The free market of ideas is a basic principle in all healthy democracies. But that doesn’t mean that there are no limits on what a newspaper should or should not publish.
A piece written by one Salman Abu Sita, recently published by ABC Australia, claiming to make “The moral case against Zionism,” is a case in point.
Put simply, there is no ‘moral case’ against a national liberation movement.
While we will focus on some parts, we refuse to fully engage with the details of an attempt to delegitimize an entire people. Before discussing some of the specific claims made, it’s important to look at the bigger picture. Though the writer may talk about this being the “moral case against Zionism,” attacks on Zionism aren’t a mere critique of an ideology; they are critiquing the entire existence of the country and its citizens.
The op-ed totally overlooks a basic truth: whatever your criticism of leaders and politicians, the fact remains that Jews have as much of a right as anyone to their own state.
Without that modicum of acknowledgement that Jews are not strangers to the Holy Land, that Jews have a stake in it and have ancient roots in it, Abu Sita’s op-ed amounts to a disgusting piece of delegitimization, one aimed at making the presence of Jews in their homeland invalid. That simply won’t rub.
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From the very start, the writer’s animus is absolutely clear:
Can there really be any doubt that the creation of the State of Israel was, at its heart, a colonialist act of dispossession, and has established an “apartheid regime” that systematically discriminates against and subjugates its own citizens? The evidence is overwhelming.
Already in the first sentence, two tired and disingenuous charges appears: that Israel is a “colonialist” state and an “apartheid” regime. The latter is an intellectually dishonest and false claim, an old smear used by those who despise Israel. The word features a further eight times over the course of the article. Anyone who starts, and indeed continues, in this vein is not interested in a serious debate about Israel but only in its delegitimization.
Related reading: The False Israel-Apartheid Libel
The former claim, that Israel’s creation was a colonialist act of dispossession, is just as fallacious as the apartheid charge. Zionism is not a colonial movement; it’s a national liberation movement for the Jewish people. Entirely missing from Abu Sita’s diatribe is acknowledgment of the Jewish people’s millennia-old roots in this land – which makes sense in a perverted way, because once you admit that, then the whole colonial argument just doesn’t work.
Even if one were to take a more nuanced approach and attempted to look at the positions and views of the British administrators and leaders who enabled Israel’s birth, and those of the early Zionists who advocated for the State of Israel, seizing on the flaws of these statesmen and leaders is emphatically not proof that Zionism is, at root, a colonial exercise. While Britain had a crucial role in Israel’s founding and undoubtedly has a colonial past – that does not mean everything it touched was a colonial project.
In the writer’s desperation to cast Jews as invaders, the piece repeatedly makes reference to European Jews, a convenient and tired attempt at portraying Jews as culturally alien and with no connection to the region.
Very much in accord with the ethos of late-nineteenth century Europe, Zionism was a colonialist, political movement that used a biblical religious frame to encourage more European Jews to emigrate. By the end of the nineteenth century, neither antisemitism in Europe nor religious sentiment had led to large numbers of Jews emigrating to Palestine.
In reality, the majority of Israeli Jews are actually of Middle Eastern extract. Naturally, the article obscures this inconvenient fact. It also refuses to acknowledge the reality that while the early political Zionists were indeed of European descent, the concept of Zionism is rooted in traditional Jewish beliefs and Jewish history: Jews originate in the Holy Land, and this is where a Jewish homeland belongs.
Related reading: The Jewish Connection to the Land of Israel
Similarly, Abu Sita uses scare quotes to suggest that Jews are not actually a nation.
Prior to the Paris conference, the inaugural Zionist conference in 1897 in Basel developed a plan, the Basel Program, to achieve a Jewish state by declaring that all Jews belonged to a nation of people and that this “nation” had rights to a country and that it would be in Palestine.
It might be hard for Abu Sita and his ilk to stomach, but the concept of a Jewish nation goes back millennia. The Hebrew term Am Yisrael, meaning the Nation of Israel, is found regularly in ancient Jewish texts.
Abu Sita is so busy condemning Zionism that he cannot bring himself to recognize that anti-Zionism is riddled with antisemitism. Halfway through his piece, he writes that “anti-Zionism from the outset was not antisemitic”. This is a stunning rewriting of history. As long as Zionism has existed, there have always been antisemitic elements present among those objecting to it, and these have elements only become more prominent with time. Abu Sita utterly ignores the antisemitism which riddles anti-Zionism.
Throughout the piece, Abu Sita makes numerous contentious claims. For example: “At the time of the Basel Congress, some 95 percent of the population were Arab Palestinians who owned 99 percent of the land.”
In reality, most of the land was owned by absentee property owners from other parts of the Ottoman Empire. That’s how the Jews managed to buy such a large amount of the land.
ABC Australia Does Journalism a Disservice
The op-ed section of a newspaper or media outlet is often its most vibrant and expressive. A good op-ed supplement will contain pieces from a range of perspectives, and allow writers to compete in the battleground of ideas.
As Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC Australia owes its citizens a platform upon which a wide range of ideas should be aired and discussed. Nevertheless, there should be fair limits as to what can and cannot be published. ABC Australia does journalism a disservice when publishing barely-disguised hate speech.
Pieces which serve to totally delegitimize an entire nation, articles which undermine the right of millions of people to live where they are, do not promote peace and do not deserve a platform in the form of one of a country’s most cherished institutions.
Virulent hatred of this kind has no place on the website of a national broadcaster such as ABC Australia.
Please let ABC’s Religion and Ethics team know what you think through their online contact page – https://www.abc.net.au/religion/contact-us/
