Zionism? Racism!

Before every election, everyone here assembles governments. Every voter is a strategist, everyone a senior advisor. One agreement hovers above it all: it must be a “Zionist government.” Which is to say: everyone seems to understand, without quite saying so, that Zionism has become a code for Jewish exclusivity, and in practice for Jewish racism. How else are we to read a government formed without Arabs? True, some operate on a wider Zionist register, without Arabs and without the ultra Orthodox alike. They manage to be racist and antisemitic at once, and yet “terribly patriotic.” Lucky us, two for the price of one. Indeed, in present day Israel, Zionism is racism.

We can dispense with the threadbare arguments of the “imagine a European or American country whose major parties pledge in advance to form a coalition without Jews” variety. What a festival of weeping and self pity that would produce. Yet once again, what is forbidden to the rest of the world is permitted to Israeli Jews when they turn it against Palestinians, who happen to be no less Semitic than we are. And so, let us stay here and dig inward, into the Zionist questions themselves.

It is amusing, even ridiculous, to watch this Zionist Olympiad. Worn out politicians with nothing to offer but incitement compete over who is the better Zionist. “I am a Zionist” and “you are a post Zionist,” “he is a Zionist by the book” and “she is most certainly not.” “Post Zionist” has already become a terrible curse, the worst. What are they actually talking about? Herzl’s idea, at least in its political architecture, was clear enough: to establish in the Levant a nation state on the nineteenth century Central European model, a parliamentary democracy within which the challenges of the Jewish collective would be resolved. The passage from an ancient religious people to a secular modern nation was essential, and it arrived with explicit instructions: “We shall respect the rabbis, but we shall see to it that their place is in the synagogues, just as the army’s place is in the barracks.” That held for very little time. Today, the further right you move along the Zionist scale, the more the rabbis find themselves inside the army’s barracks, and the army becomes the long, extended arm of the religious rioters. The further left you move, the more you are gripped by blind loyalty to that same unruly army and by continuous groveling before the rabbis. Zionism, at both its poles, now worships precisely the institutions Herzl sought to keep within their bounds.

What is the problem? This definition of “Zionist” is superfluous to begin with, and whoever still insists on using it does so in the service of exclusion and malice. Zionism was the movement meant to allow the Jewish people to pass from a dispersed, diasporic order to a new structure of government, centralized and sovereign. It was the scaffolding that made the move from the old house to the new one possible. In May 1948 the task was completed. The new house was inaugurated in an unprecedented elation for the Jewish people, and in an appalling catastrophe for the Palestinian people. Amid all the jubilation and panic, no one remembered to remove the scaffolding, even though it had been entirely redundant from the day the house was built. Since then, every Israeli has had three names. Our family name is: we are all human beings, like all other creatures. Our middle name is: Israelis, by virtue of our identity card and citizenship. And the first name varies according to each person’s religious or cultural identity. What do we need a fourth name for, the Zionist one? What does it add that the other three do not already cover? Nothing good.

The test of “are you a Zionist” serves in Israel to build a ladder of loyalty and privilege, even though no single definition captures the whole range of those who call themselves Zionists. Everyone knows who is privileged and who is left outside the fence. Zionism is the filter, the sorting device by which Israelis discriminate against one another.

The right uses its Zionism to discriminate against Arabs. The secular camp uses its Zionism to despise the ultra Orthodox. The ultra Orthodox, too, enter the game and call themselves Zionists in order to curse the refugees and the migrant workers, recall with no longing Eli Yishai. Each has its own Zionist filter. A true democratic state cannot sustain itself over time on such a method. In a democratic state, citizenship is meant to be the only status, with no ideological identity tests. The moment the Zionism test took the place of the citizenship test, democracy died from within. We of all people ought to know this, for sorting human beings by the state is precisely the selection that Jews were forced to undergo so many times in history. It seems the Jewish camel cannot see its own racist hump.

For this reason, the contemporary use of the Zionist test is far more than an old relic of language. It is a betrayal of Israeliness. It tells the citizens, and Arab citizens in particular, that their belonging to the state is conditional, contingent on their submission to the ideological framework of the Jewish majority. It is also a betrayal of democracy, for a true democracy belongs to all its citizens, and not only to those who pass a national test within it. When “Zionist” becomes a synonym for legitimate, then “the one who is not a Zionist” automatically becomes a suspect, fit to receive the entire package of exclusions and discriminations. So let it be clear: I am not a Zionist, I am an Israeli. Zionism completed its task in 1948, and I came into the world after its expiry date. An Israeli, like all Israelis, members of my own people and members of other peoples, those who think as I do and those whose views are the opposite of mine. We are all equal to one another.

In this sharp and painful sense, Zionism in today’s Israel has become racism. As long as those who claim they would replace the racial doctrine that holds power today keep evading the plain declaration that they stand for full civic equality, without all the Zionist shticks and tricks, they are essentially the same thing. Nicer, a little more secular, and yet just as selective and just as far from equality. The true democratic alternative will begin the moment someone within the political system dares to declare, in a clear voice, that the State of Israel belongs to all its citizens, and that their citizenship is the only category that determines their standing. Until that voice is heard, clearly and without evasion, those who offer only a more polite version of the same hierarchy do not deserve our vote.