For more than 20 years after
the establishment of the State of Israel, anti-Zionism was a regional
phenomenon — a conflict between Arab and Jewish national movements in the
Middle East. In the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, the Soviets exploited
antisemitism for political purposes, but it was seldom part of international
debate until after the Six-Day War in 1967.
By the end of the 1960s, and
since 1975, anti-Zionism became international in scope. It first appeared in
the universities in the West where the New Left, in cooperation with Arab
student associations, attacked Israeli policy. 1
When the United Nations
General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 on November 10, 1975, and declared
"Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination," it
significantly expanded anti-Zionism into the sphere of international
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and therefore into Third World countries.
This was accomplished in collaboration between the Arabs and the Soviet Union
that endowed anti-Zionism with legitimacy and official recognition.2
After the First World War, the
Arabs expected Greater Syria — which included Palestine and Lebanon — to become
a vast, united, and sovereign Arab empire. Instead, the French and the British
divided the area into what the Arabs considered "irrationally carved
out" entities that became the present-day states of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Trans-Jordan
(later Jordan), Iraq, and Israel. The Arabs were outraged that a "non-Arab
embryo state in Palestine" had been inserted into an area where it would
never be accepted. They claimed that this shattered their dreams of unification
and impeded their search for a common identity. 3
The fight against a Jewish
homeland became an integral part of their struggle "for dignity and
independence." Israel's existence, they claimed, "implied that not
only a part of the Arab patrimony, but also parts of Islam, had been stolen.
For a Moslem, there was no greater shame than for that to happen." The
only way to eliminate this deeply felt affront — this "symbol of
everything that had dominated them in the past" — was to rid the area of
"imperialist domination." 4
Zionism has been branded as
the official enemy of the Arab national movement, but Arab governments have
long been accused of using the Arab-Israeli confrontation to divert attention
from their own critical domestic social and economic problems. When confronted,
they respond that if this were not a real concern, it would not resonate so strongly
among the Arab masses. 5
Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton
University, the dean of Middle Eastern scholars in the West, says Arab fixation
with Israel "is the licensed grievance. In countries where people are
becoming increasingly angry and frustrated at all the difficulties under which
they live — the poverty, unemployment, oppression — having a grievance which
they can express freely is an enormous psychological advantage." 6
The Israeli-Arab conflict is
the only local political grievance that can be openly discussed. If the
population were permitted freedom of speech, Lewis believes that the obsession
with Israel would become far less important. Like most people, Arabs are
concerned about their own priorities. For the Palestinian Arabs, who view
themselves as the permanent victims, the main issue is their struggle with
Israel. If Arabs in other countries were permitted to focus on their own
problems, they would do so. 7
For Arabs, the attempt to
blame Western imperialism is nothing more than an excuse to attack Israel, as
another Hebrew University professor Jacob Talmon asserted: "For decades
the Arabs have been obsessed by memories of past glories and prophecies of
future greatness, mocked by the injury and shame of having an alien and
despised race injected into the nerve center of their promised pan-Arab empire,
between its Asian and African halves, just at a time when the colonial powers
had started their great retreat from their colonial possessions in Asia and
Africa." 8
To lessen their feelings of shame for losing
every war against Israel, the Arabs attributed the success of Jewish settlement
in Palestine and the Israeli military triumphs of 1948 and 1956 to Western
imperialism. As the representative of the Great Powers, Israel became the
Arabs' scapegoat whenever they became frustrated in their attempt to transcend
"centuries of social, economic, and cultural development, and catch
up" with the West.
This anti-Israel fixation precipitated a
methodical "Manichean metaphysic, the focus of an entire philosophy of
history, with the Jewas the devil incarnate from the days of patriarch Abraham
himself till his assumption of the role of the linchpin of an
American-Imperialist-Zionist world-plot against the Arab world, the Socialist
Commonwealth and all colonial peoples." 9
1. Yohanan
Manor, "Anti-Zionism," (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1984):
8.
2. Ibid.
3. Saul
Friedlander and Mahmoud Hussein, Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue (New York:
Holmes and Meier, 1975), 6, 18, 21.
4. Ibid., 9,
34.
5. Ibid.
6.
"Islam's Interpreter," The Atlantic Online (April 4, 2004),
Online.
7. Ibid;
Friedlander and Hussein, Arabs and Israelis: A Dialogue, 32-33, 36.
8. Jacob L. Talmon,
Israel Among the Nations (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 169-170.
9. Ibid.170.
