Serious students of mythology, including Ernst
Cassirer and Henry Tudor among others, agree that myths, along with art,
language, religion, music and science, provide the symbols needed for
expressing humanity’s interpretation of the world. By contrast,
Post-Zionist sociologists employ the term myth in its pejorative sense
of fraud and deception.. They even accuse Zionism of systematically
“commissioning” great writers and scholars to disseminate Zionist
ideology to justify its immoral act of occupying Arab territory in
Palestine-Israel.
Zionism, it is asserted, sought to establish a
“mythical” continuity between bygone eras of Jewry and contemporary
Israel, and thereby to brain-wash Israel-born generations of Jewish
youth into believing that they were the descendants of earlier
generations of Jews since Biblical antiquity who cherished a love of
Zion. According to the Post-Zionists, the Jews who came to
Palestine-Israel were merely a random collection of immigrants, not
“olim”, and their sabra offspring were no more than second generation
immigrants. The notion that they belong to an ancient Jewish people that
returned to claim sovereignty over its historic homeland, is, in their
eyes, a Zionist myth.
This conception of Zionist “mythology” reflects
the influence of post-modernist deconstructionism that views “historical
continuity” as mythical falsehood. History is an arbitrary
concantination of separate events whose continuity is a figment of
mythical thinking stemming from political ideology. There is no
continuity in Jewish history, and contemporary Jews are not heir to any
historical tradition. Those ideas merely serve the purpose of Zionist
political propaganda, claim Post-Zionists.
However, allegations made about the “commissioning”
of famous writers and scholars to work for some Zionist “propaganda
machine” is a fabrication for which no Post-Zionist author ever produces
evidence. Numerous documents dating from 1920 to 1960 from archives are
remarkable for their outspoken devotion to, and support of, Zionist
ideals. Post-modern individualism denies any meaning to people’s
collective responsibility for their communities or nations. The sabras’
devotion to Zionism is “explained” by Post-Zionists as the product of
Zionist brainwashing by its commissioned agents. Post-Zionists have
adopted a deconstructionist view of human events that atomizes history
into disconnected units. Deconstructionist Post-Zionists denounce
Zionism for attributing meaning to Jewish historical continuity, for
“brainwashing” Jewish youth to think that they are walking in the
footsteps of their forebears from ancient times, and for calling upon
Jewry to assume collective responsibility for its historical fate.
In
addition to eradicating the meaning humanity attributes to its
historical experience, these accusations share the distinguishing
features of classical anti-Semitism, to wit: Jewry and Zionism allegedly
commit a crime by transmitting their “myths” to the next generation,
while all the nations of the world consider that task to be their moral
obligation in order to preserve and enhance the meaning of their human
and national existence. For the Post- Zionists, the accepted norms of
human and national behavior are to be denied to the Jewish people. The
Post-Zionists are unequivocally anti-Zionist. These ideas express an
anti-Jewish nihilism stemming from Jewish self hatred, regrettably
rampant in Israel’s universities and colleges.
