Over at Normblog, there’s a great post by Eve Gerrard in which she goes to work on certain arguments against Zionism.
She’s responding to to a book review by Geoffrey Wheatcroft and says,
Anti-Semitism is a light sleeper, he seems to imply, and Jews should be careful to avoid adopting views - such as the view that Jews have a right to self-determination - which everyone else finds abhorrent, for fear of waking it from its sleep. I wonder if Wheatcroft would be happy to say to other minority groups (blacks, say, or homosexuals) or even to members of majority groups (such as feminist women), that they shouldn’t collectively embrace unpopular views for fear of making others hate them; that the price of acceptance is and should be conformity to the dominant view? (That isn’t a rhetorical question, by the way - I would truly like to know the answer to it.) But I have no reason to believe that Wheatcroft generally recommends to minority groups a political position so numbingly hostile to independent thought and progressive reform. It seems likely that this prescription is one he reserves for Jews, perhaps because hostility towards them has in the recent past been so murderous, on so huge a scale, that it’s especially important to prevent it recurring. But in that case, the claims and assumptions of Wheatcroft’s first narrative collapse.
Do yourself a favour; go and read the rest now.
I would suggest people read Geoffrey Wheatcroft read his book “The Contoversy of Zion.” In that book he not only attacks Zionism he also goes after what he calls Jews “who make a living out of the Holocaust.” p339.
His whole book is written from the point of view of an “impartial scholar” yet he clearly takes sides with Jews who were and are anti-Zionist.
What exactly gives him the right to take sides in an intra-Jewish debate he never says.
It’s as if a white “scholar” were to take sides in the Black American debate about how best to fight discrimination.
Wheatcroft goes on also to accuse the Israeli government of using the Holocaust for its own political purposes.
His views on these issues are sometime indistinguishable from those of a David Duke or a Norman Finkelstein.
Like them he also accuses anyone who questions his stance of trying to shut down debate or belonging to the Zionist lobby. He did this recently when he reviewed a book by Tony Judt in the New York Times Book Review. In the review he accused Zionists of trying to wreck the career of anyone critical of Israel.
I had written a letter to the Times pointing out the Wheatcroft’s career was hardly in danger of being ruined by criticism, but alas the paper in its infinite wisdom decided not to publish any letters about the review.