Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                           A STATE IS NOT A NATION

Like so many things in life, it began as serendipity. I was fooling around on Youtube before we were to switch to Netflix and continue watching the Danish political drama series Borgen that we were enjoying. But by pure accident I found on Youtube the whole of a debate held, before a very large audience, in London in 2019 on the moot that “Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism”.  We were intrigued and we watched it.

Arguing for the moot were the British journalist Melanie Phillips and the Israeli politician and member of the Knesset Einat Wilf . Arguing against the moot were the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and the Al Jazeera journalist Madhi Hasan.

The arguments of both sides were ones that I have often heard.

Phillips and Wilf argued that Anti-Zionism was just a code word for Anti-Semitism; that those who proclaimed solidarity with Palestinians were the same people who chanted anti-Jewish slogans; that Israel was a legitimately constituted sovereign state, the only fully-functioning democracy in the Middle East and besides (and apparently most important for these two speakers) that Israel was the natural home of Jews, whose ownership of the land stretched back thousands of years. Zionism was not colonialism. It was just a movement to bring Jews back to where they rightly belonged.

Ilan Pappe disputed all this. Yes, he said, there were some who conflated Anti-Zionism with a hatred of Jews, but as a Jew himself he opposed Zionism and he was not a “self-hating Jew”. He pointed out that many Jews, even in the modern state of Israel, were opposed to the nationalist ideology of Zionism, and that appeals to very ancient history as a basis for Jewish ownership were very weak. For well over a thousand years, the great majority of people living in what is now the state of Israel were Palestinian Arabs with Jews a very tiny majority. The modern state of Israel was built in large part by forcibly driving out these Palestinians. Madhi Hasan said he was fully aware of anti-semites hiding behind the banner of Anti-Zionism, but he too pointed out the many Jewish thinkers, religious groups and political societies who opposed Zionism. If you voted for the moot that “Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism”, then you would be including these people too, and that would be a patent absurdity.

Much more was said, in a more nuanced form than I have been able to report here. All four speakers spoke forcefully, even passionately, although Einat Wilf’s contribution sounded most like the formulaic rhetoric that the politician had used often before.

Who won? My answer would be nobody, as nobody was really convinced to alter opinions on the basis of what had been said. In “debates” like this, most of the audience have already made up their minds on the moot before they enter the hall where the debate is held. There was a “vote” at the end and the moot was rejected, but then the level of applause after each speaker showed that the majority of the audience rejected the moot from the get–go.

You may have your own opinion on whether Anti-Zionism is always the same as Anti-Semitism. Personally I am not going to argue the case. But I will assert one important thing. I believe every sovereign state should be open to reasonable criticism and therefore every government should be open to reasonable criticism. But state and government are not the same as the people and the nation. If I were to criticise the actions and decisions of Israel’s state and government, it would not mean that I was criticisng the whole Israeli population and it would certainly not mean that I was anti-semitic.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about this belief, but not with regard to the state of Israel.

My dentist is Chinese. My doctor is Chinese. My home city of Auckland has a growing population of Chinese. I frequently interact happily with Chinese people. I am not xenophobic or Sinophobic.

But I am no fan of the current Chinese state and government.

I have never claimed to be an expert on China. (See on this post my account of a very brief visit to Shanghai Confessionsof a Heartless Capitalist Exploiter). But I do know that the state of the so-called People’s Republic of China is economically more-or-less capitalist, but is politically a one-party totalitarian state with constant surveillance of its citizens,  state-controlled media, absolutely no freedom to dissent and no respect for human rights. This totalitarian state is also essentially an imperialist state. It has swallowed up Tibet, forced birth control and abortions upon Tibetan women to severely limit the indigenous Tibetan population, and flooded Tibet with Han Chinese settlers. It is currently using the same inhumane and coercive tactics against Muslim Uyghurs in its western provinces. Having long-since discarded destructive Maoist ideas of economy, it has prospered materially – at least for many Han Chinese and - despite its concerns about a drastically declining birth-rate -  is clearly going into expansionist mode with ever stronger threats against Taiwan which it claims as its own. And of course it has crushed what remained of democracy in Hong Kong, which was supposed, by mutual agreement, to have a special and separate relationship with China. Those dissidents who have fought to retain democracy in Hong Kong are ethnic Chinese.

So in criticising, and in some areas condemning, the decisions and actions of the state and government of China, am I Sinophobic? Obviously not, because the government and state of China are not the people and nation of China. A state is not a nation or a people. Criticising reasonably a state or government does not make one racist, xenophobic, anti-semitic, Sino-phobic or any other form of racial bigotry.