Zionism is Racism – Part 2
Zionism needs to be redefined
Monday April 27 2009 20:17:24 PM BDT
By Habib Siddiqui, USA
Israel's inherent racism has been vividly clear to anyone who had visited the Occupied Territories. As was noted in 2003 by The Foundation for Middle East Peace, a Washington-based institution that has been tracking Israeli settlement-building for decades, Israel's relentless increase in territorial control had "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."
The situation today is worse than it was back then in 2003. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reported that the Israeli assault in last December and January killed more than 1,300 Gazans, including 300 children. Israeli missiles leveled the parliament building, mosques, the central courthouse, the Ministry of Justice, the main U.N. food storage warehouse, and the Red Crescent Society hospital. The science lab at Islamic University's highly regarded medical school was destroyed. The Israeli attack was on a defenseless population that had no bomb shelters, no warning sirens, and no adequate means of caring for the victims. In each case Israel's target was not an opposing army but a civilian society, to destroy Gaza as a functioning community. Truly, Israel's genocidal campaign succeeded in killing everything except the will of the people.
John Ging, head of the U.N. relief operations in Gaza, reported that by the time the bombing eased off, 400,000 Gazans had been without running water for three weeks, 20,000 homes were destroyed or damaged and 100,000 people were homeless. In the town of Beit Hanoun alone 30,000 tons of sewage flowed in the streets every hour. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accused the Israeli army of using white phosphorous – a banned substance for use against civilians -- that burns human flesh to the bone. Israel also stopped delivery of humanitarian aid. On Feb. 5 the Israeli navy stopped a Lebanese ship from carrying relief supplies and diverted it to Israel in what the Arab League called "an act of piracy."
And yet to a jaundice-eyed West, such war crimes of the Zionist state are nothing but a show of its right of self-defense!
The 2008 annual report of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) entitled "The State of Human Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories" noted that "Arab Israelis are disadvantaged, persecuted, endangered, and live under third-world conditions."
Israel's political and military leaders are neither shy about their determination for Eretz Israel nor about clarifying that the non-Jews have no future there. It was in 2002, Israel's ex-education minister, Limor Livnat, spelled out in defense of Zionism that Israel is not "just another state like all the other states." She said, "We are not just a state of all its citizens."
Parties like the ruling Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu and National Union consider settling Jews in the entire Palestine as an expression of fulfillment of Zionism. The 1999 Likud Charter, e.g., emphasized the right of settlement in "Judea (and) Samaria", more commonly known as the "West Bank and Gaza." Similarly, their claims of the Jordan River as the permanent eastern border to Israel and Jerusalem as "the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel," do the same. The 'Peace & Security' chapter of the 1999 Likud Party platform "flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river." The chapter continued: "The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state." Yet, Israel's western patrons never ask about ratifying such a Charter!
In a thoroughly researched article "Zionism as a racist ideology" (Counter Punch, Nov. 8/9, 2003) Bill and Kathleen Christison (former high ranking officials with the CIA) rightly observed, "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."
And this is exactly what the Zionist state has been doing against the original inhabitants of Israel -- the Palestinians. Like a gifted artist, it has painted them as inherently hostile who want to "destroy Israel" and "throw the Jews into the seas." This justifies eviction of Palestinians, destruction of their homes, discriminating against them and denying democratic rights to them. Situation is created so hopelessly unlivable for this "other" people that they are pushed into violence. And once this happens, they are relegated to the status of "terrorists" with whom no negotiation can be made. Forgotten then are all those conciliatory gestures including the PLO's decision in 1988 to recognize Israel's existence, relinquish Palestinian claims to the three-quarters of Palestine residing inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, and even recognize Israel's "right" to exist there.
Even when negotiations take place, these are conducted hypocritically as part of face-saving measures (to show that Israel is for peaceful solution to hide her intent), and more as a bargaining tactic not only to extract favorable concessions from the weaker party but also from the sponsor (usually the USA). So those negotiations are a necessary and prudent way to weaken the Palestinian position while further enriching and strengthening the Zionist state. These schemes have not changed; they only get reinvigorated with time.
While all the great nations have valued inclusion or plurality, the Zionist state stands for exclusion, racism and xenophobia. In 2006, Israeli cabinet minister Avidgor Lieberman said that Israel had no alternative but to move toward "exchanges of populations and territory, in order to create the most homogenously Jewish state." He also said, "Minorities are the biggest problem in the world." On May 12 2002, Netanyahu dubbed a Palestinian state, in a crude, racist slur, as "Arafat-istan". When it comes to the subject of Israeli Arabs, it's hard to tell where Netanyahu ends and Lieberman begins.
In 1923, Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of today's Zionism and the founder of the Jewish Legion, wrote: "Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important … to speak Hebrew, but unfortunately it is even more important to be able to shoot — or else I am through with playing colonization." [The Iron Wall]
No one personifies the colonial expansionist policy of Jabotinsky and the Zionist Israel with ruthless cool-headedness better than Benjamin Netanyahu. The crowning moment for him was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a pro-Likud Jewish zealot Yigal Amir in 1995, during peace negotiations between the Israeli state and the PLO. As a beneficiary of that murder, Likud came to power in 1996 and peace talks came to a halt. The same conglomeration of social forces that blocked any prospect of even a shadow of an independent Palestinian state is now in power under Netanyahu's watch. Netanyahu and Lieberman, as spokesmen of the settler movement, are physical embodiments of anti-Palestine, anti-Arab racism.
The civilized people living in vast territories of Asia, Africa and Latin America must take a hard look at today's Zionism and analyze what this evil is doing to the affected people of the region. When they do, like open-minded curious surgeons, they will find nothing pleasant about this cancerous entity called Zionism. It is not accident that a great Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum had said, "Zionism is the greatest form of spiritual impurity. They have polluted the Jewish people with their heresy."
A colonial settler movement like Zionism that uproots indigenous people is an anti-thesis of national liberation movement. Like Myanmarism, it remains one of the last relics of racism that needs to be torn down for greater good of humanity.
It is high time to openly express outrage and revulsion at today's Zionism, which is nothing but a racist policy that aims ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people from their ancestral home. The world body needs to reinstate the U.N. Resolution 3379, because Zionism is uglier today than it was back in 1991 when it was revoked.
President Ahmadinejad's speech on Zionism's culpability to fostering unbridled racism would sound offensive, inflammatory and unacceptable only to those who have no problem sanctioning war crimes of Israel against unarmed Palestinians. Those individuals are closet racists themselves. Shame on them for sustaining the scourge of Zionism!
Habib Siddiqui
E Mail : saeva@aol.com
The situation today is worse than it was back then in 2003. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reported that the Israeli assault in last December and January killed more than 1,300 Gazans, including 300 children. Israeli missiles leveled the parliament building, mosques, the central courthouse, the Ministry of Justice, the main U.N. food storage warehouse, and the Red Crescent Society hospital. The science lab at Islamic University's highly regarded medical school was destroyed. The Israeli attack was on a defenseless population that had no bomb shelters, no warning sirens, and no adequate means of caring for the victims. In each case Israel's target was not an opposing army but a civilian society, to destroy Gaza as a functioning community. Truly, Israel's genocidal campaign succeeded in killing everything except the will of the people.
John Ging, head of the U.N. relief operations in Gaza, reported that by the time the bombing eased off, 400,000 Gazans had been without running water for three weeks, 20,000 homes were destroyed or damaged and 100,000 people were homeless. In the town of Beit Hanoun alone 30,000 tons of sewage flowed in the streets every hour. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accused the Israeli army of using white phosphorous – a banned substance for use against civilians -- that burns human flesh to the bone. Israel also stopped delivery of humanitarian aid. On Feb. 5 the Israeli navy stopped a Lebanese ship from carrying relief supplies and diverted it to Israel in what the Arab League called "an act of piracy."
And yet to a jaundice-eyed West, such war crimes of the Zionist state are nothing but a show of its right of self-defense!
The 2008 annual report of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) entitled "The State of Human Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories" noted that "Arab Israelis are disadvantaged, persecuted, endangered, and live under third-world conditions."
Israel's political and military leaders are neither shy about their determination for Eretz Israel nor about clarifying that the non-Jews have no future there. It was in 2002, Israel's ex-education minister, Limor Livnat, spelled out in defense of Zionism that Israel is not "just another state like all the other states." She said, "We are not just a state of all its citizens."
Parties like the ruling Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu and National Union consider settling Jews in the entire Palestine as an expression of fulfillment of Zionism. The 1999 Likud Charter, e.g., emphasized the right of settlement in "Judea (and) Samaria", more commonly known as the "West Bank and Gaza." Similarly, their claims of the Jordan River as the permanent eastern border to Israel and Jerusalem as "the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel," do the same. The 'Peace & Security' chapter of the 1999 Likud Party platform "flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river." The chapter continued: "The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state." Yet, Israel's western patrons never ask about ratifying such a Charter!
In a thoroughly researched article "Zionism as a racist ideology" (Counter Punch, Nov. 8/9, 2003) Bill and Kathleen Christison (former high ranking officials with the CIA) rightly observed, "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."
And this is exactly what the Zionist state has been doing against the original inhabitants of Israel -- the Palestinians. Like a gifted artist, it has painted them as inherently hostile who want to "destroy Israel" and "throw the Jews into the seas." This justifies eviction of Palestinians, destruction of their homes, discriminating against them and denying democratic rights to them. Situation is created so hopelessly unlivable for this "other" people that they are pushed into violence. And once this happens, they are relegated to the status of "terrorists" with whom no negotiation can be made. Forgotten then are all those conciliatory gestures including the PLO's decision in 1988 to recognize Israel's existence, relinquish Palestinian claims to the three-quarters of Palestine residing inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, and even recognize Israel's "right" to exist there.
Even when negotiations take place, these are conducted hypocritically as part of face-saving measures (to show that Israel is for peaceful solution to hide her intent), and more as a bargaining tactic not only to extract favorable concessions from the weaker party but also from the sponsor (usually the USA). So those negotiations are a necessary and prudent way to weaken the Palestinian position while further enriching and strengthening the Zionist state. These schemes have not changed; they only get reinvigorated with time.
While all the great nations have valued inclusion or plurality, the Zionist state stands for exclusion, racism and xenophobia. In 2006, Israeli cabinet minister Avidgor Lieberman said that Israel had no alternative but to move toward "exchanges of populations and territory, in order to create the most homogenously Jewish state." He also said, "Minorities are the biggest problem in the world." On May 12 2002, Netanyahu dubbed a Palestinian state, in a crude, racist slur, as "Arafat-istan". When it comes to the subject of Israeli Arabs, it's hard to tell where Netanyahu ends and Lieberman begins.
In 1923, Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of today's Zionism and the founder of the Jewish Legion, wrote: "Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important … to speak Hebrew, but unfortunately it is even more important to be able to shoot — or else I am through with playing colonization." [The Iron Wall]
No one personifies the colonial expansionist policy of Jabotinsky and the Zionist Israel with ruthless cool-headedness better than Benjamin Netanyahu. The crowning moment for him was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a pro-Likud Jewish zealot Yigal Amir in 1995, during peace negotiations between the Israeli state and the PLO. As a beneficiary of that murder, Likud came to power in 1996 and peace talks came to a halt. The same conglomeration of social forces that blocked any prospect of even a shadow of an independent Palestinian state is now in power under Netanyahu's watch. Netanyahu and Lieberman, as spokesmen of the settler movement, are physical embodiments of anti-Palestine, anti-Arab racism.
The civilized people living in vast territories of Asia, Africa and Latin America must take a hard look at today's Zionism and analyze what this evil is doing to the affected people of the region. When they do, like open-minded curious surgeons, they will find nothing pleasant about this cancerous entity called Zionism. It is not accident that a great Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum had said, "Zionism is the greatest form of spiritual impurity. They have polluted the Jewish people with their heresy."
A colonial settler movement like Zionism that uproots indigenous people is an anti-thesis of national liberation movement. Like Myanmarism, it remains one of the last relics of racism that needs to be torn down for greater good of humanity.
It is high time to openly express outrage and revulsion at today's Zionism, which is nothing but a racist policy that aims ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people from their ancestral home. The world body needs to reinstate the U.N. Resolution 3379, because Zionism is uglier today than it was back in 1991 when it was revoked.
President Ahmadinejad's speech on Zionism's culpability to fostering unbridled racism would sound offensive, inflammatory and unacceptable only to those who have no problem sanctioning war crimes of Israel against unarmed Palestinians. Those individuals are closet racists themselves. Shame on them for sustaining the scourge of Zionism!
Habib Siddiqui
E Mail : saeva@aol.com
Zionism is Racism – Part 1
Friday April 24 2009 12:42:18 PM BDT : Highlights
The subject of racism is a very touchy one for both its current and former practitioners. It was thus expected that some western countries with nasty past records of racism would boycott the UN racism conference in Geneva, scheduled for April 20, 2009. A couple of days before the event, the USA announced that it would sit out the Geneva forum. Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands soon followed suit. Through their boycotting the session they have sent a blatant message endorsing racism. ......
Friday April 24 2009 12:42:18 PM BDT : Highlights
The subject of racism is a very touchy one for both its current and former practitioners. It was thus expected that some western countries with nasty past records of racism would boycott the UN racism conference in Geneva, scheduled for April 20, 2009. A couple of days before the event, the USA announced that it would sit out the Geneva forum. Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands soon followed suit. Through their boycotting the session they have sent a blatant message endorsing racism. ......
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