zionism =manifest destiny=racism=death
a ghetto is a ghetto. an oppressor is an oppressor regardless if s/he has a star of david or a swastika as a armband

“Israel is a classic settler state.”

This is very pernicious claim as it denies the historical ties of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. This comment also displays Gupta’s ignorance. Most Israeli Jews are Mizrahi (Jews from the MIddle East and North Africa), not Ashkenazi (Jews from Europe). Also, as Yaacov Lozowick notes, there is a significant amount of demographic evidence (ignored by Gupta) suggesting that Arabs and Jews were both immigrating to Palestine during the British mandate.

I WONDER ABOUT THIS ASSERTION. MR. DANIEL, DO YOU HAVE CENSUS FACTS TO BACK THIS UP? I THINK ISSUES OF RACE AND ETHNICITY ARE FLUID MR. DANIEL, AND MANY ISRAELIS AND JEWS MAYBE OF BOTH ASHKENAZI AND SEPHARDIC DESCENT. SO WHICH ARE THEY? AND IF YOU READ SOME OF AMOS OZ’S NON-FICTION BOOKS, YOU’LL SEE HOW MUCH CONFLICT THERE WAS/IS BETWEEN THESE TWO GROUPS.

TO RESPOND TO YOUR ASSERTION THAT ZIONISM DOES NOT HAVE AN IMPERIAL SPONSOR (ORIGINALLY), I WOULD COUNTER BY SAYING THAT THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT NOW HAS REGIONAL IMPERIAL AMBITIONS AND HAS A SPONSOR, NAMELY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

LASTLY, LIKE THE U.S.A., ISRAEL IS A DEEPLY RACIST SOCIETY. IT HAS CREATED A GIANT PRISON CALLED THE OCCUPIED TERRORITIES AND THE GOVERNMENT DISCRIMINATES AGAINST ARABS THE WAY WHITES DID IN JIM CROW.

BUT I AM INTERESTED MR. DANIEL IN YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS–CAN ISRAELI JEWS AND ARABS LIVE TOGETHER IN A SINGLE STATE OR IS THAT EVEN AN OPTION? GOING OFF ON THE JIM CROW ANALOGY, CAN THERE BE A “SEPARATE AND EQUAL” PALESTINIAN STATE?

For a historian, Mr. Daniel has a curious reading of history. Rather than deal directly with the points made, he uses logical fallacies to warp the debate.

First, let’s unpack some of the hidden ideology that Daniel uses, that is, “the historical ties of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.” What is the land of Israel? This is not something that exists in situ. As with all states, it’s a temporal definition used to advance political agendas. Many Zionists use a biblical definition of “Eretz Israel” that “stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates River, meaning all of Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, most of Iraq and huge swaths of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.”

Second, Jews are not a people. Judaism is a religion and its adherents are Jews, who are represented among many peoples across the world. It’s like saying the “Catholic people” or the “Muslim people.” It’s interesting that many Zionists tend to use the same formulation as anti-Semites, claiming there is some ethnic, racial or genetic commonality among Jews.

Thus, the category of Jews, which is given an extremely broad definition by the Israeli state for obvious political purposes, are given claim to a huge swath of the Levant based on ancient texts of highly questionable accuracy (the Old Testament), archaeological evidence of an ancient Jewish people and a kingdom that existed alongside and both before and after many other peoples and kingdoms, and a tiny modern-day community in a few cities (such as Jerusalem and Haifa under the Ottomans). In essence, what many Zionists hold is that because the kingdoms of David and Solomon existed for 73 years out of a 5,000-plus year history signifies that any Jewish person today has a superior claim on the land.

If this was the standard used globally for land claims–where an ancestor group once resided thousands of years ago and/or where a small community remained–then every nation would be convulsed by internecine warfare overnight.

I imagine Mr. Daniel must be an impassioned supporter of turning the entire Western hemisphere back over to indigenous peoples, who have a clear archaeological, historical and moral right to all the lands. After all, as a historian, he surely isn’t a hypocrite who is only advancing a partisan ideological agenda.

By way of a similar religious-historical claim, Sikh separatists in the 1980s demanded almost half of India based on the mythical Sikh nation of Khalistan. In this case, separatists from a community that is 2-3% of the population wanted almost 50% of the land (and the best land to boot). There’s a term for this: revanchism.

Now, as to the “evidence.” What is Daniel’s basis for claiming that most Israeli Jews are Mizrahi? There have been four great waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine/Israel post-1917: European Jews both after World War I to 1939, and after World War II to 1948, when the state of Israel was founded. After WW 1, “some 55,000 Jews were living in the Promised Land in the midst of 700,000 Arabs. By the time of the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948, they had reached 650,000 and the Arabs 1.3 million.” (see http://mondediplo.com/1997/11/israel). The majority of these were European Jews. Hence, Israel was founded as a classic EUROPEAN settler state.

After the founding of Israel, many ancient Jewish communities from Morocco to Iran moved almost wholesale to Israel. Some of these were Mizrahi, some Sephardic (descended from Jews from the Iberian peninsula). There have also been small but not insignificant waves from Europe and North America after 1948. The last great wave was from the former Soviet Union–some 900,000 people have immigrated to Israel since 1990. Many of them aren’t even Jewish. Kapeliouk states in Le Monde Diplomatique “20% to 30% of the community are not Jewish: there are non-Jewish members of Jewish families or ex-Soviets who have procured false documents in order to manage to leave the country.”

In 2003, according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, there were 5.165 million Jews in Israel. As of 1997, according to Kapeliouk, there were 250,000 Iraqi Jews and their descendants in Israel and perhaps half-a-million Moroccan Jews and their descendants. The only other significant Jewish community in Israel from a Middle Eastern country is from Iran, all the others are relatively small. There are also the 63,000 Falasha Jews from Ethiopia. Add these all up and it doesn’t come anywhere near to a majority. It seems Daniel is either ignorant or is engaged in historical fabrication.

But this issue of origin is irrelevant. The Jewish peoples who came from other Middle Eastern and North African countries are settlers as much as the original Ashkenazi Jews who came to British-ruled Palestine. Now the Labor Zionists–who ruled Israel uninterrupted for almost 30 years–do seen them as different. They have displayed tremendous racism towards the Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, isolating many communities in rundown towns with poor services and high unemployment and denying them political power. If this is how the Zionists treat their own, imagine how the Israeli Arabs are treated, who are second-class citizens by law.

What Daniel is trying to do is set up a notion that because supposedly all that matters to Jews is that they are Jews, then Arabs are similarly fluid. His absurd equivocation–“ there is a significant amount of demographic evidence (ignored by Gupta) suggesting that Arabs and Jews were both immigrating to Palestine during the British mandate”–has no basis in fact. Over a 30-year period the Jewish population in Palestine increased by 1100% while the Arab population grew by only 85%. The increase in the Arab population is in line with normal demographic growth. In a densely populated region–e.g., many parts of Europe and Asia–there is a lot of fluidity among communities over borders. This does not invalidate the Palestinians’ rights to the land, whatever their religious outlook.

Daniel, it appears, is subtly trying to advance the idea that because SOME Arabs were immigrating to Palestine, well then they can ALL settle elsewhere. Many Zionists express this more crudely, saying since the Palestinians are Arabs they have 10 or 20 other countries they can go to. It’s like saying the Albanians have 40 other European countries they can go to, so why complain about a little ethnic cleansing in Kosovo?

As for his second point. As virtually anyone who comes to this website knows, there is a huge disconnect between people and their “leaders.” Daniel elides the point about Herzel seeking the Ottomans’ favor, which showed that from the beginning the leaders were seeking an imperial sponsor. Other Zionist leaders looked to the British, which saw the movement as useful for their imperial ambitions. What the individual people came for is irrelevant in the geopolitical picture. Zionist leaders have, at various points, sought support from the British, French, Nazi Germany, Soviets and Americans. It’s a mistake to say that Israel is a tool or pawn of Western powers. But the historical record shows overwhelmingly that Zionist leaders have actively worked with imperial powers to strengthen Israel’s regional hegemony and the interests of its sponsoring power.

I encourage readers to read about the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1930s. It’s worth examining from many angles, from the widespread resistance, mainly civil and nonviolent, of the Palestinians, to the reign of terror instituted by the British in collaboration with Jewish militias, which used marketplace shootings, massacres, detentions and torture to repress the revolt. Some revisionist Zionists fought the British, such as the Lehi (Stern Gang), but the Labor Zionists felt that collaboration was a more effective approach to eventually establish a Jewish state.

It’s worth noting that Jabotinsky and Lehi were essentially fascists. The Lehi, incredible as it may seem, actively sought the support of Nazi Germany in 1940-41 to evict the British from Palestine. The proposal wasn’t just based on defeating a common enemy, the British, but in what Lehi saw as a shared fascist ideology: “common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO (Lehi).” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_(group).)

As for Zionism, both as an ideology and as a practice, it is colonialist, exclusivist and racist. Zionism is inherently about outsiders settling another people’s land. Israel is the only state in the world where one group (Jews) have more rights, even if they have never been to Israel, than people who have an uninterrupted presence in the land for centuries. While there some minor movements and individuals within Zionism who did espouse Arab-Jewish cooperation, the vast majority were exclusivist. And some of those who did call for a bi-national state, such as Yitzhak Epstein, did so because they recognized that Zionism meant Arab dispossession. (And all Epstein got was scorn for calling for joint farming communities and non-exclusivist schools, libraries and hospitals.) Again, the historical record is filled with plenty of thoughts and deeds from Zionists showing how it is inherently racist toward Arabs. As for savages specifically, show me a colonial ideology that doesn’t view the native people as such.

This exclusivism is key to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Take the myth that a vulnerable Israel was attacked by Arab armies in 1948. As far back as 1937–11 years before Israel’s “war of independence”–Ben Gurion said, “I favor partition of the country because when we become a strong power after the establishment of the state we will abolish partition and spread throughout Palestine” (Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel).

As to Daniel’s final point about Ralph Schoenmann, it’s a sign of desperation to attack a messenger when one doesn’t agree with the message.

A.K. Gupta

from http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3295985,00.html

Haredi writer accused of racism, slander

Arab organization calls on attorney general to launch investigation against ultra-Orthodox author of article that refers to Arabs as ‘cult of murderers, savages, worse than Nazis’

By Roee Nahmias

Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has approached Attorney General Menachem Mazuz Saturday evening and demanded that he launch an investigation against the haredi author of an article that refers to Arabs as “a cult of murderers, savages, and a loathsome nation whose prophet is a false prophet.”

In the article, published in the ultra-Orthodox newspaper “Hassidic World”, author Yitzhak Ben-Zvi writes that “the Arabs are a people similar to donkeys… they are a vile nation of savages… they have a great desire to murder and are even worse than the Nazi enemy.”

The article analyzes Torah rulings, and presents the alleged opinion of a Jewish scholar, who claims that “the hatred and cruelty of the Arabs, may they be damned, towards the Jews surpasses even that of the Nazis,” and that “the hatred to the Arabs should have naturally been etched in our hearts.”

Throughout the article, the writer refers to the Arabs as stupid, hypocrite, and uncivilized. in a separate clause, Ben-Zvi refers to Muhammad as a false prophet.

The affair was first revealed in the Israeli-Arab newspaper Kul al-Arab, which quoted the article. According to Adalah, the article is packed with severe racial incitement, slander, and insults to the religious sensitivities of the Muslims living in Israel.

Attorney Abeer Baker, who represents the organization, stated that “the article’s messages are basically of a racist nature, and their sheer purpose is the humiliation and mockery of Arabs, especially Muslims, merely because of their national and religious affiliation.”

While I realize this letter may reach you too late for publication and may not even reach the right people due to your non-hierarchical structure, I nonetheless wished to express my disappointment at some of the biases expressed in the August issue of The Indypendent. I do this because I care deeply about the importance of independent media and have relied on the Indymedia website as an invaluable source of information
during times of political protest when facts from the ground are hard to obtain. I hope you read this letter and consider the points I am making.

While reading the story from a member of the Israeli left, I had hopes that what follow inside the paper would show the same sophistication with dealing with the Israel-Palestine issue. However, there is a difference between criticizing Israeli policies (and US financial backing of Israel) and delegitimizing it as a rightful member of the community of nations.

On page 6’s “short history of anti-Semitism” there are two glaring omissions. In the year 70 A.D., the Romans defeated Jewish resistance, sacked Jerusalem, expelled the Jews from their homeland, and renamed Judea “Palestina.” This is not a myth from “biblical times,” but history, recorded by Roman authorities and documented in historical records, in art, and even on Roman coinage. To omit this event serves to challenge the right of Jewish people to return to the historical land of Israel. Similarly, no mention is made of attacks on Jews remaining in such towns as Safed by European crusaders. Jews always had a presence in Israel long before the advent of Zionism. Lastly, no mention is made of the virulent anti-Semitism (anti-Judaism) which exists in the Arab world.

On page 7’s “A Brief History of Zionism,” A. K. Gupta raises some important criticism of all “settler states” which have displaced the local population in their creation. However, no one in the United Nations refuses to accept the United States’ legitimacy as a nation despite it’s genocidal treatment of its indigenous population. Nor are boycotts waged against Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, or other countries which either exterminated their indigenous inhabitants or displaced them. Nor do these counties face any threat of invasion and attacks from their neighbors, yet they maintain armies, navies, and air forces without question. Is it because these displacements/genocidal activities happened long ago that these countries have more legitimacy than Israel? Or is it because Gupta feels that Jews aren’t a “real” people deserving of a state. Why is it that no one prefaces all discussion of America with its genocidal, settler-state origins? To require Israel to somehow apologize for its creation in all fairness requires the United States,
Australia, and Canada to do the same.

Israel, for that matter, is not a typical “settler state.” For example, the dominant language of the US, Australia, and Canada is English, the language of the colonial power from which they sprung. In South Africa, it was Afrikaans, a dialect of Dutch. In Israel, the language is Hebrew, a language spoken no where else in the world by no other people,
and most similar in structure to Arabic, the language of the neighboring countries. There is no “colonial power” which settled another part of the world. The catastrophe of European history proved the foresight of the early Jewish nationalists (Zionists). Unlike the early Americans or Australians, if their experiment had failed there would be no home country to return to, no where to go. There is no other Jewish country.

If Israel is merely a product of European colonialism, then the states of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, etc. carved up during the same period equally should not be recognized as legitimate. Gupta claims to only criticize Israel’s expansion, but he finds no fault with the invasion of Israel immediately after its creation by the UN in 1948. It seems, that any Israel, no matter how small, would have been too big an encroachment on the vast Arab world.

In Gupta’s comparison of Zionism and South African apartheid, he also makes a significant error. Apartheid was based entirely on the exploitation of Black African labor. It was the intention of the Zionists to only use Jewish labor to avoid subjugation of Arabs and dependency on Arab labor.

Many things that are politically debated in a democracy do not necessarily come to pass. The fact that some religious elements within Israel call for an expansion to the “entire biblical land of Israel” does not mean that such a plan is being considered by the government. For that matter, plenty of religious extremists wish to blow up al-Aqsa as well. In 1898 the US openly debated the annexation of Cuba. It was agreed to only annex Puerto Rico and the Phillipines.

Much has been made of the overuse of accusations of anti-Semitism. However, to attack Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people (and not only from Europe), in such a way that Israel has any less legitimacy than any other country to exist including the US — a nation which arguably have been far more genocidal, expansionist, and destructive — betrays a prejudice that the planet’s only Jewish and Hebrew-speaking state, a tiny territory with no “empire” to speak of, surrounded by Arab states on two continents from Mauritania to Iraq, indeed has no right to exist among the nations of the world. This is indeed an anti-Semitic perspective and I am disappointed that the editors of
Indymedia have allowed such an analysis to be expressed within its pages as fact.

Let us discuss how historic “Palestine” will be returned to the Arabs when Russia is called upon to return its Far East to the Chukchi, Japan considers returning Hokkaido to the Ainu, and New York State returns the city of Syracuse to the Iroquois.

Sincerely,

Michael Kassner

P.S. I think Kurds, Tamils, Saharawis, Tibetans and Sikhs should also have their own states but no one seems to champion their causes as loudly. Why?

As I read this article, I felt that I needed to reply to it with strong opposition. Not in the sense that I would pick out specific parts and claim that they were false, or claim that it was biased in any particular way. Rather, my objection, my question is, granted that ‘zionism’ may very well be fundamentally rooted in expansionism, colonialism, apartheid, and any number of masculinist dominating forces that have wreaked havoc throughout history, how should that affect our conception of the contemporary political realities surrounding Israel and the Middle East?

To me, it seems that by positioning ‘zionism’ into such a specific category, in a sense boiling it down to its most fundamental constituents, the author assumes that the complex political realities of the region are all of a sudden quite clear: the cycle of war and seemingly endless violence are the emergent properties of the inherently dominating ‘zionist’ initiative underway right now in Israel. And, certainly, this does seem, on the surface, to clearly be the case. All you have to do is ask an impoverished Shiite of south Lebanon what happened to his house, and the puzzle pieces fall into place.

However, I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask ourselves that critical and inconvenient question : What ‘zionist’ initiative are we talking about? Are we talking about the religious zionist pursuit of the biblical land of Israel, or the socialist zionist pursuit of a just and democratic state that would stand as a ‘light unto the nations’. Maybe we are talking about the all-powerful American Jewish lobby and their close relationship with fundamentalist Christians in the Bush administration, or maybe we are talking about the unfortunate role that Israel has fallen into as the long arm of Unites States Middle East policy. What is clear however, is that ‘zionism’ is a loaded term. Just like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘terrorism’, and any of the other complex ideological concepts that are used as munitions in the global ideological battle (world war 3) currently being waged all around us on many different fronts, ‘zionism’ is a term attached with extraordinarily complex meanings, nuances, and identifications, and simply cannot be summed up in a ‘brief history’ or boiled down to represent any one particular political vector.

Not knowing the author intimately, I cannot say whether or not his/her intentions are to use this ‘history’ and conception of ‘zionism’ as means to any particular political goal. However, if this is the case, I can most certainly say that they are playing into the same game as Bush, Ahmadinejad, Bin Laden, and all other destructive agents of power in the field of false politics, using concepts as weapons, limiting the scope of intellectual discourse, with the intention to gain political power.

I myself struggle daily with how the sociopolitical crisis in the Middle East will be resolved. But I know for sure that it will only be in the cultivation and development of complex ideas, like Zionism, not in doing violence on them and constricting their meaning, that our understanding of reality will be elevated and we will be able to negotiate its difficult obstacles with better skill and foresight.

Thanks for reading.