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A non-racist Zionism?
by Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
The World Conference Against
Racism is scheduled to be held in Durban, South Africa, from 31 August to
7 September. However, the Americans and the Israelis have threatened to
boycott the conference if statements linking Zionism to racism are not
removed from the draft documents. The United States and a number of former
European colonial powers are also opposing calls by many former colonies
that the conference address the question of reparations for the suffering
they endured at the hands of their colonial masters and their demand that
its closing statement include an apology from the concerned Western
powers.
Mary Robinson,
secretary-general of the conference and UN high commissioner for human
rights, has justified these stands, arguing in respect of the
Zionism-equals-racism issue that regional conflicts should not be imposed
on the agenda of the conference, and in respect of the reparations
question that the conference should not get sidetracked into issues
related to the past but should focus on the burning problems that will
face us in the years to come, especially now that sufficient progress in
the drafting of the agenda has been achieved to avoid an American boycott.
Observers believe that
Israel's determination to oppose any reference to, let alone a
re-tabling of, UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 equating Zionism
with racism, which was adopted on 10 November 1975 and annulled on
17 December 1991, has been instrumental in determining the US
position. If it is true that the acts of violent repression to which
the Palestinians are being subjected by the Israeli occupation
forces has lent new urgency to the idea of reviving the resolution,
it is no less true that these acts have made Sharon still more
adamantly opposed to its revival.
We are thus faced with a
dilemma here: should the Arab and African states insist on the
inclusion of these items on the agenda, even at the risk of
provoking an American boycott or of having the conference called off
altogether, or should they back down to ensure its convocation and
the participation of the Americans? In respect of establishing a
link between Zionism and racism, even if we are willing to go along
with Ms Robinson's assumption that Zionism is not a racist ideology,
history itself attests to the contrary.
A number of
incontrovertible facts belie the assumption, but before passing to
substance it is worth noting that, from the procedural point of
view, the very fact that Israel is lobbying so strenuously to have
any statement identifying Zionism with racism removed from the
conference documents is in itself a tacit acknowledgement of
Zionism's racist connotations. Let us now pass to the more important
substantive arguments:
First, Zionism is by
definition racist in the sense that it is an ideology based on the
singularity, not to say superiority, of one racial group. It is hard
to see how Israel can reconcile its claim that it is a non-racist
society with its raison d'être as the state of all the Jews in the
world. Under Israeli law, any Jew coming from anywhere in the world
automatically acquires Israeli citizenship as soon as he sets foot
on Israeli soil. He immediately enjoys all the rights of citizenship
enjoyed by his fellow Israelis -- that is, by his coreligionists --
but not by the Arab citizens of Israel, who are denied many of the
rights enjoyed by their Jewish compatriots. Is this not the essence
of racial discrimination?
Second, Israel might be
the state of all the Jews in the world, but has yet to define just
who is a Jew. The Jews are divided among themselves as to who is
eligible, i.e., racially pure enough, to join their exclusive club
and who is not. Those who are denied access are obviously victims of
racial discrimination.
Third, every Jew,
wherever he lives, has the right to "return" to Israel. This right
is not available to Palestinians, who may not return to the homes
they left behind in Palestine, especially if their property lies in
the 80 per cent of the historical land of Palestine now under
Israeli sovereignty. Surely this is discrimination with racist
connotations, even if we concede that both parties have rights in
historical Palestine.
Fourth, discrimination
against Palestinians extends to all fundamental issues. Security
problems concerning Palestinians are not treated on an equal footing
with security problems concerning Israelis. Thus Sharon proceeds
from the premise that what has top priority in his relations with
the Palestinians is Israel's security concerns. These concerns and,
more precisely, Sharon's personal interpretation of these concerns,
have priority over the issues of peace. If genuine peace
requirements are perceived by Sharon as detrimental to Israel's
security, peace will have to be sacrificed.
In other words,
Palestinian security has to be subordinated to the requirements of
Israel's security; the former is to be adapted to the latter. We are
not proceeding from the idea of "collective security," which aims at
satisfying both parties' security requirements simultaneously so
that the consolidation of the security of one party is a boost for
the security of the other.
Fifth, the same applies
to the issue of land. Israel has yet to declare its final borders
while at the same time insisting on its right to live within secure
borders, an oxymoron if ever there was one. There can be no talk of
"secure" borders when the location of those borders is still an open
question.
Moreover, UN Security
Council Resolution 242, accepted by all the parties as the key to a
solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, calls for the return of "land
for peace;" that is, it requires the Arabs to accept Israel's
existence (peace) in exchange for the evacuation by Israel of the
Arab territories it occupied in 1967, defined as those lying beyond
Israel's recognised borders. The fact that these borders are still
undefined leaves the Arabs holding the short end of the stick.
Israel's share of the trade-off has been effectively realised while
the same is not true of the Arab share.
The Zionist state,
unconstrained as it is led by any mutually recognised borders, has
overflowed into Arab territory, depriving the Palestinian people of
their inalienable right to self-determination within secure and
recognised borders. Once again, Zionism has had the final say,
securing for the racial group it represents a privileged right to
assert its presence and impose its dominion over the Biblical land
of Israel, regardless of such minor considerations as sovereignty,
international law and the lapse by prescription (in this case, two
millennia) of any territorial claims. Here too we are looking at a
flagrant case of racial discrimination.
Sixth, if the function
of the Israeli state is to embody and give expression to Zionist
aspirations, the function of the Palestinian state, if ever it comes
into being, will be to keep Palestinian aspirations in check and
ensure that they do not threaten Israel's stability and security.
In response to hard-core
Zionist aspirations, Israel has given itself the right to establish
settlements wherever it pleases, making no distinction between land
lying under its sovereignty and Palestinian land that it is
currently -- and illegally -- occupying.
All of this confirms
that Zionism is not, as its adherents would have the world believe,
merely the national expression of Jewish self-determination, but an
intrinsically racist ideology that justifies the most brutal acts of
repression against the Palestinians as necessary for the security of
one specific racial group. How can the United Nations, which has
issued countless resolutions condemning doctrines of racial
differentiation and superiority as morally reprehensible and
socially unjust, refuse to even consider a resolution equating
Zionism with racism?
Mary Robinson might be
forgiven for thinking that any conference, even one that is severely
compromised, is better than no conference at all. But how can a
conference held for the specific purpose of combating racial
discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance hold back from
discussing a doctrine that displays all these features? Racism can
only be eradicated if right comes to prevail over might. The course
of history should be corrected in terms of established principles,
and not the opposite; that is, not by distorting those principles to
justify de facto developments.
Take the historical
condition of imperialism, which transformed many peoples of the
world into slaves of the imperialist powers, stunting their economic
and political development and violating their most basic human
rights. What should our reaction to this aberration be today? Should
the descendants of its victims simply shrug off this dark chapter in
their history and let bygones be bygones, or should they ask their
former overlords to apologize and make reparation for the harm they
inflicted -- that is, to recognize that the past impinges on the
present and that present generations are entitled to material
compensation?
Former US President Bill
Clinton apologized to the Japanese-Americans who were interned and
ill-treated during World War II for no reason other than their
Japanese ancestry, which, it was believed, could turn them into a
fifth column acting for the enemies of the United States. More
important are the apologies addressed to the Jews because of the
Holocaust and the persecution they endured under Hitler. There is a
clear case of double standards here. For right to prevail over
might, correcting mistakes of the past must not be selective. The
rules of the present should prevail over those of the past.
And when it comes to
equating Zionism with racism, the criterion cannot be what Israel,
or the US for that matter, has to say on the issue, but what the
parties suffering from the racist practices of Israel have to say,
notably the Palestinians, particularly with the present escalation
of violence in the occupied territories, where Israel's systematic
war of extermination and expropriation against a native civilian
population displays all the characteristics of a policy of ethnic
cleansing -- which the United Nations has defined as a war crime.
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