Der 1997 in der Jungle World erschienene Zeitungsartikel Vom Antizionismus zum Antisemitismus von Joachim Bruhn ist nun erstmals in englischer Sprache auf unserer Website abrufbar und steht unter unserer Rubrik Positionen & Texte zur Verfügung. Der Artikel ist im Namen der Initiative Sozialistische Forum 2002 in längerer Fassung in dem Buch Furchtbare Antisemiten, ehrbare Antizionisten erschienen (Kapitel 7: Das zionistische Dilemma).

Weitere Texte von Joachim Bruhn werden in naher Zukunft ins Englische übertragen.

 

Joachim Bruhn

From Anti-Zionism to Antisemitism

Zionism is a wrong answer to antisemitism. It was, however, the only historically appropriate answer

Translated by E. A. [1]

 

Everyone speaks of “Zionism” instead of Israeli nationalism. What is to be thought of Zionism and anti-Zionism in lights of a materialist notion of the nation? And why is it correct to claim that anti-Zionism is merely the left-wing appearance of antisemitism?

 

I Critique of the State instead of Anti-Zionism

What the UN, pressured by the Arab and Soviet camp, condemned in 1975 as the ‘racist essence of Zionism’ is the essence of statehood itself: Homogeneity and homogenisation of individuals to form a state’s people and, thereby, the material for domination. Anti-Zionism, however, displays a peculiar yet revealing lack of interest in this unique process of ex nihilo constitution of a civil state power, this historically unprecedented catching-up to statehood. In a time lapse, the founding of Israel carried out the process of primitive accumulation, which had taken over 200 years in Europe, on the indigenous Arab population. It did not, however, attempt to compensate the subsistence farmers who were set free in the course of agricultural capitalisation with industrialisation. For this reason, the founding of Israel appears to the bourgeois philo-semite as an unprecedented miracle, and to the left-wing anti-Zionist as pure cruelty. However, in their German-nationalist reverence and their tankie-esque outraged aversion alike, these critics of Israel have nothing in mind than their self-referential illusion of the good state, be it nationalist or socialist. [read more]