Zionism = Racism

If anyone needs to be persuaded that Zionism is a form of racism, then the Regulation Bill, preliminarily passed on 16 November 2016 in the Apartheid parliament, otherwise known as the Knesset, provides a clear proof. The bill, that would allow for the retroactive legalization of Jewish settlement outposts built on privately owned Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, should be called ‘The Law for Regulating the Land Theft from People whose Mother is not Jewish’. It allows Jews to legally appropriate privately held lands belonging to non-Jews who live in occupied Palestine. The bill abolished the Palestinians’ right to own land, just like their other rights – the right to free expression, the right of association, the right to family life, the right to freedom of movement, and the right to national self- determination in their own country. This bill, part of what Professor Yesha’ayahu Leibowitz called ‘a Judeo-Nazi act’, was of course passed by a democratic vote, like similar bills passed by the Reichstag less than eighty years ago, and fifty years since the UN reversed its just resolution defining Zionism as racism. Israeli propaganda that the UN is ‘always against us’ is a demagogic lie which aims to demand greater rights for the settler colony, a.k.a. the State of Israel, established as a white European entity on the western Mediterranean. The UN, ostensibly an organisation aimed to safeguard world peace, in fact attempts to distribute international land theft from the colonized world between the ruling powers, and prevent war between these very powers. The UN has forgiven Israel for the Partition Plan and recognized the State of Israel after it had conquered half of the territory destined for the Arab Palestinian state; it has ignored the extensive ethnic cleansing of the natives carried out by Israel; it has overlooked the (legal) existence of the two separate routes to citizenship which form the basis for Apartheid; and it did not deny Israel membership in an organization whose founding convention outlaws Apartheid and racist legislation.

Only once in its history did the UN pass a resolution that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. The resolution was proposed to the UN General Assembly by the Organization for African Unity, most of whose members attained independence against the wishes of the major powers and despite Israel opposing their independence for at least twenty years. Indeed, Israel had voted at the UN against the independence of Algeria, Tunisia, Tanganyika, Rwanda-Burundi, Guinea, and the Portugese colonies, among others. At some of these votes, Israel had a casting vote which led to delays in according independence to several former colonies. African, Middle Eastern, former Soviet Union states as well as China and several Asian states joined the Organization of African Unity’s initiative and on 10 November 1975 the UN adopted Resolution 3379 by a vote of 72 to 35 that that ‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination’ and noting that the State of Israel collaborated with the Apartheid regime in South Africa and with the Portuguese colonial regime’s atrocities. UN Resolution 3379 stated that:

Taking note also of resolution 77 (XII) adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity at its twelfth ordinary session, held at Kampala from 28 July to 1 August 1975, which considered ‘that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being’.

It was a well argued, just resolution. How bizarre it did not move the UN to action: there were no sanctions, no claims and no boycotts, as the proposers had probably expected. It was former president Shimon Peres who initiated a sophisticated strategy aimed at reversing this important UN resolution by importing Jews from Ethiopia to Israel. The brilliant idea of importing black people as an alibi for the white villa in the brown jungle aimed at proving to Africa and the Third World that Israel was not racist, using Ethiopian Jews as excuse and proof. This was how the heroic rescue narratives of saving Ethiopia Jews, not wanted in Israel until then, came about. At the end of the 1970s hundreds of Ethiopians were brought to Israel by the IDF and the Mossad: between 1977 and 1984 some 8,000 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel by covert action. And in the early 1980s Israel ran a mediatized campaign aimed at African leaders, claiming that Israel does not differentiate between blacks and whites (as long as they belong to the Jewish race of course). Indeed, Asher Naim, Israel’s former ambassador in Ethiopia during what was called ‘Operation Solomon’ described as a ‘Miraculous Airlift of Ethiopian Jews’, stated boldly that ‘Israel is the only state in the world which brought in black people, unchained’. Peres’s stunt worked and, following pressure by Israel and the US, African states were persuaded to change their votes, and on 16 December 1991 the UN revoked its Zionism is Racism resolution with resolution 4668. Since then the motivation to import blacks lessened considerably, while Jewish Ethiopians who were brought to Israel have experienced what the UN decided to deny: Zionism and its product – the State of Israel – are indeed racist.

Israeli racism has two main sources. The first is its being a settler colonial project which regards the natives whose country it settled as inferior and unnecessary human material. Today we can state categorically that in all the cases of settler colonialism – the United States of America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand – the elimination of the natives was an integral part of the settlement process. Furthermore, genocide and genocidal intent are part and parcel of the settlement project which aims to replace the natives with the settlers. Up to now the genocide executed by the Zionist movement has been controlled and gradual, mostly through the extensive ongoing ethnic cleansing for the past seventy years. At the same time, genocidal attacks are periodically meted to the Gaza enclave which serves Israel as a test ground for its armament and security industries, though it has not yet reached a consistent and planned totality.

The second source of Zionist racism is Jewish Rabbinical law, which has flourished in Israel precisely because it is a territory stolen from the original natives of Palestine. The settlers’ need to justify land robbery and the expropriation of the natives is pushing Israeli society towards the consoling mythic world of the Jewish religion. The best current exponents of Israeli identity (as established by colonial-socialist Zionism) are the rabbis of the national religious Jewish Home party. Its Judeo-Nazi rabbis are its most important ideologues, calling for equating the Palestinians with the Biblical Amalekites – the enemy of the Israelites who were reportedly wiped out almost entirely as the result of the Israelite victories against them shortly after the Exodus and continuing into the early Israelite monarchy. One of their propaganda organs is the popular publication ‘The Springs of Salvation’, distributed in synagogues and published by an association of the same name, whose leaders are Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu of Safed (who called to ‘destroy enemy to deter attack’), Rabbi Shlomo Aviner from the Bet El settlement (who wrote that ‘Religious women enlisting in IDF destroying soul of state') , and Rabbi Yaacov Ariel from Ramat Gan (who decried gays and lesbians as ‘disabled and predatory’). This is what the religious leaders say about their opponents: ‘Interesting whether they would leave the concentration of the Amalekites in extermination camps to others… time will tell’. Of course no one, no legal adviser, nor Mr Netanyahu, has accused the Judeo-Nazi writers of this terrifying document which envisage the establishment of extermination camps, of genocide.

These two sources of Israeli racism constitute an explosive mix, dangerous for the Palestinians, for the Israeli population, for the region’s states and for world Jewry. However, it the fundamentalist margins do not endanger the regime but are rather its vanguard, compass and oracle. The anti-democratic discriminatory legislation against Israel’s Arab population, NGOs or even reticent liberals are not signs of ‘fascism’ as argued anxiously by the Zionist left; they are a much more dangerous phenomenon. Israel’s racial regime is gradually becoming a Judeo-Nazi regime. The ancient myths of the sanctity of the land, the sanctity of Jewish blood, and racial superiority based on chosen-ness, as well as the tens of thousands supporters of building the third temple complete with the destruction of the ‘Temple Mount’ mosques are all complicit in the Nazification of Israeli society.

It is also worth noting that Israeli racism finds expression in its anti-democratic emergency laws. Indeed, Israel is the only so-called democracy in the world which, for the past seventy years, has been based on a state of emergency. This state of emergency enables the regime to legally break, annul or suspend any law, and is the only contemporary illustration of the legal vision of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi party’s constitutional theorist. These emergency laws are based on the )Emergency) Defence Regulations (1945), inherited from the British colonial regime, which fit the Zionism regime perfectly.

Interestingly, the relationship between Zionism and Nazism had detractors as well as defenders. The most flattering and honest comparison between Zionism and Nazism regarding racial purity is found in Rabbi Joachim Prinz’s book Wir Juden (1934), in which the author expresses his admiration for the ‘German revolution’ which put an end to liberalism that, he writes, was ‘the only form of political life that aided Jewish assimilation, and that disappeared’. Rabbi Prinz see the Nazi race laws ‘the fulfilment of our desire’ and writes: ‘We are interested in a new law replacing assimilation: a statement of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state based on the purity of nation and race can be respected only by a Jew who declares belonging to his kind’. What a befitting spiritual father for the Israeli far right anti-assimilation Lehava organization, whose objective is to oppose any personal or business relationships between Arabs and Jews as well as personal relationships between Jews and foreigners! The crude flattery of Hitler did not deter the Judeo Nazi Prinz from becoming an American citizen, and a close friend of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Israel’s left politicians and their followers worry that the koshering of land theft by the racist Regulation Bill would trigger hostile international reaction and perhaps even bring about the re-enactment of the Zionism is Racism UN resolution. The radical left, on the other hand, expects the UN to punish Israel and re-adopt the correct definition of the Israeli racial state. However, both are misguided. History proves that the real UN bosses, the imperialist powers, regard Israel precisely as did Herzl, and as what African and Middle East states already know. Israel is the west’s iron arm, a western fortress aimed at dominating the Arab orient in order to prevent its unity and maintain its backwardness. For the time being the imperial rulers of the world have no replacement for Israel due to its social stability which enables its mighty and privileged army. Israeli Jewish society’s growing religiosity, aimed at solidifying its stability and regional exceptionalism, ensures that Israel continues to serve western interests against the nations of the Middle East. The only way of changing Israel’s racist nature is if and when the wretched of the Israeli state finally join an internal campaign of turning the Jewish state into a secular democracy.