|
 
Support Wrong Planet Awareness!
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
Sand
Phoenix
Joined: Sep 16, 2007
Posts: 1776
Location: Finland
|
 Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 3:27 pm Post subject: |
 |
|
March 22, 2004
Zionism & the Politics of Assassination
On Extrajudicial Executions
By MAZIN QUMSIYEH
As the fourth strongest army in the world, Israel could have arrested the quadriplegic and partially blind spiritual elder of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). But history shows that such extrajudicial executions (200 so far) create instability and a cycle of revenge that is calculated to serve Zionist colonization efforts.
Political Zionism started in 1845 with a British feasibility study for Jewish colonization in Palestine to further British interests in weakening the Ottoman Empire and establish connections to colonial holdings in India. The adoption of this political (as opposed to religious or cultural) Zionism by a small but very influential segment of Ashkenazi Jews in Europe was deemed crucial for success. Zionism remained marginal among Jews until it capitalized on the atrocities of WWII. Early advocates of Zionism did not shy away from using the term colonization to describe their activities or to describe the use of violence to achieve their goals because natives will always resist such efforts. This violence against native Palestinians started in 1917 when the Zionist Herbert Samuel was appointed as British high commissioner. He made it clear with violent action that the end result will be the creation of a Jewish state in a land that had less than 6% Jewish population.
Most native Jews, including the Palestinian Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, were opposed to Zionism at the time. Before 1917 Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and Jews coexisted in relative harmony. Violence between 1917 and 1949 resulted in the establishment of a Jewish state and the ethnic cleansing of 530 Palestinian villages and towns. Israel rejected International law by adopting exclusionary laws that prevent refugees from returning while offering automatic citizenship to Jews (including converts) from anywhere in the world. Zionists expected resistance of Palestinian Christians and Muslims. 800,000 were made refugees by 1949 (now nearly 5 million including Yassin's family). Israeli leaders from Ben Gurion to Sharon have always used the 'Zionist response' to resistance: overwhelming violence and increased colonization.
It was Zionist Jews who first to plant bombs in market places (1930s), first bomb civilian neighborhoods using aircraft (1947), first sent mail letter bombs (1940s), and first to hijack (1954) and shoot down (1973) civilian airplanes. As our biased mainstream US media keeps emphasizing, Palestinians also engaged in expected violent resistance. Violence is a symptom and was used to further colonization efforts whether in Palestine or in America (against Native Americans). It is not a coincidence that the major waves of expulsions of Palestinians occurred between October 1947 to January 1949 and in June 1967. It is not a coincidence that in the name of 'security', Israel destroyed over 3000 Palestinian homes rendering some 15,000 civilians homeless most in the most desirable land. The Apartheid wall being built with the excuse of the violence is not separating Israel from the occupied areas but is surrounding Palestinians in small cantons to starve them and force them to leave. Thus, Zionist leaders deem violence and escalation a sound strategy because, as the first Prime Minister of Israel admitted, peace would mean having to restore rights to native people.
Israel's assassination of Sheikh Yassin was described as stupid (Gush Shalom), horrendous mistake (Yossi Beilin), contrary to International law (Amnesty International and the European Union), and a war crime (Israeli liberal leaders). I think such actions remove any doubt about the fact that political Zionism is incompatible with peace in the 21st century. As for us here, Israel's strong lobby in congress drained us of over $100 billion in direct aid and much more indirectly. It is responsible for the low standing of the US around the world. The price tag is much higher in lives lost: American, Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi, and others.
Just like South Africa shed apartheid, Israel must shed Zionism and become a country for people of all religions rather than a country for and by Jews. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (including the right of refugees to return) provides the most logical road map to peace. The American public can no longer afford to allow our government to keep supporting violence and war against the will of the international community. Only then will we begin to rectify historic injustices and bring peace at home and abroad.
Mazin Qumsiyeh is an associate professor at Yale University and co-founder of the Palestine Right to Return Coalition. |
|
| Back to top |
|
Sand
Phoenix
Joined: Sep 16, 2007
Posts: 1776
Location: Finland
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 3:36 pm Post subject: |
|
|
March 11, 2005
Who is Pushing Whom into the Sea?
Ben Gurion: "We Must Expel the Arabs and Take Their Place"
By WILLIAM MARTIN
On 11 October 1961 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion declared in the Israeli Knesset:
'The Arabs' exit from Palestine...began immediately after the UN resolution, from the areas earmarked for the Jewish state. And we have explicit documents testifying that they left Palestine following instructions by the Arab leaders, with the Mufti at their head, under the assumption that the invasion of the Arab armies at the expiration of the Mandate will destroy the Jewish state and push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive'.
Thus, Mr Ben Gurion is asserting that it is his perception that 1) there were directions from the neighboring Arab states and the Mufti in Jerusalem for the indigenous Arabs of Palestine to evacuate their homes and lands on the promise that the Arab armies would destroy the nascent Jewish state, and, further, 2) that those armies intended to "push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive". The phrase "push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive" has acquired a life of its own as it is invoked by Zionist supporters on a daily basis in order to justify the aggressive policies of Israel as well as its recalcitrance in continuing the occupation of the Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.
It is a highly emotive phrase invoking images of the Holocaust, though adapted to a Mediterranean setting.
Mr Ben Gurion gives no attribution for this phrase, nor does he claim that it is a quote from an Arab source. It is expressed here as if it is his personal surmise as to the Arab army's intentions.
The phrase has been variously attributed by Zionist supporters to Yasser Arafat, Gamel Abdul Nasser, or any other of Israel's enemies, but none whom I have challenged, including U S Congressman Henry Waxman who made the claim in a letter to me, attributing the phrase to Nasser, have been able to provide any documentation of support for their claim. This 1961 speech certainly predates Arafat's 1968 ascension to the head of the PLO. The phrase is very much entrenched in the thinking of Israel supporters and is taken as a factual basis for an Arab intent of Genocide and of their own potential for peril.
The speech by Mr. Ben Gurion appears to be the origin of the phrase. A search of the speeches of Gamel Abdul Nasser fails to reveal it, nor does it reveal any other than a pragmatics approach to his dealing with Israel. This phrase is sufficiently dramatic and threatening so that if it was in fact uttered by a significant Arab leader, it would be prominent and easily found in any competent historical treatment, which it is not. The phrase, thus, has a Jewish origin and not an Arab origin. Mr Ben Gurion is the originator of the phrase, in all likelihood.
Mr. Ben Gurion's first claim that the Arab exodus from Palestine was provoked by directives from the leaders of the surrounding Arab states has been shown by overwhelming historical research to be false.
Since the early 1980's a new generation of professional historians, many, though not all, Israeli, and recognized as professionally competent within their own society, as well as to a wider audience, and aided in no small measure by the opening of many historical and military documents archived by the Israel, and British governments, and to a lesser extent, Arab governments, have provided a revised historical perspective as a challenge to the official Israeli history of the origin of the state of Israel. These newly released documents have been systematically mined by Ben Gurion University Professor of History, Benny Morris, as well as others.
One telling document uncovered by Professor Benny Morris is "The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine in the Period 1/12/1947 ¬ 1/6/1948" dated 30 June, 1948 and was produced by the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Service during the first weeks of the truce (11 June ¬ 9 July) of 1948. It analyzes the numbers of refugees, the stages of the exodus, the causes, destination and problems of absorption in the host countries. The appendix contains the village by village breakdown in terms of numbers of initial inhabitants, their destinations and the causes of their flight.
On the eve of the UN Partition Plan Resolution of 29 Nov 1947, according to the report, there were 219 Arab villages and four Arab, or partly Arab, towns in the area designated for the Jewish state, with a total Arab population of 340,000 Arab residents. By June 1, 180 of these towns had been evacuated, with 239,000 Arabs fleeing the areas of the Jewish state. A further 152,000 Arabs, from 70 villages and three towns (Jaffa, Jenin, and Acre), had fled their homes in the areas designated for Palestinian Arab statehood in the Partition Resolution. Thus by June 1, according to the report, the refugee total was 391,000, with an error of 10 to 15%.
The UN gives a figure of 750,000 ¬ 800,000 Palestinian refugees by the end of 1948, so that the period covered by the Intelligence Service Report is one in which roughly one half the refugee population was generated.
The report then outlines eleven (I will list five) of what the IDF Intelligence Service regarded, in June 1948, as the factors which precipitated the exodus, listing them in order of importance as:
a. Direct hostile Jewish [Haganah/IDF] operations against Arab settlements. (The Haganah was the army of the Yeshuv, or Jewish community in Palestine, and was the precursor of the Israeli Defense Force, or IDF.)
b. The effect of our [Haganah/IDF] hostile operations on nearby Arab settlements (especially ¬ the fall of large neighboring centers).
c. Operations of the Jewish dissidents [Menachem Begin's Irgun and Yitzhak Shamir's Stern Gang, also known as the Irgun Tzvai Leumi and the Lehi, resp.].
d. Jewish whispering operations [psychological warfare] aimed at frightening away Arab inhabitants.
e. Ultimate expulsion orders [by Haganah/IDF].
The Intelligence Service then gives a detailed breakdown and explanation of these factors, stressing that "without doubt, hostile [Haganah/IDF] operations were the main cause of the movement of the population". The wave of emigration in each district, explains the report, "followed hard upon the increase and expansion of our [Haganah/IDF] operations in that district. The departure of the British of course, helped the Arab evacuation, but it appears that the British withdrawal freed our hands for action more than it influenced the Arab immigration directly."
The report cites "surprise, protracted mortar barrages, and the use of loudspeakers broadcasting threatening messages, factors which had a strong influence in precipitation flight". "An attack on one village or town often affected its neighbors. The evacuation of a certain village because of an attack by us prompted in its wake many neighboring villages to flee", the report states. "The fall of Tiberias, Safad, Samakh, Jaffa, and Acre engendered in their wake many waves of emigrants."
The report concludes that "It is possible to say that at least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our Haganah/IDF operations and by their influence. the effects of the operations of the dissidents Jewish organizations [the Irgun and the Stern Gang] directly caused some 15% of the emigration." The Intelligence Service states that the activities of the Irgun and Stern were especially important in the Jaffa-Tel Aviv area, in the coastal plain to the north, and around Jerusalem. The report cites the "special effect" of the Irgun and Stern Gang operations in Deir Yassin.
The action at Deir Yassin, especially greatly affected the thinking of the Arabs; not a little of the immediate flight during our [Haganah/IDF] attacks, especially in the central and southern areas was due to this factor which can be described as a decisive accelerating factor.
Recall that the Deir Yassin massacre, which occurred on April 9 1948, claimed the lives of about 240 men women and children of this peaceful village and included rapes and mutilations. See, The Deir Yassin Massacre. There were other massacres, perhaps two to three thousands, essentially defenseless, Palestinians were massacred, according to Haifa University historian Ilan Pappe, however the Deir Yassin massacre was widely publicized and became, in some ways, the signature of the Irgun and the Stern Gang.
Altogether the report states, Jewish [Haganah/IDF, Irgun, Stern] military accounted for 70% if the Arab exodus from Palestine.
In direct contradiction to Ben Gurion, the report states "the Arab institutions attempted to struggle against the phenomenon of flight and evacuation, and to curb the waves of emigration". The Arab Higher Committee imposed restrictions, and issued threats, punishments, and propaganda in the radio and press to curb the emigration, and also tried to mobilize the governments in the neighboring Arab states to assist in this effort, as both shared the same interest.
"More than once", the report states, "[Haganah/IDF units were forced] to expel inhabitants [after they had returned to their homes]".
Thus in sum, this document, which is only one of many to have surfaced in consequence of the historical research of the last 20 years completely refutes Ben Gurion's claim and reveals it to have no basis in fact.
Mr Ben Gurion was lying through his teeth, to put it plainly.
It should be observed that the Jewish agency in Palestine declared itself a state on May 14, 1948. It was the next day, May 15 that the first of five Arab armies or contingents of armies entered Palestine. Thus, approximately half of the 1948 refugees fled or were extirpated before the first foreign Arab soldier set foot in Palestine. The time line is important: the Deir Yassin Massacre occurred on April 9, the expulsion of Arabs from the cities of Jaffe, Haifa, Tiberias, and Safid occurred at the end of April and in the first days of May. The flight of the Palestinian refugees, thus, was not set in motion by the entrance of the Arab armies as is often claimed.
Nor should we take from Mr Ben Gurion's statement that the concept of Palestinian evacuation was confined to the years 1947 - 1948. The concept of transfer of the indigenous Arab population to make way for a Jewish state was intrinsic to the thinking of the Zionist leaders from its initial inception.
Thus Theodor Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, said in 1892:
[We shall] spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.
And in 1937, Ben Gurion stated:
The compulsory transfer of Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own feet during the days of the First and Second Temple.
And in a letter to his son, also in 1937, he stated:
We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places ¬ then we have force at our disposal.
And in early 1948 Ben Gurion wrote in his War Diary,
"During the assault we must be ready to strike the decisive blow; that is, either to destroy the towns or expel its inhabitants so our people can replace them."
And in February 1948, Ben Gurion told Yoseph Weitz, director of the settlement of the Jewish National Fund and head of the official Transfer Committee of 1948:
The war will give us land. The concept of 'ours' and 'not ours' are peace concepts, only, in war they lose their whole meaning.
In fact, the concept of transfer, a euphemism for expulsion, was embraced by the entire Jewish leadership from the earliest stages of Zionism until the 1948 extirpation of the indigenous population. Transfer committees were actually set up from 1937 on until 1948 in order to study ways of riding Palestine of as many Arabs as possible.
By the end of the 1948 War, hundreds of Arab villages had been completely depopulated. Their house and buildings were bulldozed of blown up primarily for the purpose of preventing the return of their owners. Benny Morris lists 369 Palestinian villages and towns destroyed, while Professor Walid Khalidi, leading a team of field researchers, in an exhaustive study, describes the destruction of each of 418 villages or hamlets which are listed on an index of Palestinian cities of 1945.
Quoting from Ilan Pappe's book, A History of Modern Palestine:
[W]hen winter was over and the spring of 1949 warmed a particularly frozen
Palestine, the land which we have described ¬ reconstructing a period stretching over 250 years ¬ had changed beyond recognition. The countryside, the rural heart of Palestine, with its colourful and picturesque villages was ruined. Half the villages had been destroyed, flattened by Israeli bulldozers which had been at work since August 1948 when the government had decided to either turn them into cultivated land or to build new Jewish settlements on their remains. A naming committee granted the new settlements Hebraized versions of the original Arab names . David Ben Gurion explained that this was done as part of an attempt to prevent future claim to the villages. It was also supported by the Israeli archeologists, who had authorized the names as returning the map to something resembling 'ancient Israel'.
Of equal importance, in engendering what Arafat called an Israeli "Masada complex" is the common pro-Zionist interpretation of the 1968 PLO Charter as calling for the destruction of the state of Israel in which the term "destruction" is interpreted as "pushing all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive."
Though the document calls for armed struggle, there is nothing in it incompatible with the establishment of a secular democratic state which recognizes and respects the three major religions.
Indeed, article 16 of the document states:
The liberation of Palestine, from a spiritual viewpoint, will prepare an atmosphere of tranquility and peace for the Holy Land in the shade of which all the Holy Places will be safeguarded, and freedom of worship and visitation to all will be guaranteed, without distinction or discrimination of race, colour, language or religion.
And article 19 states:
The partitioning of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void, because it is contrary to the wish of the people of Palestine and its natural right to a homeland, and contradicts the principles embodied in the Charter of the UN, the first of which is the right of self-determination.
Under American pressure, Arafat and the PLO eventually amended the PLO Charter so as to accept the reality of a Jewish state on 80% of historical Palestine leaving room for a Palestinian state on the remainder. However, one democratic state based on non-discrimination with equal rights for Jews, Christians and Moslems is closer to American values than a state created specifically for one ethnicity whose laws uphold the superior rights of one race or ethnicity, namely the Jewish one, over that of another, namely the minority Palestinian citizens of Israel. In amending the PLO Charter so as to accept the two state solution, we have actually moved away from basic American values of non-discrimination based on race. Those liberals who worked for the dissolution of the white supremacists governments of Rhodesia and South Africa need to explain their slavish devotion to the state of Israel which is based on Jewish supremacy.
The Zionists did not drive the Palestinians into the sea, but they did drive them from their homes and villages and ancestral lands and from Palestine and into squalid refugee camps, and in the process massacred two to three thousand. The irony of Ben Gurion's statement should not escape us. Ben Gurion and the Zionists demand deference for a fictitious intention on the part of the Palestinian and Arabs while ignoring or denying the very real expulsion of the Palestinians.
Much of the perception of Israel and much of its popular support rest on the myth of the purity of Israel and much of that can be traced directly to David Ben Gurion's distortions of truth. The unambiguous historical evidence is that the state of Israel was founded upon terrorism and the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population. There is nothing pure or righteous about that.
William James Martin teaches in the Mathematics Department at the University of Florida. He can be reached at: wmartin@math.ufl.edu |
|
| Back to top |
|
Ragtime
Legal Eagle Eye
Joined: Nov 03, 2006
Age: 29
Posts: 7393
Location: Dallas, Texas
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:31 pm Post subject: |
|
|
When Israel forceably, physically uprooted its citizens and their families from their homes from Gaza, I was absolutely horrified.
But, I thought, "This shouldn't have happened, but now the whole world will have to admit that Israel is serious
about peace. It's overkill to yank those families out of there, but at least no one can say Israel doesn't want peace with the Palestinians, when it is willing to turn against its own people to appease them."
But I underestimated the sheer blinding power of the worldwide hatred against the Jews.
(This even after being educated about the Holocaust. Still, I held out hope.)
They could bend over backwards for the Palestinians until their backs break,
and yet few would even choose to recognize the effort. 
_________________
Anyone who is interested in philosophy, the of meaning of life, and answers to our hardest questions, I suggest you check out the free, online mp3 archive of Ravi Zacharias at www.rzim.org.
Last edited by Ragtime on Tue May 20, 2008 4:38 pm; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
skafather84
Platypus God
Joined: Mar 21, 2006
Age: 24
Posts: 4663
Location: Los Angeles, CA
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:37 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Sand wrote: | | The American public can no longer afford to allow our government to keep supporting violence and war against the will of the international community. |
whether the american public can afford it or not, the indoctrination is so deep over here, it's not very likely. |
|
| Back to top |
|
skafather84
Platypus God
Joined: Mar 21, 2006
Age: 24
Posts: 4663
Location: Los Angeles, CA
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:39 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Ragtime wrote: | | But I underestimated the sheer blinding power of the worldwide hatred against the Jews. |
taking stances that are not blindly pro-israel is not hating jews and i find it HIGHLY offensive that you say that. |
|
| Back to top |
|
Ragtime
Legal Eagle Eye
Joined: Nov 03, 2006
Age: 29
Posts: 7393
Location: Dallas, Texas
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:39 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Tell me, skafather84, when will the Jews not anymore be a threat to peace in your opinion? When they are completely wiped out?
Hitler did half the job. Do you wish he was allowed to continue the other half unabated?
_________________
Anyone who is interested in philosophy, the of meaning of life, and answers to our hardest questions, I suggest you check out the free, online mp3 archive of Ravi Zacharias at www.rzim.org.
Last edited by Ragtime on Tue May 20, 2008 4:41 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
skafather84
Platypus God
Joined: Mar 21, 2006
Age: 24
Posts: 4663
Location: Los Angeles, CA
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:41 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Ragtime wrote: | Tell me, skafather84, when will the Jews not be a threat in your mind anymore? When they are completely wiped out?
Hitler did half the job. Do you wish he was allowed to continue unabated? |
it's not about the jews you worthless piece of humanoid scum. |
|
| Back to top |
|
iamnotaparakeet
Centurio Caesareae
Joined: Aug 01, 2007
Age: 22
Posts: 11615
Location: Domus Psittacorum
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:41 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| skafather84 wrote: | | Sand wrote: | | The American public can no longer afford to allow our government to keep supporting violence and war against the will of the international community. |
whether the american public can afford it or not, the indoctrination is so deep over here, it's not very likely. |
Yeah, liberal indoctrination is as dense as osmium here. People are so anti-war and anti-Israel that I find it hard to believe the situation. But I guess that's what you get for letting the State indoctrinate *cough* educate children over long periods of time.
_________________
Ego non sum parvus psittacus!
Es neesmu mazs papagailis!
Yo no soy un periquito! |
|
| Back to top |
|
Ragtime
Legal Eagle Eye
Joined: Nov 03, 2006
Age: 29
Posts: 7393
Location: Dallas, Texas
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:41 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| skafather84 wrote: | | Ragtime wrote: | Tell me, skafather84, when will the Jews not be a threat in your mind anymore? When they are completely wiped out?
Hitler did half the job. Do you wish he was allowed to continue unabated? |
it's not about the jews you worthless piece of humanoid scum. |
Apparently it is. News to skafather: Israel is about the Jews.
_________________
Anyone who is interested in philosophy, the of meaning of life, and answers to our hardest questions, I suggest you check out the free, online mp3 archive of Ravi Zacharias at www.rzim.org. |
|
| Back to top |
|
skafather84
Platypus God
Joined: Mar 21, 2006
Age: 24
Posts: 4663
Location: Los Angeles, CA
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:45 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Ragtime wrote: | | skafather84 wrote: | | Ragtime wrote: | Tell me, skafather84, when will the Jews not be a threat in your mind anymore? When they are completely wiped out?
Hitler did half the job. Do you wish he was allowed to continue unabated? |
it's not about the jews you worthless piece of humanoid scum. |
Apparently it is. News to skafather: Israel is about the Jews. |
israel isn't about the jews. it's about political power and that has no religious orientation. but you're too stupid to think beyond anything being in religious terms. |
|
| Back to top |
|
skafather84
Platypus God
Joined: Mar 21, 2006
Age: 24
Posts: 4663
Location: Los Angeles, CA
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:46 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| iamnotaparakeet wrote: | | skafather84 wrote: | | Sand wrote: | | The American public can no longer afford to allow our government to keep supporting violence and war against the will of the international community. |
whether the american public can afford it or not, the indoctrination is so deep over here, it's not very likely. |
Yeah, liberal indoctrination is as dense as osmium here. People are so anti-war and anti-Israel that I find it hard to believe the situation. But I guess that's what you get for letting the State indoctrinate *cough* educate children over long periods of time. |
quit playing the victim and acting like you're a minority. |
|
| Back to top |
|
iamnotaparakeet
Centurio Caesareae
Joined: Aug 01, 2007
Age: 22
Posts: 11615
Location: Domus Psittacorum
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:50 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| skafather84 wrote: | | iamnotaparakeet wrote: | | skafather84 wrote: | | Sand wrote: | | The American public can no longer afford to allow our government to keep supporting violence and war against the will of the international community. |
whether the american public can afford it or not, the indoctrination is so deep over here, it's not very likely. |
Yeah, liberal indoctrination is as dense as osmium here. People are so anti-war and anti-Israel that I find it hard to believe the situation. But I guess that's what you get for letting the State indoctrinate *cough* educate children over long periods of time. |
quit playing the victim and acting like you're a minority. |
By this, do you insinuate that you are a victim and a minority? I don't think you see what this country is like today.
_________________
Ego non sum parvus psittacus!
Es neesmu mazs papagailis!
Yo no soy un periquito!
Last edited by iamnotaparakeet on Tue May 20, 2008 5:46 pm; edited 3 times in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
Ragtime
Legal Eagle Eye
Joined: Nov 03, 2006
Age: 29
Posts: 7393
Location: Dallas, Texas
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 4:50 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| skafather84 wrote: | | Ragtime wrote: | | skafather84 wrote: | | Ragtime wrote: | Tell me, skafather84, when will the Jews not be a threat in your mind anymore? When they are completely wiped out?
Hitler did half the job. Do you wish he was allowed to continue unabated? |
it's not about the jews you worthless piece of humanoid scum. |
Apparently it is. News to skafather: Israel is about the Jews. |
israel isn't about the jews. |
Yes it is! You can attempt to assuage your anti-Semitism by calling it anti-Israelism,
but it's the same thing.
_________________
Anyone who is interested in philosophy, the of meaning of life, and answers to our hardest questions, I suggest you check out the free, online mp3 archive of Ravi Zacharias at www.rzim.org. |
|
| Back to top |
|
Sand
Phoenix
Joined: Sep 16, 2007
Posts: 1776
Location: Finland
|
| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 5:18 pm Post subject: |
|
|
November 8 / 9, 2003
Zionism as a Racist Ideology
Reviving an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
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 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 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 benig | | |
|
| | |
