Zionism as a Racist Ideology
Reviving an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON

During a presentation on the Palestinian-Israeli situation in 2001, an 
American-Israeli acquaintance of ours began with a typical attack on 
the Palestinians. Taking the overused line that "Palestinians never 
miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," he asserted snidely that, 
if only the Palestinians had had any decency and not been so all-fired 
interested in pushing the Jews into the sea in 1948, they would have 
accepted the UN partition of Palestine. Those Palestinians who became 
refugees would instead have remained peacefully in their homes, and the 
state of Palestine could in the year 2001 be celebrating the 53rd 
anniversary of its independence. Everything could have been sweetness 
and light, he contended, but here the Palestinians were, then a year 
into a deadly intifada, still stateless, still hostile, and still 
trying, he claimed, to push the Jews into the sea.

It was a common line but with a new and intriguing twist: what if the 
Palestinians had accepted partition; would they in fact have lived in a 
state at peace since 1948? It was enough to make the audience stop and 
think. But later in the talk, the speaker tripped himself up by 
claiming, in a tone of deep alarm, that Palestinian insistence on the 
right of return for Palestinian refugees displaced when Israel was 
created would spell the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. He did 
not realize the inherent contradiction in his two assertions (until we 
later pointed it out to him, with no little glee). You cannot have it 
both ways, we told him: you cannot claim that, if Palestinians had not 
left the areas that became Israel in 1948, they would now be living 
peaceably, some inside and some alongside a Jewish-majority state, and 
then also claim that, if they returned now, Israel would lose its 
Jewish majority and its essential identity as a Jewish state.*

This exchange, and the massive propaganda effort by and on behalf of 
Israel to demonstrate the threat to Israel's Jewish character posed by 
the Palestinians' right of return, actually reveal the dirty little 
secret of Zionism. In its drive to establish and maintain a state in 
which Jews are always the majority, Zionism absolutely required that 
Palestinians, as non-Jews, be made to leave in 1948 and never be 
allowed to return. The dirty little secret is that this is blatant 
racism.

But didn't we finish with that old Zionism-is-racism issue over a 
decade ago, when in 1991 the UN repealed a 1975 General Assembly 
resolution that defined Zionism as "a form of racism or racial 
discrimination"? Hadn't we Americans always rejected this resolution as 
odious anti-Semitism, and didn't we, under the aegis of the first Bush 
administration, finally prevail on the rest of the world community to 
agree that it was not only inaccurate but downright evil to label 
Zionism as racist? Why bring it up again, now?

The UN General Assembly based its 1975 anti-Zionist resolution on the 
UN's own definition of racial discrimination, adopted in 1965. 
According to the International Convention on the Elimination of All 
Forms of Racial Discrimination, racial discrimination is "any 
distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, 
colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or 
effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or 
exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms 
in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of 
public life." As a definition of racism and racial discrimination, this 
statement is unassailable and, if one is honest about what Zionism is 
and what it signifies, the statement is an accurate definition of 
Zionism. But in 1975, in the political atmosphere prevailing at the 
time, putting forth such a definition was utterly self-defeating.

So would a formal resolution be in today's political atmosphere. But 
enough has changed over the last decade or more that talk about Zionism 
as a system that either is inherently racist or at least fosters racism 
is increasingly possible and increasingly necessary. Despite the 
vehement knee-jerk opposition to any such discussion throughout the 
United States, serious scholars elsewhere and serious Israelis have 
begun increasingly to examine Zionism critically, and there is much 
greater receptivity to the notion that no real peace will be forged in 
Palestine-Israel unless the bases of Zionism are examined and in some 
way altered. It is for this reason that honestly labeling Zionism as a 
racist political philosophy is so necessary: unless the world's, and 
particularly the United States', blind support for Israel as an 
exclusivist Jewish state is undermined, unless the blind acceptance of 
Zionism as a noble ideology is undermined, and unless it is recognized 
that Israel's drive to maintain dominion over the occupied Palestinian 
territories is motivated by an exclusivist, racist ideology, no one 
will ever gain the political strength or the political will necessary 
to force Israel to relinquish territory and permit establishment of a 
truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state in a part of 
Palestine.

Recognizing Zionism's Racism

A racist ideology need not always manifest itself as such, and, if the 
circumstances are right, it need not always actually practice racism to 
maintain itself. For decades after its creation, the circumstances were 
right for Israel. If one forgot, as most people did, the fact that 
750,000 Palestinians (non-Jews) had left their homeland under duress, 
thus making room for a Jewish-majority state, everyone could accept 
Israel as a genuine democracy, even to a certain extent for that small 
minority of Palestinians who had remained after 1948. That minority was 
not large enough to threaten Israel's Jewish majority; it faced 
considerable discrimination, but because Israeli Arabs could vote, this 
discrimination was viewed not as institutional, state-mandated racism 
but as the kind of discrimination, deplorable but not 
institutionalized, faced by blacks in the United States. The occupation 
of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, with their two million 
(soon to become more than three million) Palestinian inhabitants, was 
seen to be temporary, its end awaiting only the Arabs' readiness to 
accept Israel's existence.

In these "right" circumstances, the issue of racism rarely arose, and 
the UN's labeling of Israel's fundamental ideology as racist came 
across to Americans and most westerners as nasty and vindictive. 
Outside the third world, Israel had come to be regarded as the 
perpetual innocent, not aggressive, certainly not racist, and desirous 
of nothing more than a peace agreement that would allow it to mind its 
own business inside its original borders in a democratic state. By the 
time the Zionism-is-racism resolution was rescinded in 1991, even the 
PLO had officially recognized Israel's right to exist in peace inside 
its 1967 borders, with its Jewish majority uncontested. In fact, this 
very acceptance of Israel by its principal adversary played no small 
part in facilitating the U.S. effort to garner support for overturning 
the resolution. (The fact of U.S. global dominance in the wake of the 
first Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union earlier in 1991, 
and the atmosphere of optimism about prospects for peace created by the 
Madrid peace conference in October also played a significant part in 
winning over a majority of the UN when the Zionism resolution was 
brought to a vote of the General Assembly in December.)

Realities are very different today, and a recognition of Zionism's 
racist bases, as well as an understanding of the racist policies being 
played out in the occupied territories are essential if there is to be 
any hope at all of achieving a peaceful, just, and stable resolution of 
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The egg of Palestine has been 
permanently scrambled, and it is now increasingly the case that, as 
Zionism is recognized as the driving force in the occupied territories 
as well as inside Israel proper, pre-1967 Israel can no longer be 
considered in isolation. It can no longer be allowed simply to go its 
own way as a Jewish-majority state, a state in which the circumstances 
are "right" for ignoring Zionism's fundamental racism.

As Israel increasingly inserts itself into the occupied territories, 
and as Israeli settlers, Israeli settlements, and Israeli-only roads 
proliferate and a state infrastructure benefiting only Jews takes over 
more and more territory, it becomes no longer possible to ignore the 
racist underpinnings of the Zionist ideology that directs this 
enterprise. It is no longer possible today to wink at the permanence of 
Zionism's thrust beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders. It is now clear that 
Israel's control over the occupied territories is, and has all along 
been intended to be, a drive to assert exclusive Jewish control, taming 
the Palestinians into submission and squeezing them into ever smaller, 
more disconnected segments of land or, failing that, forcing them to 
leave Palestine altogether. It is totally obvious to anyone who spends 
time on the ground in Palestine-Israel that the animating force behind 
the policies of the present and all past Israeli governments in Israel 
and in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem has always been 
a determination to assure the predominance of Jews over Palestinians. 
Such policies can only be described as racist, and we should stop 
trying any longer to avoid the word.

When you are on the ground in Palestine, you can see Zionism 
physically imprinted on the landscape. Not only can you see that there 
are settlements, built on land confiscated from Palestinians, where 
Palestinians may not live. Not only can you see roads in the occupied 
territories, again built on land taken from Palestinians, where 
Palestinians may not drive. Not only can you observe that water in the 
occupied territories is allocated, by Israeli governmental authorities, 
so inequitably that Israeli settlers are allocated five times the 
amount per capita as are Palestinians and, in periods of drought, 
Palestinians stand in line for drinking water while Israeli settlements 
enjoy lush gardens and swimming pools. Not only can you stand and watch 
as Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian olive groves and other 
agricultural land, destroy Palestinian wells, and demolish Palestinian 
homes to make way for the separation wall that Israel is constructing 
across the length and breadth of the West Bank. The wall fences off 
Palestinians from Israelis, supposedly to provide greater security for 
Israelis but in fact in order to cage Palestinians, to define a border 
for Israel that will exclude a maximum number of Palestinians.

But, if this is not enough to demonstrate the inherent racism of 
Israel's occupation, you can also drive through Palestinian towns and 
Palestinian neighborhoods in and near Jerusalem and see what is perhaps 
the most cruelly racist policy in Zionism's arsenal: house demolitions, 
the preeminent symbol of Zionism's drive to maintain Jewish 
predominance. Virtually every street has a house or houses reduced to 
rubble, one floor pancaked onto another or simply a pile of broken 
concrete bulldozed into an incoherent heap. Jeff Halper, founder and 
head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House 
Demolitions (ICAHD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, 
has observed that Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have 
all conveyed what he calls "The Message" to Palestinians. The Message, 
Halper says, is "Submit. Only when you abandon your dreams for an 
independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the 
Land of Israel, will we relent [i.e., stop attacking Palestinians]." 
The deeper meaning of The Message, as carried by the bulldozers so 
ubiquitous in targeted Palestinian neighborhoods today, is that "You 
[Palestinians] do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 
1948and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."

In the end, Halper says, the advance of Zionism has been a process of 
displacement, and house demolitions have been "at the center of the 
Israeli struggle against the Palestinians" since 1948. Halper 
enumerates a steady history of destruction: in the first six years of 
Israel's existence, it systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages 
inside Israel, fully 85 percent of the villages existing before 1948; 
since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 11,000 
Palestinian homes. More homes are now being demolished in the path of 
Israel's "separation wall." It is estimated that more than 4,000 homes 
have been destroyed in the last two years alone.

The vast majority of these house demolitions, 95 percent, have nothing 
whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically 
to displace non-Jews and assure the advance of Zionism. In Jerusalem, 
from the beginning of the occupation of the eastern sector of the city 
in 1967, Israeli authorities have designed zoning plans specifically to 
prevent the growth of the Palestinian population. Maintaining the 
"Jewish character" of the city at the level existing in 1967 (71 
percent Jewish, 29 percent Palestinian) required that Israel draw 
zoning boundaries to prevent Palestinian expansion beyond existing 
neighborhoods, expropriate Palestinian-owned lands, confiscate the 
Jerusalem residency permits of any Palestinian who cannot prove that 
Jerusalem is his "center of life," limit city services to Palestinian 
areas, limit development in Palestinian neighborhoods, refuse to issue 
residential building permits to Palestinians, and demolish Palestinian 
homes that are built without permits. None of these strictures is 
imposed on Jews. According to ICAHD, the housing shortage in 
Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem is approximately 25,000 units, 
and 2,000 demolition orders are pending.

Halper has written that the human suffering involved in the 
destruction of a family home is incalculable. A home "is one's symbolic 
center, the site of one's most intimate personal life and an expression 
of one's status. It is a refuge, it is the physical representation of 
the family,maintainingcontinuity on one's ancestral land." Land 
expropriation is "an attack on one's very being and identity." Zionist 
governments, past and present, have understood this well, although not 
with the compassion or empathy that Halper conveys, and this attack on 
the "very being and identity" of non-Jews has been precisely the 
animating force behind Zionism.

Zionism's racism has, of course, been fundamental to Israel itself 
since its establishment in 1948. The Israeli government pursues 
policies against its own Bedouin minority very similar to its actions 
in the occupied territories. The Bedouin population has been forcibly 
relocated and squeezed into small areas in the Negev, again with the 
intent of forcing an exodus, and half of the 140,000 Bedouin in the 
Negev live in villages that the Israeli government does not recognize 
and does not provide services for. Every Bedouin home in an 
unrecognized village is slated for demolition; all homes, and the very 
presence of Bedouin in them, are officially illegal.

The problem of the Bedouins' unrecognized villages is only the partial 
evidence of a racist policy that has prevailed since Israel's 
foundation. After Zionist/Israeli leaders assured that the non-Jews (i.
e., the Palestinians) making up the majority of Palestine's population 
(a two-thirds majority at the time) departed the scene in 1948, Israeli 
governments institutionalized favoritism toward Jews by law. As a 
Zionist state, Israel has always identified itself as the state of the 
Jews: as a state not of its Jewish and Palestinian citizens, but of all 
Jews everywhere in the world. The institutions of state guarantee the 
rights of and provide benefits for Jews. The Law of Return gives 
automatic citizenship to Jews from anywhere in the world, but to no 
other people. Some 92 percent of the land of Israel is state land, held 
by the Jewish National Fund "in trust" for the Jewish people; 
Palestinians may not purchase this land, even though most of it was 
Palestinian land before 1948, and in most instances they may not even 
lease the land. Both the Jewish National Fund, which deals with land 
acquisition and development, and the Jewish Agency, which deals 
primarily with Jewish immigration and immigrant absorption, have 
existed since before the state's establishment and now perform their 
duties specifically for Jews under an official mandate from the Israeli 
government.

Creating Enemies

Although few dare to give the reality of house demolitions and state 
institutions favoring Jews the label of racism, the phenomenon this 
reality describes is unmistakably racist. There is no other term for a 
process by which one people can achieve the essence of its political 
philosophy only by suppressing another people, by which one people 
guarantees its perpetual numerical superiority and its overwhelming 
predominance over another people through a deliberate process of 
repression and dispossession of those people. From the beginning, 
Zionism has been based on the supremacy of the Jewish people, whether 
this predominance was to be exercised in a full-fledged state or in 
some other kind of political entity, and Zionism could never have 
survived or certainly thrived in Palestine without ridding that land of 
most of its native population. The early Zionists themselves knew this 
(as did the Palestinians), even if naïve Americans have never quite 
gotten it. Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism, talked from the beginning 
of "spiriting" the native Palestinians out and across the border; 
discussion of "transfer" was common among the Zionist leadership in 
Palestine in the 1930s; talk of transfer is common today.

There has been a logical progression to the development of Zionism, 
leading inevitably to general acceptance of the sense that, because 
Jewish needs are paramount, Jews themselves are paramount. Zionism grew 
out of the sense that Jews needed a refuge from persecution, which led 
in turn to the belief that the refuge could be truly secure only if 
Jews guaranteed their own safety, which meant that the refuge must be 
exclusively or at least overwhelmingly Jewish, which meant in turn that 
Jews and their demands were superior, taking precedence over any other 
interests within that refuge. The mindset that in U.S. public discourse 
tends to view the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from a perspective 
almost exclusively focused on Israel arises out of this progression of 
Zionist thinking. By the very nature of a mindset, virtually no one 
examines the assumptions on which the Zionist mindset is based, and few 
recognize the racist base on which it rests.

Israeli governments through the decades have never been so innocent. 
Many officials in the current right-wing government are blatantly 
racist. Israel's outspoken education minister, Limor Livnat, spelled 
out the extreme right-wing defense of Zionism a year ago, when the 
government proposed to legalize the right of Jewish communities in 
Israel to exclude non-Jews. Livnat justified Israel's racism as a 
matter of Jewish self-preservation. "We're involved here," she said in 
a radio interview, "in a struggle for the existence of the State of 
Israel as the state of the Jews, as opposed tothose who want to force 
us to be a state of all its citizens." Israel is not "just another 
state like all the other states," she protested. "We are not just a 
state of all its citizens."

Livnat cautioned that Israel must be very watchful lest it find in 
another few years that the Galilee and the Negev, two areas inside 
Israel with large Arab populations, are "filled with Arab communities." 
To emphasize the point, she reiterated that Israel's "special purpose 
is our character as a Jewish state, our desire to preserve a Jewish 
community and Jewish majority hereso that it does not become a state of 
all its citizens." Livnat was speaking of Jewish self-preservation not 
in terms of saving the Jews or Israel from a territorial threat of 
military invasion by a marauding neighbor state, but in terms of 
preserving Jews from the mere existence of another people within 
spitting distance.

Most Zionists of a more moderate stripe might shudder at the 
explicitness of Livnat's message and deny that Zionism is really like 
this. But in fact this properly defines the racism that necessarily 
underlies Zionism. Most centrist and leftist Zionists deny the reality 
of Zionism's racism by trying to portray Zionism as a democratic system 
and manufacturing enemies in order to be able to sustain the inherent 
contradiction and hide or excuse the racism behind Zionism's drive for 
predominance.

Indeed, the most pernicious aspect of a political philosophy like 
Zionism that masquerades as democratic is that it requires an enemy in 
order to survive and, where an enemy does not already exist, it 
requires that one be created. In order to justify racist repression and 
dispossession, particularly in a system purporting to be democratic, 
those being repressed and displaced must be portrayed as murderous and 
predatory. And in order to keep its own population in line, to prevent 
a humane people from objecting to their own government's repressive 
policies, it requires that fear be instilled in the population: fear of 
"the other," fear of the terrorist, fear of the Jew-hater. The Jews of 
Israel must always be made to believe that they are the preyed-upon. 
This justifies having forced these enemies to leave, it justifies 
discriminating against those who remained, it justifies denying 
democratic rights to those who later came under Israel's control in the 
occupied territories.

Needing an enemy has meant that Zionism has from the beginning had to 
create myths about Palestinians, painting Palestinians and all Arabs as 
immutably hostile and intransigent. Thus the myth that in 1948 
Palestinians left Palestine so that Arab armies could throw the Jews 
into the sea; thus the continuing myth that Palestinians remain 
determined to destroy Israel. Needing an enemy means that Zionism, as 
one veteran Israeli peace activist recently put it, has removed the 
Palestinians from history. Thus the myths that there is no such thing 
as a Palestinian, or that Palestinians all immigrated in modern times 
from other Arab countries, or that Jordan is Palestine and Palestinians 
should find their state there.

Needing an enemy means that Zionism has had to make its negotiating 
partner into a terrorist. It means that, for its own preservation, 
Zionism has had to devise a need to ignore its partner/enemy or expel 
him or assassinate him. It means that Zionism has had to reject any 
conciliatory effort by the Palestinians and portray them as "never 
missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity" to make peace. This 
includes in particular rejecting that most conciliatory gesture, the 
PLO's decision in 1988 to recognize Israel's existence, relinquish 
Palestinian claims to the three-quarters of Palestine lying inside 
Israel's pre-1967 borders, and even recognize Israel's "right" to exist 
there.

Needing an enemy means, ultimately, that Zionism had to create the 
myth of the "generous offer" at the Camp David summit in July 2000. It 
was Zionist racism that painted the Palestinians as hopelessly 
intransigent for refusing Israel's supposedly generous offer, actually 
an impossible offer that would have maintained Zionism's hold on the 
occupied territories and left the Palestinians with a disconnected, 
indefensible, non-viable state. Then, when the intifada erupted (after 
Palestinian demonstrators threw stones at Israeli police and the police 
responded by shooting several demonstrators to death), it was Zionist 
racism speaking when Israel put out the line that it was under siege 
and in a battle for its very survival with Palestinians intent on 
destroying it. When a few months later the issue of Palestinian 
refugees and their "right of return" arose publicly, it was Zionist 
racism speaking when Israel and its defenders, ignoring the several 
ways in which Palestinian negotiators signaled their readiness to 
compromise this demand, propagated the view that this too was intended 
as a way to destroy Israel, by flooding it with non-Jews and destroying 
its Jewish character.

The Zionist Dilemma

The supposed threat from "the other" is the eternal refuge of the 
majority of Israelis and Israeli supporters in the United States. The 
common line is that "We Israelis and friends of Israel long for peace, 
we support Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, we have 
always supported giving the Palestinians self-government. But 'they' 
hate us, they want to destroy Israel. Wasn't this obvious when Arafat 
turned his back on Israel's generous offer? Wasn't this obvious when 
Arafat started the intifada? Wasn't this obvious when Arafat demanded 
that the Palestinians be given the right of return, which would destroy 
Israel as a Jewish state? We have already made concession after 
concession. How can we give them any further concessions when they 
would only fight for more and more until Israel is gone?" This line 
relieves Israel of any responsibility to make concessions or move 
toward serious negotiations; it relieves Israelis of any need to treat 
Palestinians as equals; it relieves Israelis and their defenders of any 
need to think; it justifies racism, while calling it something else.

Increasing numbers of Israelis themselves (some of whom have long been 
non-Zionists, some of whom are only now beginning to see the problem 
with Zionism) are recognizing the inherent racism of their nation's 
raison d'etre. During the years of the peace process, and indeed for 
the last decade and a half since the PLO formally recognized Israel's 
existence, the Israeli left could ignore the problems of Zionism while 
pursuing efforts to promote the establishment of an independent 
Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that would coexist with 
Israel. Zionism continued to be more or less a non-issue: Israel could 
organize itself in any way it chose inside its own borders, and the 
Palestinian state could fulfill Palestinian national aspirations inside 
its new borders.

Few of those nettlesome issues surrounding Zionism, such as how much 
democracy Zionism can allow to non-Jews without destroying its reason 
for being, would arise in a two-state situation. The issue of Zionism's 
responsibility for the Palestinians' dispossession could also be put 
aside. As Haim Hanegbi, a non-Zionist Israeli who recently went back to 
the fold of single-state binationalism (and who is a long-time cohort 
of Uri Avnery in the Gush Shalom movement), said in a recent interview 
with the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, the promise of mutual recognition 
offered by the Oslo peace process mesmerized him and others in the 
peace movement and so "in the mid-1990s I had second thoughts about my 
traditional [binational] approach. I didn't think it was my task to go 
to Ramallah and present the Palestinians with the list of Zionist 
wrongs and tell them not to forget what our fathers did to their 
fathers." Nor were the Palestinians themselves reminding Zionists of 
these wrongs at the time.

As new wrongs in the occupied territories increasingly recall old 
wrongs from half a century ago, however, and as Zionism finds that it 
cannot cope with end-of-conflict demands like the Palestinians' 
insistence that Israel accept their right of return by acknowledging 
its role in their dispossession, more and more Israelis are coming to 
accept the reality that Zionism can never escape its past. It is 
becoming increasingly clear to many Israelis that Israel has absorbed 
so much of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem into itself that the 
Jewish and the Palestinian peoples can never be separated fairly. The 
separation wall, says Hanegbi, "is the great despairing solution of the 
Jewish-Zionist society. It is the last desperate act of those who 
cannot confront the Palestinian issue. Of those who are compelled to 
push the Palestinian issue out of their lives and out of their 
consciousness." For Hanegbi, born in Palestine before 1948, 
Palestinians "were always part of my landscape," and without them, 
"this is a barren country, a disabled country."

Old-line Zionist Meron Benvenisti, who has also moved to support for 
binationalism, used almost identical metaphors in a Ha'aretz interview 
run alongside Hanegbi's. Also Palestine-born and a contemporary of 
Hanegbi, Benvenisti believes "this is a country in which there were 
always Arabs. This is a country in which the Arabs are the landscape, 
the natives.I don't see myself living here without them. In my eyes, 
without Arabs this is a barren land."

Both men discuss the evolution of their thinking over the decades, and 
both describe a period in which, after the triumph of Zionism, they 
unthinkingly accepted its dispossession of the Palestinians. Each man 
describes the Palestinians simply disappearing when he was an 
adolescent ("They just sort of evaporated," says Hanegbi), and 
Benvenisti recalls a long period in which the Palestinian "tragedy 
simply did not penetrate my consciousness." But both speak in very un-
Zionist terms of equality. Benvenisti touches on the crux of the 
Zionist dilemma. "This is where I am different from my friends in the 
left," he says, "because I am truly a native son of immigrants, who is 
drawn to the Arab culture and the Arabic language because it is here. 
It is the land.Whereas the right, certainly, but the left too hates 
Arabs. The Arabs bother them; they complicate things. The subject 
generates moral questions and that generates cultural unease."

Hanegbi goes farther. "I am not a psychologist," he says, "but I think 
that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns 
himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's 
impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to 
live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the 
settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the 
insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to 
conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the 
indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds."

While some thoughtful Israelis like these men struggle with 
philosophical questions of existence and identity and the collective 
Jewish conscience, few American defenders of Israel seem troubled by 
such deep issues. Racism is often banal. Most of those who practice it, 
and most of those who support Israel as a Zionist state, would be 
horrified to be accused of racism, because their racist practices have 
become commonplace. They do not even think about what they do. We 
recently encountered a typical American supporter of Israel who would 
have argued vigorously if we had accused her of racism. During a 
presentation we were giving to a class, this (non-Jewish) woman rose to 
ask a question that went roughly like this: "I want to ask about the 
failure of the other Arabs to take care of the Palestinians. I must say 
I sympathize with Israel because Israel simply wants to have a secure 
state, but the other Arabs have refused to take the Palestinians in, 
and so they sit in camps and their hostility toward Israel just 
festers."

This is an extremely common American, and Israeli, perception, the 
idea being that if the Arab states would only absorb the Palestinians 
so that they became Lebanese or Syrians or Jordanians, they would 
forget about being Palestinian, forget that Israel had displaced and 
dispossessed them, and forget about "wanting to destroy Israel." Israel 
would then be able simply to go about its own business and live in 
peace, as it so desperately wants to do. This woman's assumption was 
that it is acceptable for Israel to have established itself as a Jewish 
state at the expense of (i.e., after the ethnic cleansing of) the 
land's non-Jewish inhabitants, that any Palestinian objection to this 
reality is illegitimate, and that all subsequent animosity toward 
Israel is ultimately the fault of neighboring Arab states who failed to 
smother the Palestinians' resistance by anesthetizing them to their 
plight and erasing their identity and their collective memory of 
Palestine.

When later in the class the subject arose of Israel ending the 
occupation, this same woman spoke up to object that, if Israel did give 
up control over the West Bank and Gaza, it would be economically 
disadvantaged, at least in the agricultural sector. "Wouldn't this 
leave Israel as just a desert?" she wondered. Apart from the fact that 
the answer is a clear "no" (Israel's agricultural capability inside its 
1967 borders is quite high, and most of Israel is not desert), the 
woman's question was again based on the automatic assumption that 
Israel's interests take precedence over those of anyone else and that, 
in order to enhance its own agricultural economy (or, presumably, for 
any other perceived gain), Israel has the right to conquer and take 
permanent possession of another people's land.

The notion that the Jewish/Zionist state of Israel has a greater right 
to possess the land, or a greater right to security, or a greater right 
to a thriving economy, than the people who are native to that land is 
extremely racist, but this woman would probably object strenuously to 
having it pointed out that this is a Jewish supremacist viewpoint 
identical to past justifications for white South Africa's apartheid 
regime and to the rationale for all European colonial (racist) systems 
that exploited the human and natural resources of Africa, the Middle 
East, and Asia over the centuries for the sole benefit of the 
colonizers. Racism must necessarily be blind to its own immorality; the 
burden of conscience is otherwise too great. This is the banality of 
evil.

(Unconsciously, of course, many Americans also seem to believe that 
the shameful policies of the U.S. government toward Native Americans 
somehow make it acceptable for the government of Israel to pursue 
equally shameful policies toward the Palestinians. The U.S. needs to 
face its racist policies head on as much as it needs to confront the 
racism of its foremost partner, Israel.)

This woman's view is so very typical, something you hear constantly in 
casual conversation and casual encounters at social occasions, that it 
hardly seems significant. But this very banality is precisely the evil 
of it; what is evil is the very fact that it is "hardly significant" 
that Zionism by its nature is racist and that this reality goes 
unnoticed by decent people who count themselves defenders of Israel. 
The universal acceptability of a system that is at heart racist but 
proclaims itself to be 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.

They are also contributors to CounterPunch's hot new book: The 
Politics of Anti-Semitism.

The Christison's can be reached at: [log in to unmask]




Weekend Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003

Saul Landau
Cui Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off

Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality

Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver

Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"

John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines

William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit

Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes

Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred

Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos

Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle

Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action

Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon

Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire

David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him Famous

Adam Engel
America, What It Is

Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn

Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie

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