Is Zionism racism?
WHEN the United Nations General Assembly "resolved" in
April 27, 1992
ZIONISM AND RACISM once, but not for racist reasons..."
Zionism is not a racist ideology. It is a classic colonialist ideology, whose purpose was to alleviate the hardship of the Jews by bringing them to the land of Israel, without giving any consideration to
1975 that Zionism was a form of racism, I was reminded of the "councils" of the mediaeval Christian Church and their bizarre pronouncements regarding the workings of the universe.
The bishops were wrong in every case, but nevertheless, these councils did not have the power to determine, by majority vote, the real situation; even if 90% of the church fathers asserted that the sun revolved around the earth, the fact remained that the opposite was the case.
The fact of whether or not Zionism is racist will not be determined by the balance of power within the UN General
Assembly, or by pressure from the oil states or
Washington, but by the deeds of the Zionists themselves.
All the UN can do is to give Zionism a bad name, or, alternatively, a clean bill of health.
MICHAEL WARSCHAWSKI*
HE equation of Zionism with
T racism requires, first of all, that the terms be defined.
Zionism: is a political movement working for the solution of the Jewish problem by bringing the Jews of the world to the Land of Israel and the establishment there of a sovereign Jewish society.
Racism: According to Even Shoshan's authoritative dictionary of the Hebrew language, racism is "The point of view that the nations of the world are divided into superior and inferior races".
On the face of it, then, Zionism has no racist dimension at all; at most it is a utopia, more suited to the 19th century than to present-day reality. Zionism does not state that the Jewish people is a superior race or that the Arab nation is inferior.
And indeed this definition provided the basis for the claims of all those who denied the validity of the UN resolution:
the Jewish people is not a race, and Zionism does not speak about superior or inferior races. Therefore, Zionism is not racist.!
Yet there is another definition of racism, less etymologically narrow, but undoubtedly closer to its meaning in colloquial usage. Racism is discrimination against human beings on the basis of their national, racial, religious or ethnic origin.
According to this common-sense definition, the concept of racism does not have to do with values, intentions, goals or objectives, but with how a person, movement, or institution behaves towards other human beings. This was the definition adopted by the international "Covenant for the abolition of all forms of racial discrimination", which the Israeli government signed after much hesitation in 1979.
The covenant states that "racial discrimination is any differentiation, exclusion from the collectivity, restriction or preference for reason of race, colour, lineage, national or ethnic origin - with the intent or result of eliminating or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise - on an equal basis — of human rights and basic freedoms in political, economic, social and cultural life, or in any other realm of public life". In this sense, Zionism as an ideology is not racist, but the Zionist enterprise and the Zionist State of Israel - as it is defined — is very, very racist.
"Racist? Us?"
In article published in Ha'aretz under the title, "Racist? Us?" several respected Israeli intellectuals, for the most part liberals, attempt to refute the definition of Israel as a racist state. They make two fundamental claims: Firstly, that the ideology which brought about the establishment of the state was not racist, and therefore the most one can do is speak of a governmental policy of racial discrimination. Secondly, that the intentions of those who fashioned the policy was not racist. Prof. Yosef Gorney combines the two claims in an effort to deny the racist character of the Zionist state. "There is no racism in Zionist ideology. Indeed, Zionist policy has discriminated against Arabs more than the fate of the "natives" . Zionism is not anti-Arab, it simply does not take them into account and in the process of building the state relates to them as a solely "ecological" problem, like the swamps, like malaria, like its vector, the anopheles mosquito.
However, between a movement with a racist ideology and what Aryeh Na'or defines, in the same article, as "morally reprehensible, and even revolting, devices for discriminating against Arabs", there is another category, which Attorney Avigdor
Feldman calls "a regime which is a form of racism", that is, a regime of racial discrimination (in the words of the abovementioned International Covenant...)
which is both institutionalized and intentional. This is perhaps less frightening than a regime which advocates the position of the existence of a inferior and superior races, but far more serious than just a "set of devices" or a "policy which includes some elements of racism".
Discrimination between Jews and Arabs is inscribed on the identity card and in the genetic code of the State of Israel and has had a vital part in defining the nature of the existing regime and its laws, its national priorities and the dominant culture.
UN decisions leave bitter legacy
First an aside: The United Nations, which in 1975 condemned Zionism as a form of racism, bears no small responsibility for the existence of the racist regime in the State of Israel. One may recall that, according to the UN resolution of 1947, the partition of mandatory Palestine was to result in the establishment of two states: one Arab, with 97% Arab inhabitants and one Jewish, with 53% Jews and 47% Arabs. A Jewish state, almost half of whose inhabitants are Arabs - does not this give institutionalized racism a green light from the very start? Or did the UN delegates, who voted for partition, know that all 47% would never remain within the boundaries of the Jewish state? One way or another, by defining the Jewish character of the state, the UN granted international legitimacy to the State of * This article first appeared in the March-April 1992 issue of News From Within, published by the Alternative Information Centre, Jerusalem. 1. See, among others, Yosef Gorney, The Arab question and the Jewish problem, Tel Aviv University Press. 2. Aryeh Dayan, "Racist? Us?", Ha'aretz, December 23 27, 1991.
April 27, 1992
ZIONISM AND RACISM Israel's racist character, and perhaps also to the expulsion of her Arab population.
The statement in the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming Israel to be the state of the entire Jewish people, expresses the essence of the character of the existing regime, and the High Court has repeatedly emphasized - most recently when it debated whether the Progressive List for Peace was qualified to run in Knesset
- that this statement has not only symbolic and formal significance, but real implications for all state institutions and in the setting of policy for all government authorities.
The term "Jewish state" defines the collectivity which the State of Israel is supposed to serve and protect. This collectivity is not of all the state's citizens, but the entire Jewish nation, over and above Jews who are citizens of the state, and excluding citizens of the state who were neither born to a Jewish mother nor converted to Judaism according to Jewish law.
In other words, not only does a Jewish Mafioso from Paris have the right and the ability (via Zionist institutions) to determine the state's priorities, but the few Palestinians who managed to obtain citizenship have neither the right nor the ability to be part of the sovereign collectivity. The Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel do, indeed, enjoy civil rights and vote for representatives to the legislative body, but this fact alone does not make them equal citizens or full partners in the collectivity which the state is supposed to serve.
Arabs forbidden to own land
A blatant example of this can be found in the Land Laws and the agreements between the State of Israel and the Jewish
National Fund, which forbid Arab citizens of the State of Israel to own "national land" or even to buy or lease state land. In this context, the State of Israel made a significant innovation to the doctrine of racial discrimination — by replacing the concept of "state land" with "land of the nationality", the dominant nationality of course.
In addition to the Land Laws, which exclude Arab citizens from the sovereign collectivity, particular attention should be given to the laws which define the right of residency in the State of Israel (the Law of
Return, the Citizenship Law) and the racist philosophy hidden in their clauses.
Avigdor Feldman is making a very old claim, when he states? that the Law of
Return, which automatically grants citizenship to anyone born to a Jewish mother or converted according to Jewish law, is not a racist law, but a legitimate expression of affirmative action.
We would have no difficulty agreeing 24 with the learned counsellor, if the Law of International Viewpoint # 227
Return stood on its own, unconnected with the Citizenship Law and the systematic policy of refusing residency to members of the Palestinian people. But the Law of Return is but one link in a policy according to which only Jews have the right of residency in the Land of Israel, except if a non-Jew proves, according to the Laws and regulations of the Jewish state, that he has not lost his right to residency. In other words, a Jew who is not a citizen of Israel is always a potential resident; whereas by contrast the status of an Arab citizen or resident is always provisional.
Independence declaration permits discrimination
Denied a part in the collective ownership of the land and bearing provisional residence status, the Arab citizen of the Jewish state lacks even the rights of the "stranger dwelling in the land" recognized by the Jewish Torah. And indeed, it is not mere chance that, in the Declaration of Independence - which functions in lieu of a constitution — it was "forgotten" to state that there would not be discrimination on grounds of nationality in the state of Israel. Such a statement, had it been made, could have been used to repeal laws and regulations which favour members of the Jewish people and to establish equality between members of the two peoples.
The wording of the Declaration of Independence was chosen precisely to exclude such equality, and in order to avoid its creation, the Israeli Knesset stubbornly refuses to legislate a democratic constitution. The lack of a democratic constitutional framework, upon whose basis any expression of nationally-based discrimination would be rejected, has allowed the legislature and the administrative authority to create a complete and all-encompassing infrastructure of racial discrimination between Jews and Arabs.
The pretentious liberalism of the State's founders — and the need to keep the United Nations quiet - made it hard for them to legislate openly apartheid laws, as in
South Africa. But since the existing regime was based on an apartheid system, they were compelled to search for sophisticated ways to institute this racial discrimination. The primary form this has taken is security and the state of war; the Law of
Present Absentees, the Military Government of the Arab areas of the state until
1966, and the non-repeal of the mandatory
Emergency Regulations — are just a few examples of the way in which a system of double standards was created for Jews and
Arabs, under the pretext of a state of emergency.
By virtue of the Absentee Property Law, for example, the Jewish state was able to transfer a tremendous amount of property, mainly land, from Arab citizens to Jewish citizens. Of this, Attorney Avigdor Feldman says: "In those days, the High Court heard dozens of appeals by Arab residents against land expropriation. The lawyers attempted to present the overall picture to the court: expropriations are always from the Arabs, the land is always handed over to Jews, "public needs" are always the needs of the Jewish public.
"The court was totally consistent. It always refused to see the overall picture. It was never willing to go beyond examination of the legality of a specific expropriation order. It simply made itself the partner in discrimination",
Should anyone claim that these were just the not-so-pleasant birth pangs of the state, we shall remind him that the lands of the village of Ramayah were expropriated in 1976 and earmarked for transfer to use as a new immigrant neighbourhood in 1991 (case still not concluded) and of the houses in Silwan, in East Jerusalem, which have recently been transferred, thanks to the Absentee Property Law, to
The pretext of public interest
The claim of "public interest" is just one of the methods for transferring resources from one part of the population to another.
Another is by the use of non-racial categorization of sections of the population in ways which legitimize real racial discrimination. Writes Aryeh Dayan4: "In the notso-few instances when the policy of discrimination succeeded in entering the law books despite everything, it was always in disguise, as if the legislator was asha-
"If one examines the entire body of law, she will find that there is no law, except for the Law of Return, which reserves privileges for Jews only. In all other discriminatory laws and regulations, instead of
"Jews" what is written is "former servicemen/women" or 'one to whom the Law of
Return would apply were s/he not an
Israeli citizen'.
"And should anyone claim that someone who serves three years in the army deserve more privileges than someone who doesn't serve, we will be quick to point out that former serviceman/woman" does not only mean someone who was actually a soldier in uniform for a specific period, but even someone whose distant relative served — that is, every Jew. The High
Court has given its legal seal of approval to this display of sophistication, as Avigdor Feldman explains: "Even when it became clear that a Jew could be considered to be a "former serviceman", even if he had not served in the army, the court continued to lend a hand to the maintenance of this deceitful practice. The law beca-
April 27, 1992• # 227 International Viewpoint me a device for attaining racist objectives"
The use of para-governmental institutions (the "national institutions" , that is, the Jewish National Fund, the Jewish Agency) for the carrying out of the policy of discriminating in favour of the Jews, provides a convenient out, even for quintessential liberals like Asa Kasher: "An Israeli government which talks about the Judaization of Galilee is like an American government talking about the Christianization of New York. To the Jewish Agency, the body elected by the Jewish people (sic), it is permissible to encourage Jews to move to the Galilee. To the government of Israel which is supposed to represent all the citizens of the state it is forbidden. The problem is that there is total confusion between the areas of activity of the Jewish esting bit of folklore, but mostly a nuisan-
This way of relating continued after the establishment of the state as well: the Arabs "disappeared". Including from memory. The minority who remained were placed in "reserves" in the hope that they too would disappear (the Kafr Qsem massacre, and the plan of which this was a part, took place only five years after the end of the mass expulsion of Arabs, which went on, as is well known, until 1951), and along with the vote, they were accorded the status of provisional citizens. Forgetting about the defeated
That the Arabs would be third class citizens went without saying; the state of war with the Arab World, and the relatively small size of the remnant left after the
ZIONISM AND RACISM the addition of one and a half million more Palestinians to the area under Israeli rule after the Six-Day War in 1967; and the development of a Palestinian national movement following the founding of Fatah and its successes after 1967.
These three factors taken together prevented the continuation of a policy of ignoring the non-Jew within Jewish society, exposed the racist character of the current regime and granted social legitimacy to various forms of racist behaviour and openly racist ideologies. Hatred became legitimate, because there was someone to be afraid of, someone to hate. In 1967, the Palestinians became a "problem" and that "problem" activated the potential racism inherent in the existence of an exclusivist Jewish society.
The legitimacy bestowed on the openly and those of the government. It is an intentio-
Sерь...
nal confusion, in the service of a policy of ethnic and national discrimination" 5
With all due respect, the confusion to which Asa racist "transfer" philosophy of far-right groups such as Moledet, Kach, T'hiya and the Yesha rabbis in the 1980s was not the consequence of the "corruption of Israeli society by the occupation" as
Kasher is referring is unavoi- 000Д dable and, as he himself points out, intentional. And therefore, it is totally out of place and without justification, from a liberal point of view, to speak of the Jewish Agency's "right" to encourage the Judaization of the Galilee, while knowing that the Jewish agency exists for the purpose of providing a cover for official discriminathe faithful adherents of the "lost purity of Zionism" claim, but of the impossibility of continuing to ignore the reality of the conflict between the Zionist settlement movement and the national liberation struggle of the Arab Palestinian people.
It had been possible to erase the transfer of 1948-51, the mini-transfer of 1967 and the attempted transfer of
2141!
We said at the beginning, that there is no need for premeditation or for a conscious and declared desire to discriminate or oppress, for a given regime to be characterized as racist. When it is a matter of a regime, racism is an objective situation, which does not require hatred or deliberate malice. However, alongside the institutional and legal structures which ensure discrimination against the Arab population in Israel (and it makes no difference if we call this "additional privileges for Jews"), an entire racist culture has developed in Israel or, more precisely, a number of racist approaches have come to characterize the relationship of the Jewish popula-
We have already described the Zionist movement's initial racist approach to the country's Arab inhabitants. We defined it as "ecological racism", the absence of relating to them in terms of human categories (including hatred), but the use instead of ecological categories: the Arabs are part of the landscape, sometimes an intermass expulsion, made their exclusion from the collectivity easier, even for the most liberal Israeli Jews. The state and society were Jewish not only in theory but, almost, in practice; and at the time the contradiction between a Jewish state and a democratic state was not obvious. It was therefore possible to put in place a policy of discrimination without hatred, without problems of conscience, without moral anguish; Israeli society in the 1950s and 60s could easily free itself of any association with any openly racist ideologies.
In the late 1960s a combination of factors brought about a revolution in the relation of Israeli society towards the Palestinians in the state: the internal needs (economic and political of Israeli society, which led to the end of the period of military government, and to greater integration of the Palestinian minority in society;
1956 from the collective memory because the victims were no longer before our eyes, and those who remained were too stunned to give voice to an outcry that could arouse us; one could repress the awareness of the discrimination of the 50s and 60s, because the victim was not much more than a little piece of the "minority" mosaic, without a unifying identity or any real ability to protest. Thus it was possible to carry out transfer and to feel progressive, to exercise discrimination and feel justified.
This luxury was taken from Israeli society on June 7, 1967. And the closing of eyes and stopping of ears gave way to a true relationship with the other, in this case, a relationship of hatred and open racism. "Death to the Arabs!" is the 1990 version of the slogan "Brotherhood of peoples" of the Mapam ["socialist" Zio3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. are view with Tikva Honig- Paras in Matpen, 25 March 1988.
ZIONISM AND RACISM / VENEZUELA
A model of instability
International Viewpoint # 227 • April 27, 1992 nist] kibbutzim which were established on stolen lands, on erased villages, on plunder and killing. It is much more blunt and much less hypocritical.
Israeli society of the 1990s is more racist in its outspoken statements, be they ideological, or in the guise of laws, governmental regulations or Knesset decisions. But in the last analysis, it acts, breathes and operates exactly as in the first two decades of the state, but with a lesser degree of hypocrisy and denial.
For peoples as for individuals, dealing with reality as it is, including its past, is an essential condition for being able to overcome existential problems. Denial of reality is a much shrewder enemy than open hatred. The existence of the Palestinians is indeed a problem for the advocates of a Jewish state, and especially for those Zionists who honestly champion democratic and humanistic values.
The beginning of wisdom
Wisdom begins with the recognition of the existence of the Palestinians and of the problem. The problem is not that there are Palestinian Arabs who claim to belong here and demand their rights over the land, but in the contradiction between a democratic approach and one which claims exclusivism in a place where there are other human beings.
In days gone by, Mapam was able to advocate Zionism and the brotherhood of peoples at one and the same time, because it was able to deny the existence of another people; Ratz Youth [the youth organization connected to Mapam] of today are not able to deny the existence of Arabs under Israeli rule, without fundamental rights, without equality; many of them are not interested in denying this fact and shutting their eyes, as did their pioneer parents, because they know that it won't help, and because they understand that shutting one's eyes paves the way for racist demagogues like Rechav'am Ze'evi and Rabbi Dov Lior.
And these same Ratz Youth and others who see themselves as progressive Zionists are today called upon to contend with the dilemma placed before them by Rabbi Kahane: A Jewish state or a democratic state. Up to this point, all the Zionist parties have answered "a Jewish state" at the price of the distortion of democracy. The new generation understands better and better that the price of Israel's being an exclusivist state at all costs is no longer just these distortions, but her turning into a mixture of South Africa, Northern Ireland and the Wild West. In simpler terms, the choice today is either a democratic 26 state or Massada. *
THE two coup attempts in Venezuela in December 1991 and February 1992 came as a surprise to all those who considered that its 30 years of democracy made it a model of stability in Latin America. The Socialist International - of which Venezuelan president Carlos Andres Perez is a prominent figure - fears a return of the "old ways" in Latin America. RAUL ZIBECHI
T HE common explanation for the coup
attempt of the early morning of February 4, 1992, when a group of army and air force officers tried to put president Carlos Andres Perez to flight, was administrative corruption and the growing social crisis brought about by the different economic adjustments inflicted on the country. The government's appeal to the people to rise up and defend democracy failed to move the population, who were, if anything, rather pleased by the thought of the fall of the president. Venezuelans do not feel obliged to mobilize to defend a "democracy" under which 85% of the population is considered poor.
The deeper causes of the putsch attempt should not be sought in the amorphous ideology of its protagonists, who proclaimed themselves to be "Bolivarists" and who some consider to be nationalists. The real reason is the spiralling social crisis and the violence of the economic policies promoted by the president.!
To explain the present events we need to go back three years, to the start of Perez' second term of office. As soon as his coronation ceremony was over, Perez' new government announced an economic package tripling the price of oil and other basic products. The epoch when high oil prices had given Venezuela a certain prosperity were over. The income had been wasted on projects of no benefit to the majority of the population, but at least strong economic growth rates meant political stability and social peace.
On February 27, 1989 the caracazo [from the name of the capital Caracas] erupted, a poblada, as a popular uprising is known in Venezuela, by which the country expressed its refusal to pay for the wrenching economic turn pushed through under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, burning and pillaging thousands of shops, shattering into pieces the democratic shop window that had left them on its margins. The street plan of Caracas meant that in a few hours, the demonstrators had completely stopped traffic circulation, overwhelmed the police and encircled the rich neighbourhoods. Carlos Andres Perez called on the army to re-establish order, but "calm" was only restored after a terrible week in which more than 1,000 people died, according to Amnesty International.
A few weeks later it seemed that the situation was under control. But a gulf had opened between the ruling Social Democratic party and the majority of the population and it has never been filled in. In 1989 social protest erupted onto the political scene with a force not seen since the 1960s. The poor neighbourhoods have become no-go areas for the police. If they want to go in they carry out a military occupation and do not withdraw before having carried out various repressive operations.
The caracazo marked both the end of popular apathy and the formal declaration of economic. legal and military war against the country's poor. Three years later, the victims' families are still looking for dozens of missing persons - it seems that the armed forces tried to hide hundreds of bodies to cover up for the extent of the massacre. At the time Perez claimed that there were "only" 275 deaths, but the families talk of 3,000. Grim harvest of austerity policies
In these three years the Social Democratic president has succeeded in depressing living standards to the level of the dark days of the dictatorship of Perez Jimenez in the 1950s. Here are a few facts:
• The number of households living below the poverty line rose from 19% in 1981 to 40% in 1990.
• The number of malnourished children was 10% in 1989 and is about 18% now.
• School-rolls have fallen from 4.9 million in 1981 to 3.7 million in 1990.
• The rate of unemployment is 20%. 35% of those who work are in the informal sector.?
Alongside growing hunger, corruption is endemic in both government and private enterprise. The population is showing less and less interest in politics, with a 40% abstention rate in the last elections. To hold back popular protest, the government has militarized the popular neighbourhoods with guard posts being set up at key points and the army going in to show who is boss when they feel like it.
Human rights organizations have noted a deterioration in the past three years. The report from the Venezuelan Programme for Education