Collective rights — or a competing nationalism?

Yehudah Shenhav

Fresnozionism.org
02 May '10

Arye Tepper, in a review of Yehuda Shenhav’s book “The Time of the Green Line”:

The issue that divides the two camps is Zionism. The Zionist left wants to consolidate a Jewish-democratic state within the “green line”—that is, the borders that existed from 1949, fixed by the armistice that ended Israel’s war of independence, until the June 1967 Six-Day war—and to help engineer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The post-Zionist or “radical” left is in favor of a one-state solution, i.e., doing away with Israel as a Jewish state and creating a “state of all its citizens” in its stead.

To the Zionist left, the post-Zionist left isn’t so much post- as anti-Zionist. But to the post-Zionist left, the Zionist left isn’t liberal — or leftist — at all…

Shenhav puts forward two large claims about the Zionist left, the first being that it lives in a state of complete denial regarding the fundamentals of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. According to Shenhav, the Zionist left has persuaded itself that the basic point of contention in the conflict lies in the results of the Six-Day war, which ended with Israel having seized the Sinai peninsula (long since returned to Egypt), Gaza (now under Hamas), the Golan Heights (claimed by Syria), and, especially, the West Bank with its large Palestinian population. Therefore, reasons the Zionist left, once Israel hands back the West Bank, “1967″ will have been reversed and peace will become possible.

To Shenhav, this is a delusion. Zero hour for the Palestinians, he contends, was and remains not 1967 but 1948: i.e., the founding of Israel itself.

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