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.

Defending the declaration

“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained statehood…

"The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture…”

Extracts from Israel’s Declaration of Independence, read out by David Ben Gurion, almost exactly 63 years ago, as the storm clouds of war gathered.  The following day the Arab world would unite in an attempt to strangle the Jewish State at birth.  Israel won that war, and several since, but today, though the physical threats to its security remain, there is also another war to be fought; it is for the defense of the dreams of Israel’s founding fathers.

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).

4 comments on the election...

1. Yisrael Beiteinu and ‘loyalty to the state’

Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu claim that their policy of demanding that all Israeli citizens sign a pledge of “loyalty to the state” is not racist because while they have Israelis Arabs in mind with this proposal, it is not based on their ethnicity but their behavior – their suspected disloyalty. In this case, I wonder whether certain Jewish Israelis would also have a problem pledging their loyalty to the state. I am thinking in particular of those extremist West Bank settlers who insist that the democratically elected government of Israel has no authority over them because they answer only to God and His interpreters, their Rabbis. Would those residents of Hebron who attacked Israeli soldiers and their Rabbis who called Olmert and Barak enemies of Judaism be regarded as loyal to the State under Lieberman’s definition? And would those Charedim who regard Yom Haatzmaut and Yom Hazikaron as irrelevant to them be able to sign a loyalty pledge in good conscience?