The first issue of the Engage Journal is up. From the inaugural editorial by David Seymour and David Hirsh:
Paradoxically, many on the left presents the Israel/Palestine debate in terms reminiscent of George W. Bush’s now notorious comment that, “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. One is forced to choose between one national narrative and the other – between “good” and “evil” – as if any position not exhausted by this opposition simply does not exist. The Engage Journal develops a paradigm that rejects the dominance of such Manichean thinking. It refuses ways of thinking that mystifies and demonises either, on the one hand, Israelis or Jews or, on the other hand, Arabs, Palestinians or Muslims. It rejects the essentialism that presents one or other of these ‘sides’ as inherently and eternally racist, undemocratic or ‘fundamentalist’. Engage supports the praxis of democrats and anti-racists in both Israel and Palestine.
See also Shalom Lappin’s gripping piece on antisemitism in the UK. It’s long, but the gist is as follows:
Since the 1967 war Israel has pursued an increasingly repressive occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and, until July, 2005, Gaza. Under successive governments its relentless expansion of Jewish settlements has cut deeply into Palestinian land and threatened the prospects of a two-state solution. The occupation has inspired violent resistance and a large scale terrorist campaign, which in turn has provoked a sharp military response that involves systematic human rights abuses.
It is to be expected that these events should be an important topic of public conversation in Britain. It is also entirely reasonable that the actions of the Israeli government should be subjected to scrutiny and vigorous criticism.
However, Lappin continues:
Regardless of what one thinks of Zionism and the creation of Israel in historical terms, Israel is a country that has existed for close to sixty years, and it now has a population of 6,869,500. Of these, 5,529,300 (80%) are Israeli Jews, who constitute a clearly recognizable national entity characterised by a language, shared culture, and common history. Using the rhetoric of anti-Zionism to criticise Israel’s repression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories is, in most cases, a device for rendering the call for Israel’s elimination palatable. By reducing an entire nation to an ideology, one gives the appearance of calling for a change of political regime when one is, in fact, advocating the destruction of one country and its replacement by another.
The radical uniqueness of this stance becomes apparent when one considers that no parallel movements exist for dismantling other countries, even when these were created by territorial partition in response to religio-ethnic strife, as in the case of Pakistan and India (established at the same time as Israel), or through colonial conquest and ethnic cleansing, like Australia, Canada, the United States, and most Latin American countries. The fact that, in general, the damage done to the indigenous populations of these countries remains unaddressed has not undermined their international legitimacy, which is never brought into serious question.
Anti-Zionism is also widely used in the current debate as a means of criticising the overwhelming majority of Jews who support Israel’s existence, while avoiding direct reference to Jews as such. In this context “Zionist” has been emptied of its original historical and political content, and turned into a term of abuse that is used as a rough paraphrase of expressions like “racist” and “colonialist”.
In a more sinister vein, it is employed to suggest a powerful, quasi criminal political and financial lobby working from within the Jewish Community, in league with the Unite[d] States, to promote Israeli and Jewish interests by controlling the press and pulling levers of international power. It is in this mode that current anti-Zionism blossoms into full blown anti-Semitism.
These distinct strands of anti-Zionism frequently blend into each other, and they often become closely intertwined in extreme anti-Israel discourse, despite their conceptual differences. The effect of this toxic mixture is that a line of discussion that may start out as reasonable, if forceful criticism of Israeli policy can quickly escalate into an assault on Israel as a country, and then graduate into transparently racist charges of Zionist control of the press and the political process.
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