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?
