larry kirschner

This kind of perfect post is why Zionism wins these debates before it even gets around to answering them. Alonso, who I’m led to believe is something of an international law enthusiast, thinks the total expulsion and emptying of ancient minority communities down to the last man, woman and child - literally every Jew, religious and secular, Zionist and anti-Zionist - is explainable by, well, Zionism. That it's not the fault of the person doing the expelling, but of somebody else somewhere else who pissed them off. He doesn't, for example, think that the Jews' fleeing from Iraq is connected to the deep ties between Iraqi nationalism and Nazism. (Google the Rashid Ali regime.) Or the social realities exposed by the Farhud (Google is your friend here too). Or by the fact that in the early 1940s, the biggest youth movement in Baghdad, whose population was still almost a quarter Jewish, was run out of the Nazi embassy. (Really.) The sheer, ballsy intellectual dishonesty is amazing. Think about what he's saying: If every last Jew, secular and Hasidic, left-wing and right-wing, including literally every last anti-Zionist, disappeared from New York City in the next 15 years and moved to Israel, then according to Alonso, “Zionism” would be a sufficient explanation. It wouldn't be a story of what's wrong with New York itself, just, you know, Zionism. Or put another way, he wants you to look away from the emptying of three continents of its Jews. As long as there’s Zionism, he says, his international law credentials glistening in the morning sun, then one can ethnically cleanse a millennia-old community and have it be deemed someone else’s fault. Someday, in a moment of weakness, he might momentarily wonder whether Zionism might have been the *result* of the murderous impulses of modernizing post-imperial societies, a *response* to what Iraq and Russia and Germany and even gentle Morocco were becoming, rather than a *cause* of their murderous dysfunction. But that day is unlikely to come. He is an ideologue, not a scholar. There is no honesty here. There are ethnic cleansings he's willing to explain away - well, one ethnic cleansing.