Ahmad: Shahid Alam on Israeli Exceptionalism
Ahrar Ahmad reviews M. Shahid Alam. Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 274 pp., for IC
Initially, the slogan “a land without a people for a people without land” was skillfully employed to encourage Jews to migrate, and to allay Western discomfort. Alas, as Alam points out insistently, this struggle for a Jewish homeland ignored the Arabs already there, who had been there for centuries, and who significantly exceeded the number of Jews who had migrated there during the entire 50 year period. In fact, even in 1948, they constituted almost two-thirds of the population, and occupied almost three-fifths of the land, in the mandate territories. Consequently, what the Zionist logic demanded was to delegitimize, indeed dehumanize, those Palestinians as nothing more than a pesky nuisance that merely complicated their own grand designs and obvious triumphs. The Arabs were dismissed as people unworthy of basic human dignity, devoid of moral agency, and incapable of having nationalist aspirations.
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