ZGram - 8/8/2001 - "What is Zionism if not racism?" - Part I

[Ingrid Rimland]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

August 8, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

The following annotated essay appeared in the following Newsgroups:

talk.politics.mideast,
soc.culture.mideast,
soc.culture.palestine,
soc.culture.israel,
soc.culture.usa

The essay below is one of the most thoughtful, highly condensed, critically
honest looks at Israel's midwives, founders and present leaders as well as
Israeli policies and society in general.  Unfortunately, the author
regurgitates the standard, one-dimensional Hollywood version of National
Socialist (German) policies and aims, but this is not the place for an ABC
on National Socialism, and the rest of the essay is ruthlessly frank.  It
bears careful study and deserves wide distribution.

The essay is titled:  What is Zionism if not racism?

[START]

Israeli Democracy: A Promise As Yet Fulfilled

by Michael Lopez-Calderon

 The Chinese, wonderful expositors of allegories, maxims, and proverbs,
have an ancient saying that still resonates with truth: "The first step on
the long road to wisdom is to call everything by its proper name."

Israels political system, often touted as the only democracy in the Middle
East, invites the scrupulous wisdom of the Chinese sages. An intellectually
honest appraisal of Israeli democracy, an appraisal motivated by a deep
commitment to democratic pluralism and Enlightenment rationalism, leads one
to judge Israels democracy as an unfulfilled promise for both Israeli Jews
and Israeli Arabs, and of course, the Palestinians.

Defenders of Israel will challenge such an assertion by pointing out how
all democracies are flawed. For example, an unconditional supporter of
Israel, citing the Supreme Courts Brown v Board decision of 1954, the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Title Nine, will
argue that American democracy only recently began to fulfill its promise to
African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, women, and yes, even
American Jews.(1)

He or she would be right, and recent evidence of disenfranchisement of the
poor predominantly, though not exclusively, Black and Latino in the 2000
Presidential Election only lends support to critics of Americas flawed
democracy. However, though America often failed and, occasionally,
continues to fail its democratic promise, we can speak of a "promise"
because it is both enshrined in our founding national documents and rooted
in our cultural, political, and social structures.

Israels "promise" is far more tenuous and far less obvious; neither her
founding documents nor ideological, cultural, and social roots give much
impetuous to democratic pluralism. In fact, a number of structural factors
work against the establishment of democratic pluralism in Israel.

 Let us examine these structural factors:

* Zionism. A late-19^th century European ideology influenced by German
Romantic  nationalism that emerged as anti-Enlightenment, anti-Semitic
reactionaries in  France, Germany, and Austria grew more numerous and
vociferous. Zionism also arose  in reaction to the wave of murderous
pogroms in Czarist Russia and Eastern Europe.  However, Zionism did not
escape the influence of retrogressive thinking then  prevalent throughout
Europe. Zionism absorbed much of the European colonial  mindset, replete
with racism towards non-European people, particularly Africans,  Arabs, and
"Orientals." The original Zionists, far from the enlightened socialists
and anarchists of legend, arrived in Palestine with the cultural baggage of
European racism and colonialism.

 * Zionism emerged in a German nation that was still engaged in the debate
over  national identity. The German (Frankfurt) Liberals identified with
the French  Revolutionary Enlightenment liberal ideal - the belief that a
nation consisted of  abstract citizens, laws, and membership in "a rational
and just social order  constructed on shared political i.e. democratic
values."(2)

Their opposites were the  German Romantic Nationalists, who detested
everything French, in part because of  the manner in which French ideals
had been introduced to the Germanic states,  namely, under the boots of la
Grand Armee during the Napoleonic conquest. Another  reason the German
Romantic Nationalists opposed the French ideal was their need to  define an
authentic, German alternative, one that was rooted in German culture and
tradition, in other words, anything but French. This brand of German
Romantic  national and political identity evolved into late 19th century
Pan-Germanism.  Pan-Germanism stressed "blood and soil";  it "was based on
the idea that all  persons who were of the German race, blood, descent,
wherever they lived or to  whatever state they belonged, owed their primary
loyalty to Germany and should  become citizens of the German state, their
true homeland."(3)

Worse, this belief in  the organically bound membership of citizens was
infused with an element of  hostility to Enlightenment rationalism and
especially, liberalism and democratic  pluralism. Pan-Germans, like their
Romantic predecessors, delved into the  smorgasbord of Gothic mysticism,
Teutonic "volk" legends, the intuitive, and two  lethal, late 19th century
additions: racism and Social Darwinism. This was the  setting in which
Theodor Herzl formulated his nationalist philosophy of Zionism.

 * Herzls Zionism, however, was in a strange way an accommodation to, not
resistance  against, the ideological premise of modern anti-Semitism.
"Throughout the  Diaspora, its [Zionisms] adherents argued, Jews
constituted an alien presence  amidst states belonging to other,
numerically preponderant, nationalities.  Anti-Semitism was the natural
impulse of an organic whole infected by a foreign  body (or too obtrusive a
foreign body)."(4)

Herzls Zionism solved the Jewish  Question by accepting the underlying
premise of Europes anti-Jewish,  anti-Enlightenment, and ultimately,
anti-democratic reactionaries: Jews were an  inassimilable people who were
in need of a State of their own. Two versions of  Zionism gradually
emerged: Labor and Cultural Zionism. The latter argued that the  real
threat to Jewish survival was "an increasingly secular civilization that
rendered them [Jews] anachronisms. The real danger was not the Gentiles'
icy  reception but, rather, their seductive embrace."(5)

Cultural Zionism, now wedded to  the only viable form of Zionism that
remains in Israel, namely religious Zionism,  is one of the greatest
obstacles to genuine democratic pluralism in Israel.

 * Israels founders had a choice: create an Israeli nation with secular,
liberal-democratic pluralism as its centerpiece, or forge a "blood and
soil"  Jewish State with citizenship subordinated to an ethno-religious,
racial identity  of Jewish exclusivity. The so-called left-wing Labor
Zionists chose exclusion over  pluralism, ethno-religious and racial
identity over abstract citizenship, and  rabbinical religious authority
instead of secular to manage the institutions of  civil society. They chose
a colonial style of rule rather than a shared  pluralistic democracy that
would have made citizenship equally available for all  who lived in
Israel-Palestine.(6)

A secular, liberal-democratic, pluralistic Israel  would have provided all
of her inhabitants with equal citizenship and full  participation in every
aspect of the nation. That was never even considered.  Israel now reaps
what it had sown fifty-three years ago. She reaps a bitter  harvest.

 * Israels policy of redeeming the land by placing ownership exclusively in
Jewish  hands ranks as one of the worlds most discriminatory. The very
notion that land  possessed by another is unredeemed smacks of the worst
kind of national chauvinism  since an Austrian paperhanger insisted that
the Wehrmacht "liberate" the  ethnic-German populated Sudetenland from the
Czechs.

In his controversial book,  Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Israel Shahak
examined the religious ideology of  Israels land policy. Shahak wrote about
the ideology of "Redemption of Land," an  exclusivist ideology that holds
that "the land which has been redeemed is the land  which has passed from
non-Jewish to Jewish ownership. The ownership can be either  private, or
belong to either the [Jewish National Fund] JNF or the Jewish State.  The
land which belongs to non-Jews is, on the contrary, considered to be
unredeemed."(7)

The unredeemed stigma applies even in cases where the non-Jewish  owners
are decent, moral human beings. A criminal or slothful Jewish atheist who
"buys a piece of land from a virtuous non-Jew [will make] the unredeemed
land  redeemed by such a transaction."(8)  Redemption of Land logically
blends with another  notorious exclusivist policy: the Law of Return.

[END]

Tomorrow:  Conclusion

=====

Thought for the Day:

"Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted
by visions of what will be."

(Alexis de Tocqueville)