The (not so) progressive anti-Zionist agenda

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/JPost
25 April '10

While Zionist groups are celebrating the 150th anniversary of Herzl's birthday, opponents of Zionism seem to feel rather upbeat. The sense that the anti-Zionists' dream of a world without a Jewish state will eventually come true was conveyed in a recent Foreign Policy article by Israeli writer Dmitry Reider, who confidently claimed that "an increasing number of Israeli voices are beginning to inquire whether the one-state idea is more than just a bogeyman." The mere fact that an influential mainstream magazine like Foreign Policy would publish such an article was noted with great satisfaction on several virulently anti-Zionist blogs.

Indeed, Herzl's 150th birthday seems to have inspired some of the major media outlets to mark the occasion by exploring "alternatives" for Zionism. The Guardian's "Comment is Free" website evoked the vision of "An Israel-Palestine like no other nation" in an article that supposedly reflected "progressive" Zionist efforts to come up with "a new model of statehood". Similarly, an article in the Christian Science Monitor proposed to subject Israel and the Palestinians to some "radical" political experiment with a "parallel states scenario" that would give the world a chance to explore ways to overcome "the territorially based, zero-sum notion of sovereignty that has grounded the nation-state for at least three centuries."

All of these articles justify the quest for "solutions" that would put an end to Israel as a Jewish state with the argument that the peace process has failed to achieve a two-state solution that would provide for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Implicit in this reasoning is the notion that the fact that Israel is one of the few successful states established in modern times is irrelevant. Instead, Israel is held responsible for creating a Palestinian state, and Israel's failure to do so is apparently thought to justify the notion that the Jewish state has forfeited its right to exist.

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