I would like to respond to J.M. Sorrell’s column “Zionism for Real” [July 3], which accuses anti-Zionists of antisemitism. Underlying her conflation of Zionism with antisemitism is a commitment to seeing Zionism in only one dimension: as a morally righteous solution to centuries of European antisemitism and the Holocaust.
On the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, she writes that “when the option of two states was offered, the Arabs turned it down. Subsequently, over 700,000 Arabs left Israel.” This distorted account blames the victims of the Nakba, evading Zionist responsibility for the violent displacement of Palestinian society. Even when Zionists accept responsibility for Palestinian expulsion, it is often presented as a just remedy to Jewish experience of antisemitism.
As the late Holocaust scholar Alon Confino explains, “Zionists accept expulsion as a solution and so, on a profound level, they own no moral responsibility for the destruction of Palestinian way of life in Palestine.”
Sorrell’s column conveys an inability to accept that victims of antisemitism can also be colonial oppressors under a Zionist project, one that Oren Yiftachel describes as the “colonization of refugees.” For many Zionists, their project cannot be considered colonial because this would contradict their experience as a persecuted minority and undermine the absolute morality of their project — even if it means annihilating the indigenous Palestinian population.
It is in this spirit that the writer ends her piece by discrediting anti-Zionists for their “belief that every demographic except Jews have the right to self-determination and a homeland.” Beyond her statement’s total disregard of a Palestinian right to self-determination in their homeland, it also prompts a different question: Does any group have the right to self-determination and a homeland if it requires the violent elimination of its indigenous population?
The fact that this question causes so much discomfort to Zionists reveals the weakness of its one-dimensional narrative.
Iyko Day
Northampton