Occasionally you know there’s something the matter with an argument when it sounds wrong, not because you have a fully formed rebuttal in your head. Listening to the editor-in-chief of The Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes, question Tucker Carlson, the far-Right American podcaster and influencer, about his views on Israel, I had that feeling. Beddoes asked Carlson, “Do you believe in Israel’s right to exist?” She then followed it up with a curious question: if Carlson did believe in Israel’s right to exist as a political entity, did that not make him a Zionist?
It was an interesting rhetorical manoeuvre. I can’t think of another country that would inspire this kind of question. For instance, if Tucker Carlson accepted the reality of India as a state, would Beddoes argue that this made Carlson, by definition, an Indian nationalist? I don’t think so. This bid to naturalise Zionism, to fudge an acknowledgment of Israel’s existence into support for the messianic Jewish nationalism that is Israel’s ideology, is a way of turning Zionism into consensual common sense.
This ideological one-two didn’t work with Carlson who recognised, as does everyone but Israel’s most fanatical supporters, that both questions were loaded. If to acknowledge Israel’s existence is to be a Zionist, then an anti-Zionist is someone who wills the destruction of the Jewish state and the Jews who live there. This makes anti-Zionism indistinguishable from anti-Semitism which was, of course, the whole point of Beddoes’ questions.
An American critic, Lee Siegel, criticised Carlson for making the right to exist seem like Israeli hasbara because a nation’s right to exist has respectable antecedents in Thomas Paine’s and Ernest Renan’s writings on the subject, and in Vladimir Lenin’s endorsement of the related right to self-determination. But as Siegel himself writes in his New Statesman article, the “right to exist” applies only to a “justly governed nation”. Israel, actually-existing-Israel, is a violent, apartheid state where a minority of Palestinians are second-class citizens and a majority are helots whose lives, property and human rights are forfeit to a violent settler state.
Historically, Israel is unique amongst nations in that its existence was and is premised on the continuous displacement and ethnic cleansing of the people who occupy the land that it covets and claims as its own. Historically, Israel’s right to exist was established through the violent denial of Palestine’s right to exist.
There was a time when the question, does a Palestinian state have the right to exist, had some small traction. Now, Israel has abandoned the pretence of gesturing at a Palestinian Bantustan in the distant future. Every Jewish political party in Israel rejects the ‘two-state solution’ out of hand. The West Bank, the putative home of the Palestinian state, is being sliced and diced and occupied by homicidal supremacist settlers who kill, displace and sexually assault Palestinians with near-perfect impunity.
Last month, the United States of America’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said that it would be fine if Israel “helped itself” to all the land between the Euphrates
and the Nile. The US government issued a half-hearted clarification but under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Israel’s irredentist drive to violently expand into the lands of neighbouring nations has been winked at and encouraged.
Beddoes could have asked, do Israel’s neighbours have a right to resist Israel’s determination to annex large chunks of their territory? Not content with the Golan Heights, Israel recently annexed a ‘buffer zone’ in Syria. In the course of its ongoing invasion of Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces has now announced that it plans to occupy a large ‘buffer zone’ in southern Lebanon. Israel has ordered the evacuation of large parts of Beirut as a preliminary to their flattening, as in Gaza. It is simultaneously bombing Tehran. It is in this context, as Israel rampages around the Middle East and West Asia like a juggernaut licensed to slaughter civilians, that the editor of England’s oldest ‘liberal’ paper, The Economist, leads with the question: “Do you think Israel has the right to exist?”
Grotesque as Beddoes’ priorities are, they should surprise no one who followed The Economist’s reporting and editorialising through the destruction of Gaza. In a strong field, it outdid the West’s mainstream news organisations in its enthusiasm for Israel’s cruelty. Early in the war, its journalists spread inflammatory canards about Israeli infants decapitated by Hamas, confidently asserted that the IDF couldn’t be responsible for bombing hospitals, and insisted that the IDF was incapable of targeting civilians. The Economist helpfully suggested that Gazan civilians could be “temporarily” parked in Egypt’s Sinai to allow Israel to kill off Hamas undistracted. Its editors insisted throughout the war that the Hamas-run health ministry’s figures for deaths in Gaza were unreliable and inflated only to acknowledge at the end of it that the health ministry had, if anything, undercounted the horrific toll.
Even at the tail-end of the genocide, after the IDF had killed seventy thousand and more Palestinians, The Economist persistently argued against a ceasefire because Israel’s righteous war couldn’t end till Hamas was destroyed. When Carlson asked Beddoes what she thought of Gaza, she replied that the war was a perfectly reasonable response to the horrors of October 7 that subsequently turned into a disaster. Really? Why then was her magazine arguing against a ceasefire when the scale of the ‘disaster’ had become obvious?
Carlson caught Beddoes out when she began by saying that the war was a disaster for Israel before mentioning the Palestinian dead. It was more than a gotcha; for Beddoes, as for most of the West’s mainstream media, the Palestinians are always an afterthought, a footnote to Israel’s well-being, its right to exist.
Does Beddoes think that Palestine has a right to exist? When the British government announced that it was going to formally recognise a Palestinian state, The Economist was wholly against it. The Economist is vaguely in favour of the two-state solution that Israel has categorically rejected. Beddoes and the magazine she edits find numberless ways of justifying Israel’s wars, its ethnic cleansing, its mass killing of civilians, but they will deny Palestinians the consolation of symbolic recognition. In this The Economist is wholly representative of the derangement that allows the West to go on about the rules-based order while facilitating genocide.
After Gaza, it’s impossible for liberal pundits to talk out of both sides of their mouths at once. So we shouldn’t be surprised that when the editor-in-chief of The Economist was called out on Gaza by a far-Right conspiracist, notorious for flirting with anti-Semites, it was Carlson who emerged as the even-handed liberal while Beddoes was reduced to Israel’s stooge.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com