- During a presentation on the Palestinian-Israeli situation
in 2001, an American-Israeli acquaintance of ours began with a typical
attack on the Palestinians. Taking the overused line that "Palestinians
never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," he asserted snidely
that, if only the Palestinians had had any decency and not been so all-fired
interested in pushing the Jews into the sea in 1948, they would have accepted
the UN partition of Palestine. Those Palestinians who became refugees would
instead have remained peacefully in their homes, and the state of Palestine
could in the year 2001 be celebrating the 53rd anniversary of its independence.
Everything could have been sweetness and light, he contended, but here
the Palestinians were, then a year into a deadly intifada, still stateless,
still hostile, and still trying, he claimed, to push the Jews into the
sea.
-
- It was a common line but with a new and intriguing twist:
what if the Palestinians had accepted partition; would they in fact have
lived in a state at peace since 1948? It was enough to make the audience
stop and think. But later in the talk, the speaker tripped himself up by
claiming, in a tone of deep alarm, that Palestinian insistence on the right
of return for Palestinian refugees displaced when Israel was created would
spell the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. He did not realize the
inherent contradiction in his two assertions (until we later pointed it
out to him, with no little glee). You cannot have it both ways, we told
him: you cannot claim that, if Palestinians had not left the areas that
became Israel in 1948, they would now be living peaceably, some inside
and some alongside a Jewish-majority state, and then also claim that, if
they returned now, Israel would lose its Jewish majority and its essential
identity as a Jewish state.*
-
- This exchange, and the massive propaganda effort by and
on behalf of Israel to demonstrate the threat to Israel's Jewish character
posed by the Palestinians' right of return, actually reveal the dirty little
secret of Zionism. In its drive to establish and maintain a state in which
Jews are always the majority, Zionism absolutely required that Palestinians,
as non-Jews, be made to leave in 1948 and never be allowed to return. The
dirty little secret is that this is blatant racism.
-
- But didn't we finish with that old Zionism-is-racism
issue over a decade ago, when in 1991 the UN repealed a 1975 General Assembly
resolution that defined Zionism as "a form of racism or racial discrimination"?
Hadn't we Americans always rejected this resolution as odious anti-Semitism,
and didn't we, under the aegis of the first Bush administration, finally
prevail on the rest of the world community to agree that it was not only
inaccurate but downright evil to label Zionism as racist? Why bring it
up again, now?
-
- The UN General Assembly based its 1975 anti-Zionist resolution
on the UN's own definition of racial discrimination, adopted in 1965. According
to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination, racial discrimination is "any distinction, exclusion,
restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or
ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing
the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights
and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or
any other field of public life." As a definition of racism and racial
discrimination, this statement is unassailable and, if one is honest about
what Zionism is and what it signifies, the statement is an accurate definition
of Zionism. But in 1975, in the political atmosphere prevailing at the
time, putting forth such a definition was utterly self-defeating.
-
- So would a formal resolution be in today's political
atmosphere. But enough has changed over the last decade or more that talk
about Zionism as a system that either is inherently racist or at least
fosters racism is increasingly possible and increasingly necessary. Despite
the vehement knee-jerk opposition to any such discussion throughout the
United States, serious scholars elsewhere and serious Israelis have begun
increasingly to examine Zionism critically, and there is much greater receptivity
to the notion that no real peace will be forged in Palestine-Israel unless
the bases of Zionism are examined and in some way altered. It is for this
reason that honestly labeling Zionism as a racist political philosophy
is so necessary: unless the world's, and particularly the United States',
blind support for Israel as an exclusivist Jewish state is undermined,
unless the blind acceptance of Zionism as a noble ideology is undermined,
and unless it is recognized that Israel's drive to maintain dominion over
the occupied Palestinian territories is motivated by an exclusivist, racist
ideology, no one will ever gain the political strength or the political
will necessary to force Israel to relinquish territory and permit establishment
of a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state in a part of Palestine.
-
- Recognizing Zionism's Racism
-
- A racist ideology need not always manifest itself as
such, and, if the circumstances are right, it need not always actually
practice racism to maintain itself. For decades after its creation, the
circumstances were right for Israel. If one forgot, as most people did,
the fact that 750,000 Palestinians (non-Jews) had left their homeland under
duress, thus making room for a Jewish-majority state, everyone could accept
Israel as a genuine democracy, even to a certain extent for that small
minority of Palestinians who had remained after 1948. That minority was
not large enough to threaten Israel's Jewish majority; it faced considerable
discrimination, but because Israeli Arabs could vote, this discrimination
was viewed not as institutional, state-mandated racism but as the kind
of discrimination, deplorable but not institutionalized, faced by blacks
in the United States. The occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem,
with their two million (soon to become more than three million) Palestinian
inhabitants, was seen to be temporary, its end awaiting only the Arabs'
readiness to accept Israel's existence.
-
- In these "right" circumstances, the issue of
racism rarely arose, and the UN's labeling of Israel's fundamental ideology
as racist came across to Americans and most westerners as nasty and vindictive.
Outside the third world, Israel had come to be regarded as the perpetual
innocent, not aggressive, certainly not racist, and desirous of nothing
more than a peace agreement that would allow it to mind its own business
inside its original borders in a democratic state. By the time the Zionism-is-racism
resolution was rescinded in 1991, even the PLO had officially recognized
Israel's right to exist in peace inside its 1967 borders, with its Jewish
majority uncontested. In fact, this very acceptance of Israel by its principal
adversary played no small part in facilitating the U.S. effort to garner
support for overturning the resolution. (The fact of U.S. global dominance
in the wake of the first Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union
earlier in 1991, and the atmosphere of optimism about prospects for peace
created by the Madrid peace conference in October also played a significant
part in winning over a majority of the UN when the Zionism resolution was
brought to a vote of the General Assembly in December.)
-
- Realities are very different today, and a recognition
of Zionism's racist bases, as well as an understanding of the racist policies
being played out in the occupied territories are essential if there is
to be any hope at all of achieving a peaceful, just, and stable resolution
of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The egg of Palestine has been permanently
scrambled, and it is now increasingly the case that, as Zionism is recognized
as the driving force in the occupied territories as well as inside Israel
proper, pre-1967 Israel can no longer be considered in isolation. It can
no longer be allowed simply to go its own way as a Jewish-majority state,
a state in which the circumstances are "right" for ignoring Zionism's
fundamental racism.
-
- As Israel increasingly inserts itself into the occupied
territories, and as Israeli settlers, Israeli settlements, and Israeli-only
roads proliferate and a state infrastructure benefiting only Jews takes
over more and more territory, it becomes no longer possible to ignore the
racist underpinnings of the Zionist ideology that directs this enterprise.
It is no longer possible today to wink at the permanence of Zionism's thrust
beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders. It is now clear that Israel's control
over the occupied territories is, and has all along been intended to be,
a drive to assert exclusive Jewish control, taming the Palestinians into
submission and squeezing them into ever smaller, more disconnected segments
of land or, failing that, forcing them to leave Palestine altogether. It
is totally obvious to anyone who spends time on the ground in Palestine-Israel
that the animating force behind the policies of the present and all past
Israeli governments in Israel and in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and
East Jerusalem has always been a determination to assure the predominance
of Jews over Palestinians. Such policies can only be described as racist,
and we should stop trying any longer to avoid the word.
-
- When you are on the ground in Palestine, you can see
Zionism physically imprinted on the landscape. Not only can you see that
there are settlements, built on land confiscated from Palestinians, where
Palestinians may not live. Not only can you see roads in the occupied territories,
again built on land taken from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not
drive. Not only can you observe that water in the occupied territories
is allocated, by Israeli governmental authorities, so inequitably that
Israeli settlers are allocated five times the amount per capita as are
Palestinians and, in periods of drought, Palestinians stand in line for
drinking water while Israeli settlements enjoy lush gardens and swimming
pools. Not only can you stand and watch as Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian
olive groves and other agricultural land, destroy Palestinian wells, and
demolish Palestinian homes to make way for the separation wall that Israel
is constructing across the length and breadth of the West Bank. The wall
fences off Palestinians from Israelis, supposedly to provide greater security
for Israelis but in fact in order to cage Palestinians, to define a border
for Israel that will exclude a maximum number of Palestinians.
-
- But, if this is not enough to demonstrate the inherent
racism of Israel's occupation, you can also drive through Palestinian towns
and Palestinian neighborhoods in and near Jerusalem and see what is perhaps
the most cruelly racist policy in Zionism's arsenal: house demolitions,
the preeminent symbol of Zionism's drive to maintain Jewish predominance.
Virtually every street has a house or houses reduced to rubble, one floor
pancaked onto another or simply a pile of broken concrete bulldozed into
an incoherent heap. Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), an anthropologist
and scholar of the occupation, has observed that Zionist and Israeli leaders
going back 80 years have all conveyed what he calls "The Message"
to Palestinians. The Message, Halper says, is "Submit. Only when you
abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that
Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent [i.e., stop attacking
Palestinians]." The deeper meaning of The Message, as carried by the
bulldozers so ubiquitous in targeted Palestinian neighborhoods today, is
that "You [Palestinians] do not belong here. We uprooted you from
your homes in 1948and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."
-
- In the end, Halper says, the advance of Zionism has been
a process of displacement, and house demolitions have been "at the
center of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians" since 1948.
Halper enumerates a steady history of destruction: in the first six years
of Israel's existence, it systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages
inside Israel, fully 85 percent of the villages existing before 1948; since
the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 11,000 Palestinian
homes. More homes are now being demolished in the path of Israel's "separation
wall." It is estimated that more than 4,000 homes have been destroyed
in the last two years alone.
-
- The vast majority of these house demolitions, 95 percent,
have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically
to displace non-Jews and assure the advance of Zionism. In Jerusalem, from
the beginning of the occupation of the eastern sector of the city in 1967,
Israeli authorities have designed zoning plans specifically to prevent
the growth of the Palestinian population. Maintaining the "Jewish
character" of the city at the level existing in 1967 (71 percent Jewish,
29 percent Palestinian) required that Israel draw zoning boundaries to
prevent Palestinian expansion beyond existing neighborhoods, expropriate
Palestinian-owned lands, confiscate the Jerusalem residency permits of
any Palestinian who cannot prove that Jerusalem is his "center of
life," limit city services to Palestinian areas, limit development
in Palestinian neighborhoods, refuse to issue residential building permits
to Palestinians, and demolish Palestinian homes that are built without
permits. None of these strictures is imposed on Jews. According to ICAHD,
the housing shortage in Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem is approximately
25,000 units, and 2,000 demolition orders are pending.
-
- Halper has written that the human suffering involved
in the destruction of a family home is incalculable. A home "is one's
symbolic center, the site of one's most intimate personal life and an expression
of one's status. It is a refuge, it is the physical representation of the
family,maintainingcontinuity on one's ancestral land." Land expropriation
is "an attack on one's very being and identity." Zionist governments,
past and present, have understood this well, although not with the compassion
or empathy that Halper conveys, and this attack on the "very being
and identity" of non-Jews has been precisely the animating force behind
Zionism.
-
- Zionism's racism has, of course, been fundamental to
Israel itself since its establishment in 1948. The Israeli government pursues
policies against its own Bedouin minority very similar to its actions in
the occupied territories. The Bedouin population has been forcibly relocated
and squeezed into small areas in the Negev, again with the intent of forcing
an exodus, and half of the 140,000 Bedouin in the Negev live in villages
that the Israeli government does not recognize and does not provide services
for. Every Bedouin home in an unrecognized village is slated for demolition;
all homes, and the very presence of Bedouin in them, are officially illegal.
-
- The problem of the Bedouins' unrecognized villages is
only the partial evidence of a racist policy that has prevailed since Israel's
foundation. After Zionist/Israeli leaders assured that the non-Jews (i.e.,
the Palestinians) making up the majority of Palestine's population (a two-thirds
majority at the time) departed the scene in 1948, Israeli governments institutionalized
favoritism toward Jews by law. As a Zionist state, Israel has always identified
itself as the state of the Jews: as a state not of its Jewish and Palestinian
citizens, but of all Jews everywhere in the world. The institutions of
state guarantee the rights of and provide benefits for Jews. The Law of
Return gives automatic citizenship to Jews from anywhere in the world,
but to no other people. Some 92 percent of the land of Israel is state
land, held by the Jewish National Fund "in trust" for the Jewish
people; Palestinians may not purchase this land, even though most of it
was Palestinian land before 1948, and in most instances they may not even
lease the land. Both the Jewish National Fund, which deals with land acquisition
and development, and the Jewish Agency, which deals primarily with Jewish
immigration and immigrant absorption, have existed since before the state's
establishment and now perform their duties specifically for Jews under
an official mandate from the Israeli government.
-
- Creating Enemies
-
- Although few dare to give the reality of house demolitions
and state institutions favoring Jews the label of racism, the phenomenon
this reality describes is unmistakably racist. There is no other term for
a process by which one people can achieve the essence of its political
philosophy only by suppressing another people, by which one people guarantees
its perpetual numerical superiority and its overwhelming predominance over
another people through a deliberate process of repression and dispossession
of those people. From the beginning, Zionism has been based on the supremacy
of the Jewish people, whether this predominance was to be exercised in
a full-fledged state or in some other kind of political entity, and Zionism
could never have survived or certainly thrived in Palestine without ridding
that land of most of its native population. The early Zionists themselves
knew this (as did the Palestinians), even if naÔve Americans have
never quite gotten it. Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism, talked from the
beginning of "spiriting" the native Palestinians out and across
the border; discussion of "transfer" was common among the Zionist
leadership in Palestine in the 1930s; talk of transfer is common today.
-
- There has been a logical progression to the development
of Zionism, leading inevitably to general acceptance of the sense that,
because Jewish needs are paramount, Jews themselves are paramount. Zionism
grew out of the sense that Jews needed a refuge from persecution, which
led in turn to the belief that the refuge could be truly secure only if
Jews guaranteed their own safety, which meant that the refuge must be exclusively
or at least overwhelmingly Jewish, which meant in turn that Jews and their
demands were superior, taking precedence over any other interests within
that refuge. The mindset that in U.S. public discourse tends to view the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict from a perspective almost exclusively focused
on Israel arises out of this progression of Zionist thinking. By the very
nature of a mindset, virtually no one examines the assumptions on which
the Zionist mindset is based, and few recognize the racist base on which
it rests.
-
- Israeli governments through the decades have never been
so innocent. Many officials in the current right-wing government are blatantly
racist. Israel's outspoken education minister, Limor Livnat, spelled out
the extreme right-wing defense of Zionism a year ago, when the government
proposed to legalize the right of Jewish communities in Israel to exclude
non-Jews. Livnat justified Israel's racism as a matter of Jewish self-preservation.
"We're involved here," she said in a radio interview, "in
a struggle for the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the
Jews, as opposed tothose who want to force us to be a state of all its
citizens." Israel is not "just another state like all the other
states," she protested. "We are not just a state of all its citizens."
-
- Livnat cautioned that Israel must be very watchful lest
it find in another few years that the Galilee and the Negev, two areas
inside Israel with large Arab populations, are "filled with Arab communities."
To emphasize the point, she reiterated that Israel's "special purpose
is our character as a Jewish state, our desire to preserve a Jewish community
and Jewish majority hereso that it does not become a state of all its citizens."
Livnat was speaking of Jewish self-preservation not in terms of saving
the Jews or Israel from a territorial threat of military invasion by a
marauding neighbor state, but in terms of preserving Jews from the mere
existence of another people within spitting distance.
-
- Most Zionists of a more moderate stripe might shudder
at the explicitness of Livnat's message and deny that Zionism is really
like this. But in fact this properly defines the racism that necessarily
underlies Zionism. Most centrist and leftist Zionists deny the reality
of Zionism's racism by trying to portray Zionism as a democratic system
and manufacturing enemies in order to be able to sustain the inherent contradiction
and hide or excuse the racism behind Zionism's drive for predominance.
-
- Indeed, the most pernicious aspect of a political philosophy
like Zionism that masquerades as democratic is that it requires an enemy
in order to survive and, where an enemy does not already exist, it requires
that one be created. In order to justify racist repression and dispossession,
particularly in a system purporting to be democratic, those being repressed
and displaced must be portrayed as murderous and predatory. And in order
to keep its own population in line, to prevent a humane people from objecting
to their own government's repressive policies, it requires that fear be
instilled in the population: fear of "the other," fear of the
terrorist, fear of the Jew-hater. The Jews of Israel must always be made
to believe that they are the preyed-upon. This justifies having forced
these enemies to leave, it justifies discriminating against those who remained,
it justifies denying democratic rights to those who later came under Israel's
control in the occupied territories.
-
- Needing an enemy has meant that Zionism has from the
beginning had to create myths about Palestinians, painting Palestinians
and all Arabs as immutably hostile and intransigent. Thus the myth that
in 1948 Palestinians left Palestine so that Arab armies could throw the
Jews into the sea; thus the continuing myth that Palestinians remain determined
to destroy Israel. Needing an enemy means that Zionism, as one veteran
Israeli peace activist recently put it, has removed the Palestinians from
history. Thus the myths that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, or
that Palestinians all immigrated in modern times from other Arab countries,
or that Jordan is Palestine and Palestinians should find their state there.
-
- Needing an enemy means that Zionism has had to make its
negotiating partner into a terrorist. It means that, for its own preservation,
Zionism has had to devise a need to ignore its partner/enemy or expel him
or assassinate him. It means that Zionism has had to reject any conciliatory
effort by the Palestinians and portray them as "never missing an opportunity
to miss an opportunity" to make peace. This includes in particular
rejecting that most conciliatory gesture, the PLO's decision in 1988 to
recognize Israel's existence, relinquish Palestinian claims to the three-quarters
of Palestine lying inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, and even recognize
Israel's "right" to exist there.
-
- Needing an enemy means, ultimately, that Zionism had
to create the myth of the "generous offer" at the Camp David
summit in July 2000. It was Zionist racism that painted the Palestinians
as hopelessly intransigent for refusing Israel's supposedly generous offer,
actually an impossible offer that would have maintained Zionism's hold
on the occupied territories and left the Palestinians with a disconnected,
indefensible, non-viable state. Then, when the intifada erupted (after
Palestinian demonstrators threw stones at Israeli police and the police
responded by shooting several demonstrators to death), it was Zionist racism
speaking when Israel put out the line that it was under siege and in a
battle for its very survival with Palestinians intent on destroying it.
When a few months later the issue of Palestinian refugees and their "right
of return" arose publicly, it was Zionist racism speaking when Israel
and its defenders, ignoring the several ways in which Palestinian negotiators
signaled their readiness to compromise this demand, propagated the view
that this too was intended as a way to destroy Israel, by flooding it with
non-Jews and destroying its Jewish character.
-
- The Zionist Dilemma
-
- The supposed threat from "the other" is the
eternal refuge of the majority of Israelis and Israeli supporters in the
United States. The common line is that "We Israelis and friends of
Israel long for peace, we support Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank
and Gaza, we have always supported giving the Palestinians self-government.
But 'they' hate us, they want to destroy Israel. Wasn't this obvious when
Arafat turned his back on Israel's generous offer? Wasn't this obvious
when Arafat started the intifada? Wasn't this obvious when Arafat demanded
that the Palestinians be given the right of return, which would destroy
Israel as a Jewish state? We have already made concession after concession.
How can we give them any further concessions when they would only fight
for more and more until Israel is gone?" This line relieves Israel
of any responsibility to make concessions or move toward serious negotiations;
it relieves Israelis of any need to treat Palestinians as equals; it relieves
Israelis and their defenders of any need to think; it justifies racism,
while calling it something else.
-
- Increasing numbers of Israelis themselves (some of whom
have long been non-Zionists, some of whom are only now beginning to see
the problem with Zionism) are recognizing the inherent racism of their
nation's raison d'etre. During the years of the peace process, and indeed
for the last decade and a half since the PLO formally recognized Israel's
existence, the Israeli left could ignore the problems of Zionism while
pursuing efforts to promote the establishment of an independent Palestinian
state in the West Bank and Gaza that would coexist with Israel. Zionism
continued to be more or less a non-issue: Israel could organize itself
in any way it chose inside its own borders, and the Palestinian state could
fulfill Palestinian national aspirations inside its new borders.
-
- Few of those nettlesome issues surrounding Zionism, such
as how much democracy Zionism can allow to non-Jews without destroying
its reason for being, would arise in a two-state situation. The issue of
Zionism's responsibility for the Palestinians' dispossession could also
be put aside. As Haim Hanegbi, a non-Zionist Israeli who recently went
back to the fold of single-state binationalism (and who is a long-time
cohort of Uri Avnery in the Gush Shalom movement), said in a recent interview
with the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, the promise of mutual recognition
offered by the Oslo peace process mesmerized him and others in the peace
movement and so "in the mid-1990s I had second thoughts about my traditional
[binational] approach. I didn't think it was my task to go to Ramallah
and present the Palestinians with the list of Zionist wrongs and tell them
not to forget what our fathers did to their fathers." Nor were the
Palestinians themselves reminding Zionists of these wrongs at the time.
-
- As new wrongs in the occupied territories increasingly
recall old wrongs from half a century ago, however, and as Zionism finds
that it cannot cope with end-of-conflict demands like the Palestinians'
insistence that Israel accept their right of return by acknowledging its
role in their dispossession, more and more Israelis are coming to accept
the reality that Zionism can never escape its past. It is becoming increasingly
clear to many Israelis that Israel has absorbed so much of the West Bank,
Gaza, and East Jerusalem into itself that the Jewish and the Palestinian
peoples can never be separated fairly. The separation wall, says Hanegbi,
"is the great despairing solution of the Jewish-Zionist society. It
is the last desperate act of those who cannot confront the Palestinian
issue. Of those who are compelled to push the Palestinian issue out of
their lives and out of their consciousness." For Hanegbi, born in
Palestine before 1948, Palestinians "were always part of my landscape,"
and without them, "this is a barren country, a disabled country."
-
- Old-line Zionist Meron Benvenisti, who has also moved
to support for binationalism, used almost identical metaphors in a Ha'aretz
interview run alongside Hanegbi's. Also Palestine-born and a contemporary
of Hanegbi, Benvenisti believes "this is a country in which there
were always Arabs. This is a country in which the Arabs are the landscape,
the natives.I don't see myself living here without them. In my eyes, without
Arabs this is a barren land."
-
- Both men discuss the evolution of their thinking over
the decades, and both describe a period in which, after the triumph of
Zionism, they unthinkingly accepted its dispossession of the Palestinians.
Each man describes the Palestinians simply disappearing when he was an
adolescent ("They just sort of evaporated," says Hanegbi), and
Benvenisti recalls a long period in which the Palestinian "tragedy
simply did not penetrate my consciousness." But both speak in very
un-Zionist terms of equality. Benvenisti touches on the crux of the Zionist
dilemma. "This is where I am different from my friends in the left,"
he says, "because I am truly a native son of immigrants, who is drawn
to the Arab culture and the Arabic language because it is here. It is the
land.Whereas the right, certainly, but the left too hates Arabs. The Arabs
bother them; they complicate things. The subject generates moral questions
and that generates cultural unease."
-
- Hanegbi goes farther. "I am not a psychologist,"
he says, "but I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions
of Zionism condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live
like this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible
to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the settlements
and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that
the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is
something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this
land that drives us out of our minds."
-
- While some thoughtful Israelis like these men struggle
with philosophical questions of existence and identity and the collective
Jewish conscience, few American defenders of Israel seem troubled by such
deep issues. Racism is often banal. Most of those who practice it, and
most of those who support Israel as a Zionist state, would be horrified
to be accused of racism, because their racist practices have become commonplace.
They do not even think about what they do. We recently encountered a typical
American supporter of Israel who would have argued vigorously if we had
accused her of racism. During a presentation we were giving to a class,
this (non-Jewish) woman rose to ask a question that went roughly like this:
"I want to ask about the failure of the other Arabs to take care of
the Palestinians. I must say I sympathize with Israel because Israel simply
wants to have a secure state, but the other Arabs have refused to take
the Palestinians in, and so they sit in camps and their hostility toward
Israel just festers."
-
- This is an extremely common American, and Israeli, perception,
the idea being that if the Arab states would only absorb the Palestinians
so that they became Lebanese or Syrians or Jordanians, they would forget
about being Palestinian, forget that Israel had displaced and dispossessed
them, and forget about "wanting to destroy Israel." Israel would
then be able simply to go about its own business and live in peace, as
it so desperately wants to do. This woman's assumption was that it is acceptable
for Israel to have established itself as a Jewish state at the expense
of (i.e., after the ethnic cleansing of) the land's non-Jewish inhabitants,
that any Palestinian objection to this reality is illegitimate, and that
all subsequent animosity toward Israel is ultimately the fault of neighboring
Arab states who failed to smother the Palestinians' resistance by anesthetizing
them to their plight and erasing their identity and their collective memory
of Palestine.
-
- When later in the class the subject arose of Israel ending
the occupation, this same woman spoke up to object that, if Israel did
give up control over the West Bank and Gaza, it would be economically disadvantaged,
at least in the agricultural sector. "Wouldn't this leave Israel as
just a desert?" she wondered. Apart from the fact that the answer
is a clear "no" (Israel's agricultural capability inside its
1967 borders is quite high, and most of Israel is not desert), the woman's
question was again based on the automatic assumption that Israel's interests
take precedence over those of anyone else and that, in order to enhance
its own agricultural economy (or, presumably, for any other perceived gain),
Israel has the right to conquer and take permanent possession of another
people's land.
-
- The notion that the Jewish/Zionist state of Israel has
a greater right to possess the land, or a greater right to security, or
a greater right to a thriving economy, than the people who are native to
that land is extremely racist, but this woman would probably object strenuously
to having it pointed out that this is a Jewish supremacist viewpoint identical
to past justifications for white South Africa's apartheid regime and to
the rationale for all European colonial (racist) systems that exploited
the human and natural resources of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia over
the centuries for the sole benefit of the colonizers. Racism must necessarily
be blind to its own immorality; the burden of conscience is otherwise too
great. This is the banality of evil.
-
- (Unconsciously, of course, many Americans also seem to
believe that the shameful policies of the U.S. government toward Native
Americans somehow make it acceptable for the government of Israel to pursue
equally shameful policies toward the Palestinians. The U.S. needs to face
its racist policies head on as much as it needs to confront the racism
of its foremost partner, Israel.)
-
- This woman's view is so very typical, something you hear
constantly in casual conversation and casual encounters at social occasions,
that it hardly seems significant. But this very banality is precisely the
evil of it; what is evil is the very fact that it is "hardly significant"
that Zionism by its nature is racist and that this reality goes unnoticed
by decent people who count themselves defenders of Israel. The universal
acceptability of a system that is at heart racist but proclaims itself
to be benign, even noble, and the license this acceptability gives Israel
to oppress another people, are striking testimony to the selectivity of
the human conscience and its general disinterest in human questions of
justice and human rights except when these are politically useful.
-
- Countering the Counter-Arguments
-
- To put some perspective on this issue, a few clarifying
questions must be addressed. Many opponents of the occupation would argue
that, although Israel's policies in the occupied territories are racist
in practice, they are an abuse of Zionism and that racism is not inherent
in it. This seems to be the position of several prominent commentators
who have recently denounced Israel severely for what it does in the West
Bank and Gaza but fail to recognize the racism in what Israel did upon
its establishment in 1948. In a recent bitter denunciation of Zionist policies
today, Avraham Burg, a former Knesset speaker, lamented that Zionism had
become corrupted by ruling as an occupier over another people, and he longed
for the days of Israel's youth when "our national destiny" was
"as a light unto the nations and a society of peace, justice and equality."
These are nice words, and it is heartening to hear credible mainstream
Israelis so clearly denouncing the occupation, but Burg's assumption that
before the occupation Zionism followed "a just path" and always
had "an ethical leadership" ignores the unjust and unethical
policy of ethnic cleansing that allowed Israel to become a so-called Jewish
democracy in the first place.
-
- Acknowledging the racist underpinnings of an ideology
so long held up as the embodiment of justice and ethics appears to be impossible
for many of the most intellectual of Israelis and Israeli defenders. Many
who strongly oppose Israel's policies in the occupied territories still,
despite their opposition, go through considerable contortions to "prove"
that Israel itself is not racist. Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the Jewish
magazine Tikkun and a long-time opponent of the occupation, rejects the
notion that Zionism is racist on the narrow grounds that Jewishness is
only a religious identity and that Israel welcomes Jews of all races and
ethnicities and therefore cannot be called racist. But this confuses the
point. Preference toward a particular religion, which is the only aspect
of racism that Lerner has addressed and which he acknowledges occurs in
Israel, is no more acceptable than preference on ethnic grounds.
-
- But most important, racism has to do primarily with those
discriminated against, not with those who do the discriminating. Using
Lerner's reasoning, apartheid South Africa might also not be considered
racist because it welcomed whites of all ethnicities. But its inherent
evil lay in the fact that its very openness to whites discriminated against
blacks. Discrimination against any people on the basis of "race, colour,
descent, or national or ethnic origin" is the major characteristic
of racism as the UN defines it. Discrimination against Palestinians and
other non-Jews, simply because they are not Jews, is the basis on which
Israel constitutes itself. Lerner seems to believe that, because the Palestinian
citizens of Israel have the vote and are represented in the Knesset, there
is no racial or ethnic discrimination in Israel. But, apart from skipping
over the institutional racism that keeps Palestinian Israelis in perpetual
second-class citizenship, this argument ignores the more essential reality
that Israel reached its present ethnic balance, the point at which it could
comfortably allow Palestinians to vote without endangering its Jewish character,
only because in 1948 three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forced
to leave what became the Jewish state of Israel.
-
- More questions need to be addressed. Is every Israeli
or every Jew a racist? Most assuredly not, as the examples of Jeff Halper,
Haim Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti, and many others like them strikingly illustrate.
Is every Zionist a racist? Probably not, if one accepts ignorance as an
exonerating factor. No doubt the vast majority of Israelis, most very good-hearted
people, are not consciously racist but "go along" unquestioningly,
having been born into or moved to an apparently democratic state and never
examined the issue closely, and having bought into the line fed them by
every Israeli government from the beginning, that Palestinians and other
Arabs are enemies and that whatever actions Israel takes against Palestinians
are necessary to guarantee the personal security of Israelis.
-
- Is it anti-Semitic to say that Zionism is a racist system?
Certainly not. Political criticism is not ethnic or religious hatred. Stating
a reality about a government's political system or its political conduct
says nothing about the qualities of its citizens or its friends. Racism
is not a part of the genetic makeup of Jews, any more than it was a part
of the genetic makeup of Germans when Hitler ran a racist regime. Nor do
Zionism's claim to speak for all Jews everywhere and Israel's claim to
be the state of all Jews everywhere make all Jews Zionists. Zionism did
not ask for or receive the consent of universal Jewry to speak in its name;
therefore labeling Zionism as racist does not label all Jews and cannot
be called anti-Semitic.
-
- Why It Matters
-
- Are there other racist systems, and are there governing
systems and political philosophies, racist or not, that are worse than
Zionism? Of course, but this fact does not relieve Zionism of culpability.
(Racism obviously exists in the United States and in times past was pervasive
throughout the country, but, unlike Israel, the U.S. is not a racist governing
system, based on racist foundations and depending for its raison d'etre
on a racist philosophy.) Many defenders of Israel (Michael Lerner and columnist
Thomas Friedman come to mind) contend that when Israel is "singled
out" for criticism not also leveled at oppressive regimes elsewhere,
the attackers are exhibiting a special hatred for Jews. Anyone who does
not also criticize Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il or Bashar al-Assad for
atrocities far greater than Israel's, they charge, is showing that he is
less concerned to uphold absolute values than to tear down Israel because
it is Jewish. But this charge ignores several factors that demand criticism
of Zionist racism. First, because the U.S. government supports Zionism
and its racist policy on a continuing basis and props up Zionism's military
machine with massive amounts of military aid, it is wholly appropriate
for Americans (indeed, it is incumbent on Americans) to call greater attention
to Zionism's racism than, for instance, to North Korea's appalling cruelties.
The United States does not assist in North Korea's atrocities, but it does
underwrite Zionism's brutality.
-
- There is also a strong moral reason for denouncing Zionism
as racist. Zionism advertises itself, and actually congratulates itself,
as a uniquely moral system that stands as a "light unto the nations,"
putting itself forward as in a real sense the very embodiment of the values
Americans hold dear. Many Zionist friends of Israel would have us believe
that Zionism is us, and in many ways it is: most Americans, seeing Israelis
as "like us," have grown up with the notion that Israel is a
noble enterprise and that the ideology that spawned it is of the highest
moral order. Substantial numbers of Americans, non-Jews as well as Jews,
feel an emotional and psychological bond with Israel and Zionism that goes
far beyond the ties to any other foreign ally. One scholar, describing
the U.S.-Israeli tie, refers to Israel as part of the "being"
of the United States. Precisely because of the intimacy of the relationship,
it is imperative that Zionism's hypocrisy be exposed, that Americans not
give aid and comfort to, or even remain associated with, a morally repugnant
system that uses racism to exalt one people over all others while masquerading
as something better than it is. The United States can remain supportive
of Israel as a nation without any longer associating itself with Israel's
racism.
-
- Finally, there are critical practical reasons for acknowledging
Zionism's racism and enunciating a U.S. policy clearly opposed to racism
everywhere and to the repressive Israeli policies that arise from Zionist
racism. Now more than at any time since the United States positioned itself
as an enthusiastic supporter of Zionism, U.S. endorsement, and indeed facilitation,
of Israel's racist policies put this country at great risk for terrorism
on a massive scale. Terrorism arises, not as President Bush would have
us believe from "hatred of our liberties," but from hatred of
our oppressive, killing policies throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds,
and in a major way from our support for Israel's severe oppression of the
Palestinians. Terrorism is never acceptable, but it is explainable, and
it is usually avoidable. Supporting the oppression of Palestinians that
arises from Israel's racism only encourages terrorism.
-
- It is time to begin openly expressing revulsion at the
racism against Palestinians that the United States has been supporting
for decades. It is time to sound an alarm about the near irreversibility
of Israel's absorption of the occupied territories into Israel, about the
fact that this arises from a fundamentally racist ideology, about the fact
that this racism is leading to the ethnicide of an entire nation of people,
and about the fact that it is very likely to produce horrific terrorist
retaliation against the U.S. because of its unquestioning support. Many
who are intimately familiar with the situation on the ground are already
sounding an alarm, usually without using the word racism but using other
inflammatory terms. Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen recently observed that
"Israel's atrocities have now intensified to an extent unimaginable
in previous decades." Land confiscation, curfew, the "gradual
pushing of Palestinians from areas designated for Jews" have accompanied
the occupation all along, he wrote, but the level of oppression now "is
quite another story.[This is] an eliminationist policy on the verge of
genocide."
-
- The Foundation for Middle East Peace, a Washington-based
institution that has tracked Israeli settlement-building for decades, came
to much the same conclusion, although using less attention-getting language,
in its most recent bimonthly newsletter. Israel, it wrote, is "undertaking
massive, unprecedented efforts beyond the construction of new settlement
housing, which proceeds apace, to put the question of its control of these
areas beyond the reach of diplomacy." Israel's actions, particularly
the "relentless" increase in territorial control, the foundation
concluded, have "compromised not only the prospect for genuine Palestinian
independence but also, in ways not seen in Israel's 36-year occupation,
the very sustainability of everyday Palestinian life."
-
- It signals a remarkable change when Israeli commentators
and normally staid foundations begin using terms like "unprecedented,"
"unimaginable in previous decades," "in ways not seen in
Israel's 36-year occupation," even words like "eliminationist"
and "genocide." While the Bush administration, every Democratic
presidential candidate (including, to some degree, even the most progressive),
Congress, and the mainstream U.S. media blithely ignore the extent of the
destruction in Palestine, more and more voices outside the United States
and outside the mainstream in the U.S. are finally coming to recognize
that Israel is squeezing the life out of the Palestinian nation. Those
who see this reality should begin to expose not only the reality but the
racism that is at its root.
-
- Some very thoughtful Israelis, including Haim Hanegbi,
Meron Benvenisti, and activists like Jeff Halper, have come to the conclusion
that Israel has absorbed so much of the occupied territories that a separate,
truly independent Palestinian state can never be established in the West
Bank and Gaza. They now regard a binational solution as the only way. In
theory, this would mean an end to Zionism (and Zionist racism) by allowing
the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples to form a single secular state in
all of Palestine in which they live together in equality and democracy,
in which neither people is superior, in which neither people identifies
itself by its nationality or its religion but rather simply by its citizenship.
Impossible? Idealized? Pie-in-the-sky? Probably so but maybe not.
-
- Other Israeli and Jewish activists and thinkers, such
as Israel's Uri Avnery and CounterPunch contributor Michael Neumann, have
cogently challenged the wisdom and the realism of trying to pursue binationalism
at the present time. But it is striking that their arguments center on
what will best assure a decent outcome for Palestinians. In fact, what
is most heartening about the newly emerging debate over the one- versus
the two-state solution is the fact that intelligent, compassionate people
have at long last been able to move beyond addressing Jewish victimhood
and how best to assure a future for Jews, to begin debating how best to
assure a future for both the Palestinian and the Jewish people. Progressives
in the U.S., both supporters and opponents of present U.S. policies toward
Israel, should encourage similar debate in this country. If this requires
loudly attacking AIPAC and its intemperate charges of anti-Semitism, so
be it.
-
- We recently had occasion to raise the notion of Israeli
racism, using the actual hated word, at a gathering of about 25 or 30 (mostly)
progressive (mostly) Jews, and came away with two conclusions: 1) it is
a hard concept to bring people to face, but 2) we were not run out of the
room and, after the initial shock of hearing the word racist used in connection
with Zionism, most people in the room, with only a few exceptions, took
the idea aboard. Many specifically thanked us for what we had said. One
man, raised as a Jew and now a Muslim, came up to us afterward to say that
he thinks Zionism is nationalist rather than racist (to which we argued
that nationalism was the motivation but racism is the resulting reality),
but he acknowledged, with apparent approbation, that referring to racism
had a certain shock effect. Shock effect is precisely what we wanted. The
United States' complacent support for everything Israel does will not be
altered without shock.
-
- When a powerful state kills hundreds of civilians from
another ethnic group; confiscates their land; builds vast housing complexes
on that land for the exclusive use of its own nationals; builds roads on
that land for the exclusive use of its own nationals; prevents expansion
of the other people's neighborhoods and towns; demolishes on a massive
scale houses belonging to the other people, in order either to prevent
that people's population growth, to induce them "voluntarily"
to leave their land altogether, or to provide "security" for
its own nationals; imprisons the other people in their own land behind
checkpoints, roadblocks, ditches, razor wire, electronic fences, and concrete
walls; squeezes the other people into ever smaller, disconnected segments
of land; cripples the productive capability of the other people by destroying
or separating them from their agricultural land, destroying or confiscating
their wells, preventing their industrial expansion, and destroying their
businesses; imprisons the leadership of the other people and threatens
to expel or assassinate that leadership; destroys the security forces and
the governing infrastructure of the other people; destroys an entire population's
census records, land registry records, and school records; vandalizes the
cultural headquarters and the houses of worship of the other people by
urinating, defecating, and drawing graffiti on cultural and religious artifacts
and symbols when one people does these things to another, a logical person
can draw only one conclusion: the powerful state is attempting to destroy
the other people, to push them into the sea, to ethnically cleanse them.
-
- These kinds of atrocities, and particularly the scale
of the repression, did not spring full-blown out of some terrorist provocations
by Palestinians. These atrocities grew out of a political philosophy that
says whatever advances the interests of Jews is acceptable as policy. This
is a racist philosophy.
-
- What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is not genocide,
it is not a holocaust, but it is, unmistakably, ethnicide. It is, unmistakably,
racism. Israel worries constantly, and its American friends worry, about
the destruction of Israel. We are all made to think always about the existential
threat to Israel, to the Jewish people. But the nation in imminent danger
of elimination today is not Israel but the Palestinians. Such a policy
of national destruction must not be allowed to stand.
-
- -----
-
- * Assuming, according to the scenario put forth by our
Israeli-American friend, that Palestinians had accepted the UN-mandated
establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, that no war had ensued, and that
no Palestinians had left Palestine, Israel would today encompass only the
55 percent of Palestine allocated to it by the UN partition resolution,
not the 78 percent it possessed after successfully prosecuting the 1948
war. It would have no sovereignty over Jerusalem, which was designated
by the UN as a separate international entity not under the sovereignty
of any nation. Its 5.4 million Jews (assuming the same magnitude of Jewish
immigration and natural increase) would be sharing the state with approximately
five million Palestinians (assuming the same nine-fold rate of growth among
the 560,000 Palestinians who inhabited the area designated for the Jewish
state as has occurred in the Palestinian population that actually remained
in Israel in 1948). Needless to say, this small, severely overcrowded,
binational state would not be the comfortable little Jewish democracy that
our friend seems to have envisioned.
-
- Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on
the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served
as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of
Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast
Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director
of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit.
-
- Kathleen Christison also worked in the CIA, retiring
in 1979. Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine.
She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
-
- They are also contributors to CounterPunch's hot new
book: The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
-
- The Christison's can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/christison11082003.html
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