Do you sense that anti-Zionism is being normalized? I do. I hear the word and more more frequently these days, in a neutral manner. It's been separated at last from the smear, that it is anti-semitic, thru the refusal of many critics to be intimidated. Here is more evidence: Tony Judt's frankly post-Zionist obituary in the New York Review of Books for his friend Amos Elon (1926-2009), who died in Italy after a long career in Israeli letters.
Judt wisely connects Elon's exile to all the other disaffected Israelis living abroad. Also note the nice treatment of Israeli history. Before 1948, Jews could blame Palestinians for hardheartedness. And since 1967? Excerpt:
In all his writings, notably an influential 1996 New York Review
essay entitled "Israel and the End of Zionism," he was distinctly
evenhanded in acknowledging the errors of both sides. But the historic
mistakes of the Palestinians had come primarily before 1948, whereas
Israel was overwhelmingly responsible for the disastrous missteps that
followed its great victory in 1967.
Zionism, as Amos came to realize, had outlived its usefulness. "As a
measure of…'affirmative action,' Zionism was useful during the
formative years. Today it has become redundant." What had once been the nationalist ideology of a stateless people has
undergone a tragic transition. It has, for a growing number of
Israelis, been corrupted into an uncompromising ethno-religious real
estate pact with a partisan God, a pact that justifies any and all
actions against real or imagined threats, critics, and enemies. The
Zionist project, a doctrine dating to the state-building nationalisms
of the late nineteenth century, has long since lost its way. It can
mean little—though it can do much harm—in an established democratic
state with aspirations to normality. In any case it has been hijacked
by ultras. Herzl's dream of a "normal" Jewish country has become an
exclusivist sectarian nightmare, a development that Amos illustrated by
slightly misquoting Keats: "Fanatics have a dream by which they weave a
paradise for a sect."..
This growing inability—in America above all, but in Israel too—to
distinguish between Jews and Israel, Israel and Zionism, Zionism and
fanatical theological exclusivism, helps explain why an Israeli like
Amos Elon would in his later years find himself living in Tuscany
(where he died on May 25). Many Israelis, especially younger and
better-educated men and women, today live outside their country,
attracted by the cosmopolitan cities of Europe and the US. A few of
them have chosen exile rather than serve in an army of occupation. But
for a man of Elon's generation, already adult when his country came
into being and utterly committed to the necessity and success of
Zionism, the decision to sell his home in Jerusalem and settle
permanently abroad was far more wrenching and carries profound
implications. A moral exile in his own land, Amos—the consummate
Israeli in so many ways—was once again rootless; or at any rate rooted
only in his defiant cosmopolitanism.
