PALESTINA - BALSAM |
|||||||||||
|
|
|
|
Zionism as a Racist Ideology
Reviving an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide
By Kathleen and Bill Christison
http://counterpunch.org/christison11082003.html
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
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
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when in 1991 the UN repealed a 1975 General Assembly resolution that defined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
In
these "right" circumstances, the issue of racism rarely arose,
and the UN's labeling of
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
As
When
you are on the ground in
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 1948 and now we will uproot you from all of the
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,
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
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, maintaining
continuity 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
The
problem of the Bedouins' unrecognized villages is only the partial evidence
of a racist policy that has prevailed since
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 naïve 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The Zionist Dilemma
The
supposed threat from "the other" is the eternal refuge of the
majority of Israelis and Israeli supporters in the
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'être. 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
But
most important, racism has to do primarily with those discriminated
against, not with those who do the discriminating. Using Lerner's reasoning,
apartheid
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
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'être 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
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
Finally,
there are critical practical reasons for acknowledging Zionism's racism
and enunciating a
It is time to begin openly expressing revulsion at the racism against Palestinians
that the
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
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
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
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
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
-----
* 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
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,
Kathleen Christison also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since then
she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of