Status Updates From Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

reviewing for Library Journal because I just cannot give myself a break.

Only when one understands the extent of Zionist collaboration with Nazism can one understand the relentlessness of the campaign against Arendt.

"By means of Auschwitz-which has become over the years Israel's main reference in its relations with a world defined repeatedly as anti-Semitic and forever hostile-Israel rendered itself immune to criti-cism, and impervious to a rational dialogue with the world around," wrote the Israeli historian Idith Zertal.

“If Jews could live safely in other countries, that undermined the central contention of Zionism: that Jews could be safe only in a Jewish state. In 1938, the Zionists therefore blocked a plan to bring twenty thousand Jewish children to the United States.”

“The belief that peace was Zionism's goal revealed a fundamental error, consuming the entire careers of diplomats as well as of historians. It was logical to believe that Israel wanted peace, but its actions, consistent with those of other settler colonies, revealed that its negotiations were a sham, aimed at credulous outsiders.”

“The hunger for more and more Palestinian land drove Israel to expand and expand, pouring salt in the already-gaping wound of indigenous dispossession, empowering the most extreme elements in the settler-colonial society, fueling Arab enmity, and guaranteeing itself a condition of permanent warfare.”

“For many Jews as well as for millions of non-Jews, the Holocaust had granted the Jews the status of the ultimate victim-people. Unique suffering conferred unique status. This moral prestige was granted, by extension, to the Israeli state, and— by even further extension—to the Israeli army.”

“…who had carried out the genocide, to the Arabs, who had not: that is, sending the Arabs the bill for European crimes. This was another kind of colonization, a moral colonization this time.

“These peoples shared a culture and a language that sprawled across countries and continents, and another thing they shared, despite their great diversity, was a history of European imperialism. The story of the expulsion of the Jews had the added convenience of shifting the consequences of the Holocaust from the Europeans,…”

“Like so many Zionist stories, this one is a little too simple, a little too much like a fairy tale, and again like so many Zionist stories-relies on racist ideas. The reality is that the distinction between "Arab" and “Jew" only arrived with Zionism. Before, there were Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs, Jewish Arabs, and “Arab" no more referred to a specific race or religion than the term "Latin American" did.”