> Zionism: Pitting The West Against Islam
> By M Shahid Alam
> Tehran Times
>
> The history of Israel has often been read as the saga of a people
> marked for extinction, who emerged from nazi death camps ­ from
> Auschwitz, Belcec and Treblinka ­ to establish their own country in
> 1948. Without taking away anything from the suffering of European
> Jews, I will insist that this way of thinking about Israel ­ apart
> from its mythologizing ­ has merit only as a partisan narrative. It
> seeks to insulate Israel against the charge of a devastating
> colonization by falsifying history, by camouflaging the imperialist
> dynamics that brought it into existence, and denying the perilous
> future with which it now confronts the Jews, the West and the Islamic
> world.
>
> When we examine the consequences that have flowed from the creation of
> Israel, when we contemplate the greater horrors that may yet flow from
> the logic of Zionism, Israel's triumphs appear in a different light.
> We are forced to examine these triumphs with growing dread and
> incredulity. Israel's early triumphs, though real from a narrow
> Zionist standpoint, have slowly mutated by a fateful process into ever-
> widening circles of conflict that now threaten to escalate into major
> wars between the West and Islam. Although this conflict has its source
> in colonial ambitions, the dialectics of this conflict have slowly
> endowed it with the force and rhetoric of a civilizational war: and
> perhaps worse, a religious war.
>
> This is the tragedy of Israel. It is not a fortuitous tragedy. Driven
> by history, chance and cunning, the Zionists wedged themselves between
> two historical adversaries, the West and Islam, and by harnessing the
> strength of the first against the second, it has produced the
> conditions of a conflict that has grown deeper over time.
>
> Zionist historiography describes the emergence of Israel as a triumph
> over Europe's centuries-old anti-Semitism, in particular over its
> twentieth-century manifestation, the demonic, industrial plan of the
> Nazis to stamp out the existence of the Jewish people. But this is a
> tendentious reading of Zionist history: it obscures the historic offer
> Zionism made to the West ­ the offer to rid the West of its Jews, to
> lead them out of Christendom into Islamic Palestine. In offering to
> 'cleanse' the West of the 'hated Jews', the Zionists were working with
> the anti-Semites, not against them.
>
> Theodore Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, had a clear
> understanding of this complementarity between Zionism and anti-
> Semitism; and he was convinced that Zionism would prevail only if anti-
> Semitic Europe could be persuaded to work for its success. It is true
> that Jews and anti-Semites have been historical adversaries, that Jews
> have been the victims of Europe's religious vendetta since Rome first
> embraced Christianity. However, Zionism would enter into a new
> relationship with anti-Semitism that would work to the advantage of
> Jews. The insertion of the Zionist idea in the Western discourse would
> work a profound change in the relationship between Western Jews and
> Gentiles.
>
> In order to succeed, the Zionists would have to create a new
> adversary, common to the West and the Jews. In choosing to locate
> their colonial-settler state in Palestine ­ and not in Uganda or
> Argentina ­ the Zionists had also chosen an adversary that would
> deepen their partnership with the West. The Islamic world was a great
> deal more likely to energize the West's imperialist ambitions and
> evangelical zeal than Africa or Latin America.
>
> Israel was the product of a partnership that seems unlikely at first
> blush, between Western Jews and the Western world. It is the powerful
> alchemy of the Zionist idea that created this partnership. The Zionist
> project to create a Jewish entity in Palestine possessed the unique
> power to convert two historical antagonists, Jews and Gentiles, into
> allies united in a common imperialist enterprise against the Islamic
> world. The Zionists harnessed the negative energies of the Western
> world ­ its imperialism, its anti-Semitism, its crusading nostalgia,
> its anti-Islamic bigotry, and its deep racism ­ and focused them on a
> new imperialist project, the creation of a Western surrogate state in
> the Islamic heartland.
>
> To the West's imperialist ambitions, this new colonial project offered
> a variety of strategic advantages. Israel would be located in the
> heart of the Islamic world; it would sit astride the junction of Asia,
> Africa and Europe; it would guard Europe's gateway to the Indian
> Ocean; and it could monitor developments in the Persian Gulf with its
> vast reserves of oil.
>
> For the West as well as Europe's Jews, this was a creative moment:
> indeed, it was an historical opportunity. For European Jews, it was a
> stroke of brilliance. Zionism was going to leverage Western power in
> their cause.
>
> As the Zionist plan would unfold, inflicting pain on the Islamic
> world, evoking Islamic anger against the West and Jews, the
> complementarities would be discovered ­ or created ­ between the two
> antagonist strains of Western history. In the United States the
> Zionist movement would give encouragement to evangelical Protestants ­
> who looked upon the birth of Israel as the fulfilment of end-times
> prophecies ­ and convert them into fanatic partisans of Zionism. In
> addition, Western civilization, which had hitherto traced its central
> ideas and institutions to Rome and Athens, would be repackaged as a
> Judeo-Christian civilization. This reframing not only underscores the
> Jewish roots of the Western world, it also makes a point of
> emphasizing that Islam is the outsider, the adversary.
>
> Zionism owes its success solely to this unlikely partnership. On their
> own, the Zionists could not have gone anywhere. They could not have
> created Israel by bribing or coercing the Ottomans into granting them
> a charter to colonize Palestine. Despite his offers of loans,
> investments, technology and diplomatic expertise, Theodore Herzl was
> repeatedly rebuffed by the Ottoman sultan. It is even less likely that
> the Zionists could at any time have mobilized a Jewish army in Europe
> to invade and occupy Palestine, against Ottoman and Arab opposition to
> the creation of a Jewish entity on Islamic lands.
>
> The Zionist partnership with the West was indispensable for the
> creation of a Jewish entity. This partnership was also fateful. It
> produced a powerful new dialectic, which has encouraged Israel, both
> as the political centre of the Jewish Diaspora and the chief outpost
> of the West in the heart of the Islamic world, to become more daring
> in its designs against the Islamic world and beyond.
>
> In turn, a wounded and humiliated Islamic world, more resentful and
> determined after every defeat, has been driven to embrace increasingly
> radical ideas and methos to recover its dignity and power ­ and to
> attain this recovery on the strength of Islamic ideas.
>
> This destabilizing dialectic has now brought the West itself into a
> direct confrontation against the Islamic world. We are now staring
> into the precipice. Yet do we possess the will to pull back from it?
>
> M Shahid Alam is a professor of economics at a university in Boston
> and author of Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on
> America's 'War Against Islam'.
>
> http://www.rense.com/general74/zzn.htm