Norman Lebrecht

Friday 9 July
As an Islamic cleric spreads his gospel of hate in London, one Jewish writer considers his response
FIGHTING THE EXTREMISTS
Norman Lebrecht
Professor Yusuf al-Qaradawi, presently in London, is a mainstream figure in the Muslim world. He has a weekly show on al-Jazeera, the Arab equivalent of CNN, and a chair in Sunni studies at the University of Qatar. Banned from the US and his native Egypt, the good sheikh is described by the Muslim Council of Great Britain as “a voice of reason and understanding”.
He is, beyond contradiction, a considerable scholar who memorised the Koran aged 10 and obtained his doctorate at the august Al-Azhar University. When he speaks of Islam he speaks with authority.
These fundamentalisms are rejected by the kings of Jordan and Morocco and ignored by moderate British Muslims, but across the Arab world hatred has become the driving rhetoric, allied to the allure of al-Qaeda. A vicious circle has set in since 9/11.
The more the West fears terrorism, the more Arabs feel threatened, the more they seek comfort in fundamental hatreds – hatred of America, hatred of Christianity, of Jews. Arab school textbooks are stuffed with Nazi cartoons. The Old and New Testaments are derided as “distortions”. Saudi envoys refer to Jews as dogs, snakes and pigs, the ultimate pejoratives. Racism is rampant, and consensually ignored. The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, bids the racist al-Qaradawi “truly welcome”.
I can hardly believe my eyes. It suggests to me that Zionism, the right of Jews to their own land, is as important today as it was when Theodor Herzl formulated the idea in his pamphlet Der Judenstaat, in 1896. A working journalist, square-bearded and rationalist, Herzl importuned heads of state to permit a return to Zion.
At his funeral in Vienna, 100 years ago this week, mourners thronged from all over Europe. “A tumult ensued,” reported Stefan Zweig. “Many stormed his coffin, crying, sobbing, screaming in a wild explosion of despair.”
Herzl had put political flesh on a 2,000-year-old dream. The British offered him space Uganda but the Holy Land proved irresistible, though he knew it was not empty.
When he set out to waylay the German Kaisar at the gates of Jerusalem in 1898, the journalist Herzl took note of all he saw – the populous towns the acres of land unattended by absentee owners, the terrible poverty. Far from ignoring the Arab population, he assured the mayor of Jerusalem that “it is their well-being, their individual wealth, that we will increase by bringing in their own”.
That was pure Zionism: the renewal of a region through Jewish capital, energy and ethics. Thousands surged to work the stubborn soil. They revived Hebrew as a living language, invented the kibbutz as a model village and practiced socialism and art with a fervour that would have delighted William Morris. More people speak Hebrew today as a mother tongue than Welsh or Danish. The desert bloomed and the economy boomed – for the Jews at least.
Arab inhabitants, whose numbers increased as the Jews brought prosperity, lacked a unifying identity (the term “Palestinian” did not exist until 1917). They were Christians or Muslims, traders or farmers, residents or nomads. Some 700,000 left Palestine in 1948, many of them forced out by Israeli victories; some 850,000Jews, seldom mentioned, were expelled from Arab countries.
It was not Zionism that created the Palestinian tragedy but the refusal of oil-rich Arab states to accommodate refugees, and of Palestinians to accept peace offers. Yasser Arafat conceded only last month that Israel might be here to stay. Where Jews fulfilled a dream, Palestinians cultivated an illusion.
Every now and then there is a glimpse of Herzl’s paradise. After the 1993 Oslo agreement, the world and its bankers rushed in. The French offered to build a railway from Beirut to Kuwait, the Germans to modern infrastructure. Then the mood soured and the mirage faded.
“If you desire it,” said Herzl, “it needn’t be a dream.” The more Zionism is vilified, the more Herzl is proved right. Anti-Semitism is resurgent. British synagogues are fire-bombed and cemeteries desecrated. Rabbinical students are knifed in the streets of France and Belgium. Islamic extremism is rampant.
Without the existence of Israel, Europe would revert to the everyday racism of Hilaire Belloc, John Buchan and TS Eliot, if not the murderous pogroms of Russia and expulsions of Spain. Without Israel, no Jew could stand today as leader of the Tory Party.
I have never considered myself a Zionist, not even in the years when I lived in Israel and spoke its guttural vernacular. Utopian ideologies are alien to my outlook, their panaceas too pat, too ignorant of glorious individualism.
Now, I have had to reconsider. The centre-Left embraces anti-Zionism as the Right once espoused anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism monopolises the comment of European newspapers. Zionism is anathema – at best an anachronism, at worst an impediment to world peace.
Against Arab anti-Semitism and a battery of academic bigots and blundering journalists who malign Zionism as a terrible evil, I must fight the lie. I don’t have to love Ariel Sharon to be a Zionist any more than I vote Tony Blair to be British. Israel has done its share of wrongs and will have to redress them. But the fact that anti-Semitism can thrive in the 21st century is proof that Herzl was right.
If Jews are to enjoy the same human rights as the rest of humanity, they need a state of their own. A century after Herzl, I have decided to become a Zionist. If you deplore racial and religious hatreds, you should be one, too.