Zionism As A
Racist Ideology
By Kathleen And
Bill Christison
Counterpunch.org
20 November, 2003
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 benign,
even noble, and the license this acceptability gives Israel to oppress
another people, are striking testimony to the selectivity of the human
conscience and its general disinterest in human questions of justice
and human rights except when these are politically useful.
Countering the
Counter-Arguments
To put some perspective
on this issue, a few clarifying questions must be addressed. Many opponents
of the occupation would argue that, although Israel's policies in the
occupied territories are racist in practice, they are an abuse of Zionism
and that racism is not inherent in it. This seems to be the position
of several prominent commentators who have recently denounced Israel
severely for what it does in the West Bank and Gaza but fail to recognize
the racism in what Israel did upon its establishment in 1948. In a recent
bitter denunciation of Zionist policies today, Avraham Burg, a former
Knesset speaker, lamented that Zionism had become corrupted by ruling
as an occupier over another people, and he longed for the days of Israel's
youth when "our national destiny" was "as a light unto
the nations and a society of peace, justice and equality." These
are nice words, and it is heartening to hear credible mainstream Israelis
so clearly denouncing the occupation, but Burg's assumption that before
the occupation Zionism followed "a just path" and always had
"an ethical leadership" ignores the unjust and unethical policy
of ethnic cleansing that allowed Israel to become a so-called Jewish
democracy in the first place.
Acknowledging the
racist underpinnings of an ideology so long held up as the embodiment
of justice and ethics appears to be impossible for many of the most
intellectual of Israelis and Israeli defenders. Many who strongly oppose
Israel's policies in the occupied territories still, despite their opposition,
go through considerable contortions to "prove" that Israel
itself is not racist. Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the Jewish magazine
Tikkun and a long-time opponent of the occupation, rejects the notion
that Zionism is racist on the narrow grounds that Jewishness is only
a religious identity and that Israel welcomes Jews of all races and
ethnicities and therefore cannot be called racist. But this confuses
the point. Preference toward a particular religion, which is the only
aspect of racism that Lerner has addressed and which he acknowledges
occurs in Israel, is no more acceptable than preference on ethnic grounds.
But most important,
racism has to do primarily with those discriminated against, not with
those who do the discriminating. Using Lerner's reasoning, apartheid
South Africa might also not be considered racist because it welcomed
whites of all ethnicities. But its inherent evil lay in the fact that
its very openness to whites discriminated against blacks. Discrimination
against any people on the basis of "race, colour, descent, or national
or ethnic origin" is the major characteristic of racism as the
UN defines it. Discrimination against Palestinians and other non-Jews,
simply because they are not Jews, is the basis on which Israel constitutes
itself. Lerner seems to believe that, because the Palestinian citizens
of Israel have the vote and are represented in the Knesset, there is
no racial or ethnic discrimination in Israel. But, apart from skipping
over the institutional racism that keeps Palestinian Israelis in perpetual
second-class citizenship, this argument ignores the more essential reality
that Israel reached its present ethnic balance, the point at which it
could comfortably allow Palestinians to vote without endangering its
Jewish character, only because in 1948 three-quarters of a million Palestinians
were forced to leave what became the Jewish state of Israel.
More questions need
to be addressed. Is every Israeli or every Jew a racist? Most assuredly
not, as the examples of Jeff Halper, Haim Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti,
and many others like them strikingly illustrate. Is every Zionist a
racist? Probably not, if one accepts ignorance as an exonerating factor.
No doubt the vast majority of Israelis, most very good-hearted people,
are not consciously racist but "go along" unquestioningly,
having been born into or moved to an apparently democratic state and
never examined the issue closely, and having bought into the line fed
them by every Israeli government from the beginning, that Palestinians
and other Arabs are enemies and that whatever actions Israel takes against
Palestinians are necessary to guarantee the personal security of Israelis.
Is it anti-Semitic
to say that Zionism is a racist system? Certainly not. Political criticism
is not ethnic or religious hatred. Stating a reality about a government's
political system or its political conduct says nothing about the qualities
of its citizens or its friends. Racism is not a part of the genetic
makeup of Jews, any more than it was a part of the genetic makeup of
Germans when Hitler ran a racist regime. Nor do Zionism's claim to speak
for all Jews everywhere and Israel's claim to be the state of all Jews
everywhere make all Jews Zionists. Zionism did not ask for or receive
the consent of universal Jewry to speak in its name; therefore labeling
Zionism as racist does not label all Jews and cannot be called anti-Semitic.
Why It Matters
Are there other
racist systems, and are there governing systems and political philosophies,
racist or not, that are worse than Zionism? Of course, but this fact
does not relieve Zionism of culpability. (Racism obviously exists in
the United States and in times past was pervasive throughout the country,
but, unlike Israel, the U.S. is not a racist governing system, based
on racist foundations and depending for its raison d'etre on a racist
philosophy.) Many defenders of Israel (Michael Lerner and columnist
Thomas Friedman come to mind) contend that when Israel is "singled
out" for criticism not also leveled at oppressive regimes elsewhere,
the attackers are exhibiting a special hatred for Jews. Anyone who does
not also criticize Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il or Bashar al-Assad
for atrocities far greater than Israel's, they charge, is showing that
he is less concerned to uphold absolute values than to tear down Israel
because it is Jewish. But this charge ignores several factors that demand
criticism of Zionist racism. First, because the U.S. government supports
Zionism and its racist policy on a continuing basis and props up Zionism's
military machine with massive amounts of military aid, it is wholly
appropriate for Americans (indeed, it is incumbent on Americans) to
call greater attention to Zionism's racism than, for instance, to North
Korea's appalling cruelties. The United States does not assist in North
Korea's atrocities, but it does underwrite Zionism's brutality.
There is also a
strong moral reason for denouncing Zionism as racist. Zionism advertises
itself, and actually congratulates itself, as a uniquely moral system
that stands as a "light unto the nations," putting itself
forward as in a real sense the very embodiment of the values Americans
hold dear. Many Zionist friends of Israel would have us believe that
Zionism is us, and in many ways it is: most Americans, seeing Israelis
as "like us," have grown up with the notion that Israel is
a noble enterprise and that the ideology that spawned it is of the highest
moral order. Substantial numbers of Americans, non-Jews as well as Jews,
feel an emotional and psychological bond with Israel and Zionism that
goes far beyond the ties to any other foreign ally. One scholar, describing
the U.S.-Israeli tie, refers to Israel as part of the "being"
of the United States. Precisely because of the intimacy of the relationship,
it is imperative that Zionism's hypocrisy be exposed, that Americans
not give aid and comfort to, or even remain associated with, a morally
repugnant system that uses racism to exalt one people over all others
while masquerading as something better than it is. The United States
can remain supportive of Israel as a nation without any longer associating
itself with Israel's racism.
Finally, there are
critical practical reasons for acknowledging Zionism's racism and enunciating
a U.S. policy clearly opposed to racism everywhere and to the repressive
Israeli policies that arise from Zionist racism. Now more than at any
time since the United States positioned itself as an enthusiastic supporter
of Zionism, U.S. endorsement, and indeed facilitation, of Israel's racist
policies put this country at great risk for terrorism on a massive scale.
Terrorism arises, not as President Bush would have us believe from "hatred
of our liberties," but from hatred of our oppressive, killing policies
throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, and in a major way from our support
for Israel's severe oppression of the Palestinians. Terrorism is never
acceptable, but it is explainable, and it is usually avoidable. Supporting
the oppression of Palestinians that arises from Israel's racism only
encourages terrorism.
It is time to begin
openly expressing revulsion at the racism against Palestinians that
the United States has been supporting for decades. It is time to sound
an alarm about the near irreversibility of Israel's absorption of the
occupied territories into Israel, about the fact that this arises from
a fundamentally racist ideology, about the fact that this racism is
leading to the ethnicide of an entire nation of people, and about the
fact that it is very likely to produce horrific terrorist retaliation
against the U.S. because of its unquestioning support. Many who are
intimately familiar with the situation on the ground are already sounding
an alarm, usually without using the word racism but using other inflammatory
terms. Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen recently observed that "Israel's
atrocities have now intensified to an extent unimaginable in previous
decades." Land confiscation, curfew, the "gradual pushing
of Palestinians from areas designated for Jews" have accompanied
the occupation all along, he wrote, but the level of oppression now
"is quite another story.[This is] an eliminationist policy on the
verge of genocide."
The Foundation for
Middle East Peace, a Washington-based institution that has tracked Israeli
settlement-building for decades, came to much the same conclusion, although
using less attention-getting language, in its most recent bimonthly
newsletter. Israel, it wrote, is "undertaking massive, unprecedented
efforts beyond the construction of new settlement housing, which proceeds
apace, to put the question of its control of these areas beyond the
reach of diplomacy." Israel's actions, particularly the "relentless"
increase in territorial control, the foundation concluded, have "compromised
not only the prospect for genuine Palestinian independence but also,
in ways not seen in Israel's 36-year occupation, the very sustainability
of everyday Palestinian life."
It signals a remarkable
change when Israeli commentators and normally staid foundations begin
using terms like "unprecedented," "unimaginable in previous
decades," "in ways not seen in Israel's 36-year occupation,"
even words like "eliminationist" and "genocide."
While the Bush administration, every Democratic presidential candidate
(including, to some degree, even the most progressive), Congress, and
the mainstream U.S. media blithely ignore the extent of the destruction
in Palestine, more and more voices outside the United States and outside
the mainstream in the U.S. are finally coming to recognize that Israel
is squeezing the life out of the Palestinian nation. Those who see this
reality should begin to expose not only the reality but the racism that
is at its root.
Some very thoughtful
Israelis, including Haim Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti, and activists like
Jeff Halper, have come to the conclusion that Israel has absorbed so
much of the occupied territories that a separate, truly independent
Palestinian state can never be established in the West Bank and Gaza.
They now regard a binational solution as the only way. In theory, this
would mean an end to Zionism (and Zionist racism) by allowing the Jewish
and the Palestinian peoples to form a single secular state in all of
Palestine in which they live together in equality and democracy, in
which neither people is superior, in which neither people identifies
itself by its nationality or its religion but rather simply by its citizenship.
Impossible? Idealized? Pie-in-the-sky? Probably so but maybe not.
Other Israeli and
Jewish activists and thinkers, such as Israel's Uri Avnery and CounterPunch
contributor Michael Neumann, have cogently challenged the wisdom and
the realism of trying to pursue binationalism at the present time. But
it is striking that their arguments center on what will best assure
a decent outcome for Palestinians. In fact, what is most heartening
about the newly emerging debate over the one- versus the two-state solution
is the fact that intelligent, compassionate people have at long last
been able to move beyond addressing Jewish victimhood and how best to
assure a future for Jews, to begin debating how best to assure a future
for both the Palestinian and the Jewish people. Progressives in the
U.S., both supporters and opponents of present U.S. policies toward
Israel, should encourage similar debate in this country. If this requires
loudly attacking AIPAC and its intemperate charges of anti-Semitism,
so be it.
We recently had
occasion to raise the notion of Israeli racism, using the actual hated
word, at a gathering of about 25 or 30 (mostly) progressive (mostly)
Jews, and came away with two conclusions: 1) it is a hard concept to
bring people to face, but 2) we were not run out of the room and, after
the initial shock of hearing the word racist used in connection with
Zionism, most people in the room, with only a few exceptions, took the
idea aboard. Many specifically thanked us for what we had said. One
man, raised as a Jew and now a Muslim, came up to us afterward to say
that he thinks Zionism is nationalist rather than racist (to which we
argued that nationalism was the motivation but racism is the resulting
reality), but he acknowledged, with apparent approbation, that referring
to racism had a certain shock effect. Shock effect is precisely what
we wanted. The United States' complacent support for everything Israel
does will not be altered without shock.
When a powerful
state kills hundreds of civilians from another ethnic group; confiscates
their land; builds vast housing complexes on that land for the exclusive
use of its own nationals; builds roads on that land for the exclusive
use of its own nationals; prevents expansion of the other people's neighborhoods
and towns; demolishes on a massive scale houses belonging to the other
people, in order either to prevent that people's population growth,
to induce them "voluntarily" to leave their land altogether,
or to provide "security" for its own nationals; imprisons
the other people in their own land behind checkpoints, roadblocks, ditches,
razor wire, electronic fences, and concrete walls; squeezes the other
people into ever smaller, disconnected segments of land; cripples the
productive capability of the other people by destroying or separating
them from their agricultural land, destroying or confiscating their
wells, preventing their industrial expansion, and destroying their businesses;
imprisons the leadership of the other people and threatens to expel
or assassinate that leadership; destroys the security forces and the
governing infrastructure of the other people; destroys an entire population's
census records, land registry records, and school records; vandalizes
the cultural headquarters and the houses of worship of the other people
by urinating, defecating, and drawing graffiti on cultural and religious
artifacts and symbols when one people does these things to another,
a logical person can draw only one conclusion: the powerful state is
attempting to destroy the other people, to push them into the sea, to
ethnically cleanse them.
These kinds of atrocities,
and particularly the scale of the repression, did not spring full-blown
out of some terrorist provocations by Palestinians. These atrocities
grew out of a political philosophy that says whatever advances the interests
of Jews is acceptable as policy. This is a racist philosophy.
What Israel is doing
to the Palestinians is not genocide, it is not a holocaust, but it is,
unmistakably, ethnicide. It is, unmistakably, racism. Israel worries
constantly, and its American friends worry, about the destruction of
Israel. We are all made to think always about the existential threat
to Israel, to the Jewish people. But the nation in imminent danger of
elimination today is not Israel but the Palestinians. Such a policy
of national destruction must not be allowed to stand.
-----
* Assuming, according
to the scenario put forth by our Israeli-American friend, that Palestinians
had accepted the UN-mandated establishment of a Jewish state in 1948,
that no war had ensued, and that no Palestinians had left Palestine,
Israel would today encompass only the 55 percent of Palestine allocated
to it by the UN partition resolution, not the 78 percent it possessed
after successfully prosecuting the 1948 war. It would have no sovereignty
over Jerusalem, which was designated by the UN as a separate international
entity not under the sovereignty of any nation. Its 5.4 million Jews
(assuming the same magnitude of Jewish immigration and natural increase)
would be sharing the state with approximately five million Palestinians
(assuming the same nine-fold rate of growth among the 560,000 Palestinians
who inhabited the area designated for the Jewish state as has occurred
in the Palestinian population that actually remained in Israel in 1948).
Needless to say, this small, severely overcrowded, binational state
would not be the comfortable little Jewish democracy that our friend
seems to have envisioned.
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency
for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence
Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on
certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and
Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's Office
of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit.
Kathleen Christison
also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since then she has been mainly
preoccupied by the issue of Palestine. She is the author of Perceptions
of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.