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Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism

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Contrary to the knee-jerk rejection by one reviewer here (review entitled "a tenditious [sic] polemic", this is an excellent work. M. Shahid Alam has his own point of view, as any student of history must (something that is not permitted in the US when one's view directly denies the "received wisdom"). Alam is decisively -- and laudably -- outside the brutally narrow, even tyrannical, mainstream of Israeli, American and European scholarship on this subject. This is the kind of book that untenured professors dare not write because it will bring down the wrath of bigots and racists like Alan Dershowitz. An important read.

With respect specifically to the comments of Mr. Guberman:

How on earth can a work written in 1902 be taken to refute an ideology of 30 and 40 years later? David Ben-Gurion was 16 when Altneuland was published, and as _many_ have noted (across the spectrum of scholarship on the founding of Israel), Zionism has taken _many_ forms, just as most (even all) nationalist movements have. There is simply no denying that Ben-Gurion did indeed reject the notion that Palestinians had any rights collectively, as a people (and thus any rights to their own nation). Thus, while insisting on Jewish nationalist rights, Ben-Gurion rejected comparable rights for Palestinians. He also spoke explicitly of common cause with the Christian minority of Lebanon in undermining and even destroying the Palestinians.

Ben-Gurion: "Israel is the bastion of the West in the Middle East." Sounds like classic Western imperialist thinking to me.

Ben-Gurion again: "[A] Christian state should be established, with its southern border on the Litani River (i.e., in Lebanon). We will make an alliance with it. When we smash the Arab legion's strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan, too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt dares to fight on, we will bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo.... And in this fashion, we will end the war and settle our forefathers' account with Egypt, Assyria, and Aram."

That's not a socialist Zionist vision, it's a biblical one.

The claim that Alam adopts "a conspiracy theory" regarding slavish US adherence to blindly pro-Israel policy is merely a libel calculated to eliminate any need to actually rebut Alam's arguments.

The author offers his extraordinary research few dared to undertake exposing the destructive dogma of Zionism. A must read for everyone interested to work for justice in the Middle East and peace in the world. A book of solid scholarship.

that recycles exploded canards, for example, that, in the 1930s David Ben Gurion, later the first Prime Minister of Israel, advocated a "transfer," in modern parland, an ethnic cleansing, of the Arabs of Palestine.

For a refutation of the false claim that Zionism's early leaders sought to establish an "exclusionary colonialism," one need only read the 1902 Zionist utopian novel Altneuland: The Old-New-Land (the old-new land) by Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, available on-line here: [...]

Alam also associates Zionism with the idea of Jews as a chosen people. But political Zionism incorporated no such doctrine. Moreover, the Socialist Zionist builders of the Zionist enterprise in Israel (formerly Mandatory Palestine) were largely agnostics or athiests. Indeed, many Orthodox Jews, especially those whom today sometimes are called "ultra-Orthodox," opposed political Zionism on the grounds that a return to the land of Israel was to be accomplished only by God, not by mere humans.

Alam also adopts a conspiracy theory view of the success of Zionists in attracting the support of labor and civil rights leaders, of (many) members of Congress, and of various Presidents.

In short, although written by a professor (of economics), the book fails even minimal academic standards.