Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri reminds us that “post-Zionism” among Israeli leftist academics is, for the most part, just anti-Zionism made more fashionable. The post-Zionists are the intellectual, and in many cases literal, heirs of the small but vocal anti-Zionist far Left that managed to accompany the Zionist movement to Israel. Even at the height of Stalin’s persecution of Jews in the early 1950s, there was an active pro-Stalinist Communist movement in Israel. Avineri concludes with some extremely trenchant comments:
Some of those who call themselves “post-Zionists” also come from the former Communist camp. There is something pathetic in that 20 years ago they believed in a new, just world that was to emerge from Moscow or Cuba, and the only thing that is left to them of that lofty vision today is anti-Zionism. Not the brotherhood of nations, not the liberation of the proletariat, not universal social justice – all of this has collapsed in a tragic way; the only thing that remains is the hatred of Zionism.
The anti-Zionist position has accompanied Zionism from the very outset, and it is a legitimate position even if one does not agree with it; it led some of the Communists in the Land of Israel (sorry, Palestine) to justify acts of murder of Jews in Hebron and Jerusalem, committed by Palestinians in 1929, as the authentic expression of a “popular uprising,” even if its inspiration was fanatical Islam.
There is nothing new in this moral blindness and these historical distortions, but it is worth remembering: This is not a matter of post-Zionists, but rather of anti-Zionists of the old school. The absurdity is that anti-Zionists of a different breed, the people of the ultra-Orthodox movement Agudat Yisrael, for example, have accepted the historical fact of the existence of the State of Israel. The other anti-Zionists, who are accustomed to calling themselves the people of the world of tomorrow, are still captive in the snares of the past. Indeed there is nothing new under the sun.
UPDATE: Maybe someone has done this already, but if not a book or Ph.D. thesis worth someone’s serious attention would be one on the continued influence of Soviet propaganda on the agenda, themes, language, etc., of the anti-Israel far left worldwide.