Alum: Zionism dialogue disheartening

I happened to be browsing the web and came upon the March 14th issue of the Oberlin Review. It’s disheartening to see that discourse at Oberlin is still mired in the same old tired New Left Zionism=Racism debate, which has been out of vogue in academia for quite some time. More disheartening was seeing an Oberlin College faculty member, Professor Frances Hasso, intervening in the fray “ to provide historical perspective.” She correctly states that “The slogan [Zionism=Racism] clearly does not fully capture the Zionist movement or its histories and debates. Nor does it address the range of motivations and beliefs of the movement’s adherents.” Unfortunately, neither does Professor Hasso in her letter to the editor.
Hasso’s telling of the history of Zionism is a skewed misrepresentation at best. She sprinkles some quotes by Zionist luminaries, specifically those of the Political Zionist stream, at the beginning of her article in an effort to lend a sense of balance and credibility to her argument. Hasso then picks and chooses de-contextualized quotes from a few choice people in the early stages of the political Zionist movement (pre- World War I) to support her argument while ignoring the the opinions and actions of the majority of contemporary Zionists and Zionist streams, not to mention any ones that came later. She rightly acknowledges the ellisions found in Zionist hagiography but then refuses to acknowledge her own lacunae. She skips over the period of the entire British Mandate (1917-48), which is germane to any understanding of land disputes, settlement patterns and immigration in Palestine. Any actual history that she cites is almost exclusively written from a pro-Palestinian vantage point, which although valid is by no means balanced nor authoritative. She doesn’t even discuss any of the ideological underpinnings behind Zionism. Hasso neglects to mention that Zionism at its core is not about land nor about stereotyping and demeaning other populations. It’s about Jewish liberation, self-determination, transformation, rebirth and renewal. Perhaps she would have benefited from attending the ExCo course I taught in the early 90s entitled “The Ideology of Zionism” or the 1992 course taught by Visiting Professor Paul Mendes-Flohr, a respected scholar whom she cites grossly out of context.
Have certain elements of the Zionist movement possessed aspects of racialized settler-colonialism? Sure, but so has Palestinian nationalism. Conveniently forgotten by Hasso is the enormous influx of Arab immigration to Palestine during the British Mandate; the Zionists were not the only ones to attempt to take advantage of settling in Palestine and occupying land during colonial British rule. One might also say the prohibition against the sale of Palestinian land to Jews, prominently articulated in the 1990s by the PA-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem Ikrama Sabri, PA Justice Minister Freih Abu Middein, as well as by PA Chairman Arafat and the PA Cabinet, smacks of exclusivity, racism and the denial of civil liberties. Sounds like a racialized concern with demography and geography to me.
I’m not denying the oppressive and often racist actions undertaken by the Israeli government against Palestinians. Nor will I deny that the establishment of the state of Israel has caused great sorrow for Palestinians. I appreciate Prof. Hasso’s encouragement of critical thinking against and questioning of the dominant Zionist narrative. In fact, this confrontation of the traditional Israeli national story is now the dominant discourse in Zionist and post-Zionist studies. Revisionist Israeli historians such as Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe, have done much to puncture the Zionist myth and create a more complete picture of the Zionist enterprise. But I doubt that these prominent scholars, or even someone like me who merely wrote his JNES honors thesis on an esoteric ideological split in the Israel kibbutz movement in the early 1950s, would have the incredible hubris to try to explain the entire Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the history of Zionism in a single letter to the editor.

—Bruce Kaplan
OC’93
Cambridge, MA