Indian Muslims Are Against Zionism Not Judaism
By
Asad Mirza, New Age Islam
5 November
2023
The On-Going Conflict In Israel Has Found A New
Supporter Amongst The Right-Wing Hindu Nationalists. Though Most Of Them Do Not
Have Any Clue That What Is The Real Cause Of War In Israel, But They Still
Condemn The Indian Muslims For Their Support To The Palestinians. Asad Mirza Tries
To Find Out The Root Cause Of The Conflict.
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The recent
anti-Muslim sentiments, expressed mostly on various social media platforms globally
by blind followers of the right-wing ideology, and in some cases publicly also
by right-wing Hindu priests in India leads one to surmise that they are
completely ignorant of the real issue here, and for them the easiest binary is
just Hindu and Muslim, and who-so-ever the Indian Muslims support, the
right-wing Hindu must oppose them.
To a large
extent this applies to a larger section of the Indian electronic media, too.
They continue their PTCs parroting the lines given by the Israeli defence
media, sadly with no real ground reporting from the conflict zone.
It should
be noted that Muslims, whether in India or any other country are not against
Judaism but Zionism, and there is a sea of difference amongst the two. Muslims
can’t be against Judaism, as like Islam, Judaism too is a religion of the book,
and its founders are patriarchs of the Islamist theology too.
However, to
debunk these false narratives and interpretations, it becomes imperative to
have a clear understanding how this concept of Zionism evolved and what were
the relations of Arab Muslims and Arab Jews before the spread of the Zionist
movement across the globe and how they were able to construct the whole edifice
of anti-semitism, labelled against anyone who opposed Zionism.
Prior to
that it would be helpful to understand the current demographic situation of
Israel. As per a survey carried out by Washington-based Pew Research Centre in
2015, Jews comprise 81 per cent of Israel’s population, Muslims constitute 14
per cent, Christians and Druze both constitute 2 per cent each and 1 per cent
declare themselves as Atheists.
But in
spite of such a large population of Arab Muslims, Arab political parties have
long struggled to gain representation in Israel’s government over the years, a
complete denial of one’s political rights, besides many Arabs have expressed
alarm at the leadership of right-wing Jewish politicians, including the current
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Academician
Moshe Behar, a Jew, of Manchester University in his paper Were There—and Can
There Be—Arab Jews?, presented at Notre Dam University in 2021, answers the
question: Can there be Arab Jews? He answers in the affirmative and supports
his position by historically tracing the meaning of Arab identity from the
early twentieth century onward. He further contends that the political realm
has heretofore been undervalued in historical accounts of Arab identity and in
his essay shows the payoff in bringing this feature of Arab identity to the
forefront.
He also
reflects on the broader questions of what Arab identity by itself consists of
as well as the very act of defining the self and the other. He concludes the
piece with reflections on the limitations of the statement of opposition to the
International Human Rights Association’s definition of anti-semitism endorsed
by Palestinian and Arab intellectuals, academics, and journalists. Behar argued
that the failure to include Arab Jews in this statement reproduces rather than
overcomes the problematic binary thinking in which the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is framed.
To further
understand the question of Arab Jews, we’ll have to go back to the origins of
Zionism, which has been explained very lucidly by Liora Halperin in her essay
Origins and Evolution of Zionism, published in September 2015 by
Philadelphia-U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Liora
opines that Zionism is a variety of Jewish nationalism. It asserts, rather
correctly, that Jews constitute a nation whose survival, both physical and
cultural, requires its return to the Jews’ ancestral home in the Land of
Israel. Pre-1948 Zionism was more than a nationalist movement: it was a
revolutionary project to remake the Jewish people.
Liora
further opines that Zionism is a form of Jewish nationalism that posits Jews
are a nation and that Jews should receive national rights on the basis of this
identity. What distinguishes Zionism from other forms of Jewish nationalism is
that Zionists, after a brief period of uncertainty and alternative proposals,
believed that the location for these rights or sovereignty should be the Land
of Israel, which religious Jewish tradition regarded as Jews’ ancient and
ultimate homeland.
In fact,
the man universally credited with founding the Zionist movement was Theodor
Herzl (1860–1904), an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and political
activist. Herzl’s Zionism was purely political in theory and practice: the Jews
as a nation did not need a new culture, language, or concept of the messianic
era, but only a national polity of their own, whose creation would solve the
problem of anti-Semitism both for the Jews themselves and for Europe as a
whole, as expounded in his book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State).
Essentially,
Zionism’s origins lay in a confluence of factors: physical persecution of East
European Jewry, Jewish assimilation in the West, and a Hebrew cultural revival
that rejected or transformed traditional Jewish religiosity. At the end of the
1800s, Zionism’s first adherents were concentrated in the Russian Pale of
Settlement and Rumania, but under the dynamic leadership of Theodor Herzl,
Zionism established itself as a global political movement.
Laura
further opines that though Zionism has a particular logic that emerged from the
events surrounding it, not all Jews subscribe to that logic and in fact a
majority of Jews initially did not. Their opposition stemmed from a number of
directions. Jewish liberals, committed to the idea of Jewish integration,
thought that Zionism, by conceding to the permanence of anti-Semitism, would in
turn lead to more anti-Semitism.
Orthodox
Jews believed that Jews had been exiled in ancient times because of their sins
and would return only with God’s will and in messianic times. They believed
that taking action to return to Palestine en masse was nothing short of heresy.
This religious opposition would change as politico-religious streams of Zionism
emerged, but it is important to recall that Orthodoxy was initially deeply
opposed to Zionism.
If we
earnestly study the events post-1917 and particularly post-1948, we’ll be able
to decipher that Jews-Muslims/Islam relation were never a sore point
politically, but post-1948 the Zionist movement was able to spread its
tentacles with the help of the erstwhile colonial powers i.e. the U.K. and the
super power i.e. the U.S.A.
Under a
planned expansionist programme, supported by a well laid out strategy to drive
out illiterate Arabs from their homeland, Zionist Kibbutz’s (settlements) were
established in a phased manner over the years all over Palestine – which was an
independent country, leading to the present crisis.
What many
people are fed by various news outlets is the history of Israel post-1948, and
the gullible consumers of this false propaganda fail to understand that the
erstwhile colonial powers are still continuing their colonial legacy in Israel,
and that’s what Muslims are against globally.
In the
larger interest of global peace, it would be more useful to change this false
binary and see the real intention of creating a new state of Israel by the
global powers and in that sense it would not be a war against Palestinians but
Muslims globally.
In the
on-going conflict we don’t need to focus on Hamas, but dispossession,
oppression and apartheid against the Palestinians, and more specifically this
conflict didn’t started on October the seventh but decades ago.
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Asad
Mirza is a Delhi-based senior political and international affairs commentator
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/indian-muslims-zionism-judaism/d/131050
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