by Nasser Abourahme | Community Works | Published in Parapraxis Magazine – The Social Link
What is anti-Zionism today? What traditions does it draw on? What are its political and epistemic starting points? And to whom or what is it answerable?
Before these questions, there is the question of timing: Why pose this now? We’ve been here before. Anti-Zionism is, of course, as old as Zionism itself, so why is this a question to which we still need answers? The most obvious reply is that anti-Zionism is again a matter of urgent political concern, an urgency that appears in direct relation to the crisis of the Zionist project and as a direct effect of the resistant forces that have produced this crisis. Israel’s turn to open, limitless, exterminatory violence has quite simply plunged ideological Zionism into what is most likely a terminal crisis, an abyss from which it may never exit. An ideology that in the West was once, in the full sense of the word, hegemonic is today badly flailing. And yet the ideological defeat of Zionism does not equal, by any stretch, its political defeat. Quite the contrary. In correlation with its waning as ideology, Zionism as a disciplinary repressive tool has only expanded.
