Whilst brother Habib talks about Oil, I wonder who would protect Saudi Arabia, if there was an absolute need of oil and the Saudis refused.
Who would protect Mecca?
The solution for you would be a one-state solution, with two political parties representing the Palsetinians:
The Islamic Dawa Party and HAMAS led by Khaled Mashaal
http://www.google.se/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4ADBR_enSE222SE222&q=Jews+for+Allah
versus Manhigut Yehudit, led by Moshe Feiglin
One State, which the Dawa Party - four wives per man, full time, would overpopulate within one generation.
Shall we leave it there?
>
> From: Momodou Buharry Gassama <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 2007/05/29 ti PM 02:18:24 CEST
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Ämne: FWD: Zionism as a Racist Ideology
>
> Zionism as a Racist Ideology
> Reviving an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide
> By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
>
> During a presentation on the Palestinian-Israeli situation in 2001, an
> American-Israeli acquaintance of ours began with a typical attack on
> the Palestinians. Taking the overused line that "Palestinians never
> miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," he asserted snidely that,
> if only the Palestinians had had any decency and not been so all-fired
> interested in pushing the Jews into the sea in 1948, they would have
> accepted the UN partition of Palestine. Those Palestinians who became
> refugees would instead have remained peacefully in their homes, and the
> state of Palestine could in the year 2001 be celebrating the 53rd
> anniversary of its independence. Everything could have been sweetness
> and light, he contended, but here the Palestinians were, then a year
> into a deadly intifada, still stateless, still hostile, and still
> trying, he claimed, to push the Jews into the sea.
>
> It was a common line but with a new and intriguing twist: what if the
> Palestinians had accepted partition; would they in fact have lived in a
> state at peace since 1948? It was enough to make the audience stop and
> think. But later in the talk, the speaker tripped himself up by
> claiming, in a tone of deep alarm, that Palestinian insistence on the
> right of return for Palestinian refugees displaced when Israel was
> created would spell the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. He did
> not realize the inherent contradiction in his two assertions (until we
> later pointed it out to him, with no little glee). You cannot have it
> both ways, we told him: you cannot claim that, if Palestinians had not
> left the areas that became Israel in 1948, they would now be living
> peaceably, some inside and some alongside a Jewish-majority state, and
> then also claim that, if they returned now, Israel would lose its
> Jewish majority and its essential identity as a Jewish state.*
>
> This exchange, and the massive propaganda effort by and on behalf of
> Israel to demonstrate the threat to Israel's Jewish character posed by
> the Palestinians' right of return, actually reveal the dirty little
> secret of Zionism. In its drive to establish and maintain a state in
> which Jews are always the majority, Zionism absolutely required that
> Palestinians, as non-Jews, be made to leave in 1948 and never be
> allowed to return. The dirty little secret is that this is blatant
> racism.
>
> But didn't we finish with that old Zionism-is-racism issue over a
> decade ago, when in 1991 the UN repealed a 1975 General Assembly
> resolution that defined Zionism as "a form of racism or racial
> discrimination"? Hadn't we Americans always rejected this resolution as
> odious anti-Semitism, and didn't we, under the aegis of the first Bush
> administration, finally prevail on the rest of the world community to
> agree that it was not only inaccurate but downright evil to label
> Zionism as racist? Why bring it up again, now?
>
> The UN General Assembly based its 1975 anti-Zionist resolution on the
> UN's own definition of racial discrimination, adopted in 1965.
> According to the International Convention on the Elimination of All
> Forms of Racial Discrimination, racial discrimination is "any
> distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race,
> colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or
> effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or
> exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms
> in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of
> public life." As a definition of racism and racial discrimination, this
> statement is unassailable and, if one is honest about what Zionism is
> and what it signifies, the statement is an accurate definition of
> Zionism. But in 1975, in the political atmosphere prevailing at the
> time, putting forth such a definition was utterly self-defeating.
>
> So would a formal resolution be in today's political atmosphere. But
> enough has changed over the last decade or more that talk about Zionism
> as a system that either is inherently racist or at least fosters racism
> is increasingly possible and increasingly necessary. Despite the
> vehement knee-jerk opposition to any such discussion throughout the
> United States, serious scholars elsewhere and serious Israelis have
> begun increasingly to examine Zionism critically, and there is much
> greater receptivity to the notion that no real peace will be forged in
> Palestine-Israel unless the bases of Zionism are examined and in some
> way altered. It is for this reason that honestly labeling Zionism as a
> racist political philosophy is so necessary: unless the world's, and
> particularly the United States', blind support for Israel as an
> exclusivist Jewish state is undermined, unless the blind acceptance of
> Zionism as a noble ideology is undermined, and unless it is recognized
> that Israel's drive to maintain dominion over the occupied Palestinian
> territories is motivated by an exclusivist, racist ideology, no one
> will ever gain the political strength or the political will necessary
> to force Israel to relinquish territory and permit establishment of a
> truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state in a part of
> Palestine.
>
> Recognizing Zionism's Racism
>
> A racist ideology need not always manifest itself as such, and, if the
> circumstances are right, it need not always actually practice racism to
> maintain itself. For decades after its creation, the circumstances were
> right for Israel. If one forgot, as most people did, the fact that
> 750,000 Palestinians (non-Jews) had left their homeland under duress,
> thus making room for a Jewish-majority state, everyone could accept
> Israel as a genuine democracy, even to a certain extent for that small
> minority of Palestinians who had remained after 1948. That minority was
> not large enough to threaten Israel's Jewish majority; it faced
> considerable discrimination, but because Israeli Arabs could vote, this
> discrimination was viewed not as institutional, state-mandated racism
> but as the kind of discrimination, deplorable but not
> institutionalized, faced by blacks in the United States. The occupation
> of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, with their two million
> (soon to become more than three million) Palestinian inhabitants, was
> seen to be temporary, its end awaiting only the Arabs' readiness to
> accept Israel's existence.
>
> In these "right" circumstances, the issue of racism rarely arose, and
> the UN's labeling of Israel's fundamental ideology as racist came
> across to Americans and most westerners as nasty and vindictive.
> Outside the third world, Israel had come to be regarded as the
> perpetual innocent, not aggressive, certainly not racist, and desirous
> of nothing more than a peace agreement that would allow it to mind its
> own business inside its original borders in a democratic state. By the
> time the Zionism-is-racism resolution was rescinded in 1991, even the
> PLO had officially recognized Israel's right to exist in peace inside
> its 1967 borders, with its Jewish majority uncontested. In fact, this
> very acceptance of Israel by its principal adversary played no small
> part in facilitating the U.S. effort to garner support for overturning
> the resolution. (The fact of U.S. global dominance in the wake of the
> first Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union earlier in 1991,
> and the atmosphere of optimism about prospects for peace created by the
> Madrid peace conference in October also played a significant part in
> winning over a majority of the UN when the Zionism resolution was
> brought to a vote of the General Assembly in December.)
>
> Realities are very different today, and a recognition of Zionism's
> racist bases, as well as an understanding of the racist policies being
> played out in the occupied territories are essential if there is to be
> any hope at all of achieving a peaceful, just, and stable resolution of
> the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The egg of Palestine has been
> permanently scrambled, and it is now increasingly the case that, as
> Zionism is recognized as the driving force in the occupied territories
> as well as inside Israel proper, pre-1967 Israel can no longer be
> considered in isolation. It can no longer be allowed simply to go its
> own way as a Jewish-majority state, a state in which the circumstances
> are "right" for ignoring Zionism's fundamental racism.
>
> As Israel increasingly inserts itself into the occupied territories,
> and as Israeli settlers, Israeli settlements, and Israeli-only roads
> proliferate and a state infrastructure benefiting only Jews takes over
> more and more territory, it becomes no longer possible to ignore the
> racist underpinnings of the Zionist ideology that directs this
> enterprise. It is no longer possible today to wink at the permanence of
> Zionism's thrust beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders. It is now clear that
> Israel's control over the occupied territories is, and has all along
> been intended to be, a drive to assert exclusive Jewish control, taming
> the Palestinians into submission and squeezing them into ever smaller,
> more disconnected segments of land or, failing that, forcing them to
> leave Palestine altogether. It is totally obvious to anyone who spends
> time on the ground in Palestine-Israel that the animating force behind
> the policies of the present and all past Israeli governments in Israel
> and in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem has always been
> a determination to assure the predominance of Jews over Palestinians.
> Such policies can only be described as racist, and we should stop
> trying any longer to avoid the word.
>
> When you are on the ground in Palestine, you can see Zionism
> physically imprinted on the landscape. Not only can you see that there
> are settlements, built on land confiscated from Palestinians, where
> Palestinians may not live. Not only can you see roads in the occupied
> territories, again built on land taken from Palestinians, where
> Palestinians may not drive. Not only can you observe that water in the
> occupied territories is allocated, by Israeli governmental authorities,
> so inequitably that Israeli settlers are allocated five times the
> amount per capita as are Palestinians and, in periods of drought,
> Palestinians stand in line for drinking water while Israeli settlements
> enjoy lush gardens and swimming pools. Not only can you stand and watch
> as Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian olive groves and other
> agricultural land, destroy Palestinian wells, and demolish Palestinian
> homes to make way for the separation wall that Israel is constructing
> across the length and breadth of the West Bank. The wall fences off
> Palestinians from Israelis, supposedly to provide greater security for
> Israelis but in fact in order to cage Palestinians, to define a border
> for Israel that will exclude a maximum number of Palestinians.
>
> But, if this is not enough to demonstrate the inherent racism of
> Israel's occupation, you can also drive through Palestinian towns and
> Palestinian neighborhoods in and near Jerusalem and see what is perhaps
> the most cruelly racist policy in Zionism's arsenal: house demolitions,
> the preeminent symbol of Zionism's drive to maintain Jewish
> predominance. Virtually every street has a house or houses reduced to
> rubble, one floor pancaked onto another or simply a pile of broken
> concrete bulldozed into an incoherent heap. Jeff Halper, founder and
> head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House
> Demolitions (ICAHD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation,
> has observed that Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have
> all conveyed what he calls "The Message" to Palestinians. The Message,
> Halper says, is "Submit. Only when you abandon your dreams for an
> independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the
> Land of Israel, will we relent [i.e., stop attacking Palestinians]."
> The deeper meaning of The Message, as carried by the bulldozers so
> ubiquitous in targeted Palestinian neighborhoods today, is that "You
> [Palestinians] do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in
> 1948and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."
>
> In the end, Halper says, the advance of Zionism has been a process of
> displacement, and house demolitions have been "at the center of the
> Israeli struggle against the Palestinians" since 1948. Halper
> enumerates a steady history of destruction: in the first six years of
> Israel's existence, it systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages
> inside Israel, fully 85 percent of the villages existing before 1948;
> since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 11,000
> Palestinian homes. More homes are now being demolished in the path of
> Israel's "separation wall." It is estimated that more than 4,000 homes
> have been destroyed in the last two years alone.
>
> The vast majority of these house demolitions, 95 percent, have nothing
> whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically
> to displace non-Jews and assure the advance of Zionism. In Jerusalem,
> from the beginning of the occupation of the eastern sector of the city
> in 1967, Israeli authorities have designed zoning plans specifically to
> prevent the growth of the Palestinian population. Maintaining the
> "Jewish character" of the city at the level existing in 1967 (71
> percent Jewish, 29 percent Palestinian) required that Israel draw
> zoning boundaries to prevent Palestinian expansion beyond existing
> neighborhoods, expropriate Palestinian-owned lands, confiscate the
> Jerusalem residency permits of any Palestinian who cannot prove that
> Jerusalem is his "center of life," limit city services to Palestinian
> areas, limit development in Palestinian neighborhoods, refuse to issue
> residential building permits to Palestinians, and demolish Palestinian
> homes that are built without permits. None of these strictures is
> imposed on Jews. According to ICAHD, the housing shortage in
> Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem is approximately 25,000 units,
> and 2,000 demolition orders are pending.
>
> Halper has written that the human suffering involved in the
> destruction of a family home is incalculable. A home "is one's symbolic
> center, the site of one's most intimate personal life and an expression
> of one's status. It is a refuge, it is the physical representation of
> the family,maintainingcontinuity on one's ancestral land." Land
> expropriation is "an attack on one's very being and identity." Zionist
> governments, past and present, have understood this well, although not
> with the compassion or empathy that Halper conveys, and this attack on
> the "very being and identity" of non-Jews has been precisely the
> animating force behind Zionism.
>
> Zionism's racism has, of course, been fundamental to Israel itself
> since its establishment in 1948. The Israeli government pursues
> policies against its own Bedouin minority very similar to its actions
> in the occupied territories. The Bedouin population has been forcibly
> relocated and squeezed into small areas in the Negev, again with the
> intent of forcing an exodus, and half of the 140,000 Bedouin in the
> Negev live in villages that the Israeli government does not recognize
> and does not provide services for. Every Bedouin home in an
> unrecognized village is slated for demolition; all homes, and the very
> presence of Bedouin in them, are officially illegal.
>
> The problem of the Bedouins' unrecognized villages is only the partial
> evidence of a racist policy that has prevailed since Israel's
> foundation. After Zionist/Israeli leaders assured that the non-Jews (i.
> e., the Palestinians) making up the majority of Palestine's population
> (a two-thirds majority at the time) departed the scene in 1948, Israeli
> governments institutionalized favoritism toward Jews by law. As a
> Zionist state, Israel has always identified itself as the state of the
> Jews: as a state not of its Jewish and Palestinian citizens, but of all
> Jews everywhere in the world. The institutions of state guarantee the
> rights of and provide benefits for Jews. The Law of Return gives
> automatic citizenship to Jews from anywhere in the world, but to no
> other people. Some 92 percent of the land of Israel is state land, held
> by the Jewish National Fund "in trust" for the Jewish people;
> Palestinians may not purchase this land, even though most of it was
> Palestinian land before 1948, and in most instances they may not even
> lease the land. Both the Jewish National Fund, which deals with land
> acquisition and development, and the Jewish Agency, which deals
> primarily with Jewish immigration and immigrant absorption, have
> existed since before the state's establishment and now perform their
> duties specifically for Jews under an official mandate from the Israeli
> government.
>
> Creating Enemies
>
> Although few dare to give the reality of house demolitions and state
> institutions favoring Jews the label of racism, the phenomenon this
> reality describes is unmistakably racist. There is no other term for a
> process by which one people can achieve the essence of its political
> philosophy only by suppressing another people, by which one people
> guarantees its perpetual numerical superiority and its overwhelming
> predominance over another people through a deliberate process of
> repression and dispossession of those people. From the beginning,
> Zionism has been based on the supremacy of the Jewish people, whether
> this predominance was to be exercised in a full-fledged state or in
> some other kind of political entity, and Zionism could never have
> survived or certainly thrived in Palestine without ridding that land of
> most of its native population. The early Zionists themselves knew this
> (as did the Palestinians), even if naïve Americans have never quite
> gotten it. Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism, talked from the beginning
> of "spiriting" the native Palestinians out and across the border;
> discussion of "transfer" was common among the Zionist leadership in
> Palestine in the 1930s; talk of transfer is common today.
>
> There has been a logical progression to the development of Zionism,
> leading inevitably to general acceptance of the sense that, because
> Jewish needs are paramount, Jews themselves are paramount. Zionism grew
> out of the sense that Jews needed a refuge from persecution, which led
> in turn to the belief that the refuge could be truly secure only if
> Jews guaranteed their own safety, which meant that the refuge must be
> exclusively or at least overwhelmingly Jewish, which meant in turn that
> Jews and their demands were superior, taking precedence over any other
> interests within that refuge. The mindset that in U.S. public discourse
> tends to view the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from a perspective
> almost exclusively focused on Israel arises out of this progression of
> Zionist thinking. By the very nature of a mindset, virtually no one
> examines the assumptions on which the Zionist mindset is based, and few
> recognize the racist base on which it rests.
>
> Israeli governments through the decades have never been so innocent.
> Many officials in the current right-wing government are blatantly
> racist. Israel's outspoken education minister, Limor Livnat, spelled
> out the extreme right-wing defense of Zionism a year ago, when the
> government proposed to legalize the right of Jewish communities in
> Israel to exclude non-Jews. Livnat justified Israel's racism as a
> matter of Jewish self-preservation. "We're involved here," she said in
> a radio interview, "in a struggle for the existence of the State of
> Israel as the state of the Jews, as opposed tothose who want to force
> us to be a state of all its citizens." Israel is not "just another
> state like all the other states," she protested. "We are not just a
> state of all its citizens."
>
> Livnat cautioned that Israel must be very watchful lest it find in
> another few years that the Galilee and the Negev, two areas inside
> Israel with large Arab populations, are "filled with Arab communities."
> To emphasize the point, she reiterated that Israel's "special purpose
> is our character as a Jewish state, our desire to preserve a Jewish
> community and Jewish majority hereso that it does not become a state of
> all its citizens." Livnat was speaking of Jewish self-preservation not
> in terms of saving the Jews or Israel from a territorial threat of
> military invasion by a marauding neighbor state, but in terms of
> preserving Jews from the mere existence of another people within
> spitting distance.
>
> Most Zionists of a more moderate stripe might shudder at the
> explicitness of Livnat's message and deny that Zionism is really like
> this. But in fact this properly defines the racism that necessarily
> underlies Zionism. Most centrist and leftist Zionists deny the reality
> of Zionism's racism by trying to portray Zionism as a democratic system
> and manufacturing enemies in order to be able to sustain the inherent
> contradiction and hide or excuse the racism behind Zionism's drive for
> predominance.
>
> Indeed, the most pernicious aspect of a political philosophy like
> Zionism that masquerades as democratic is that it requires an enemy in
> order to survive and, where an enemy does not already exist, it
> requires that one be created. In order to justify racist repression and
> dispossession, particularly in a system purporting to be democratic,
> those being repressed and displaced must be portrayed as murderous and
> predatory. And in order to keep its own population in line, to prevent
> a humane people from objecting to their own government's repressive
> policies, it requires that fear be instilled in the population: fear of
> "the other," fear of the terrorist, fear of the Jew-hater. The Jews of
> Israel must always be made to believe that they are the preyed-upon.
> This justifies having forced these enemies to leave, it justifies
> discriminating against those who remained, it justifies denying
> democratic rights to those who later came under Israel's control in the
> occupied territories.
>
> Needing an enemy has meant that Zionism has from the beginning had to
> create myths about Palestinians, painting Palestinians and all Arabs as
> immutably hostile and intransigent. Thus the myth that in 1948
> Palestinians left Palestine so that Arab armies could throw the Jews
> into the sea; thus the continuing myth that Palestinians remain
> determined to destroy Israel. Needing an enemy means that Zionism, as
> one veteran Israeli peace activist recently put it, has removed the
> Palestinians from history. Thus the myths that there is no such thing
> as a Palestinian, or that Palestinians all immigrated in modern times
> from other Arab countries, or that Jordan is Palestine and Palestinians
> should find their state there.
>
> Needing an enemy means that Zionism has had to make its negotiating
> partner into a terrorist. It means that, for its own preservation,
> Zionism has had to devise a need to ignore its partner/enemy or expel
> him or assassinate him. It means that Zionism has had to reject any
> conciliatory effort by the Palestinians and portray them as "never
> missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity" to make peace. This
> includes in particular rejecting that most conciliatory gesture, the
> PLO's decision in 1988 to recognize Israel's existence, relinquish
> Palestinian claims to the three-quarters of Palestine lying inside
> Israel's pre-1967 borders, and even recognize Israel's "right" to exist
> there.
>
> Needing an enemy means, ultimately, that Zionism had to create the
> myth of the "generous offer" at the Camp David summit in July 2000. It
> was Zionist racism that painted the Palestinians as hopelessly
> intransigent for refusing Israel's supposedly generous offer, actually
> an impossible offer that would have maintained Zionism's hold on the
> occupied territories and left the Palestinians with a disconnected,
> indefensible, non-viable state. Then, when the intifada erupted (after
> Palestinian demonstrators threw stones at Israeli police and the police
> responded by shooting several demonstrators to death), it was Zionist
> racism speaking when Israel put out the line that it was under siege
> and in a battle for its very survival with Palestinians intent on
> destroying it. When a few months later the issue of Palestinian
> refugees and their "right of return" arose publicly, it was Zionist
> racism speaking when Israel and its defenders, ignoring the several
> ways in which Palestinian negotiators signaled their readiness to
> compromise this demand, propagated the view that this too was intended
> as a way to destroy Israel, by flooding it with non-Jews and destroying
> its Jewish character.
>
> The Zionist Dilemma
>
> The supposed threat from "the other" is the eternal refuge of the
> majority of Israelis and Israeli supporters in the United States. The
> common line is that "We Israelis and friends of Israel long for peace,
> we support Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, we have
> always supported giving the Palestinians self-government. But 'they'
> hate us, they want to destroy Israel. Wasn't this obvious when Arafat
> turned his back on Israel's generous offer? Wasn't this obvious when
> Arafat started the intifada? Wasn't this obvious when Arafat demanded
> that the Palestinians be given the right of return, which would destroy
> Israel as a Jewish state? We have already made concession after
> concession. How can we give them any further concessions when they
> would only fight for more and more until Israel is gone?" This line
> relieves Israel of any responsibility to make concessions or move
> toward serious negotiations; it relieves Israelis of any need to treat
> Palestinians as equals; it relieves Israelis and their defenders of any
> need to think; it justifies racism, while calling it something else.
>
> Increasing numbers of Israelis themselves (some of whom have long been
> non-Zionists, some of whom are only now beginning to see the problem
> with Zionism) are recognizing the inherent racism of their nation's
> raison d'etre. During the years of the peace process, and indeed for
> the last decade and a half since the PLO formally recognized Israel's
> existence, the Israeli left could ignore the problems of Zionism while
> pursuing efforts to promote the establishment of an independent
> Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that would coexist with
> Israel. Zionism continued to be more or less a non-issue: Israel could
> organize itself in any way it chose inside its own borders, and the
> Palestinian state could fulfill Palestinian national aspirations inside
> its new borders.
>
> Few of those nettlesome issues surrounding Zionism, such as how much
> democracy Zionism can allow to non-Jews without destroying its reason
> for being, would arise in a two-state situation. The issue of Zionism's
> responsibility for the Palestinians' dispossession could also be put
> aside. As Haim Hanegbi, a non-Zionist Israeli who recently went back to
> the fold of single-state binationalism (and who is a long-time cohort
> of Uri Avnery in the Gush Shalom movement), said in a recent interview
> with the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, the promise of mutual recognition
> offered by the Oslo peace process mesmerized him and others in the
> peace movement and so "in the mid-1990s I had second thoughts about my
> traditional [binational] approach. I didn't think it was my task to go
> to Ramallah and present the Palestinians with the list of Zionist
> wrongs and tell them not to forget what our fathers did to their
> fathers." Nor were the Palestinians themselves reminding Zionists of
> these wrongs at the time.
>
> As new wrongs in the occupied territories increasingly recall old
> wrongs from half a century ago, however, and as Zionism finds that it
> cannot cope with end-of-conflict demands like the Palestinians'
> insistence that Israel accept their right of return by acknowledging
> its role in their dispossession, more and more Israelis are coming to
> accept the reality that Zionism can never escape its past. It is
> becoming increasingly clear to many Israelis that Israel has absorbed
> so much of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem into itself that the
> Jewish and the Palestinian peoples can never be separated fairly. The
> separation wall, says Hanegbi, "is the great despairing solution of the
> Jewish-Zionist society. It is the last desperate act of those who
> cannot confront the Palestinian issue. Of those who are compelled to
> push the Palestinian issue out of their lives and out of their
> consciousness." For Hanegbi, born in Palestine before 1948,
> Palestinians "were always part of my landscape," and without them,
> "this is a barren country, a disabled country."
>
> Old-line Zionist Meron Benvenisti, who has also moved to support for
> binationalism, used almost identical metaphors in a Ha'aretz interview
> run alongside Hanegbi's. Also Palestine-born and a contemporary of
> Hanegbi, Benvenisti believes "this is a country in which there were
> always Arabs. This is a country in which the Arabs are the landscape,
> the natives.I don't see myself living here without them. In my eyes,
> without Arabs this is a barren land."
>
> Both men discuss the evolution of their thinking over the decades, and
> both describe a period in which, after the triumph of Zionism, they
> unthinkingly accepted its dispossession of the Palestinians. Each man
> describes the Palestinians simply disappearing when he was an
> adolescent ("They just sort of evaporated," says Hanegbi), and
> Benvenisti recalls a long period in which the Palestinian "tragedy
> simply did not penetrate my consciousness." But both speak in very un-
> Zionist terms of equality. Benvenisti touches on the crux of the
> Zionist dilemma. "This is where I am different from my friends in the
> left," he says, "because I am truly a native son of immigrants, who is
> drawn to the Arab culture and the Arabic language because it is here.
> It is the land.Whereas the right, certainly, but the left too hates
> Arabs. The Arabs bother them; they complicate things. The subject
> generates moral questions and that generates cultural unease."
>
> Hanegbi goes farther. "I am not a psychologist," he says, "but I think
> that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns
> himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's
> impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to
> live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the
> settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the
> insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to
> conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the
> indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds."
>
> While some thoughtful Israelis like these men struggle with
> philosophical questions of existence and identity and the collective
> Jewish conscience, few American defenders of Israel seem troubled by
> such deep issues. Racism is often banal. Most of those who practice it,
> and most of those who support Israel as a Zionist state, would be
> horrified to be accused of racism, because their racist practices have
> become commonplace. They do not even think about what they do. We
> recently encountered a typical American supporter of Israel who would
> have argued vigorously if we had accused her of racism. During a
> presentation we were giving to a class, this (non-Jewish) woman rose to
> ask a question that went roughly like this: "I want to ask about the
> failure of the other Arabs to take care of the Palestinians. I must say
> I sympathize with Israel because Israel simply wants to have a secure
> state, but the other Arabs have refused to take the Palestinians in,
> and so they sit in camps and their hostility toward Israel just
> festers."
>
> This is an extremely common American, and Israeli, perception, the
> idea being that if the Arab states would only absorb the Palestinians
> so that they became Lebanese or Syrians or Jordanians, they would
> forget about being Palestinian, forget that Israel had displaced and
> dispossessed them, and forget about "wanting to destroy Israel." Israel
> would then be able simply to go about its own business and live in
> peace, as it so desperately wants to do. This woman's assumption was
> that it is acceptable for Israel to have established itself as a Jewish
> state at the expense of (i.e., after the ethnic cleansing of) the
> land's non-Jewish inhabitants, that any Palestinian objection to this
> reality is illegitimate, and that all subsequent animosity toward
> Israel is ultimately the fault of neighboring Arab states who failed to
> smother the Palestinians' resistance by anesthetizing them to their
> plight and erasing their identity and their collective memory of
> Palestine.
>
> When later in the class the subject arose of Israel ending the
> occupation, this same woman spoke up to object that, if Israel did give
> up control over the West Bank and Gaza, it would be economically
> disadvantaged, at least in the agricultural sector. "Wouldn't this
> leave Israel as just a desert?" she wondered. Apart from the fact that
> the answer is a clear "no" (Israel's agricultural capability inside its
> 1967 borders is quite high, and most of Israel is not desert), the
> woman's question was again based on the automatic assumption that
> Israel's interests take precedence over those of anyone else and that,
> in order to enhance its own agricultural economy (or, presumably, for
> any other perceived gain), Israel has the right to conquer and take
> permanent possession of another people's land.
>
> The notion that the Jewish/Zionist state of Israel has a greater right
> to possess the land, or a greater right to security, or a greater right
> to a thriving economy, than the people who are native to that land is
> extremely racist, but this woman would probably object strenuously to
> having it pointed out that this is a Jewish supremacist viewpoint
> identical to past justifications for white South Africa's apartheid
> regime and to the rationale for all European colonial (racist) systems
> that exploited the human and natural resources of Africa, the Middle
> East, and Asia over the centuries for the sole benefit of the
> colonizers. Racism must necessarily be blind to its own immorality; the
> burden of conscience is otherwise too great. This is the banality of
> evil.
>
> (Unconsciously, of course, many Americans also seem to believe that
> the shameful policies of the U.S. government toward Native Americans
> somehow make it acceptable for the government of Israel to pursue
> equally shameful policies toward the Palestinians. The U.S. needs to
> face its racist policies head on as much as it needs to confront the
> racism of its foremost partner, Israel.)
>
> This woman's view is so very typical, something you hear constantly in
> casual conversation and casual encounters at social occasions, that it
> hardly seems significant. But this very banality is precisely the evil
> of it; what is evil is the very fact that it is "hardly significant"
> that Zionism by its nature is racist and that this reality goes
> unnoticed by decent people who count themselves defenders of Israel.
> The universal acceptability of a system that is at heart racist but
> proclaims itself to be benign, even noble, and the license this
> acceptability gives Israel to oppress another people, are striking
> testimony to the selectivity of the human conscience and its general
> disinterest in human questions of justice and human rights except when
> these are politically useful.
>
> Countering the Counter-Arguments
>
> To put some perspective on this issue, a few clarifying questions must
> be addressed. Many opponents of the occupation would argue that,
> although Israel's policies in the occupied territories are racist in
> practice, they are an abuse of Zionism and that racism is not inherent
> in it. This seems to be the position of several prominent commentators
> who have recently denounced Israel severely for what it does in the
> West Bank and Gaza but fail to recognize the racism in what Israel did
> upon its establishment in 1948. In a recent bitter denunciation of
> Zionist policies today, Avraham Burg, a former Knesset speaker,
> lamented that Zionism had become corrupted by ruling as an occupier
> over another people, and he longed for the days of Israel's youth when
> "our national destiny" was "as a light unto the nations and a society
> of peace, justice and equality." These are nice words, and it is
> heartening to hear credible mainstream Israelis so clearly denouncing
> the occupation, but Burg's assumption that before the occupation
> Zionism followed "a just path" and always had "an ethical leadership"
> ignores the unjust and unethical policy of ethnic cleansing that
> allowed Israel to become a so-called Jewish democracy in the first
> place.
>
> Acknowledging the racist underpinnings of an ideology so long held up
> as the embodiment of justice and ethics appears to be impossible for
> many of the most intellectual of Israelis and Israeli defenders. Many
> who strongly oppose Israel's policies in the occupied territories
> still, despite their opposition, go through considerable contortions to
> "prove" that Israel itself is not racist. Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor
> of the Jewish magazine Tikkun and a long-time opponent of the
> occupation, rejects the notion that Zionism is racist on the narrow
> grounds that Jewishness is only a religious identity and that Israel
> welcomes Jews of all races and ethnicities and therefore cannot be
> called racist. But this confuses the point. Preference toward a
> particular religion, which is the only aspect of racism that Lerner has
> addressed and which he acknowledges occurs in Israel, is no more
> acceptable than preference on ethnic grounds.
>
> But most important, racism has to do primarily with those
> discriminated against, not with those who do the discriminating. Using
> Lerner's reasoning, apartheid South Africa might also not be considered
> racist because it welcomed whites of all ethnicities. But its inherent
> evil lay in the fact that its very openness to whites discriminated
> against blacks. Discrimination against any people on the basis of
> "race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin" is the major
> characteristic of racism as the UN defines it. Discrimination against
> Palestinians and other non-Jews, simply because they are not Jews, is
> the basis on which Israel constitutes itself. Lerner seems to believe
> that, because the Palestinian citizens of Israel have the vote and are
> represented in the Knesset, there is no racial or ethnic discrimination
> in Israel. But, apart from skipping over the institutional racism that
> keeps Palestinian Israelis in perpetual second-class citizenship, this
> argument ignores the more essential reality that Israel reached its
> present ethnic balance, the point at which it could comfortably allow
> Palestinians to vote without endangering its Jewish character, only
> because in 1948 three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forced to
> leave what became the Jewish state of Israel.
>
> More questions need to be addressed. Is every Israeli or every Jew a
> racist? Most assuredly not, as the examples of Jeff Halper, Haim
> Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti, and many others like them strikingly
> illustrate. Is every Zionist a racist? Probably not, if one accepts
> ignorance as an exonerating factor. No doubt the vast majority of
> Israelis, most very good-hearted people, are not consciously racist but
> "go along" unquestioningly, having been born into or moved to an
> apparently democratic state and never examined the issue closely, and
> having bought into the line fed them by every Israeli government from
> the beginning, that Palestinians and other Arabs are enemies and that
> whatever actions Israel takes against Palestinians are necessary to
> guarantee the personal security of Israelis.
>
> Is it anti-Semitic to say that Zionism is a racist system? Certainly
> not. Political criticism is not ethnic or religious hatred. Stating a
> reality about a government's political system or its political conduct
> says nothing about the qualities of its citizens or its friends. Racism
> is not a part of the genetic makeup of Jews, any more than it was a
> part of the genetic makeup of Germans when Hitler ran a racist regime.
> Nor do Zionism's claim to speak for all Jews everywhere and Israel's
> claim to be the state of all Jews everywhere make all Jews Zionists.
> Zionism did not ask for or receive the consent of universal Jewry to
> speak in its name; therefore labeling Zionism as racist does not label
> all Jews and cannot be called anti-Semitic.
>
> Why It Matters
>
> Are there other racist systems, and are there governing systems and
> political philosophies, racist or not, that are worse than Zionism? Of
> course, but this fact does not relieve Zionism of culpability. (Racism
> obviously exists in the United States and in times past was pervasive
> throughout the country, but, unlike Israel, the U.S. is not a racist
> governing system, based on racist foundations and depending for its
> raison d'etre on a racist philosophy.) Many defenders of Israel
> (Michael Lerner and columnist Thomas Friedman come to mind) contend
> that when Israel is "singled out" for criticism not also leveled at
> oppressive regimes elsewhere, the attackers are exhibiting a special
> hatred for Jews. Anyone who does not also criticize Saddam Hussein or
> Kim Jong Il or Bashar al-Assad for atrocities far greater than
> Israel's, they charge, is showing that he is less concerned to uphold
> absolute values than to tear down Israel because it is Jewish. But this
> charge ignores several factors that demand criticism of Zionist racism.
> First, because the U.S. government supports Zionism and its racist
> policy on a continuing basis and props up Zionism's military machine
> with massive amounts of military aid, it is wholly appropriate for
> Americans (indeed, it is incumbent on Americans) to call greater
> attention to Zionism's racism than, for instance, to North Korea's
> appalling cruelties. The United States does not assist in North Korea's
> atrocities, but it does underwrite Zionism's brutality.
>
> There is also a strong moral reason for denouncing Zionism as racist.
> Zionism advertises itself, and actually congratulates itself, as a
> uniquely moral system that stands as a "light unto the nations,"
> putting itself forward as in a real sense the very embodiment of the
> values Americans hold dear. Many Zionist friends of Israel would have
> us believe that Zionism is us, and in many ways it is: most Americans,
> seeing Israelis as "like us," have grown up with the notion that Israel
> is a noble enterprise and that the ideology that spawned it is of the
> highest moral order. Substantial numbers of Americans, non-Jews as well
> as Jews, feel an emotional and psychological bond with Israel and
> Zionism that goes far beyond the ties to any other foreign ally. One
> scholar, describing the U.S.-Israeli tie, refers to Israel as part of
> the "being" of the United States. Precisely because of the intimacy of
> the relationship, it is imperative that Zionism's hypocrisy be exposed,
> that Americans not give aid and comfort to, or even remain associated
> with, a morally repugnant system that uses racism to exalt one people
> over all others while masquerading as something better than it is. The
> United States can remain supportive of Israel as a nation without any
> longer associating itself with Israel's racism.
>
> Finally, there are critical practical reasons for acknowledging
> Zionism's racism and enunciating a U.S. policy clearly opposed to
> racism everywhere and to the repressive Israeli policies that arise
> from Zionist racism. Now more than at any time since the United States
> positioned itself as an enthusiastic supporter of Zionism, U.S.
> endorsement, and indeed facilitation, of Israel's racist policies put
> this country at great risk for terrorism on a massive scale. Terrorism
> arises, not as President Bush would have us believe from "hatred of our
> liberties," but from hatred of our oppressive, killing policies
> throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, and in a major way from our
> support for Israel's severe oppression of the Palestinians. Terrorism
> is never acceptable, but it is explainable, and it is usually
> avoidable. Supporting the oppression of Palestinians that arises from
> Israel's racism only encourages terrorism.
>
> It is time to begin openly expressing revulsion at the racism against
> Palestinians that the United States has been supporting for decades. It
> is time to sound an alarm about the near irreversibility of Israel's
> absorption of the occupied territories into Israel, about the fact that
> this arises from a fundamentally racist ideology, about the fact that
> this racism is leading to the ethnicide of an entire nation of people,
> and about the fact that it is very likely to produce horrific terrorist
> retaliation against the U.S. because of its unquestioning support. Many
> who are intimately familiar with the situation on the ground are
> already sounding an alarm, usually without using the word racism but
> using other inflammatory terms. Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen
> recently observed that "Israel's atrocities have now intensified to an
> extent unimaginable in previous decades." Land confiscation, curfew,
> the "gradual pushing of Palestinians from areas designated for Jews"
> have accompanied the occupation all along, he wrote, but the level of
> oppression now "is quite another story.[This is] an eliminationist
> policy on the verge of genocide."
>
> The Foundation for Middle East Peace, a Washington-based institution
> that has tracked Israeli settlement-building for decades, came to much
> the same conclusion, although using less attention-getting language, in
> its most recent bimonthly newsletter. Israel, it wrote, is "undertaking
> massive, unprecedented efforts beyond the construction of new
> settlement housing, which proceeds apace, to put the question of its
> control of these areas beyond the reach of diplomacy." Israel's
> actions, particularly the "relentless" increase in territorial control,
> the foundation concluded, have "compromised not only the prospect for
> genuine Palestinian independence but also, in ways not seen in Israel's
> 36-year occupation, the very sustainability of everyday Palestinian
> life."
>
> It signals a remarkable change when Israeli commentators and normally
> staid foundations begin using terms like "unprecedented," "unimaginable
> in previous decades," "in ways not seen in Israel's 36-year
> occupation," even words like "eliminationist" and "genocide." While the
> Bush administration, every Democratic presidential candidate
> (including, to some degree, even the most progressive), Congress, and
> the mainstream U.S. media blithely ignore the extent of the destruction
> in Palestine, more and more voices outside the United States and
> outside the mainstream in the U.S. are finally coming to recognize that
> Israel is squeezing the life out of the Palestinian nation. Those who
> see this reality should begin to expose not only the reality but the
> racism that is at its root.
>
> Some very thoughtful Israelis, including Haim Hanegbi, Meron
> Benvenisti, and activists like Jeff Halper, have come to the conclusion
> that Israel has absorbed so much of the occupied territories that a
> separate, truly independent Palestinian state can never be established
> in the West Bank and Gaza. They now regard a binational solution as the
> only way. In theory, this would mean an end to Zionism (and Zionist
> racism) by allowing the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples to form a
> single secular state in all of Palestine in which they live together in
> equality and democracy, in which neither people is superior, in which
> neither people identifies itself by its nationality or its religion but
> rather simply by its citizenship. Impossible? Idealized? Pie-in-the-
> sky? Probably so but maybe not.
>
> Other Israeli and Jewish activists and thinkers, such as Israel's Uri
> Avnery and CounterPunch contributor Michael Neumann, have cogently
> challenged the wisdom and the realism of trying to pursue binationalism
> at the present time. But it is striking that their arguments center on
> what will best assure a decent outcome for Palestinians. In fact, what
> is most heartening about the newly emerging debate over the one- versus
> the two-state solution is the fact that intelligent, compassionate
> people have at long last been able to move beyond addressing Jewish
> victimhood and how best to assure a future for Jews, to begin debating
> how best to assure a future for both the Palestinian and the Jewish
> people. Progressives in the U.S., both supporters and opponents of
> present U.S. policies toward Israel, should encourage similar debate in
> this country. If this requires loudly attacking AIPAC and its
> intemperate charges of anti-Semitism, so be it.
>
> We recently had occasion to raise the notion of Israeli racism, using
> the actual hated word, at a gathering of about 25 or 30 (mostly)
> progressive (mostly) Jews, and came away with two conclusions: 1) it is
> a hard concept to bring people to face, but 2) we were not run out of
> the room and, after the initial shock of hearing the word racist used
> in connection with Zionism, most people in the room, with only a few
> exceptions, took the idea aboard. Many specifically thanked us for what
> we had said. One man, raised as a Jew and now a Muslim, came up to us
> afterward to say that he thinks Zionism is nationalist rather than
> racist (to which we argued that nationalism was the motivation but
> racism is the resulting reality), but he acknowledged, with apparent
> approbation, that referring to racism had a certain shock effect. Shock
> effect is precisely what we wanted. The United States' complacent
> support for everything Israel does will not be altered without shock.
>
> When a powerful state kills hundreds of civilians from another ethnic
> group; confiscates their land; builds vast housing complexes on that
> land for the exclusive use of its own nationals; builds roads on that
> land for the exclusive use of its own nationals; prevents expansion of
> the other people's neighborhoods and towns; demolishes on a massive
> scale houses belonging to the other people, in order either to prevent
> that people's population growth, to induce them "voluntarily" to leave
> their land altogether, or to provide "security" for its own nationals;
> imprisons the other people in their own land behind checkpoints,
> roadblocks, ditches, razor wire, electronic fences, and concrete walls;
> squeezes the other people into ever smaller, disconnected segments of
> land; cripples the productive capability of the other people by
> destroying or separating them from their agricultural land, destroying
> or confiscating their wells, preventing their industrial expansion, and
> destroying their businesses; imprisons the leadership of the other
> people and threatens to expel or assassinate that leadership; destroys
> the security forces and the governing infrastructure of the other
> people; destroys an entire population's census records, land registry
> records, and school records; vandalizes the cultural headquarters and
> the houses of worship of the other people by urinating, defecating, and
> drawing graffiti on cultural and religious artifacts and symbols when
> one people does these things to another, a logical person can draw only
> one conclusion: the powerful state is attempting to destroy the other
> people, to push them into the sea, to ethnically cleanse them.
>
> These kinds of atrocities, and particularly the scale of the
> repression, did not spring full-blown out of some terrorist
> provocations by Palestinians. These atrocities grew out of a political
> philosophy that says whatever advances the interests of Jews is
> acceptable as policy. This is a racist philosophy.
>
> What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is not genocide, it is not a
> holocaust, but it is, unmistakably, ethnicide. It is, unmistakably,
> racism. Israel worries constantly, and its American friends worry,
> about the destruction of Israel. We are all made to think always about
> the existential threat to Israel, to the Jewish people. But the nation
> in imminent danger of elimination today is not Israel but the
> Palestinians. Such a policy of national destruction must not be allowed
> to stand.
>
> -----
>
> * Assuming, according to the scenario put forth by our Israeli-
> American friend, that Palestinians had accepted the UN-mandated
> establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, that no war had ensued, and
> that no Palestinians had left Palestine, Israel would today encompass
> only the 55 percent of Palestine allocated to it by the UN partition
> resolution, not the 78 percent it possessed after successfully
> prosecuting the 1948 war. It would have no sovereignty over Jerusalem,
> which was designated by the UN as a separate international entity not
> under the sovereignty of any nation. Its 5.4 million Jews (assuming the
> same magnitude of Jewish immigration and natural increase) would be
> sharing the state with approximately five million Palestinians
> (assuming the same nine-fold rate of growth among the 560,000
> Palestinians who inhabited the area designated for the Jewish state as
> has occurred in the Palestinian population that actually remained in
> Israel in 1948). Needless to say, this small, severely overcrowded,
> binational state would not be the comfortable little Jewish democracy
> that our friend seems to have envisioned.
>
> Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis
> side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as
> National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of
> Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast
> Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director
> of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person
> unit.
>
> Kathleen Christison also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since
> then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine. She is
> the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
>
> They are also contributors to CounterPunch's hot new book: The
> Politics of Anti-Semitism.
>
> The Christison's can be reached at: [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
>
> Weekend Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
>
> Saul Landau
> Cui Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
>
> Noam Chomsky
> Empire of the Men of Best Quality
>
> Bruce Jackson
> Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
>
> Brian Cloughley
> "Mow the Whole Place Down"
>
> John Stanton
> The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
>
> William S. Lind
> Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
>
> Ben Tripp
> The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
>
> Christopher Brauchli
> Divine Hatred
>
> Dave Zirin
> An Interview with John Carlos
>
> Agustin Velloso
> Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
>
> Josh Frank
> Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
>
> Ron Jacobs
> Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
>
> Strickler / Hermach
> Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
>
> David Vest
> Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him Famous
>
> Adam Engel
> America, What It Is
>
> Dr. Susan Block
> Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
>
> Poets' Basement
> Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
>
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