British Paper Publishes Jewish Anti-Zionist

by on May 29, 2008 6
How refreshing to read, in the Guardian, a piece on Ahad Ha'am, the cultural Zionist who opposed Herzl's dreams of a Jewish state in Palestine. The writer, David Goldberg, is plainly an anti-Zionist, and urges readers to go past the Nakba to the root cause, the original Zionist colonists, who were never welcome. Wrote Ha'am on a visit to Palestine in 1891:
"We tend to believe abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, an uncultivated wilderness, and anyone can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which lies fallow."
I learned something from this piece. Here, meanwhile, the media allow the Israel lobby to maintain the near-universal delusion that being anti-Zionist is antisemitic. This is a form of intellectual thuggery. In Australia, Antony Loewenstein is often published in the mainstream press. And how often is Joel Kovel given an Op-Ed here?

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Beyondoweiss, Israel/Palestine, US Politics

{ 6 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Leila Abu-Saba says:
    May 30, 2008 at 12:36 am

    I must have screwed up and dropped my comment about Karl Linn, an early Zionist and later anti-Zionist, Holocaust survivor, Kibbutznik, member of Etsel (Jewish resistance group) for a short while, psychoanalyst, landscape architect & urban garden creator, and Arab-Jewish dialogue promoter… he had lots to say about the land and Arabs and Jews. His memorial website includes none of it…

    I allude here in my obituary of him:

    http://bedouina.typepad.com/doves_eye/2005/02/karl_linn.html

    He wrote and self-published a memoir on his relationship to Palestine, Israel and Zionism – I'll have to find it. Looks like his heirs are trying to ignore his critique of the Zionist myth about the land.

  2. Leila Abu-Saba says:
    May 30, 2008 at 12:39 am

    I was friends with the late Karl Linn, a HOlocaust survivor who went to Palestine in 1934, lived on a Kibbutz, studied agriculture, joined a Zionist resistance movement, left to get psychoanalyzed, became a shrink, then a prominent landscape architect and urban green movement pioneer. (Whew)

    In dialogue group he often said that coming to Palestine saved his life, but he displaced Arab indigenous people, and that has always troubled him. He talked about how he and his fellow kibbutznicks had no relations with the Arab neighbors; they chased the Arabs off their property, and only later did Linn discover that the Jews had confiscated land holding the local Arabs' cemetery – the Arabs were trying to get in to visit their ancestors. This was all before 48.

    Linn also said several times to me that Arab traditional agricultural methods were much more sustainable than "modern" ones, and he wished he had understood that back then.

    Linn self-published a memoir in pamphlet form but none of his observations about Arabs and Jews in Palestine and later Israel are reflected on his memorial website. I wonder who put it together – someone who doesn't see things the way he did. Linn was much more radical than I was on the subject of Israel/Palestine in those days (2002-2003).

    Your comments above make me think of him… I will look for his memoir in my papers.

  3. Glenn Condell says:
    May 30, 2008 at 12:47 am

    'In Australia, Antony Loewenstein is often published in the mainstream press. And how often is Joel Kovel given an Op-Ed here?'

    The difference is that while Antony cops the standard relentless bollocking from the usual suspects, they don't have the almost total lock on ownership and management of MSM that applies in the US.

    Plus the non-Lobby types in journalism here are perhaps not quite as conditioned to be scared of the potential 'antisemitism' blowback that characterises US Lobby responses to anything perceived as pro-Palestinian.

    Though it occurs, as poor old Ed O'Loughlin's experience last week shows.

  4. Leila Abu-Saba says:
    May 30, 2008 at 1:03 pm

    Let me take back something I posted above. I don't know what Karl Linn's heirs want or think about his critique of Israel. His memorial website is devoted to his environmental activism and his colorful life. The anti-Zionist critique is not really there although there's a slight allusion to it in the Palestine section of the digital media archive. The people developing the website may not have felt competent to deal with the topic; or they were scared of it.

    I found his memoir pamphlet and it's riveting. I'm sending Phil a photocopy of it. I may write to the webmaster at Karl Linn.org and ask if they would consider uploading the memoir to the site. It would be irresponsible of me to claim that the heirs are suppressing anything – I have no evidence of that at all, it's just a conclusion I jumped to. I didn't go to journalism school but I know I have to be more careful with facts than that…

  5. Doppler says:
    May 31, 2008 at 12:00 am

    "Intellectual thuggery" is a good term. Do you see the connection with Thomas Jefferson's statement, now graven in granite at his memorial, vowing eternal hostility against "every form of tyranny over the human mind." His universal statement was with specific reference to the Calvinists who opposed him bitterly because of his views on separation of church and state, and his favoring of "in God we Trust," over "In Christ we trust."

    Doppler

  6. moshe kerr says:
    June 8, 2008 at 3:51 am

    War sucks. But wars usually produce winners and losers. Israel prevailed over the Arabs; the Arabs prevailed over the Romans; the Romans prevailed over the Jews. That's the way it goes, crying over the past doesn't accomplish squat! Goyim who say Jew, return to being the wandering abused object of contempt that you once were … We Jews say, goy we're armed now, come on make my day!

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