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Theodore Herzl was a revolutionary genius, a statement that attracts attention if you know who he was. As the creator of Zionism, he excites considerable, passionate emotions. Zionism has a lot of bad connotations. We usually associate it with rampant Jewish expansionism and as justification for the unjustifiable. Many will disagree that in his creation Herzl was a revolutionary, but a revolutionary is no more or less than a person who brings about unforeseen and previously unimagined change. Revolutionaries need not be leftist or communist as our romantic sentiments have us believe. Hitler was maybe one of the most influential revolutionaries of our time. Hate him or love him, he redefined and refined fascist ideology and the German state in complex ways. Herzl was a revolutionary too because after him nations will never be the same. He created a nation from scratch. Zionism is one of the subtlest forms of nationalism and was, at its inception, the most radical in theory. Not because it proposed expansionism, which it does not, nor because it endorsed injustice in the name of protecting Jews, which it also does not. Zionism was radical because it dispensed with almost all the accepted forms of what defined a nation. Almost I say, because language plays an important but not central role. By the time of Herzl’s writing, the diaspora spoke a hundred languages and the most common was Yiddish, a German derivative, but Herzl still maintained that the Hebrew Old Testament provided a basis for the creation of the “Jewish Myth”.
The myth is what we grapple with on a daily basis. It is the myth that fuels the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. It is the myth that Herzl verbalised and that allowed him to claim that the Jews were not merely a religious or ethnic group, but a nation. The Jews, said Herzl, may be spread amongst the countries of the world, they may speak different languages or be of different skin colours and they may even be racist against each other. But one and all they are separate from the people they live amongst and bound to one another by a tragic tale of loss. A great loss followed by thousands of years of persecution and ghetto existence in nearly every land where they lived. A history that every Jew learns and weeps for: the years of slavery in Egypt and escape with Moses, the destruction of Solomon’s temple and the expulsion from Judea, the centuries of being spat on in Europe and paying taxes in the Middle East simply because they were Jews. This, said Herzl, was the true meaning of being a Jew and it was a tale that bound global Jewry across borders and seas, and made every Jew part of a single tradition. This was the basis for their nationhood. It was an inspired work. In one swoop, Herzl redefined the nation. There was no need for strictures like territorial contiguity and linguistic similarity, of sharing customs and dress. These were superficial trappings of those who already had their own lands. Nationhood was something greater, a feeling of being part of an organic whole. And the Jews are a nation. The subtlety is admirable.
Now we live in a new age. Israel is the most powerful nation in the Middle East, regardless of its size and siege mentality. It is an era when growing a beard is a hazardous occupation. For a century or more now, Muslims have seen the deterioration of their once great tradition. The Naqba (Catastrophe), which defined a Palestinian nation, is now a focal point for Muslims around the world. The Muslim world too is now defined by a sense of loss: for the caliphate that was dismantled so that the last symbol of the Islamic world’s former greatness was simply done away with by colonial powers, for when Persia became first a client state and then a pariah, and when Saudi Arabia and Egypt descended to new depths of unqualified boot-licking. Through it all, most of the Muslim world was mired in poverty and debt, shouting to the very colonial powers that stripped them of their wealth and status, “We too are civilised!” The ideas of Pan-Islamism in the 1970s were a sign of recognition that the Islamic world could again be powerful. But there were the inevitable splits in the political fabric that led to losses and, instead of things becoming better, the rational Islamic nationalists led several Arab countries to successive losses in several wars that could have been won. The years 1967 and 1973 were huge blows against the Muslim consciousness developing in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It was a further deterioration of Islamic power and led inevitably to further radicalisation in those countries that was suppressed. In other countries like Iran, a clerical regime managed to gain power. The blame was placed on those countries supporting Israel, the victor of those wars, and with it more anger at their partiality to the Jewish state. No one considered that laying blame is in itself an act of weakness.
September 11, 2001, put the icing on the cake. In an age of instant communication, myths grow easily. Now there are whispers of Muslim ‘brothers’ stripped naked in airports, families forced to leave their homes because their neighbours did not like them, the ‘modesty’ of Muslim women under attack because of prejudice, a Lebanese child killed in his sleep by Israeli cluster bombs and the world whispers not a word of protest. Now, around the world, it is Muslims who are being confined to their lands, vast and poorly developed tracts in a new global ghetto. There is no change as client rulers hold their populations in grips of iron. Through it all, the inability of the entire Muslim world to bring about just reconciliation in Palestine is the symbolic sore that rankles most. Not simply because of the historic significance or the religious ideology associated with it, but because of the glaring injustice of it all. When we see groups like ISIS or the Taliban, it is the mythos of loss that binds them, the imaginary golden past where justice was a given. These are the myths that sprout in our part of this global village.
Fundamental to Islamic Zionism is the subsuming and eradication of all identities that conflict with the proposed definition of Muslim. Defined by loss and hatred, the Muslim is now God’s ‘chosen’ and no act committed by him can be a sin. Where the Jewish myth prevents Israel from seeing the self-destructive nature of its policies and prevents Israel’s allies from stopping it, Islamic Zionism tolerates any and all actions committed in the furtherance of re-establishing the past. Not revolutionary, simply copied, imprinted on minds given to feelings of alienation. The national myth, rather than a sense of community, drives the Zionist, of whatever religion, to unspeakable atrocities. Herzl could not have imagined that his theory would give rise to such an obsession with the past and such hatred for the world but it has. “You lost the holy land 2,000 years ago,” Palestinians scream at the Israelis, “so stop punishing us for it.” I wonder if the guards at Auschwitz ever heard the plea: “We lost Christ 2,000 years ago. Please stop punishing us for it.”

The writer is an Assistant Editor at Daily Times