To Understand Zionism, Read Herzl Not Mahmoud Abbas

Paul Gross, a member of HonestReporting’s Israeli board of directors, is a Senior Fellow at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem and writes and lectures on Israeli history and politics. He has previously written for a number of Israeli, British, American and Canadian titles. The views expressed here are his own.

2018 began with a rare gift to Israel advocates from Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. One of the Middle East myths most widely accepted by the western media is the ‘moderation’ of the PA leader. He is routinely portrayed as a committed peace-seeker, frustrated in his efforts to reach a deal by the “hardline” (or, sometimes, “far-right”) Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Never mind that this is a man who refused to accept the most concessionary Israeli two-state offer on record, Ehud Olmert’s in 2009; he has since walked away twice from US-mediated negotiations with Netanyahu, even after Israel’s “hardline” Prime Minister froze settlement building (in the first instance) and released Palestinian terrorists (in the second).

So how did Abbas help us out at the beginning of the year? Well, in one long historically illiterate and conspiracy-theory- laden rant to the PLO Central Council, he provided all the evidence required to bust the ‘moderation’ myth. The speech included a litany of fabrications which was labeled “anti-Semitic,” not by Netanyahu but by Avi Gabbay, leader of the left-wing opposition in the Knesset. The list of libels included a denial of Jewish connections to Jerusalem; a childish attempt at historical one-upmanship, claiming that Palestinians are the descendants of the biblical Canaanites; and the faux incredulous “When have we ever rejected negotiations?” (Any number of frustrated Israeli and American negotiators could provide him with a list of dates.)

And then there was this. A brief reference to Theodore Herzl’s formative visit to Palestine at the very end of the 19th century:

When Herzl arrived in Palestine, he saw people, human beings, citizens. So he said: ‘We should erase the Palestinians from Palestine, so that it will become a land without a people for a people without a land.

This struck me as important for two reasons. One was an accident of timing; I had just finished reading a superb biography of Herzl by the renowned Israeli professor, Shlomo Avneri. Unlike Abbas, Avineri is an expert on Zionism and a serious academic. (Dr. Mahmoud Abbas’s PhD thesis argues that Zionists exaggerated the number of victims of the Holocaust and collaborated with the Nazis.)

Avineri devotes a chapter of his book to Herzl’s 1902 utopian novel, Altneuland, his depiction of the Jewish state that the Zionist movement would create. In this imagined Jewish polity, Arabs are living there as equal citizens. In fact, the villain of the novel is a racist Jewish election candidate, who believes that non-Jews should be denied the right to vote. He is defeated in the election by a candidate running on a platform of equal rights for all citizens.

So much for Herzl the ethnic cleanser.

Herzl’s Zionism explicitly viewed the Arabs of Palestine “as equals, partners in citizenship who would vote and be elected to the public institutions of the society.” A vision which became reality when the real ‘altneuland’, the State of Israel, was established in 1948, with the equal rights of its non-Jewish citizens enshrined in its Declaration of Independence.

The second reason Abbas’s defamation of Herzl is important is its implication, and the effect of that implication. The claim that Herzl – and therefore Zionism from its inception – was racist, imperialist and brutal, is at the basis of much of the anti-Israel propaganda that we face in the media, on university campuses and elsewhere. Even though the UN eventually repealed its despicable “Zionism-is- racism” resolution of 1975, Zionism remains a dirty word in liberal circles across the western world.

What makes this narrative even more pernicious is that it infects the wider debate about Israel. Every country sometimes acts in ways that attract criticism from the international media; but only Israel has its very legitimacy as a state called into question because of controversial policies. Zionism, the founding ideology of the state, is morally tainted; therefore Israel remains constantly ‘on probation.’

We can see the toxic results of this in countless news reports on the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel’s perceived flaws and mistakes are highlighted, but not those of the Palestinians. Settlement building is headline news, but not Palestinian incitement to terror. The Palestinians are helpless victims, an oppressed people not responsible for their actions; infantilised and coddled at every turn, no matter what violence they commit – and no matter that their poverty and despair is as much a result of the corruption and criminality of the Palestinian Authority as it is of Israeli policies.

That’s the narrative, here’s the reality. From the very beginning, the Zionist movement envisaged a democratic Israel. Israel was established as a democracy in 1948, at a time when there were no more than twenty or so democracies on the planet. And unlike almost every other new country that emerged during that epoch of state creation after the collapse of the European empires, it has remained a democracy from day one to the present.

Israel has become a military super-power, but this is nothing to with some inherent Zionist militaristic impulse. Israel has fought multiple wars against states and, more recently, terror organisations, expressly committed to its annihilation. Israel today has Hamas on one border, Hezbollah on another, and the Iran-dominated ruins of what used to be Syria on a third. Each one of these troublesome neighbours sees the destruction of Israel as a religious imperative. When the only way to appease an enemy is to commit suicide, the situation requires sticks not carrots; military might and the willingness to exert it.

I’ll conclude with another recent news story, one that attracted far less coverage than the Abbas speech. This was the revelation that the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence had helped foil an ISIS terror attack on an Australian passenger plane last summer. European countries that so frequently wag the diplomatic finger at Israel have intelligence services grateful beyond measure for the assistance they receive from the Mossad and the IDF in thwarting terrorist plots. In today’s global conflict between free and open societies, and Islamist terrorists and the states that sponsor them, Israel is not just on the right side of the fight, it is leading the way. Meanwhile, our ‘peace-seeking’ friend Mahmoud Abbas has just increased the annual payment to the families of Palestinian terrorists to $403 million, seven percent of the Palestinian Authority budget.

Abbas and other propagandists will continue to spread lies and disinformation, and far too much of the world will continue to swallow it whole. Israel, approaching its 70th birthday, will continue to do what it must to survive and to thrive as the Jewish and democratic state that Theodore Herzl could only dream of.

Images: Abbas by Flash90; Avineri via YouTube/TheJerusalemCenter; Herzog via YouTube/IsraelArchives;

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