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Friday, November 21, 1975
University Daily Kansan
IS ZIONISM RACISM?
The recently adopted U.N. General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism has become a media cause-celebre. As such, if falls prey to deliberate misrepresentation of facts. The systematic positing of "anti-zionism" as "anti-semitism," and of equating being Jewish with being zionist becomes a propaganda tool bereft of substance and truth. It becomes solely an appeal to easily exploitable and easily manipulated emotions aiming to divert the public from objective realities.
A sober presentation of facts is the only way the reader can assess the nature of Zionism as it is seen by its own Zionist proponents, and to judge whether or not it is racist. And from the facts presented, the reader can glean whether the charge of anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism is justified.
Is Zionism Racism?
"Palestine should become as Jewish as England is English" Chaim Weizman, first President of Israel, Trial and Error, p.244
"When we occupy the land, we must expropriate the private property on the estates assigned to us". . . and "try to spirit the penniless population across the border."
Theodor Herzl in The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl (Patai, Raphael, ed.), vol. 1, p. 88
"Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples" (Palestinians and immigrant Jews) "together in this country" (Palestine). There is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left." Joseph Weitz, former head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department, Davar (the Israeli Labour Party daily), Sept. 29, 1967.
"Asked whether the Palestinians were not also entitled to their homeland, Premier Levi Eshkol answered: 'what are the Palestinians?' Newsweek, Feb. 17, 1969
"There was no such thing as Palestinians . . . it was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Golda Meier, June 15, 1969, London Times.
"Herzi's brilliant formulation of the Jewish Question as basically a transportation problem of moving 'a people without a land into a land without a people' is tinged with disquieting blindness . . . Palestine was not a land without a people even in Herzi's time; it was inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Arabs. . ."
Arabas... Nahum Goldman, Zionist leader and former President of World Jewish Congress.
"Since 1917, the Palestine Arab people have had their country taken from them; since 1949, the Arab inhabitants of Palestinian territory on the Israeli side of the armistice lines have been refugees living in camps on the dole; since June 1967 the other half of Palestine has been under enemy occupation." Arnold Toynbee (British historian) Los Angeles Times, March 30. 1949
In 1917, at the time of the Balfour Declaration which "promised a Jewish home in Palestine," the Arab population of Palestine consisted of 92 per cent moslems and christians, and 8 per cent Jews. In 1947, at the time of the U.N. Partition Plan, Zionist land-holdings reached a mere 6 per cent of the total, and immigration raised the percentage of Jews to one third the total population of Palestine. That increase was not a natural increase of the indigenous Jewish Palestinians, but was due to European Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Does Zionism Implement Racist Policies?
"A racist law is already in effect (in Israel), 'the Law of Return' which gives every Jew the right to settle in Israel and become an Israeli citizen by virtue of the simple fact that he is Jewish. The Arabs of Israel did not enjoy the same right, and even the Palestinian refugees, although legitimate inhabitants of the country, were not allowed to return."
Eli Lobel, Israeli writer: "Palestine and the Jews" in The Arab World and Israel,
p. 85.
"The Israeli Nationality Law is one of the most pronounced expressions of Jewish Chauvanism—a Jew becomes a citizen of Israel after one minute in the land. An Arab, not even after he and his forefathers have been there for a thousand years." "Unser Zeit," organ of the Jewish Labour Bund in the U.S., August, 1952.
"Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world, the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which non-Jews have a lesser status than Jews, and in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist. Jews must fight elsewhere for their very security and existence—against principles and practices they find themselves defending in Israel."
I. F. Stone, "I.F. Stone Weekly," 1969.
"Even we, who are acutely conscious of the Israeli . . . day by day violation of Human Rights in Israel and the occupied territories, were shocked at the alarming figures. Who would have thought that 7,554 houses were blown and-or razed by the 15th November, 1969 in the occupied territories.
"The conspicuous feature of the Israeli occupation regime (like every other occupation) is the denial of all rights at political expression and organization . . . complete freedom of expression and organization provided by the bill of Human Rights . . . is totally denied the Palestinians under Israeli occupation."
Israel Shahak, Chairman, Israeli League of Human and Civil Rights, in Israelis Against Israel, p. 6.
"Imprisonment: suspects are frequently held for months at a time without trial, without their whereabouts being known, and without lawyers or relatives being able to visit or contact them. Eventually they come before an Israeli military court. . . . Sentences are very harsh indeed." E. C. Hodgkin, London Times, Oct. 8, 1969.
"5620 Arabs have been sentenced in the Gaza strip alone for life-imprisonment and hard labor; among the prisoners there are men over 80 years old and children between 12-14 years of age. "Ma' ariv," May 3, 1971.
Are All Jews Zionists? Are All Anti-Zionists Anti-Jewish? Are There Anti-Zionist Jews?
"The Jewish people in Palestine have lived in the past in harmony with the Arab community. They have enjoyed the same privileges . . . and, I venture to say also as a fact, they never agitated for Zionism . . . a very large number of the Jewish community in Palestine today look with aversion not only upon the Zionist Home but upon the Jews who are being introduced into the country from Eastern Europe."
Lord Islington, 21 June 1922, in Ronald Storrs' Orientations, p. 340.
"Zionists fundamentally accept the racial ideology of the anti-Semites, but draw different conclusions. Instead of the Teuton, it is the Jew that is the purer or superior race."
Professor Morris B. Cohen in his book A Dreamer's Journey, quoted in Moshe Menuhin's Jewish Critics of Zionism, p. 23.
"The conditioning of American Jewry by a Jewish flag and a Jewish army and a state in Palestine and a dual citizenship in America, is more than we can accept. The secularist creed has overreached itself. We have been watching with anxiety the secularization tendencies in American-Jewish life...the intrusion of the Palestine issue as an irritating factor in intra-community relations, the persistent public expression of extremists who presume to speak for all American Jewry, the efforts to cultivate and promote the sense of psychological difference between American Jews and their fellow Americans...the unremitting efforts of certain groups to put American Jews behind programs of international political pressure. ...We refuse any longer to be religious acrobats. We cannot pact with the untenable position in society with "Jewish" nationalism as a creed imposes upon us."
Rabbi Elmer Berger & Lessing J. Rosenwald: Manifesto of the American Council for Judaism, 1943.
"I had been a brainwashed Zionist till the 1956 war. What made me think was the notorious massacre (of Arabs) at Kefar Kassem and the proclamations of Ben Gurion about the annexations . . . then the 1967 war: the cruelties, the expulsions, the lies, the wish for further expansion . . . I hate to trade on my sufferings under the Nazis . . . each one of us can become a Nazi . . . our Nazification can be the worst fate which can befall us. The danger is real . . . " Israel Shahak: president of the Israeli Leaf
Israel Shahak: president of the Israeli League for Human & Civil Rights, letter to Moshe Menuhin in Moshe Menuhin's: Jewish Critics of Zionism. p. 35-6.
"We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned; and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery; not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status. . . ."
Bertrand Russel, The International Parliamentarians on the Middle East, Feb. 2, 1970.
"There is no enemy of the good as powerful as man's indifference to evil. . . Zionism is the anti-thesis of Democracy." Rabbi Elmer Berger: "Requiem to Reason" Middle East Newsletter, Sept.-Oct., 1972, vol. vi, No. 5.
"I am a Jewish critic of Zionism."
Moshe Menuhin: Jewish Critics of Zionism, p. 2.
The Organization of Arab Students Univarsity of Kansas