Yes, strawmanning is a word. To strawman is to give a false or misleading representation of a person’s opinions or actions, usually with the intent to deceive or be unfair; to make a claim that is invented in order to win an argument. Even if it is not a proper word, I’d use to describe what Raef Zreik recently has done.
Zreik was the Religion and Public Life Visiting Scholar in Conflict and Peace 2022-23 at Harvard Divinity School. He graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, holds a law degree from Columbia University and a Doctor of Juridical Science from Harvard Law School. He is an associate professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College in Israel and a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute.
Journalist Peter Beinart finds him worthy, writing: “Sometimes the most penetrating analysts of a society are those who see it from below because they are members of an oppressed caste. I’ve often found that Raef, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has striking insights about Israeli Jewish society.”
In his piece “On the Political Theology of Zionism” in the journal Political Theology, Zreik attempts to identify what is “unique” about Zionism, as well as what the consequences of this uniqueness might be, “particularly with regard to future decolonization projects of Israel-Palestine.” One of his examples is that “Zionism as a national movement is addressed to one religious group.”
Of course, the actual uniqueness is that of the Jews, who are a people, a nation, a community and, yes, a religious group. On the other hand, persons of all religions, races and birthplaces are citizens of Israel, with full rights. That almost all the Arabs states declare Islam their official religion is ignored in his paper.
Jewish Currents has now published his forward to the volume A Land of Two Peoples, dealing with Martin Buber’s writings on Jews and Arabs. Buber, however, is not what caught my attention. What did catch my eye were several references to the thinking of the Russian-born founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement Ze’ev Jabotinsky, which Zreik manipulates as a foil. To do so, he employs the arsenal of classic Arab propaganda techniques. For Jabotinsky’s sake—and the sake of his legacy—Zreik needs to be thwarted in his inauthentic portrayal.
Zreik sees the “challenge posed by Ze’ev Jabotinsky [among others as] not primarily of an intellectual nature.” Was there an intellectual challenge, or does Zreik have such a low appreciation for Jabotinsky’s thinking? In any case, Zreik asserts that Jabotinsky’s “central claim—that conflict with the Indigenous Arab populations was inevitable and unavoidable—left Palestinians with few options other than to brace themselves for violent confrontations with Zionist colonizers.” Moreover, this challenge “could only be met on the battlefield” because “Jabotinsky forces you to fight.”
This, of course, is very wide of the mark. Jabotinsky, in his position as a Zionist leader, consistently sought to offer the Arabs of British Mandate Palestine peaceful resolutions to their murderous attacks on Jews. Zreik ignores, or rather hides, the riots initiated by Arabs in 1920, 1921 and 1929, as well as those from 1936 to 1939 and in-between, too, as if they were non-agents and innocent victims, left with “few options.”
In his 1923 paper “Iron Wall,” he famously began with an admission: “I am reputed to be an enemy of the Arabs, who wants to have them ejected from Palestine, and so forth. It is not true.” His last essay published on the subject, “The Arab Angle-Undramatized,” suggested that Jews and Arabs share equal collective autonomous rights with Arabs enjoying full citizenship freedoms.
Zreik insists in arguing “against Jabotinsky’s logic of the ineluctability of the conflict with Palestine and the logic of us versus them that continues to prevail in the Zionist political imagination.” But after more than a century of Arab-instigated violence, can we say that Jabotinsky erred? For most of that time, at least until 1977, neither Jabotinsky nor his follower, Menachem Begin, were in charge of official Zionist policy.
As for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one would think that his 2009 declaration—that if certain conditions are fulfilled, then Israel “will be ready in a future peace agreement to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside the Jewish state”—would have disproved Zreik’s thesis.
In fact, Zreik does relate to Netanyahu, writing: “The logic informing Jabotinsky’s politics—and that of his disciple Benjamin Netanyahu—derives its justification from the past, when the Jews of Europe were subject to insidious, unrelenting antisemitism. Thus their exigent need for a safe shelter … .”
The past? Unfortunately, the revived anti-Zionism, which Zreik stokes, has intersected with old-time antisemitism and thereby provides enough proof of just how wrong Zreik is.
Another instance of strawmanning can be found in this section: “A sovereign Jewish nation-state—a self-justifying objective to be attained by whatever means were deemed necessary … blinded him to the political and demographic reality of Arab Palestine.”
In the first instance, the Arabs were the ones to first adopt “any means necessary,” and today, pro-Palestine protesters display prominently the words of Frantz Fanon, “by any means necessary.” What Zreik is doing is not only presented a corrupted version of Jabotinsky’s thinking and actions; he employs terminology understood by radical progressive forces that enables them to justify their anti-Zionism. He is wielding a double-edged sword.
He relates to Jabotinsky in his forward one more time, stating that “Jabotinsky’s exclusive focus on justice for the Jewish people deliberately ignores its consequences with regard to the Palestinians. … His political logic is unbending and ruthlessly overrides ethical considerations.”
That assertion is the exact opposite of Jabotinsky’s speeches and articles over the course of four decades. One of his main argumentations was, while recognizing that minority status is not what the Arabs desire, that Jews resettling in their national homeland will bring immeasurable economic benefit to the Arabs living there and that there is no need for any Arab to leave.
Zreik eventually acknowledges that his own intellectual logic is corrupt, writing: “For many Arab intellectuals, binationalism is intrinsically untenable, for it implies recognizing the historical rights of the Jews in Palestine.” If the conflict is a zero-sum game—that if not only Jabotinsky is unacceptable as a interlocutor but Martin Buber as well—then obviously, there is no justice, relative or absolute, on the Arab side.