File spoon-archives/anarchy-list.archive/anarchy-list_2001/anarchy-list.0109, message 11


From: "Shawn Ewald" <shawn-AT-wilshire.net>
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2001 12:31:17 -0400
Subject: Reflections on Zionism From a Dissident Jew


------- Forwarded message follows ------- 
From:           	Timothy Jacob Wise <tjwise-AT-mindspring.com> 
Subject:        	[BRC-NEWS] Reflections on Zionism From a Dissident Jew 
To:             	brc-news-AT-lists.tao.ca 
Date sent:      	Wed,  5 Sep 2001 07:37:57 -0400 (EDT) 

http://zmag.org/zsustainers/zdaily/2001-09/05wise.htm 

ZNet Commentary 

September 5, 2001 

Reflections on Zionism From a Dissident Jew 

By Tim Wise <tjwise-AT-mindspring.com> 

So it's official. The U.S. has withdrawn from the World Conference on 
Racism, being held in Durban, South Africa. And though the cynical and 
historically observant might suspect that this decision was merely in 
keeping with our longstanding unwillingness to deal with the legacy of 
racism on a global scale, the official reason is more circumscribed. 
Namely, the mid-conference pullout was intended to register displeasure 
at various delegates who are pushing resolutions condemning Israeli 
treatment of Palestinians, and Zionism itself: the ideology of Jewish 
nationalism that led to the founding of Israel in 1948. As the conference 
speeds towards a no doubt controversial conclusion, perhaps it would be 
worthwhile to ask just what all the fuss is about?  

Although one can argue with the claim made by some that Zionism and 
racism are synonymous -- especially given the amorphous definition of 
"race" which makes such a position forever and always a matter of 
semantics -- it is difficult to deny that Zionism, in practice if not 
theory, amounts to ethnic chauvinism, colonial ethnocentrism, and 
national oppression.  

For saying this, I can expect to be called everything but a child of God 
by many in the Jewish community. "Self-hating" will be the term of choice 
for most, I suspect: the typical Pavlovian response to one who is Jewish, 
as I am, and yet dares to criticize Israel or the ideology underlying its 
national existence.  

"Anti-Semite" will be the other label offered me, despite the fact that 
Zionism has led to the oppression of Semitic peoples -- namely the mostly 
Semitic Palestinians -- and is also rooted in a deep antipathy even for 
Jews. Though Zionism proclaims itself a movement of a strong and proud 
people, in fact it is an ideology that has been brimming with self-hatred 
from the beginning. Indeed, early Zionists believed, as a key premise of 
the movement, that Jews were responsible for the oppression we had faced 
over the years, and that such oppression was inevitable and impossible to 
overcome, thus, the need for our own country.  

Having never read the words of Theodore Herzl -- the founder of modern 
Zionism -- or other Zionist leaders, most will find this claim hard to 
believe. But before attacking me, perhaps they should ask who it was that 
said anti-Semitism, "is an understandable reaction to Jewish defects," or 
that, "each country can only absorb a limited number of Jews, if she 
doesn't want disorders in her stomach. Germany has already too many 
Jews."  

While one might be inclined to attribute either or both statements to 
Adolph Hitler, as they are surely worthy of his venomous pen, they are 
actually comments made by Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, eventual president of 
Israel, and -- at the time he made the second statement -- head of the 
World Zionist Organization. So in the pantheon of self-hating Jews, it 
appears criticism, for Zionists, should perhaps begin at home.  

Going back to my days in Hebrew school, I never understood the dialysis-
machine-like bond that most of my peers felt for Israel. On the one hand, 
we were told God had given that land to our people, as part of His 
covenant with Abraham. This we knew because Scripture told us so. But 
this never carried much weight with me. After all, many Christians -- 
with whom I had more than a passing acquaintance growing up in the South -
- were all-too-willing to point out that the Scriptures also said (in 
their opinions) that I was going to hell, Abraham notwithstanding.  

As such, accepting Zionism because of what God did or didn't say seemed 
dicey from the get-go. What's more, this was the same God who ostensibly 
told the ancient Hebrews never to wear clothes woven with two different 
fabrics, and who insisted we burn the entrails of animals we consume on 
an alter to create a pleasing smell. Having been known to sport a wrinkle-
free poly-cotton blend, and having not the fortitude to disembowel my 
supper and incinerate its lower intestines, I had long since resolved to 
withhold judgment on what God did and didn't want, until such time as the 
Almighty decided to whisper said desires in my ear personally. The 
Rabbi's word wasn't going to cut it.  

On the other hand, we were told we needed a homeland so as to prevent 
another Holocaust. Only a strong, independent Jewish state could provide 
the kind of unity and protection required of a people who had suffered so 
much, and had lost six million souls to the Nazi terror.  

Yet this too seemed suspect to me. After all, one could argue that 
getting all the Jews together in one place -- especially a piece of real 
estate as small as Palestine -- would be a Jew-hater's dream come true. 
It would make finishing the job Hitler started that much easier. Better, 
it seemed then and still does, to have vibrant Jewish communities 
throughout the world, than to put all our dreidels in one basket, by 
pulling up stakes and heading to a place where others already lived, 
hoping they wouldn't mind too terribly if we kicked them out of their 
homes.  

In the final analysis, accepting Israel as a Jewish state for Biblical 
reasons made no more sense to me than to accept a self-identified 
Christian or Islamic nation: two configurations that understandably raise 
fears of theocracy in the heart of any Jew. And to in-gather the Jews to 
Israel for the sake of safety made no sense whatsoever. The only logic to 
Zionism then, seemed to be the "logic" of raw power: that of the settler, 
or colonizer. We wanted the land, and getting it would provide an ally 
for European and American foreign and economic policy. So with pressure 
applied and force unleashed, it became ours.  

Nearly 800,000 Palestinians would be displaced so as to allow for the 
creation of Israel: around 600,000 of whom, according to internal 
documents of the Israeli Defense Force, were expelled forcibly from their 
homes. At the time, these Palestinians, most of whose families had been 
living on the land for centuries, constituted two-thirds of the 
population and owned 90% of the land. Though some Zionists claim 
Palestine was a largely uninhabited wilderness prior to Jewish arrival, 
early settlers were far more honest. As Ahad Ha'am acknowledged in 1891:  

"We...are used to believing that Israel is almost totally desolate. 
But...this is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to 
find fields that are not sowed."  

Indeed, the large presence of Palestinians led many Zionists to openly 
advocate their removal. The head of the Jewish Agency's colonization 
department stated: "there is no room for both peoples together in this 
country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to 
neighboring countries, to transfer all of them: not one village, not one 
tribe, should be left."  

Herzl himself conceded that Zionism was "something colonial," indicating 
again that we were not discovering or founding anything. We were taking 
it, and for reasons we would never accept from others. As Shimon Peres -- 
seen as one of the most peace-loving Israeli leaders in memory -- said in 
1985: "The Bible is the decisive document in determining the fate of our 
land." Such is the stuff of fanaticism, and we would say as much were a 
fundamentalist Christian to make the same statement about the fate of the 
U.S., or anywhere else for that matter.  

That most Jews have never examined the founding principles of this 
ideology to which they cleave is unfortunate. For if they were to do so, 
they might be shocked at how anti-Jewish Zionism really is. Time and 
again, Zionists have even collaborated with open Jew-haters for the sake 
of political power.  

Consider Herzl: a man who believed Jews were to blame for anti-Semitism, 
and thus, only by fleeing for Palestine could we be safe. In The Jewish 
State, he wrote:  

"Every nation in whose midst Jews live is, either covertly or openly, 
anti-Semitic...its immediate cause is our excessive production of 
mediocre intellects, who cannot find an outlet downwards or upwards. When 
we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat. When we rise, there also 
rises our terrible power of the purse."  

He went on to say, "The Jews are carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into 
England; they have already introduced it into America." Were a non-Jew to 
suggest that Jews were to blame for anti-Semitism, our community would be 
rightly outraged. But the same words from the father of Zionism pass 
without comment.  

Worse still, early in Hitler's reign the Zionist Federation of Germany 
wrote the new Chancellor, noting their willingness to "adapt our 
community to these new structures" (namely, the Nuremberg Laws that 
limited Jewish freedom), as they "give the Jewish minority...its own 
cultural life, its own national life."  

Far from resisting Nazi genocide, some Zionists collaborated with it. 
When the British devised a plan to allow thousands of German Jewish 
children to enter the U.K. and be saved from the Holocaust, David Ben-
Gurion, who would become Israel's first Prime Minister balked, 
explaining:  

"If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany 
by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting 
them to (Israel) then I would opt for the second alternative."  

Later, Israeli Zionists would again make alliances with anti-Jewish 
extremists. In the 1970's, Israel hosted South African Prime Minister 
John Vorster, and cultivated economic and military ties with the 
apartheid state, even though Vorster had been locked up as a Nazi 
collaborator during World War II. And Israel supplied military aid to the 
Galtieri regime in Argentina, even while the Generals were known to 
harbor ex-Nazis in the country, and had targeted Argentine Jews for 
torture and death.  

Indeed, the argument that Zionism is racism finds some support in 
statements of Zionists themselves, many of whom have long concurred with 
the Hitlerian doctrine that Judaism is a racial identity as much as a 
religious and cultural one. In 1934, German Zionist Joachim Prinz, who 
would later head the American Jewish Congress, noted:  

"We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of 
belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the 
principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honored and 
respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind."  

Years later, David Ben-Gurion acknowledged that Israeli leader Menachem 
Begin could be branded racist, but that doing so would require one to 
"put on trial the entire Zionist movement, which is founded on the 
principle of a purely Jewish entity in Palestine."  

Laws granting special privileges to Jewish immigrants from anywhere in 
the world, over Palestinians whose families had been on the land for 
generations, and measures that set aside most land for exclusive Jewish 
ownership and use, are but two examples of discriminatory legislation 
underlying the Zionist experiment. As the International Convention on the 
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination makes clear, racial 
discrimination is:  

"any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, 
color, descent, or national and 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." 

Given this internationally recognized definition, we ought not be 
surprised that at a World Conference on Racism, some might suggest that 
the policies of our people in the land of Palestine had earned a place on 
the agenda. As such, we should take this opportunity to begin an honest 
dialogue, not only with Palestinians, but also with ourselves. Neither 
the chauvinism so integral to Zionism, nor the ironic self-hatred that 
has gone along with it are becoming of a strong and vital people. Just as 
a dialysis machine is no substitute for a healthy and functioning kidney, 
neither is Zionism an adequate substitute for a healthy and vibrant 
Judaism. Surely it is not for this ignoble end, that six million died.  

-- 

Tim Wise is an antiracist activist, writer and lecturer. He 
can be reached at <tjwise-AT-mindspring.com>. 

Copyright (c) 2001 Tim Wise. All Rights Reserved. 


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