Christopher Hitchens on fascism and religion: lessons for Israel

THE DEATH of Christopher Hitchens last month, at the age of 62, robbed the world of one its most eloquent advocates for freedom and democracy.

He was a man of contradictions: a graduate of British Marxism whose political hero was Thomas Jefferson; in 2000 he described George W. Bush as "unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things", and then vocally supported his re-election against Democrat John Kerry four years later. The victims of his mercilessly caustic pen also included Republican statesman Henry Kissinger, Democratic President Bill Clinton and even Mother Theresa ("She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction").

However one consistent thread running through his seemingly scattergun worldview was his hatred of tyranny and oppression.  Indeed, his uncompromising atheism – of which more later – was based on his belief that religion equaled slavery, with God cast as an all-seeing, authoritarian overlord.  His socialism was, in his words, "anti-totalitarian" rather than "anti-imperialist". He eschewed the knee-jerk anti-Americanism so prevalent among European leftists, instead supporting US-led military campaigns against ethnic cleansers like Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.

Zionism, religion and the modern State of Israel

BACK IN the UK I was a Zionist.  I supported the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic homeland.  Now I’m an Israeli, it seems I can’t define myself that way anymore without being thought of as either hopelessly anachronistic, or avowedly right-wing.

Sections of the Israeli right have made Zionism synonymous with support for the settlement movement, while sections of the left have acquiesced in this fiction by abdicating ownership of the term.  (It is worth noting that Zionism was originally a progressive liberation movement with its roots in enlightened 19^th century liberalism; closer in spirit to those supporting an end to the occupation of the Palestinians than to the West Bank settlers.  Even the father of what became the Israeli right, Vladimir Jabotinsky, was an avowed liberal who insisted on democratic rights for all the citizens of the putative Jewish state and who spoke resolutely against expelling Arabs from their homes).