Pollak: Palestinians Need to Become ‘Zionists,’ with a Small ‘Z’

The following is an excerpt from the 2021 e-book, The Zionist Conspiracy: (and how to join it), by Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak.

Introduction

There is a group of people who quietly control the destiny of their world — and you can be one of them.

They are zionists. Not in the sense of the so-called “Zionist conspiracy,” a fraudulent claim popularized by the corrupt czarist regime in the early 20th century, which claimed a secret group of Jewish leaders met to plot the fate of the world. 

That hoax, published as The Protocol of the Elders of Zion, was used to justify the persecution and murder of Jews, and is still used today to motivate irrational hatred of the Jewish state of Israel.

No — the “zionism” I am describing is a way of approaching the world and pursuing one’s own aspirations. 

It is inspired by the example of Zionism itself, a worldwide movement that saw the Jewish people, the most downtrodden on earth, re-establish their — our — ancient homeland as a thriving contemporary nation-state in the Land of Israel. 

Zionism, as a specific political and cultural phenomenon, is one of the most astonishing success stories in the history of human civilization. It has, against the odds, and many enemies, produced one of the happiest and most vibrant societies on the planet today.

Zionism, in that form, is simply understood as the belief that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in their own land. 

“Self-determination” means control of our own collective destiny. The right of self-determination need not lead to political independence, although in the case of Israel, that was a necessary outcome. The society that later became Israel — known as the Yishuv — already existed prior to the Second World War, but could not save millions of Jews from the Holocaust — denied refuge by almost every nation in the world — because it did not control its own boundaries. 

The Zionist idea was uniquely successful, in that there are few other such examples of an oppressed people rescuing themselves and creating a renaissance — not through the oppression of others, as has been erroneously claimed by Israel’s opponents, but through a process of self-improvement that has also, in fact, enriched the lives of Israel’s enemies.

The principle of self-determination is not unique to Jews, or to Israel. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson saw it as a universal right of nations in his “Fourteen Points,” his proposal for the world that was to emerge after the First World War.

Nor must the idea of self-determination remain confined to nations, or to collective groups of people. It is a principle that can be applied on an individual level. 

You determine the destiny of your own life.

Of course, each of us is formed by families, and we all live in communities. “No man is an island entire of itself,” wrote the English poet John Donne. Moreover, each of us faces obstacles and challenges placed in our way by fate and fortune; we each face competitors, and rivals; we each depend on the support, and tutelage, of other human beings.

Yet it is within the power of each individual to make the most of those circumstances — including the difficulties — not only to be the best that he or she can be, but to exceed the expectations that might otherwise have greeted us, and to transcend the boundaries of what might have been thought possible for our lives.

That is the lesson of Zionism, which in its modern form began as the vision of a lone journalist, a writer who believed — absurdly — that merely by conceiving an idea, and encouraging others to share it, he had created a future nation-state.

Theodor Herzl did not merely imagine that the Jewish state would be an administrative body. He saw it as a paradigm of a “New Society,” a country that would exemplify the highest human ideals, and that would lead the world in science, industry, and cultural endeavors.

He believed that because he could also see that the talents and energies of the Jewish people, suppressed for centuries by religious persecution, and restricted in the modern world by pseudo-scientific racism, held immense potential that could be realized if Jews were to be guaranteed the freedom to pursue their God-given abilities.

For millennia, Jews have prayed for a return to Zion — to the land that God had promised us in the Bible, and to the city of Jerusalem where we had once achieved our destiny as a people. Herzl was among the first to see that the power to fulfill those prayers lay, to some extent, in the hands of the Jewish people ourselves — and that the need was urgent.

He created a movement that achieved its astonishing goal a mere fifty years later. But Zionism need not be the sole possession of the Jewish people. 

…

In fact, there is much Palestinians could learn from Zionism. Zionism is a success story; Palestinian nationalism, thus far, is a failure. The Zionists were prepared to accept less territory than they had expected, just to achieve statehood; the Palestinians have rejected every proposal, short of the destruction of Israel. 

Palestinians believe that Israel was created because of the Holocaust; therefore they have emphasized their own sense of victimization. They overlook Israel’s deep historic and religious roots, and the fact that the foundations of the Jewish state were laid long before the Second World War.

It is because Jews were able to move beyond a victim mentality that they were able to make the most of the equal opportunity the United Nations granted to both Jews and Arabs to create their own respective states when Palestine was partitioned in 1947. Zionism is not a doctrine of conquest, nor of retribution. It is a positive vision — one to which the Holocaust granted additional urgency, but which would have been realized even without that horror. Israel today would be far stronger had European Jewry survived, with millions of souls and their talents contributing to the Zionist project.

It is my argument that Zionism contains universal principles that can be applied by any group of people, or individual human beings, as they pursue their aspirations. “Zionism” is a proper noun, but like some other such nouns, it should also have a common-noun cousin. 

The term “Catholic,” capital “C,” refers to the global church, centered in Rome, whose members believe was founded by Jesus Christ. But the term “catholic,” lower-case “c,” has a more general meaning. One dictionary defines it as “universal in extent; involving all; of interest to all.” 

“Zionism,” I believe, has such a catholic definition. The term “zionist” could refer to an approach to problem-solving in which those determined to succeed are prepared to change themselves to achieve their goals. They take full responsibility for their own fate, blaming no one else for their failures, and sharing their successes with others — even their opponents and enemies.

Missed opportunities

The legendary Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban famously said: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” That phrase is often misquoted as “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” though there is no Arab nation that has done more to earn that assessment.

The Palestinian people today, as a group, are among the more successful Arabs in the Middle East, in terms of educational achievement, and even — with the exception of the Gaza Strip, and those living in refugee camps— in terms of economic prosperity. 

But as a national movement, the Palestinian project is a failure — thanks to bad choices throughout history.

Those bad choices began in the 1920s, when the response of Palestinian Arab leaders to Jewish immigration and national aspirations was violence. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, fomented pogroms against Jews, and urged British authorities — with some success — to stop Jewish immigration. 

Ultimately, the Palestinian Arab leadership turned against the British themselves, staging an armed revolt in the 1930s. The reaction of the British authorities was to repress and disarm the Arab communities. As a result, Palestinian armed forces played a very limited role in the 1948 war.

War itself had not been inevitable. But the Palestinian Arabs rejected every proposal for sharing the land. They rejected several partition plans, even those that gave the Jewish state only small amounts of territory. 

On the eve of the Second World War, they even rejected an offer that amounted to Arab sovereignty in a unitary state, because it came with the condition that they allow a limited number of Jewish refugees into the country. 

When the United Nations passed General Assembly Resolution 181 in 1947, partitioning the land into a Jewish and an Arab state, the Palestinians again said no.

Palestinians regard May 15, the date Israel declared independence, as the “Nakba,” meaning disaster. The real disaster was not Israeli independence, but Palestinian rejection. The Palestinian leaders, together with other Arab states, decided not to build an Arab state — even while retaining the right to dispute Israel’s legitimacy, or its borders — bur rather to declare war on the Jewish state.

During the war, Arab leaders encouraged Palestinians to leave their homes so as not to interfere with the invading armies, promising them a speedy return. Though Israel was not blameless in the ensuing Arab flight, it was a major factor in the displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians, who became refugees.

Following the armistice, most of the Arab states refused to integrate the Palestinian refugees into their own countries. They preferred the Palestinians to remain in refugee camps, hoping to use them to make the case against Israel, demanding the “right of return.” Today, the descendants of those refugees number in the millions. Israel, in contrast, absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who fled the Arab world.

The Palestinians, and the Arab world, chose to cling to the lost struggle of 1948, rather than moving on, or building something new.

It was only the first of many squandered opportunities. In 1978, when Israel and Egypt made peace, Palestinians joined the rest of the Arab world in rejecting the Camp David Accords, though they provided a foundation for future negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A decade later, the Palestinians achieved significant international leverage in the first intifada. But rather than make the most of that leverage in negotiations, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat sided with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War — not just against Israel, but most of the rest of the Arab world as well.

The Palestinians had another chance with the Madrid peace conference that followed the war. Separately, Israelis and Palestinians used secret back-channel talks to forge the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993. Finally, Palestinians enjoyed self-governance under the Palestinian Authority. Statehood was possible, if Palestinians could finally accept partition, and peace.

But they did not. Instead, Arafat encouraged terror and incitement. And when Israel offered him an unprecedented deal at Camp David in July 2000 — nearly all of the West Bank, plus Gaza; a capital in part of Jerusalem; and sovereignty over the Temple Mount — he walked away and launched the violent, nihilistic second intifada.

Arafat died in 2004. His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, rejected an even more generous peace offer from Israel under Ehud Olmert in 2008. And Abbas also rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan, which offered $50 million in investment aid.

The Palestinians have rejected every offer. They have preferred struggle to compromise, believing that in the long run, they can have everything, if they just wait for Israel to collapse. To that end, the Palestinians have sided with every enemy of Israel, no matter how awful, from Saddam to Iran.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians remain stateless.

The violent core of Palestinian nationalism

It might seem relatively straightforward to meet the most basic of Israeli demands: namely, to reject terrorism, and to cease incitement against Israel and Jews. 

Instead, the Palestinian Authority has chosen to continue to support terrorism; to educate children that all of present-day Israel belongs to them; and to incite hatred against Israelis and Jews.

Terror, which might ordinarily be regarded — and is often defended — as a desperate tactic to be used only in extreme circumstances, turns out to be central to Palestinian national identity.

In 2018, under President Trump, the U.S. passed the Taylor Force Act, which prevents American taxpayer funds from being provided to the Palestinian Authority as long as the Palestinian leadership continues to pay subsidies to Palestinians serving time for terror in Israeli prisons, or to pay pensions to the bereaved families of dead Palestinian terrorists. The law was named after an American graduate student and U.S. Army veteran who was killed by a Palestinian terrorist on a visit to Israel in 2016.

Faced with a choice between losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid, and cutting off payments to terrorists and their families, the Palestinian Authority chose the terrorists.

The embrace of terror has deep roots in the Palestinian national movement. When the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created in 1964, under the auspices of the Arab states of the region, it was considered somewhat marginal. The Palestinian cause remained a sideshow compared to the larger pan-Arab ambitions of Gamel Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and others.

The defeat of the Arab powers in the Six Day War, and the sudden appearance of Israeli military governors in the West Bank and Gaza, created new room for the Palestinian cause. But it was only with the spectacular terrorist attacks of the early 1970s, notably the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, by the Black September faction, that the Palestinian cause began to earn major international attention. 

Yasser Arafat’s PLO; George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP); and Abu Nidal’s organization competed with each other to commit acts of daring and destruction. (Palestinian hijacking of airplanes was partly responsible for many security measures at airports, even before 9/11.) Palestinians have celebrated these terrorists, and the suicide bombers of the second intifada, as heroes and martyrs, naming monuments and parks in their honor.

Every nation celebrates its military heroes, including some with morally questionable records in battle. But the Palestinian national movement is one of the few that celebrates “heroes” who deliberately target civilians, or “martyrs” who willingly kill themselves to murder others. Imperial Japan celebrated the kamikaze fighters, but they largely targeted the U.S. Navy. 

Raising children to venerate mass murderers as heroes creates a corrosive national culture, one obsessed with death and destruction, rather than life or creativity. But it is the choice Palestinians have made, perhaps in the tragic belief that only such acts have held their movement together. 

Indeed, it is remarkable that Palestinians have few national holidays or symbols that are not simply opposites of Israeli holidays and symbols. “Nakba Day,” for instance, is the most significant Palestinian national holiday, yet it marks Israeli independence (on the secular calendar). 

There are many Palestinian organizations in the diaspora, especially in the West, that devote themselves to campaigning against Israel. But there are very few groups that invest effort or money into the development of Palestine itself, in preparation for independence — certainly nothing like the Zionists’ efforts to develop collective farms, or ongoing efforts to plant trees inside Israel.

Indeed, the development of the Palestinian economy, and Palestinian governing institutions, seems to be of greater interest to the international community, and to Israel itself, than to the Palestinians. 

The tragic story of the Gaza greenhouses is a case in point. In 2005, when Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip, the departing Israelis left behind thousands of greenhouses that had been used in successful agricultural enterprises.

The New York Times reported in 2005: “James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president who is serving as a Middle East envoy, hammered out the deal to buy the greenhouses. He even gave $500,000 of his own money to the group that spent $14 million for them.”

Many — though not all — of the greenhouses soon fell into disrepair. As the Atlantic noted in 2014: “The greenhouses were soon looted and destroyed, serving, until today, as a perfect metaphor for Gaza’s wasted opportunity.” Some, including Wolfensohn, partly blamed Israel for the failure, given that Israel had closed Gaza’s border crossings. But there was good reason for that: Palestinians used the opportunity of Israel’s departure to fire more rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians, not to focus on building their society.

What would Palestinian Zionism look like?

The Palestinian national movement has copied various elements of Israeli nationalism — at least as perceived by Israel’s critics. One, for example, is a focus on victimization. The Arab world, believing erroneously that Israel was founded because of the Holocaust, has tended to elevate Palestinian suffering, even comparing the supposed “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine to the genocide of European Jewry. 

But the emphasis on tragedy misses what actually made Zionism successful. If the Palestinians were to adopt what really allowed Jews to build a new state, which became one of the most prosperous countries in the world, they would succeed, too.

A “Palestinian Zionism” would begin by emphasizing sovereignty — not an abstract kind of statehood, recognized by 120 sympathetic countries at the United Nations General Assembly, but actual political independence, on territory rather than on paper. 

The Palestinians have been offered sovereignty numerous times throughout the history of the conflict, and have rejected every version. If the Palestinians were to follow the Zionist model, they would do whatever necessary to achieve political independence on any amount of territory. At that point, with equal membership in the community of nations, they could press for the resolution of any further territorial claims, diplomatically.

That is how the early Zionists approached the question of partition. They were willing to accept an unfavorable division of territory, simply for the benefit of planting a flag. They did not accept every proposal: the Zionist Congress rejected the Peel Commission plan of 1937, for instance, which proposed that the future Jewish state include only the Mediterranean coast and the northern Galilee. But they entertained every option — even considering the possibility of statehood in Africa. They understood that sovereignty was a crucial foundation. After all, if Israel existed before the Second World War, European Jewry might have been saved. 

A second element of “Palestinian Zionism” would stress the development of the Palestinian economy even before sovereignty. Zionists were draining swamps, planting trees, and experimenting with new agricultural technology long before Israel declared statehood. Jewish children carried little blue boxes for the Jewish National Fund, raising money to buy land; young adults spent years, or at least summers, on collective farms. Even into the late 20th century, there have been summer camps for American Jewish youth that have tried to create a “kibbutz” experience, training them to make Aliyah.

Palestinians have received plenty of foreign economic assistance, equivalent to several Marshall Plans — from the European Union, from the World Bank, and — until the Taylor Force Act — from the United States. But there has been little attention to development projects that Palestinians can fund themselves. 

The Palestinian diaspora includes successful people who could, if they desire, create the engines for the future development of a Palestinian state. A few such efforts exist; they can be the seeds for greater investment. Young Palestinians in the diaspora could be encouraged to develop skills the future Palestinian state needed, and encouraged to move there.

The main reason that such efforts are still rather paltry is that the Palestinian Authority is deeply corrupt. The late Yasser Arafat diverted funds into an investment portfolio that was estimated to be worth $1 billion after his death — including, ironically, $8 million in an Israeli venture capital fund. 

Mahmoud Abbas, elected president of the Palestinian Authority, is now in the [19th] year of his first four-year term. Under such conditions, it is inevitable that insiders will maximize opportunities for self-enrichment, and discourage (or extort) any kind of investment or project that is not under their direct control. 

Therefore a third way in which Palestinian nationalism ought to follow the Israeli example is to develop real, democratic self-governing institutions. Israel’s parliamentary democracy is chaotic, and unstable, and loud, but has prevented the concentration of power in the hands of any one person or party. It also has an independent judiciary, a vigorous media, and vibrant civil society institutions. 

The development of those institutions long predated Israel’s declaration of independence. Palestinian society cannot wait for statehood to develop a stronger civil society and a transparent, participatory political system. As the Zionists did, they have to start in advance.

Fourth, Palestinians should emulate Zionism by preparing an appropriate cultural foundation for building a successful state. Jews revived Hebrew and spoke it to one another; they created art and music for the movement; they celebrated their national revival long before Israel was a state. Today, Jewish schools did not, and do not, preach hatred of Arabs, or Muslims; they emphasize hopes for peace. There is prejudice in Israel, but it is opposed by the majority and by educational and culture institutions.

Palestinian children, unfortunately, continue to be indoctrinated to believe that Israel and Jews evil, and that all of the land will be theirs. It is a foundation for failure.

What kind of Palestinian state?

Fundamentally, the question that Palestinians have yet to answer is: what would a Palestinian state look like? 

Lacking a clear response, the answer reverts to the idea that “Palestine” is simply the opposite of Israel — taking up all of the land, returning all of the millions of Palestinian “refugees” to the places they remember in family lore.

But that is not a realistic vision, because it requires the elimination of Israel as a precondition — if not the death or expulsion of millions of Jews, then at least the political destruction of the state and the new society that they built.

So the question remains. I have won many an argument with pro-Palestinian activists by asking them, simply, what kind of state they want. Is it a democratic one? An Islamic one? Usually, they have no idea; they have not thought that far ahead. 

But the question is real, and problematic. Many of the activists who support the Palestinian cause — particularly in the West — have left-wing views. They fight corporate power, and insist on racial justice, gender equality, abortion rights, and religious tolerance. More than that, many demand equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and “queer” (LGBTQ) people.

Many of these values are upheld in Israel — or, at the very least, shared by broad sections of the Israeli population. But for all the “intersectionality” of left-wing movements in the West, where radical activists in other movements are expected to support the Palestinian cause, the fact is that Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza rejects these ideals. 

The safest place for a Palestinian to be gay, for instance, is Israel. Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz has noted, wryly, that activists in the U.S. marching with banners like “Queers for Palestine” would likely be persecuted if they were actually in Palestine.

Even the more limited demand that Israel end its “occupation” in the West Bank raises questions that Palestinians have yet to answer. If Palestinians object to the presence of Jewish settlements in the area, is the future Palestinian state to be rid of all Jews? Palestinian laws have apartheid-like prohibitions, dating to the period of Jordanian occupation (1948-1967), against selling land to Israelis or Jews. Are those to be retained? Or, in the terms of Nazi Germany —as the late Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Cyril Harris, put it bluntly — is the future Palestinian state to be judenrein?

If the Palestinian Authority were to offer full citizenship to the current Jewish residents of the West Bank, as a protected minority in a future Palestinian state, the Palestinian cause would acquire greater moral stature.

But the problem is that Palestinian leaders do not even respect the basic human rights of Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority is notorious for its censorship and suppression of dissent. Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip with an iron fist, uses Palestinian civilians as human shields in wars with Israel.

What the Palestinian cause lacks, fundamentally, is a positive vision — the kind of dream that Zionists had, even before Herzl, which transcended statehood and invokes a kind of idealism about the kind of society that the new state will create. 

The Palestinian vision has largely been nostalgic, and backward-looking — save for Hamas, which shares with other Islamist movements a vision of an Islamic state governed by old religious principles. Neither is realistic; neither allows room for the flourishing of human rights, or creativity, or investment in the future.

George Orwell warned in 1944 that the effects of slanderous propaganda were, in the long run, more destructive than bombs: 

The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible. War damages the fabric of civilization not by the destruction it causes (the net effect of a war may even be to increase the productive capacity of the world as a whole), nor even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred and dishonesty. By shooting at your enemy you are not in the deepest sense wronging him. But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing children up to believe them, by clamouring for unjust peace terms which make further wars inevitable, you are striking not at one perishable generation, but at humanity itself.

Zionism, for all its faults, embraced a vision in which Arabs would live in harmony with Jews. It also required that Jews change who they are to become capable of self-governance.

The Palestinian cause has been too mired in the past, and in old prejudices, to move forward. 

Palestinians must become more “zionist” — to move beyond the destructive identity of the past, and the legacy of terror, to embrace a future alongside Israel, practicing universal principles of tolerance. Only then will they fulfill their aspirations.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

The e-book, The Zionist Conspiracy: (and how to join it),is available at Amazon.com.