Trying it on over anti-semitism

Emanuele Ottolenghi is trying it on (Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, November 29). He knows full well that it is false logic to argue that because some anti-Zionists are anti-semitic therefore anti-Zionism is anti-semitic. His other proposition, that all anti-Zionists must be anti-semitic simply because we deny the right of "the Jews" to have a nation is more complicated.

It's Zionists, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who wanted "the Jews" to have a nation, not "the Jews". That's to say, it has never been the case that all Jews were, or are, Zionists. Ottolenghi is, quite rightly, hot on the tracks of anti-semitism. One problem with the Zionist project is that it has done some stereotyping of its own, claiming nationhood even for those of us who don't want it. There is also something peculiar about the idea that millions of Jewish Zionists would rather not live in the nation that they keep telling us was founded for them.

The serious side of this is that the Zionist project demands of non-Israeli Jews to support the existence and policies of a state other than the one they live in. If this was simply a matter of holidays and football teams, it wouldn't matter very much. But we're talking here about a sequence of terrible events. "The Jewish Nation", which Mr Ottolenghi mistakenly thinks belongs to an entity called "the Jews", was founded on the naqba, the catastrophe of massacre and forcible removal of the Palestinians. The daily death toll today reminds us that the naqba hasn't gone away simply because liberal Zionists repeatedly cite the right of self-determination.

Mr Ottolenghi pushes his luck even further when he accuses anti-Zionism of wishing "national suicide". The anti-Zionists I know wish for solutions in the Middle East that encompass notions of secularism, multiculturalism and federalism. However, many Zionists do indeed call these ideas "suicide" and anti-semitism, because they demand something that very few nations demand in the world today: a nation state that must always rule in favour of one self-defined ethnic or religious or racial group. And that is precisely where that nice-sounding phrase "self-determination" turns into something else, isn't it?
Michael Rosen

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