A GENUINE PEACE CANNOT BE ZIONIST : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

A genuine PEACE movement CANNOT BE ZIONIST

WRITTEN BY JASON KUNIN first published on Znet

"Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.'" - Angela Davis

It's common practice among those of us outside Israel who have been frustrated by the hostility and intimidation we encounter whenever we voice criticism of Israel to point to the fact that there is greater freedom to criticize Israel in Israel. "Look at the critical articles published in Ha'aretz," we will say. "Look at the Israeli peace movement. Look at Peace Now and Gush Shalom." Tactically, this is a useful point to make in an argument. I know because I've used it myself.

The truth is, unfortunately, that this much vaunted criticism within Israel - by the liberal media, by the so-called Israeli Left - is overwhelmingly inclined to blame the oppression of Palestinians merely on specific leaders or policies. Uri Avnery, for example, the founder of Gush Shalom and one of the most far-left public figures in Israel, writes a regular syndicated column in which he blasts the brutality of this or that general, the cruelty of this or that politician, the unfairness of this or that law. He's often quite incisive and witty. Avnery, like most of the Israeli left, is a Zionist - a critical one, to be sure, but a Zionist nonetheless who believes that a good movement has been corrupted by bad leaders and who periodically scans the horizon for the leader who can finally set Israel on its righteous path. [1]

Israeli violence and oppression, however, is rooted not simply in a few laws or politicians, but in the ideological foundations of the state itself. The problem, in short, is Zionism. Any opposition to Israel rooted in Zionism can only seek to mitigate Israeli apartheid and racism, not end it, because apartheid and racism are what Zionism - and by extension, the Israeli state - are all about. Zionism is rooted in the fundamental premise that the state be a Jewish state and that it occupy the physical space of an ancient Arab Christian and Muslim culture. Because it is impossible to achieve these two goals simultaneously without violence and racist oppression, you cannot have a genuine peace movement that is Zionist.

In mainstream Jewish circles, hardly anyone self-identifies as a "Zionist" anymore, though almost everyone is. Today, it's probably more common to hear words like "Zionist" and "Zionism" used by Palestinian solidarity activists than it is by "supporters of Israel," a newer preferred term for a Zionist. "Supporting Israel," however that gets understood, is simply for many a natural function of being Jewish, whereas the term Zionism, even if it amounts to the same thing, makes supporting Israel sound rather ideological. Which of course it is.

One of the functions of ideology, as Marxists have long argued, is to embed beliefs that support a particular set of power relations into "common sense" so that they become invisible. Antonio Gramsci called this "hegemony." When a theory or system of beliefs passes into a reflexive pattern of thought, it has transformed into ideology, and this is exactly what has happened to Zionism. To be called a Zionist is somewhat like being called "white man" if you happen to be a white man: you may acknowledge the accuracy of the description but resist the "politicization" of a position you regard as neutral.

Support for Israel, of course, is not neutral, and in order to begin to undo the damage that such support has caused over the past century, the first order of business is not just to name it, but to expose its ideological nature. Like whiteness, it is wrapped up in positions of power and privilege that white Jews, like me, don't often acknowledge we have. Yet for those of us who truly wish to see an end to the destruction of Palestine and its people, it is not enough to protest merely what Israel does, because what Israel does is an extension of what Israel is - namely, a Zionist state.

Zionist ideology informed Israel's creation, guided the foundation of its bureaucratic institutions, set the terms for its relations with its neighbours, and established a sophisticated global network of organizations, campus clubs, and schools to sustain and perpetuate Zionist ideas in Jewish communities and beyond. It continues to guide the state violence that has created one of the world's largest and longest human rights catastrophes. True, many people on the Zionist left try to identify a moment in Israel's past when this "Jewish liberation movement" turned into something terrible. For some it was the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. For others, such as those in the Peace Now movement, it was the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For still others, those with a more radical analysis, the problems go back to 1948, or even, as Hannah Arendt argued, to the 1942 Zionist Congress that shut down for good all discussion of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state. Indeed, there are still a few purists with a knowledge of Zionist history who idealize the "cultural" and bi-national Zionism of Hebrew University founder Judah Magnes and the philosopher Martin Buber. Yet the fact is, despite liberal fantasies that try to locate some primal moment in Zionist history when the movement was still pure and good, Zionism is and always has been a fundamentally racist movement shaped by the most violent and oppressive ideological forces of the nineteenth century. It is a testament to the racism of even the most enlightened Zionists - the ones who supposedly promoted Jewish-Arab cooperation - that Judah Magnes referred to Arabs as "half savage" [2], and Martin Buber lived after 1948 in the confiscated house of Edward Said's family, despite their letters imploring its return.

To understand the basis of Zionism, it is important to start not in the 1890s with Theodore Herzl and the Dreyfus trial - the point of origin from which Zionist history usually begins - but about a century earlier, to the flourishing of Romanticism in Germany and Europe in general. Rejecting the supremacy of reason that had governed European thought during the neo-classical age, the Romantics emphasized the centrality of emotion, irrationality, and spirit. (Many were borderline mystics, fascinated by the supernatural and Eastern religions.) Against the backdrop of an emerging Industrial Revolution, which precipitated the emptying of Europe's countrysides and the swelling of its cities, poets, philosophers, and intellectuals began to romanticize the vanishing peasantry and contemplate the "divinity" of nature. Those who tilled the soil and worked the land were viewed as closer to nature, and therefore closer to divinity and spirit. Blut und Boden, or "Blood and Soil," was a term that emerged in Germany by the late nineteenth century with the emergence of Romantic Nationalism, which held that nation states derive their legitimacy as a natural consequence of the organic unity of the people and the land. Blut und Boden eventually became a slogan of the Nazi party, popularized in the 1930s by race theorist Richard Walther Darré. [3]

Meanwhile, as the nineteenth century progressed, European imperialism and the colonization of "the darker nations" flourished. African slavery was still widespread, and even where it was outlawed retained enormous legitimacy among the ruling classes. Successive generations of physical and sexual exploitation of African slaves, mind you, had introduced the "problem" of miscegenation - a problem because light or white-skinned slaves threatened to unravel the fiction of race. Jews, newly emancipated from their medieval ghettos and "passing" for gentiles, posed a similar challenge to the racialized social order. Science, however, rose to the occasion, and soon the best scientific minds of the day produced a highly elaborate and eminently respectable science of race that persisted until the early twentieth century. This racial science had some interesting things to say about Jews, which in turn were absorbed into Zionism.

Racial science was predicated on comparative biology and depended upon observable difference, which was not always evident among the pale Ashkenazi Jews of Europe. Jewish physiognomy was scrutinized for signs of "blackness" and darkened in representation. In art and literature of the nineteenth century, the Jew's "exotic" features were exaggerated or made more pronounced. The hair was black (or red, to symbolize the devil), the eyes dark, the complexion swarthy. The physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavatar wrote of the Jews' "short, black, curly hair, their brown skin colour" [4]. In The Races of Men (1850), Robert Knox described Jewish physignomy as having "an African look" [5]. During the Middle Ages, Christian art had always emphasized the metaphorical blackness of the Jew - the black synagogue would be juxtaposed against the white church, for example - but racial science tried to make this metaphorical blackness into a literal blackness that was inscribed in the biology of the Jew. In both Jews and Africans, blackness was further associated with diseases, such a congenital syphilis, which would also be the marker of moral degeneracy.

The problem was that many European Jews simply didn't look black. Many had fair hair, light eyes, and Slavic or Nordic features. Here's where another nineteenth century science, sexology, came in to shore up racial science. Sexology, a now antiquated discipline that was established by people like Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, established a "scientific" basis for normative sexuality in men - aggressive, strong, heterosexual - and a "degenerate" sexuality - passive, weak, homosexual - that was soon widely associated with the Jew (who was usually configured as male). Jews were seen as prone to "neurasthenia," a condition "discovered" by the physician George M. Beard in which the finite "nerve force" of the body is depleted resulting in weakness, lethargy, fatigue, paleness, and stunted sexual development. Neurathenia, which mirrored Krafft-Ebing's masturbatory illness, was believed by Beard to be brought on by "over-civilization." It was a by-product of the increased pace and technology of industrialized society, and was confined exclusively to "highly evolved" races. It was frequently associated with "superior intellect." Sandar Gilman, who has made a career writing about racial science, notes that in medical literature of this period there was a virtual "interchangeability of the image of the neurasthenic and the Jew" [6].

Jewish accomplishment was thus made the marker of sexual dysfunction and racial degeneracy. The Jew was unathletic, a bookworm, a sissy, a degenerate (and probably a homosexual). A creature of the city, the Jew had no connection to the soil - from which sprang life and energy and health - and thus had no connection to or place in the gentile national body. The Jew was deracinated and therefore diseased and degenerate. In was in these terms that European anti-Semitism, which would soon turn so deadly, was framed.

Zionism was nurtured in this intellectual climate, and it accepted virtually all of these premises. Zionism concurred with the anti-Semites and scientific racism (as it later became known) that yes, the Jew was deracinated and weak and degenerate and "over-civilized." To reverse this degeneracy, Jews needed to connect with the soil from which they sprang, the Biblical heartland and birthplace of the Jewish people. (Never mind that, as Paul Kriwaczek notes in his recent book Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, many of the Jewish people of Europe were descended from gentile European converts [7].) "Blood and Soil" is as central a concept in Zionism as it was in Nazi fascism. The confluence of racial science, nineteenth-century sexology, and Zionism was embodied in the physician Max Nordau, an early and prominent leader in the Zionist movement who openly hoped that Zionism would create of a new race of "muscle Jews" that would revive the degenerate Jewish race. Martin Englander, another prominent early Zionist, wrote in The Evident Most Frequent Appearances of Illness in the Jewish Race (1902) that Jews' disposition to neurasthenia was cultural, the result of "over-exertion of the brain" [8] caused by two thousand years of diasporic struggle.

So at root, Zionism is not just racist, but anti-Semitic as well, and it was rightly perceived as offensive by the vast majority of European Jews when it first emerged. Religious Jews, of course, rejected Zionism on Talmudic grounds - there could be no Jewish state until the Messiah - but Zionism was also heartily rejected by secular Jews, who were still largely committed to the Enlightment project and were put off by Zionism's assertion that they were eternal strangers in their nations. Jews they may have been, but they were also Europeans who had contributed to their societies, valued European culture, and had little interest in relocating to a strange and "primitive" new land where life would be hard. Opinion, of course, would change with the rise of Nazism. By the end of the Second World War, the surviving Jews of Europe had almost universally adopted the Zionist narrative.

In Philip Roth's short story "The Conversion of the Jews," the young protagonist, Ozzie Freedman, complains about his mother's response to a plane crash. Scouring through the published list of victims, she finds eight Jewish names, and "because of the eight she said the plane crash was a ‘tragedy'" [9]. Roth here pokes fun at a tendency among Jews to focus only on Jewish suffering, though he also captures in a nutshell Zionism's approach to Jewish history.

Naturally, Jewish history should focus on Jewish suffering, as well as Jewish triumph and other matters concerning Jews. That is, after all, the point of Jewish history, and there are valid reasons for why we need it. In recent years, post-modern theories have challenged "grand narratives" of history as partial and selective and traditionally serving the interests of power, all of which is true. For several decades, historians have attempted to correct the distortions of "official" historical narratives by writing specialized histories of marginalized peoples, such as women, workers, people of colour, and LGBT people. The purpose of such histories is to reinsert a people or social class back into a historical narrative that has excluded them and to see their contributions to a history that, through the very inclusion of their narratives, is changed and broadened. Jewish history has done and should do the same thing.

The Zionist narrative, however, has opposite aims. Because it is underwritten by a belief that Jews are eternal outsiders everywhere but in the Biblical homeland, a Zionist framing of history minimizes Jews' connection to their societies, thus removing them from history. Jewish suffering during the Holocaust - which, it should be emphasized, was immense and not to be minimized - takes on a different meaning when it is divorced from its the larger context. There is no disputing the murder of millions of European Jews during the Second World War, just as there is no disputing the fact that they were killed simply because they were Jews, even if they did not self-identify as Jews. These are incontrovertible facts. But how different the facts take on meaning when you say, "the Nazis killed three million Polish Jews" than when you say, "six million Poles - about 22% of the population - were killed by the Nazis, half of whom were Jews." To frame facts in this way, however, is to risk being accused of "minimizing" the Holocaust, though one could easily argue the opposite, that it enlarges the tragedy. The Zionist narrative of the Holocaust, unfortunately, discourages Jewish acknowledgement or identification with the suffering of others (unless, as in the case of the Kurds or Darfur, it happens to coincide with U.S. and Israeli interests). Many Jews, for example, are unaware that the Israeli government refuses to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Back in the eighties, a cross erected near Auschwitz on the site of a Carmelite convent to commemorate the hundreds of thousands of Christians who died there was relentlessly opposed by Jewish groups, who insisted the camp remain a symbol of Jewish suffering exclusively, for if Auschwitz were anything but an exclusively tragedy, it would undermine the argument for an exclusively Jewish state. (Auschwitz, we should remember, is the first stop on the "March of the Living," a Zionist program that follows the visit with a trip to Israel.) Even no less a person than Elie Weisel, the famed Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, has opposed the inclusion of a Romani memorial in the U.S. Holocaust museum, though the Nazi campaign against them - the Porajmos, as they call it - was equally devastating proportionally. Indeed, unlike the Jews of Europe today, the Roma still face pre-Nazi levels of oppression. In Italy they have even been reghettoized.

Zionists argue that the Holocaust proved correct Theodore Herzl's thesis that no matter how well they assimilated into European society, Jews would always be regarded with contempt and were always in danger of being stripped of their recently won rights and killed. Yet a basic fact that hardly seems to need mentioning yet which rarely does get mentioned is that the Holocaust spread only to those countries under Nazi occupation. The Holocaust did not happen in England, for example. And while it is true that anti-Semitism was rampant throughout Europe and that the Nazis found no shortage of eager collaborators among the nations they occupied, Jews only lost their rights and lives under the rule of one nation, Nazi Germany. The Holocaust, in short, was a Nazi phenomenon, not a universally European one. Though Daniel Goldhagen has tried his best to prove that almost all Europeans were "willing executioners" to Hitler, few professional historians regard either his thesis or his argument with much credibility. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in both Eichmann in Jerusalem and in her magisterial study of anti-Semitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the Holocaust was an inconsistent affair that varied from country to country, "taking almost as many shapes and appearances as there existed countries in Europe" [10]. In Bulgaria, for example, the population overwhelmingly defied Nazi-imposed anti-Semitic laws so that by the time the Red Army liberated the country in 1944, "not a single Bulgaria Jew had been deported or died an unnatural death" [11]. In Denmark, 8,000 Danish Jews were transported by sea to safety in Sweden in what is one of the most remarkable rescue operations initiated by ordinary people. Even the vicious Vichy regime in France, which had few qualms about turning over to the Nazis Jewish refugees from other countries, made efforts to give comparative protection to its own French Jews. So to say that the Holocaust proves that a violent anti-Semitism lies like a sleeping dog beneath the surface of all gentile nations is an oversimplification and distortion of history. Zionism, however, only retains its credibility if all gentiles are closet anti-Semites.

"If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years," Hannah Arendt argued, "then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument" [12]. Arendt warned that this "thesis of eternal antisemitism" was dangerous and would "absolve Jew-haters" of their crimes [13]. And yet this belief in eternal anti-Semitism is what informs the political program of Zionism and justifies the need for a Jewish state to protect Jews from the next round of anti-Semitic violence that will surely come. As Arendt noted about Israeli attutides toward the Holocaust during the Eichmann trial, "In the eyes of Jews…the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler…appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered" [14]. Certainly, this is how history appears if, like the mother in Philip Roth's "Conversion of the Jews," your focus is only on the tragedies that befall the Jews. Jewish persecutions, however, have always taken place in the context of other persecutions. The Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492, to take one example, was a catastrophe, though so was the Muslim expulsion that followed in 1497. The violent transfer and expulsion of populations, to say nothing of persecutions, were, alas, among the terrible but not uncommon features of the rule of kings during the period in which the Jews of Europe experienced their worst treatment. Mahmood Mamdani offers an even broader perspective on the Holocaust when he notes that the Nazi intent to destroy the Jewish people as a whole was "unique - but only in Europe" [15] and that, in fact, "the first genocide of the twentieth century was the German annihilation of the Herero people in South West Africa in 1904" [16]. Indeed, as Sven Lindquist points out in The History of Bombing, one of the things that made Hitler so monstrous was that he fought a "civilized war" as if it were a "colonial war," and European powers had traditionally made distinctions between the two. ("Civilized wars" follow the laws of war. "Colonial wars" do not and often see the extermination of "lower races" as a biological necessity.) This has implications for how we understand the annihilation of European Jewry as well. Summarizing Lindquist, Mamdani writes:

The Nazi plan…was to weed out some 10 million Russians, with the remainder kept

alive as a slave labor force under German occupation. When the mass murder of

European Jews began, the great Jewish populations were not in Germany but in Poland and Russia, where they made up 10 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent of the urban population ‘in just those areas Hitler was after.' [17]

No people on earth who have survived as a people as long as the Jews have enjoyed an absolute and uninterrupted protection from persecution. Yet this is precisely what Zionism demands as the right of all Jews. Moreover, it argues that this eternal safety can only be safeguarded by an exclusively Jewish state and a regional monopoly on nuclear weapons - ironically, conditions that guarantee a state of perpetual war. One hears often how Israelis long to be considered just a "normal" state. Yet the model of "normality" that Zionism looks to is the nineteenth century imperial state, with all of its fascist trappings, such as the belief in "Blood and Soil," the promotion of a muscular national character, and the mythology of an exclusionary national identify based on a common racial/ethnic background. As the rise of Nazism resulted in the Jews of Europe being stripped of the privileges of "whiteness," which anti-Semitism defined in contrast to the Jew, emigration to Palestine under the Zionist project allowed Jews to regain their whiteness, which in this new context was defined against the indigenous Arab - but only if a colonial relationship were maintained. A whiteness that is defined through its dominant position vis-s-vis darker-skinned people is also part of the "normality" that Israel craves because it is based on the "normality" of whiteness in imperial Europe.

Zionists did not immigrate to Israel to be neighbours. They had no interest or intention of learning the local language or contributing to the local culture, as one normally would when moving to another country. Zionism, rather, was predicated on taking over the land and replacing the local culture, not fitting into it. And yet Zionist history refuses to interpret Arab resistance to Jewish immigration during the Holocaust as resistance to this colonial project, not hostility to Jews per se. Nonetheless, pointing to Arab complicity in the Holocaust serves the myth of eternal anti-Semitism and justifies not only the need for a heavily militarized Jewish state but also the on-going brutal treatment of the indigenous people of Palestine.

As for the actions of the Zionist leadership during the actual Holocaust, much has been written about their efforts to prevent other countries from taking in Jewish refugees of Europe, lest the availability of potential immigrants to Palestine be depleted. The World Zionist Organization, for example, boycotted a thirty-one nation conference held in France in 1938 that was convened to discuss the problem of Jewish refugees. As Ben- Gurion said, "If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by Transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would chose the second." More extreme Zionist factions, such as Irgun, actually tried to form an alliance the Nazi government. The young Zionist who wrote the letter making the proposal, the man who noted the "common interests" that existed between the Zionists in Palestine and the Nazis government, was the future Prime Minister of Israel Yizhak Shamir. [18]

Liberal Zionists - and I would say that most Jews today are probably liberal Zionists - believe that there exists a solution to the conflicting national projects of Jews and Palestinians: a two-state solution. Like the oft-cited "critics" one finds in Israel, liberal Zionists may openly dislike one or another Israeli leader - maybe Sharon, maybe Netanyahu - support the creation of a Palestinian state, and occasionally even express sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. If you ask them why such a two-state solution has not yet come into being, they may blame Palestinian leaders for "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity," as Abba Eban once obnoxiously remarked, or they may, if they're really liberal, blame the Jewish settlers for holding the Israeli government hostage. Regardless of why liberal Zionists believe a two-state solution has not yet come into being, they will all share a belief that Israel's leaders have consistently sought peace.

Where does such blind faith come from? Partly from the fact that it's true. Israel's leaders, in fact, have consistently sought peace - on their terms! Since 1948, they have sought peace with their neighbouring Arab states - provided they accepted Israel's regional supremacy and were willing to drop completely the subject of the Palestinians (which would include any compensation or financial assistance to countries that have taken in Palestinian refugees). They have also sought peace with the Palestinians - but provided they relinquish any claims to their land, forget their history, and, preferably, disappear off the face of the earth. True, since the first Intifada, Israel has taken a more moderate stand and has genuinely sought peace through the creation of a Palestinian state - provided that such as state be completely demilitarized, split into reservations, confined to a minimal amount of the most worthless land, governed by a puppet police state that will do its bidding, and produces for the rest of its existence not a single individual who will engage in any act of resistance. Any Palestinian leader unwilling or unable to meet these expectations has been declared by Israeli leaders as an unsuitable "partner for peace," and they have likely believed it in all sincerity. This is because, if you buy into the Zionist project and its thesis of eternal anti-Semitism - which entails that another Holocaust could erupt at any moment - it is impossible to conceive of any compromise that does not simultaneously preserve a strong Jewish state and ensure the weakness of everyone else, lest they become the next Nazi Germany. It is impossible as well to conceive of any solution that does not allow Israel to retain its status as a "white" nation - remember, this is the model of "normality" that Israel seeks - and therefore any settlement that would see Israel become part of the Middle East is precluded. (Israel's soccer team, not surprisingly, plays in the European league.)

Liberal Zionists who insist that a two-state solution along the 1967 borders is a reasonable compromise are really only in disagreement with hard-line Zionists over how much stolen Palestinian land should be kept for Jews' exclusive use. And since few liberal Zionists, because they are Zionists, are willing to concede the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and there can be no true justice - and therefore no guaranteed peace - without the right of return, two-state Zionism will always be a dead end. Moreover, two-state Zionism is ideologically unprepared to accept the reality that the settlements and settler roads have made a genuine two-state solution possible, leaving only the options of a one-state solution or eternal apartheid. If all you buy into of Zionism is the thesis of eternal anti-Semitism, you will always opt for the latter before the former, for you will be unable to compromise the so-called "security" guaranteed by a Jewish state.

For those who have grown up with Zionism programmed into them from birth, there are simply certain places that the mind cannot go. For this reason, Zionism is the greatest obstacle to peace. Challenging it, unfortunately, is no easy feat since it has become an integral part of all Jewish community life everywhere. The Jewish school, the Jewish camp, the Jewish campus clubs, the Jewish day care, the local Jewish community center, even the shul - in all of these places one absorbs Zionist ideology through osmosis. Unless you belong to one of the anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox sects such as Neturei Karta, to reject Zionism is to tear yourself apart from the connection to friends, family, and Jewish life. Increasingly, there are small anti-Zionist Jewish spaces opening up, and though they are marginal and not always accessible, their importance should be underestimated. Only if there exists the ability to participate as an anti-Zionist and a Jew in some sort of Jewish life will the risk associated with breaking from Zionism diminish. And only by rejecting Zionism can we who are Jewish break free from the trap we have created for ourselves, the trap of a Jewish state.

Jason Kunin is a Toronto teacher. He can be reached at jkunin@rogers.com.

[1] See, for example, Avnery's cautiously optimistic column on the election of Amir Peretz as Labour leader. (http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/22362). From the vantage point of Perez's brief but brutal reign as defense minister during the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, this is a good example too of how misplaced Avnery's hopefulness was and always is.

[2] Letter to Felix Warburg, Sept. 7, 1929. Reprinted in Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Ed. Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon. (New York: Grove Press, 2003.)

[3] The definitive scholarship on the continuity between German Romanticism and German fascism has been done by George L. Mosse. See in particular his landmark study The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964).

[4] Quoted in Sander L. Gilman, The Visibility of Jews in the Diaspora: Body Imagery and Its Cultural Context. (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1992): 7.

[5] Ibid., 7.

[6] Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985): 156.

[7] Paul Kriwaczek notes many historical instances of gentile conversion to Judaism in European history. He writes, "It should come as little surprise that the missionary efforts to bring lost Jews back to the Torah should spill over into the Christian and pagan world, and that Judaism should attract proselytes among the Slavs. Jewish-owned slaves, while they were still legally allowed, had good reason to convert, for they might thereby gain their freedom. But there were also many who found that the spiritual wealth of the Jews, as well as their worldly success, offered greater rewards than their own Christian lifestyle." Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation. (London: Phoenix, 2005): 120-121.

[8] Quoted in Difference and Pathology, 156-57.

[9] Philip Roth. "The Conversion of the Jews." Goodbye, Columbus. Toronto: Bantam, 1986): 102.

[10] Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (New York: Penguin, 1992): 154.

[11] Ibid., 188.

[12] Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. ( A Harvest Book: San Diego, 1976): 7.

[13] Ibid., 8.

[14] Eichmann in Jerusalem, 267.

[15] Mahmood Mamdani. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Doubleday, 2005): 7.

[16] Ibid., 8.

[17] Quoted in Mamdani, 7.

[18] For a more complete account of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, see Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. (New Jersey: Barricade Books, 2002).

Implications for a two-state solution

Zionism's Use of the Holocaust

The Origins of Zionism

Zionism as Ideology

The problem is not Israel, it's Zionism

http://zmag.org/znet

This article is simply awful. It is full of lies, tendentious readings, half-truths, and shows pretty much a complete ignorance of it subject.

A monkey using a typewriter could have come up with a better critique of Zionism than this.

Let me just focus on one example. We are told that Buber and Magnes, who opposed political Zionism and, in the case of Magnes, actively worked against the establishment of a Jewish state, were racist towards Arabs. Now, since it is well known that neither favored a state in which Jews would have more rights than Arabs, one can conclude from this that that were racist against Jews. I mean, what the fuck is the point of being racist, if you think that the Palestinian Arabs have the same rights -- even political rights -- as the Palestinian Jews.

What is the evidence for this remarkable claim? The author writes

"It is a testament to the racism of even the most enlightened Zionists - the ones who supposedly promoted Jewish-Arab cooperation - that Judah Magnes referred to Arabs as "half savage" [2], and Martin Buber lived after 1948 in the confiscated house of Edward Said's family, despite their letters imploring its return.

The reference to Buber is simply ridiculous. How does Buber's not wanting to leave the confiscated house of Said's family make him into a racist? Maybe he was a fucking jerk -- but racist? That is your evidence? And so if somebody buys a house that was confiscated in war, that ipso facto makes him a racist? Doesn't that term have any meaning anymore?

Let's go on to Magnes. One would expect from the quote that Magnes had written something like this:

"There is something in the Arab race, or people, that makes them incapable of intellectual improvement. Their race, their culture, is inferior, oriental, semitic. They will never be equal to us -- they are in their very nature half-savages."

In fact, Magnes believed nothing of the kind. In the letter referred to, written after the massacre of non-Zionist Jewish men, women, and children in Hebron, he speaks of his version of Zionism as "not depriving the Arabs (or the Jews) of their political rights for a generation or a day. His Zionism "is desirous of having Palestine become a country of two nations and three religions, all of them having equal rights, and none of them have special privileges.: a country where nationalism is but the basis of internationalism, where the population is pacificistic and disarmed -- in short, the Holy Land...."

Magnes continues:

"We have been toying with the words 'Jewish State,' 'majority,' "Jewish Palestine," 'politics', "Balfour Declaration,' etc. long enough. It is time that we come down to realities. We have passed resolutions concerning cooperation with the Arabs, but we have done very little seriously to carry them out."

"I do not say that this is easy of achievement nor do I absolutely know that it is possible. The Palestine Arabs are unhappily *still* half savage and their leaders are all small men. But this policy of cooperation is certainly more possible and more hopeful of achevement than building up a Jewish Home (National or otherwise) on bayonets and oppression."

This, as I said, was written in 1929, a particularly difficult time for Magnes, when his vision of cooperation was going up in smoke following inter-communal violence. Was Magnes a Eurocentrist, an American, who could look down his nose on the "natives"? Certainly, in that sense he was a creature of his times and his upbringing. Yes, he uses the phrase " still half-savage" (the author leaves out the adverb"still"): in a private letter, and he uses ethnic terms and generalizations that, after WWII, we are rightly sensitive about. But if anyting, this makes his willingness to give full political rights to the Palestinian Arabs, and, at a later date, to limit Jewish immigration, even the more impressiv!. And if one looks at his writings on his views of Palestinian Arabs, one finds in general a positive attitude, and always an attempt to balance negative remarks with similar statements about the Jews.

The truth is that Magnes opposed Palestinian Arab nationalism as he opposed Jewish nationalism. *He hated ethnic nationalism.*

"Palestine does not belong to the Jews and it does not belong to the Arabs, nor to Judaism or Christianity or Islam. It belongs all to them."

What about this paragraph from a letter written one week later:

"I must say that I have been amazed that not one official Jewish voice has been lifted in sympathy with such slain and injured Moslems or Christians who may have been innocent: that no money was earmarked for their injured. Of course, the Arabs were the aggressors and the most bloodthirty. Do I also have to be shouting that? But do you not know that we, too, have had our preachers of hate and disseminators of lies, our armed youth, our provocative processions, our unforgivable stupidity in our handling of the Western Wall incidents since last Yom Kippur, making out of what should have been a police incident an international political issue."

In other words, while he did not absolve Arab gangs of responsibility of massacring Jews, Magnes also was quick claim that a local incident had been fanned into a big deal by Jewish nationalists, like the Revisionist youths. He unceasingly criticised Jewish terror, as he unceasingly criticized political nationalism, and was called 'traitor" by his students at Hebrew University for it.

Look, there are problems with Magnes' Cultural Zionism, and it is understandable that his binationalist schemes didn't go far with the Arabs at the time, who were intensely nationalistic and saw no reason why the Jews as interlopers should have any political rights besides in Palestines, say, that of a minority.

But the vision of Magnes is now almost the official doctrine of Palestinian intellectuals -- and has been completely ignored by even the most liberal Zionists.

Let me give the last word to Edward Said, whom the author of this tripe apparently despises -- or will, after what he sees what Said said about the "racist" Magnes

"Second, during the inter-war period, a small but important group of Jewish thinkers (Judah Magnes, Buber, Arendt and others) argued and agitated for a binational state. The logic of Zionism naturally overwhelmed their efforts, but the idea is alive today here and there among Jewish and Arab individuals frustrated with the evident insufficiencies and depredations of the present. The essence of that vision is coexistence and sharing in ways that require an innovative, daring and theoretical willingness to get beyond the arid stalemate of assertion and rejection. Once the initial acknowledgment of the other as an equal is made, I believe the way forward becomes not only possible but attractive.

from "Truth and Reconciliation"

Edward Said was a great man -- and the way he adopted out of the mess that Zionism has wrought was first forged by Judah Magnes.

Magnes would have been proud.

Apartheid regimes are bound to fail. Israel is an apartheid regime. All the brutality, massacre, and genocide that it subjugates to its non Jewish inhabitants are doomed to hasten its demise.
As United States citizens, it is our fault, that we are letting our country to become the dictatorship of profiteers, thus our government supports dictators, tyrants, and religious or ideological extremist regimes who are well versed in the art of appearing to be democratic.

To Jerry Haber, I guess you must be the monkey that you refer to. What a long rambling comment (nonsensical I might add) which completely misses the valid points of the article.

Zionism IS the problem. Zionism is not Judaism, but unfortunately so many Jews now cling to it because that's Judaism to them.

They don't know or don't care that Zionism is a political movement to control the land of Israel (feel free to check your local dictionary), whereas Judaism is a religion and believes in G-d - the land of Israel is NOT the point of the religion it is secondary and anyone who knows about the history of Zionism also knows that prior to the founding of the State (before Jews were so assimilated) virtually EVERY Jewish religious leader (and we're talking about every type of background, German, Hungarian, Hasidic, Polish, etc...) were against Zionism.

There are many reasons that so many people today have found ways to rationalize the existence of the State and everything that it does. But I can tell you, as a non-Hesidic Orthodox Jew, it is reprehensible and it is not a reflection of Judaism.

The ability for Zionists (Jews and Non-Jews) to justify the atrocities that are being done and the claim to the land when the Zionists themselves have such a black history with terrorism themselves and dealing with the Nazi's (read Perfidy (author: the playwrite Ben Hecht) - this isn't some conspiracy nonsense, this is a book banned in Israel in the 70's, written by a famous Zionist author disgusted with what came out of a famous trial in Israel during the late 50's - early 60's) and the never ending exploitation of the Jews that were murdered during WWII.

You have to really know a fair amount of what's going on and the history to fully appreciate how completely absurd it is to support the State of Israel, unfortunately between the Zionist lobby here in the US and the complete ignorance of so many American's, it is easy to control the public opinion on this subject here in the US. The author of this article is to be commended for his candor and honesty on this subject.

There is so much to write on this subject and some highly respected professors have braved the "Antisemitic" branding that is so easily tossed around to do this - but ultimately, most people who form an opinion in favor of Israel on this issue either have only heard the US side and feel it must be the correct view because how could the US take a corrupt position (you'd think people would learn that Government is filled with corruption for Political Action Committees and numerous lobbying groups - including the Israeli lobby which is well known for being one of the most influential) - which unfortunately means they are very naive (pretty obvious when you look at opinion poles for other subjects) - or people have a personal bias to help them rationalize everything the State of Israel does (such as Pro-Zionist Jews and Christians).

Zionism exploits Judaism and anything else it can, to justify and protects itself - including the US itself - no matter what the cost - look up Jonathan Pollard on Wikipedia for just one tiny example.

And the list just goes on and on.

Following are the remarks delivered by the chief rabbi of Great Britain, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

==========

Trafalgar Square 11 January 2009

We are gathered today, not in triumph but in tears.

Nothing that has happened in Gaza needed to happen.

All it took to avoid all the suffering

was for Hamas to end firing rockets on innocent Israeli civilians.

That's all.

And let a voice go out today from here in Trafalgar Square,

And from other gatherings today in Manchester, Paris and Washington -

as it has gone out from Israel since the day it was born, 60 years ago:

We want peace

Israel wants peace.

We who love Israel want peace.

No to terror -- yes to peace

Let there be an end to bloodshed and hate.

Let there be peace.

We say to those who criticise Israel:

You want Palestinian children to grow up with hope.

So do we

You want Palestinians to be able to live in dignity.

So do we

You want Palestinian parents to have work, income, and a life for their families.

So do we

When a great British Zionist, the late Dr David Baum,

President of the Royal College of Paediatrics,

a man who lived in Bristol but asked to be buried, as he was, in Israel, in Rosh Pinah, sought to give expression to his hopes for Israel,

he created a state-of-the- art child care facility.

Where? In Gaza.

He died on a sponsored cycle ride raising money

for paediatric facilities in Gaza.

When one of the finest young men of our community, Yoni Jesner, was killed in a suicide attack on Tel Aviv bus, his family donated his organs to save life, one of whom was a seven-year-old Palestinian girl

Yasmin Abu Ramila

who had been waiting two years for a transplant.

We care about the Palestinian future.

We care for Palestinian children.

We care about life.

And that is why we say to Hamas, who for years, day after day, have been endangering the lives of innocent people:

Stop killing the Palestinian future.

In 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza.

It said to the people of Gaza: the land is yours.

The factories, the farms, the buildings our people built are yours.

The aid you seek in building an economy is yours.

That is when terror should have stopped.

Instead that is when the current wave of terror began.

The living nightmare for the people of Sderot and Ashdod and Ashkelon.

A ceaseless rain of rockets injuring and killing young and old,

the vulnerable, the innocent, who wanted nothing except peace.

There are young children in Sderot who have only known a life of living in bomb shelters.

Who can live like that?

When Jews built the land and state of Israel

The land where our ancestors lived for 4000 years,

They didn't want to fight with their neighbours.

They didn't want to spend a lifetime fighting war and fearing terror.

All they wanted to do was live.

And so we ask Hamas, and Hizbollah, and the countries that give them aid and arms,

Why do you want Israel to die?

Stop wanting Israel to die.

Start wanting your children to live.

There is one question that cries out for an answer.

Why, Hamas, do you hold in such contempt not just Israeli lives but Palestinian lives.

Why do you fire rockets from schools, store arms in hospitals, surround yourself with human shields?

Why have you consistently acted so as to maximise the death of innocent Palestinians?

In the words of Colonel Richard Kemp, reported in today's Sunday Times:

Senior military adviser to the British cabinet,

'Hamas deploys suicide attackers including women and children,

And rigs up schools and houses with booby trap explosives.

Virtually every aspect of its operations is illegal under international humanitarian law.

The Palestinian future will begin

The minute Hamas stops firing rockets on innocent Israelis.

The minute they try to stop killing the people whom they see as enemies but who want to live as friends.

The minute they stop endangering the Palestinian people by pursuing a policy that is blighting the Palestinian future.

Just say three words:

Yes to peace.

And a day will come when Israelis and Palestinians

Jews Muslims and Christians

The people of Sderot and the people of Gaza

Will live together in peace

No longer fighting one another

But helping one another to live in freedom and dignity.

That day will come.

It could be a hundred years away

Or it could be today.

It's up to Hamas and the countries that give it arms.

And for the sake of Palestinian children, and Israeli children,

Let it be today.

But in the meanwhile we say,

Beloved G-d

The G-d we worship

The G-d of life who told us to sanctify life

Al Rahman, the G-d of compassion

The G-d of Avraham, Ibrahim, father of our several faiths

Show us the way to live your way.

The way of Salaam,

The way of Shalom.
The way of Peace.

Genuine Peace cannot be "Zionist". AHA - then why can it be Islamist?

Why is it that Jews who were almost wiped out in Christian Europe and victims of numerous pogroms and massacres in the Islamic Arab states have no right to a homeland.

But Islamists who discriminate agains women. gays and all non-muslims can have Islamist states?

The Quran justifies the extermination fo Infidels and calls for killing all Jews.

Yet, Islamist states like Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran or Pakistan can exist with impunity. When Islamic Pakistan was created 99% of its Hindu and Sikh populations were massacred, or driven out. No one in the left hates Pakistan...?...why...?

Islam was brought to India by slave traders. We allow the slave trading Muslims to have Islamist states whenever and wherever they want.

How utterly hypocritical and morally bankrupt.

And all this from people who see themselves as "progressive"....sigh....

I've always wondered why the world accepts 56 Islamic states, yet rejects 1 Jewish state.

Its the standard "majority rules" I guess. With 1 1/4 billion Muslims (vs only 14 million Jews), they feel they can dictate policy. They certainly do in the United Nations.

Since that "1 jewish state" is Zionist occupied Palestine, it is pretty obvious why people who don't have their heads shoved up their asses would reject the Zionist's choser war of conquest.

Zionist occupation of Palestinian lands is as much a state of war as NAZi occupation of Poland was a state of war. Zionist occupation of Palestinian lands is as much a reason to drive Zionists out of Palestine as NAZI occupation of Poland was a reason to drive NAZIs out of Poland. DUH!!!!!!!!

Jordan is also a colonial occupier of Palestine. Jordan out of Palestine! Boycott Jordan! Jordan is a racist apartheid state! Boo, Jordan!!!

Eastern palestinian lands ARE heshmite occupied lands that should be liberated and the locals right to self determination respected. I have been saying that for years.

I'll see if I can find one at Clevland IMC.

Cleveland Indy Media Center