overlook the most heinous crimes, to pardon virtually any excess on the part of the Arabs, since, after all,
one has to take into account their “plight” and “all they have suffered.” Just as they had planned, the Arabs have succeeded
in foisting their historical fabrications into the media and from there onto the world public and its representatives everywhere.
With this, the Arabs have achieved an astonishing transformation, making themselves over into the
aggrieved party demanding justice, and Israel into an “entity”—unnatural, alien, immoral—capable of virtually no right because
its very existence is itself an irredeemable wrong.

Thus it is that Zionism, once considered a noble and legitimate national movement worthy of broad international support during
the establishment of the new world order at the opening of the twentieth century, is itself the odd man out at the initiation
of the new world order at the close of the century. Israel is the only nation on the face of the globe that important sections
of opinion consider to be guilty for being a nation—wrong for claiming its homeland as its own, culpable for building its
homes, schools, and factories on this land, and unjust for trying to defend itself against enemies who wish its destruction.
This is the view that the British colonialists fashioned for their own purposes, but today it has been accepted as truth by
many who have no conception of where these ideas came from—or where they might lead.

Of course, there are many people who argue that they have not given up on the basic promise that was made at Versailles to
the Jews. After all, they say, we have no desire to see Israel destroyed—we are only looking for balance between Israel and
the Arabs. But this position obscures what is in fact an astonishing disregard for the most basic demands of Israel’s survival.
Hence many in the United States, which measures its strategic depth in terms of thousands
of miles, chastise Israel for its insistence on having a few
tens
of miles of strategic depth. Hence while Western leaders constantly blare warnings that Israel must seek peace, they allow
their arms dealers to sell the Arab states almost
twenty times
the weaponry they sell Israel, including the pick of the most advanced systems in their arsenals. Hence some European countries
provide the means to produce even
nuclear weapons clearly aimed at Israel’s destruction to the most fanatical of its enemies, then condemn Israel for acting
against the menace. Hence important political figures, knowing full well that without immigration Israel’s position is precarious
at best, are cynically willing to impede
or endanger the movement of Jewish refugees to Israel, for the dubious end of ingratiating themselves with the Arabs.

True, the betrayal of Zionism by the West cannot today be found in explicit calls for an end to the Jewish state. Rather,
the betrayal is found in the nonchalance with which virtually the entire Western world demands that Israeli governments accept
risks that no elected official in any Western state would ever willingly accept for his own country. It is found in the insistence,
backed up by increasingly militant political and economic coercion, that Israel is an aggressor when it behaves like any other
nation, and is righteous only when it passively sits by and waits for the next blow to land. This creeping annulment of Israel’s
right to self-defense constitutes a continual erosion of the promise of Versailles. For once a nation no longer has the means
to freely defend its existence, its very right to exist is put into question. A right that cannot be defended is eventually
rendered meaningless.

As we have seen, the extraordinary constriction of the support for Zionism’s geographic and demographic needs has largely
been the result of a systematic campaign, originating with Western anti-Zionists in the first half of the century and led
by the Arab world in the second half, aimed at undermining belief in the justice of Israel’s cause. This campaign could not
have achieved such dramatic results without synchronizing its message with an appeal to Western self-interest. The argument
that wringing concessions from Israel is in the West’s interests, and particularly America’s, is identical to that which was
presented to the British during the 1920s and 1930s—and that led them to try to prevent the development of the Jewish state
by force of arms. It took a mere twenty years for Britain to be transformed from the sincere protector of the Jews and the
guarantor of their national restoration to one of the principal opponents of the restoration, abandoning the Jewish nation
at the brink of annihilation. The engine for this transformation was the idea that it was in the interest of Britain to concede
to the demands of the Arabs in their hatred of the Jewish
nation. Like the British, who were told that they would earn the gratitude of the Arabs if only they would prevent the immigration
of the Jews to Palestine, America is now told that it will earn that same gratitude if only it will force Israel to give up
the West Bank and curb immigration—steps that would purportedly cure all the problems of the Middle East, thereby stabilizing
world peace and assuring the flow of oil. In the next chapter I will examine how this exceptionally implausible claim has
been rendered plausible.

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