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Bringing the World to understand the immorality of anti-Zionism
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Joel S. Fishman
Helping the World Understand the Immorality of anti-Zionism
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Elyakim Ha
The Illusions of a Political Solution
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Elyakim Ha
Anti-Zionism: "Heart of the Politics of Immorality".
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| Helping the World Understand the Immorality of anti-Zionism |
For some years Israel's enemies have used the concept that Zionism is immoral as a weapon of political warfare to delegitimize the Jewish state by portraying it as a criminal enterprise. Opposition to Zionism became a major political problem, when on 10 November 1975, the Soviet Union and its supporters passed the U. N. resolution that "Zionism is Racism." This measure converted a partisan claim into an internationally accepted “truth.” Long after the original resolution was overturned on 16 December 1991, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist (it fell ten days later), its totalitarian ideology assumed a life of its own, and the alleged immorality of Zionism became a feature of political correctness and leftist ideology.
If we wish to convince the world that anti-Zionism is immoral, more will be needed than gentle persuasion. Our challenge is to discredit the concept and to replace it in the world’s consciousness with the positive formulation that Zionism is moral. Viewing the problem in its widest cultural perspective, it will be necessary to discredit the ideology that produced this article of faith and create a positive Judeo-Christian environment in which the morality of Zionism will be self-evident.
The present situation reminds one of a field in which a large number of weeds have sprouted. If one wishes to cultivate land that has been invaded by weeds, uprooting them alone is insufficient, because it will be necessary to repeat the operation every day. Instead, one must plow the field over and replant it in order to make it inhospitable for the weeds.(1)
The purpose of the world campaign to equate Zionism with racism, imperialism, or Nazism is to create moral confusion, as is the parallel effort to give terror respectability or to justify it while condemning it. The real motive of this verbal aggression is to destroy the distinction between right and wrong and to deconstruct the foundations of our shared legacy of Judeo-Christian morality. The resulting moral confusion is known as anomie, which means lawlessness in Greek, but in our time signifies “a social condition in which the hierarchy of values disintegrates and ‘all regulation is lacking.’” We must therefore defend the rule of law, speak the truth, and reject the use of terror and intimidation.
We must raise our sights. In the international context, we must recover the playing field and make the rules of the game, -- rules based on moral principles and idealism. In this spirit, I wish to present two insights. In his book, Renaissance Diplomacy, Garrett Mattingly described the spirit of Western idealism as it developed from the Tenth to the Fifteenth centuries:
In the Latin West idealism was not a policy deliberately adopted, but a basic moral assumption. Man was not less bound to strive eternally towards perfection because he knew in advance that his best unaided efforts could scarcely bring him nearer to it. The gulf between aspiration and achievement was part of God’s ordering of the universe. Like other creatures, princes and republics were prone to sin and error. This did not impugn the validity of the norms by which their conduct must be judged. It had not yet been suggested that in these matters society might accomplish more just by expecting less. (2)
The second insight is that one of the major cultural events of modern times was the publication in 1611 of the King James Version of the Bible. This happened on the eve of the Age of Discovery, and in the intervening centuries the West has been living off this capital. At present, we need another cultural event of the same magnitude that will bring us safely through the next few centuries as well as a series of sustained smaller steps to consolidate its effects. Perhaps by aspiring to the most ambitious goals and demanding more of ourselves we may do more to advance and safeguard our rich legacy. In this pursuit, Christians and Jews, together, may redeem the Earthly Jerusalem and raise it closer to the Heavens.
Dr. Joel Fishman is an Associate of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
1.Example taken from Lieutenant-Colonel Lyautey, “Du rôle colonial de l’Armée,” Revue des deux Mondes, Vol. CLVII (February 15, 1900):313.
2.Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964): 43.
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