In Sri Lanka, there has been a long and violent struggle for an independent Tamil homeland, but that demand is not supported by all Tamils, and many democratically minded people do not see it as a wise, just or feasible solution to the island’s ethnic conflict. Does that make them anti-Tamil racists? The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam think so, and seek to eliminate, physically, those “self-hating” Tamils who advocate another path. Like Zionism, the Tamil Tigers’ brand of Tamil nationalism secures vital support from a diaspora imbued with a memory of racism, in this case the institutional and sometimes violent racism of the Sri Lankan state.
Were those who opposed national self-determination for Afrikaaners and Zulus in post-apartheid South Africa “singling out” these ethnic groups by denying them this universal right? Both groups could boast their own language and culture, and the Afrikaaners could boast a distinctive religion. Yet their claims were universally rejected by liberal and left opinion. They were recognized as undemocratic, exclusivist nationalisms, either preserving or seeking to establish ethnic privileges. In the end, the bulk of the South African population decided that only majority rule across the country, not separatism, could guarantee minority rights. World opinion was in complete accord, yet to advocate that self-same solution for Palestine is deemed—officially—anti-semitic.
None of these examples, it will be argued, compare precisely with the Jews. After all, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus all have their own countries, why not the Jews? But what about the Sikhs? There are 23 million Sikhs globally, of whom 15 million live in the Indian state of Punjab. In the 1980s, Sikh militants seeking to convert Punjab into a separate Sikh homeland, Khalistan, fought a war with the Indian state (one of whose casualties was Indira Gandhi and the thousands of Sikhs murdered in Delhi in revenge for her death in 1984). Although the Khalistan movement received support from the Sikh diaspora, the demand divided Sikhs in the Punjab itself, and no longer enjoys widespread support. No one seriously claims that to oppose Khalistan—and wish to remain within a secular India—is tantamount to being anti-Sikh.
There are currently no Protestant or Catholic or Hindu or even Muslim states that legally privilege members of those religions in the way that the state of Israel privileges Jews. There are Muslim states that give privileges to Islam and to Muslim citizens, but there is no Muslim state that offers all Muslims worldwide a homeland, or that endows foreigners with full (indeed privileged) citizenship, simply because they are Muslims. While religion may affect citizenship rights, it is not the determinant—which is birth or long residence within the borders of the state. Paradoxically, although the Jewish state is said to belong to Jews everywhere, it does not define Jewishness by religious observance. It claims to be a secular state, unlike those Muslim states that require public observance of specific forms of Islam.
The founder of Pakistan, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, envisaged his Muslim homeland as a secular state; he was not personally devout and his contempt for mullahs was very much in keeping with the Labor Zionists’ contempt for rabbis. His Two Nations Theory defined Muslims in the subcontinent as a separate nation with the right to a separate state in a defined territory where they would comprise the majority. Was it Islamophobic to oppose the Two Nations Theory? That would make Islamophobes of the Congress, Gandhi, Nehru, the entire Indian left, not to mention the majority of Indian Muslims, who chose not to emigrate. Jinnah’s secular promise was not borne out by history. The birth of the state was accompanied by murderous ethnic cleansing (on both sides of the border). Over the following decades, minorities were persecuted and mullah-ism of the sort Jinnah disdained ran rampant; like a number of Israel’s founders, he would be appalled at the role clerical obscurantism plays in his country today. The marriage of the secular and confessional under the banner of “nationhood” is invariably uneasy, and in this sense Israeli experience is not unique.
Nations, nationalism, and national self-determination are the building blocks of the modern world, powerful social realities, but they remain analytically elusive. Nationalisms run the gamut from exclusive to inclusive, from territorial, transparent and democratic to transcendental, opaque and authoritarian. There are racial, linguistic, cultural, and religious nationalisms, often in combination. There’s Nazi blood-and-soil nationalism; there’s French Revolutionary nationalism; there’s an internationalist nationalism—preached by Garibaldi or Castro or Hugo Chávez or an earlier generation of Palestinian and Arab leaders. Where does Zionism sit in this constellation? The measurement must be—as for all other nationalisms—the democratic content of the national demand and the national identity in question. (When the Nazis annexed Sudetenland, Hitler cited in his defense the German-speaking Czechs’ right to national self-determination.) In many situations it is unclear where the balance lies. But in the case of Zionism the verdict is dramatically stark: Zionism involves, unavoidably, a denial to others of democratic and equal rights. It is an obscurantist claim dressed in the garb of secular modernity, underpinned from the beginning by naked power.
If there were as many states as there are ethnic identities, or even putative nationalities, the UN would have to be enlarged several times over. Crucially, even in the most clear-cut claims for national self-determination, there is no right to build a state on land already inhabited by others, or to sustain an ethnic majority in a state through the dispossession of others. It is here that Zionists make for Israel an exceptional claim among the nations. Their case cannot be sustained by analogy, so they delegitimize the process of analogy.
However, there is, even here, one analogy they do claim: that between Americanism and Zionism. Like Palestine, North America was a land without people for people without land. Both Americanism and Zionism are settler-colonial ideologies infused with utopianism—and racism. Both the Israeli and the US state are presented as embodying extra-territorial ideas. The “city on the hill” is an outpost, and in latter days an embodiment, of white European civilization. American exceptionalism and Israeli exceptionalism are mirrors and partners. Like the Zionists who founded Israel, the Protestant settlers who founded the USA were fleeing from and supported by an empire. They dispossessed the indigenous people while declaring them the beneficiaries of their good intentions. Among the charges the Declaration of Independence makes against King George III is that he has blocked “new appropriation of lands,” failed to encourage migration from Europe, and sided with the “merciless Indian savages” against the “inhabitants of our frontiers,” namely, the white settlers seeking to expand the colonial domain. The American Revolution, like the Zionist struggle against the British mandate in 1945–47, was partly a response by settler-colonialists to imperial restrictions on their right to dispossess natives.
I’ve heard this analogy used to justify the Nakba, the Palestinian “catastrophe” of 1948: terrible things happened to the Native Americans but these are the casualties of progress, and cannot be undone. Every people acquires its land, at one point or another, by conquest, so why should the Jews be any different?
But that raises the less comfortable case of another settler-colonialism, white South Africa. When it comes to the apartheid analogy, what’s decisive is not Carter’s legitimizing of it but the fact that it arises, spontaneously and irresistibly, to the lips of black South Africans visiting the Occupied Territories. What they see there—the Jews-only roads, the confinement of Palestinians in camps and villages, the checkpoints, the harassment, the second-class citizenship based on ethnicity—reminds them graphically of the system they suffered under and struggled against. The Afrikaaners were immigrants from Europe with a religious-nationalist consciousness whose racist assumptions about their right to the land were underpinned by superior European technology and weaponry. White settlers acquired control of the state thanks ultimately to British imperial power, with which, like the Zionists, they were often nonetheless in conflict.
There is at least one major difference between Israel and white South Africa, though it’s not one that favors the former. Under apartheid, the dominant whites used the black population as a source of cheap labor. In contrast, Zionism has aimed to remove the Palestinian population, to replace Palestinians with Jews. And this has been evident from