
Israeli Exceptionalism
We finish our series of posts looking at Zionism and nationalism.
{Part one can be accessed at Zionism: An “Abnormal” Nationalism [1]
Part two can be accessed at Zionism: An “Abnormal” Nationalism [2]}
Israel was the product of a partnership that seems unlikely at first blush, between Western Jews and the Christian West. It is the powerful alchemy of the Zionist idea that produced and sustained this partnership. The Zionist project to create a Jewish state in Palestine possessed the power to convert two historical antagonists, Jews and Gentiles, into allies united in a common imperialist enterprise against the Islamicate. At different times, the Zionists have harnessed all the negative energies of the West – its imperialism, anti-Semitism, Crusading zeal, anti-Islamic bigotry, and racism – and focused them on a new project, the creation of a surrogate Western state in the Islamicate heartland. At the same time, the West could derive considerable satisfaction from the success of the Zionist project. Western societies could take ownership of, and revel in, the triumphs of this colonial state as their own; they could congratulate themselves for helping ‘save’ the Jewish people; they could feel they had made adequate amends for their history of anti-Semitism; they could feel they had finally paid back the Arabs and Turks for their conquests of Christian lands. Israel possessed a marvellous capacity to feed several of the West’s egotistical needs.
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