I read in the Guardian that the Israeli-US genocide scholar Omer Bartov has a new book out, What Went Wrong with Israel.

From the review, it looks like Mishra covered some of the same ground in his book “The World After Gaza”.  Bartov sees Zionism as having been a liberation movement for the persecuted Jews of Europe, but opposes the kind of Zionism he sees in Israel today.  At the same time,  he refuses to call himself an “anti-Zionist” and says that he doesn’t know what that term even means.

I would define myself as anti-Zionist simply because I am anti-ehno-nationalist.  It isn’t possible to be one without the other.  By anti-ethno-nationalist, I mean that I don’t think there is a place in the modern world for nations built around particular ethnicities. To the extent that they are so (i.e. that’s the character that they have inherited) I think they need to accept and embrace the fact that they are transitioning towards being multi-ethnic, multi-religious secular states, because in all the nations that I know that is the reality.

The principle of separation between church and state needs to be strengthened and extended. Everyone’s individual and group rights should be protected, so long as they do not break the social contract that exists between state and citizen, for the purpose of protecting all citizens. In other words, setting up a national framework for Jews, Basques, Inuit, Kurds, etc is not the preferable solution, because there will always be some of these left outside the “mother country” and their individual, and, if relevant, group rights need to be protected too.

Of course, it’s not always so simple. Sometimes there are things that need to be worked out, such as cases in which rules around marriage and divorce of a particular community contravene rules that have been enacted for the nation. Some of these communitarian rules limit the rights that have been established to protect all citizens. But there are solutions; such as by invoking the right to remove oneself from the rules set by the group and invoke the protection of national laws.

The world actually has some good frameworks upon which to base national laws, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even if these frameworks unfortunately lack legal force, nations can choose to voluntarily abide by these, and align their own laws to accord with them.

At the time of its creation, and even today, some countries hark back to the outdated paradigm of the ethno-nationalist state, so it is difficult to criticize the birth of Israel on those grounds.  What needs to be criticized is the manner in which territory that was already settled by an indigenous population was usurped for the purpose of creating an ethno-nationalist state that treated those that remained after expelling the majority, as second-class citizens.  It solved the problem of traditional persecution of Jews by creating a new one, the disenfranchisement of Palestinians everywhere.  The proper solution to anti-semitism, as to all other issues involving discrimination against minorities, should have been to protect the status of Jews within all the countries where they reside.

One does not need to be an anarchist to reject the principle of ethno-nationalist states like Israel, and one does not need to look for drastic geo-political solutions to the issue.  All that needs to happen is for nations to change their internal policies to become more inclusive.  Israel, like other countries, needs political reform.  It needs to become a state for all of its citizens, in which individual and group rights are respected.  This is still possible.  It just needs to reach internal agreement that this is the desired solution.  If the nations of the world had greater internal clarity regarding their own status as multi-ethnic states, and would use their influence to pressure their neighbours to adopt similar policies, Israel would be more likely to apply.

One of the principle sticking points is the acceptance of exceptionalism, and the time has come to reject this.  Israel sees its position as exceptional because it was founded on the principle of becoming a refuge for Jews faced with anti-semitism. There needs to be zero tolerance everywhere for anti-semitism, as well as to other forms of xenophobia, and this needs to happen also in Israel itself.

Israel also sees itself as exceptional due to real or perceived threats to itself from Palestinians.  But at the same time it does nothing to appease the group aspirations of Palestinians while doing everything to perpetuate the conflict, including continuing to expropriate land from Palestinians in the area that, by agreement, has been set aside for them to create a country of their own.

In an ideal situation, neither Israel nor Palestinians would need separate national homes, because the rights of both peoples would be respected in the same territory.  But Israel cannot have it both ways.  It either needs to cede territory beyond the 1949 armistice line, which  it has stolen for Jewish settlers, for the Palestinians to establish their own state, or it needs to accept Palestinian citizens within these occupied territories as full citizens, because obviously they are not going anywhere.