Zionism Is Racism (this headline is Haaretz’s…)
JVL Introduction
In this opinion piece published by Haaretz Zvi Bar’el pulls no punches.
Revisiting the 1975 UN debate and resolution that Zionism was racism he explains the grounds on which President Hertzog could claim to reject the contention: the pluralistic, egalitarian nature of Israeli society in which freedom of speech, of movement, of thought, of expression were guaranteed…
Never mind if he is, shall we say, a bit starry-eyed about what Zionism had already become by 1975; his view now is clear.
Racists like Ben-Gvir will hold key cabinet portfolios in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and shape the country’s character:
- “They are the founding fathers of the new Zionism, which is racist, primitive and sees democratic values as a historical mistake unsuited to a true Jewish state.”
- “They have Judaized antisemitic claims and race theory and are using them to build a pure country – one that is avowedly and by law Jewish, Zionist and racist.”
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Tue 27 Dec 2022. Read the original here.
Zionism Is Racism
“We, in Israel, have endeavored to create a society which strives to implement the highest ideals of society – political, social and cultural – for all the inhabitants of Israel, irrespective of religious belief, race or sex. Show me another pluralistic society in this world in which, despite all the difficult problems among which we live, Jew and Arab live together with such a degree of harmony … in which freedom of speech, of movement, of thought, of expression are guaranteed.”
The above is one of the key sentences around which former President Chaim Herzog, who at the time was Israel’s UN ambassador, built his impressive speech blasting UN General Assembly Resolution 3379. That resolution, passed on November 10, 1975, stated that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”
Herzog recruited the Jewish people’s long history, the principles of Judaism, science, economic development and the fundamentals of democracy to undermine the resolution, which he deemed antisemitic. “For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper, and we shall treat it as such,” he concluded, before demonstratively tearing a copy of the resolution to pieces.
Sixteen years later, the UN repealed the resolution. A decade after that, when the United States demonstratively skipped the UN’s World Conference against Racism in Durban in September 2001, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said it was “important to send a signal to the freedom-loving nations of the world that we will not stand by if the world tries to describe Zionism as racism. That is as wrong as wrong can be.”
Wrong? Herzog and Fleischer, along with the U.S. presidents and other world leaders who objected to the “Zionism is racism” resolution, would have trouble finding convincing arguments against it today, when the incoming national security minister is Itamar Ben-Gvir, a disciple of Meir Kahane; another slated minister, Orit Strock, says doctors can refuse to provide treatment that violates their religious beliefs “as long as there are enough other doctors who can provide service”; Ben-Gvir’s ideological partner, Bezalel Smotrich, is horrified at the idea of his wife sharing a hospital room with an Arab woman and told Israeli Arabs, “You’re here by mistake, because Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the work in 1948 and throw you out”; and Avi Maoz, a benighted homophobe, knows that “women’s greatest contribution to the country is to marry and raise a wonderful family.”
These racists will not only hold key cabinet portfolios in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, but will shape the country’s character, dictate the boundaries of legitimate debate and shape the coming generations through the education system and the government funding they will control.
Related Ha’aretz articles:
- Ben-Gvir is paving the way for his racist friends
- Kahanism won. Israel is closing in on a right-wing, religious, authoritarian revolution
- When Zionism Becomes a Dirty Word
They are the founding fathers of the new Zionism, which is racist, primitive and sees democratic values as a historical mistake unsuited to a true Jewish state. They are entrenching a cowardly, panicked Zionism that sees gays and lesbians as an existential threat and minorities as superfluous populations.
Their power rests on the falsehood that “the people had its say” in the last election. Consequently, they are wrapping all of Israel’s millions of citizens in their stinking garment.
They have Judaized antisemitic claims and race theory and are using them to build a pure country – one that is avowedly and by law Jewish, Zionist and racist. They are building an ethnic Jewish hierarchy by determining who are the best Jews and who aren’t fit to be Jews at all. They are the priests and Levites of the cult of racism that has sprouted as a parasitic mutation on the West Bank’s terraced hillsides, from which it has climbed and twisted and now holds Zionism and Judaism by the throat.
Who will tell the now-deceased Chaim Herzog the truth? Certainly not his son, current President Isaac Herzog, who made do with the following delicate, polite comment – “I find the racist remarks heard here recently against the LGBT community and, more generally, against various communities and groups very worrying and disturbing.”
The younger Herzog had better hope that if the UN ever votes again on a resolution to define Zionism as a form of racism, he won’t be the speaker asked to respond to it.
JVL’s introduction states “Never mind if he is, shall we say, a bit starry-eyed about what Zionism had already become by 1975; his view now is clear.”
I disagree with the casual dismissal of his 1975 view and I would suggest his view now is clear only because he is part of the liberal Zionists who are terrified of what years of tolerating and excusing oppression and occupation has unleashed in full frontal view for all the world to see. How will even the most efficient PR machine in the world cope with justifying this bunch of criminal thugs? His answer and the dilemma, is encapsulated in his own words in the last sentence of the article.
Can you name a single Zionist on the planet who does not support the ethnic cleansing of 85 percent of the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948 ? They must do so because they know that if there was ever to be a Palestinian Right of Return to Israel a predominately Jewish State of Israel would cease to exist and Zionism would have failed.
Can we agree that Ethnic Cleansing is Racism ? If so I think it follows that Zionism is a racist ideology.
You could of course argue that a “home for the Jewish People” doesn’t require them to be a majority but this is surely fanciful. Just as fanciful as the idea that a two state solution will ever come into being.
It was a lie then and it is a lie now. Except that today it is clear to all except the wilfully blind that Zionism is racist.
The Nakba had already taken place, the refugees had already been refused a right of return, Israeli Palestinians were kept under military rule until 1966. All the ingredients were there but the Labour Zionists were cleverer at hiding it.
Ben Gvir and Smotrich don’t care who knows. Indeed they want people to know that there is no room in a ‘Jewish’ State for non-Jews.
I never thought that it was quite correct simply to say that Zionism is racism. If this were the case it would be impossible to be a Zionist without being a racist but there are people who regard themselves as Zionists, and are generally accepted as such, who are not racists.
What can be said is, first, that Zionism and racism are entirely compatible and, second, that there are many people (including most if not all of the current Israeli government and a fair number of their British supporters) who are both Zionists and racists and for whom, in their own minds, these are not two separate things but two aspects of the same thing.
This is important but at the same time no big deal. The PR needed to sell the ‘new’ Israeli Government would be impossible to construct in the USA and even difficult here in the UK, where the media has gotton away completely with the lazy view that any criticism of Israel is automatically antisemitic. But I expect to see now a move by notables in the pro-Israel community to begin to talk about the ‘New’ Zionism as a perversion of everything the ‘nice’ ‘Old’ Zionists stood for. A Zionism that sees Jews as more important than any other group of people is racist regardless of whether or not it is ‘new’ or ‘old’. Let’s see how the pro-Israel lobby deals with this. How do they criticise the new Government when (for instance) it decides to attack Iran? It won’t be easy to say ‘we support the IDEA of Israel, but not THIS particular Israel’. Of course, the Starmers and Sunaks of this world won’t have ANY problem at all. They have a completely different agenda.
I thought the treatment of the Palestinians couldn’t get much worse but the Government under Netanyahu reminds you of Hitler, who surrounded himself with like minded people and we all know what happened after that. If all the Countries of the World, minus the United States and the United Kingdom, came together they could put in place BDS and cripple its economy.
Thank goodness there is still a newspaper in Israel ‘critical’ of what is happening there, apparently read by 70,000-100,000 people
Colonial Zionism is ethnic cleansing. Say so!
I am prepared to concede that the treatment of Palestinians by the Zionist state may resemble the acts of WWII fascism but for semantic reasons may not be liable to be called fascism. Hover, to call the actions racist seems too tame as the persecution and killing of those deemed inferior, namely the Palestinians, does in some respects look remarkably like fascism to me.
Time to get the IHRA misdefinition exposed as a spurious imposition and a threat to free speech and democracy.