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Zionism, the Holocaust, and Israeli Human
Rights Violations Those who believe in human rights, and who work for positive social change, cannot pick and choose their holocausts. Acts of genocide, torture, and terror cannot be ranked by deciding which victims are "worthy" and "unworthy". Honesty, compassion, and consistency requires that our solidarity be extended to all oppressed peoples, classes or minorities - whether these are victims of "enemy" states, or victims of "friendly" ones. Having said this, there is no denying that Hitler's "final solution" for the Jews, and what he classified as various other untermensch ("subhuman") groups, resulted in one of the most violent outpourings of hate and genocide that the "modern" world has witnessed. Approximately six million people were slaughtered for being Jewish, and significant numbers of Gypsies, Slavs, and Poles were also killed in the name of "racial purity". They were scapegoats for a repressive, expansionist state; one more "obstacle" in the Nazi quest for lebensraum ("living space"). Acknowledging the existence of other atrocities, however, in no way denies
the historical persecution of the Jews. Nor does it diminish the mixture
of nausea, sadness, and anger that one experiences when listening to the
accounts of Holocaust-survivors, or watching documentaries about Treblinka
and Auschwitz. The twentieth century has witnessed numerous horrors, many
of them similar in scope and intensity to the Nazi Holocaust. The mass
extermination of Cambodian civilians by the Khmer Rouge, the Indonesian
military's slaughter of Timorese peasants, and the ongoing state terror
and "pacification" of the Maya in Guatemala, are only a few
examples which have approached genocidal levels. There is no ethical reason
to document, publicize, and condemn one of these atrocities, without also
condemning each and every one of the others. Israel's treatment of the
Palestinians should be no exception. In an article by Hetty Alcuitas ("Speech Angers Students", The Manitoban, Feb.2, 1994), for example, Law student Jesse Goldman dismissed Ture's speech as "anti-Semitic", and equated any attack on Zionism (and implicitly Israel) with "the destruction of the Jewish people". Evelyn Hecht, spokesperson for the Jewish Community Council, agreed with the equation, stating that "there is little difference between what [Ture] said and anti-Semitism". Neither Goldman nor Hecht referred to any concrete points made by Ture; they simply asserted that his speech was anti-Semitic. The implication, of course, is that criticism of Zionism and Israel in and of itself is anti-Semitic, and constitutes advocacy of genocide - regardless of the form or content of the criticism, or the motivations behind it. This is nonsense for at least two reasons. First of all, states are institutions which represent a particular domestic power structure - not some homogenous "people" or "nation". Important decisions (over taxation, government spending, trade, or war) are routinely made without meaningful popular input, knowledge or consent, and have little to do with the needs and desires of ordinary citizens. In essence, the primary function of any state is to protect the interests of a ruling political or economic elite. The only thing that differs from state to state is the extent and type of coercion or indoctrination that this requires. Thus, the notion that criticism of a country's foreign or domestic policy implies anything about the inherent attributes of its people (i.e., has anything to do with racism) is patently absurd. It was not racist to condemn the Nazis for their ideology or actions. It was not racist to criticize Iraq for its treatment of the Kurds, or its invasion of Kuwait. And it is certainly not racist to censure Israel for its ongoing violations of human rights and international law. Second, the principal critics of Zionism and Israel have always been Jews and Palestinians - both Semitic peoples - and they have expressed themselves in precisely the same terms as Ture. Since 1948, for example, prominent Western and Israeli Jews (such as I.F. Stone, Maxime Rodinson, Noam Chomsky, Uri Davis, Simha Flapan, and Israel Shahak) have distanced themselves from Zionism and attacked Israeli domestic and foreign policy. Some, like Chomsky, had supported Zionism in its early form - when its grassroots supporters still emphasized Arab-Jewish cooperation and socialism (of which Kibbutz collectivism was a manifestation). Others, like Flapan, had been involved directly in Israeli politics. But for all of them, Zionism came to symbolize very different things after the 1948-49 war, the Suez "crisis", the 1967 and 1973 wars, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982. Shahak, a Holocaust-survivor himself, became sickened by Israel - for its ideology of expansion and racism had begun to parallel Nazi Germany. Far from a symbol of Jewish liberation, Zionism had become synonymous with Palestinian dispossession, subjugation, dehumanization, and exile. Unable to dismiss such critics as "anti-Semites", both Stone
and Chomsky have been labelled "self-hating Jews" by reactionary
organizations like the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith (ADL). The
desperation behind such accusations should be self-evident. Following
this logic, Germans who criticized their own government during the 1930's
and 1940's, or who actively resisted the Nazis, could be dismissed as
"self-hating Aryans". One of the most striking facts about these statements is what they ignore: in their characterizations of Zionism, every single respondent was silent on the question of the Palestinians. Olude, the only one to even utter the dreaded "P" word, effectively dismisses the Palestinians by discussing Zionism and the birth of Israel solely in terms of Jewish rights and Jewish liberation. This omission (or in Olude's case, dismissal) is neither accidental nor incidental. Colonial and imperial ideologies have always presupposed the right to colonize distant lands, and to supplant, conquer, and rule over the original inhabitants - all "for their own good" of course. Palestinian thoughts as to the meaning of Zionism, or the nature of Israeli "democracy", are of no consequence. Like the Euroamerican attitude towards Indian nations, and the Nazi view of non-Aryan peoples, Zionists have always regarded the Palestinians as a nuisance, an obstacle on the road to Eretz Israel. In this respect, the similarities between the U.S. notion of Manifest Destiny, the Nazi ideology of lebensraum, and Zionism warrant further investigation.1 Each, for example, assumes a divine right to "living space" for their "chosen people" (who represent "civilization", "progress" and "light") - regardless of the prior claims of indigenous peoples (who represent things "savage", "primitive", and "dark"). Theodor Herzl, one of the intellectual founders of Zionism, was quite candid in his Eurocentric assumptions of superiority. In his book The Jewish State (which became a Zionist manifesto), he wrote that a Jewish colony in Palestine "would constitute a bulwark against Asia...the advance post of civilization against barbarism".2 Statements such as these are by no means isolated, however. They comprise the everyday language of Zionist leaders and intellectuals. Chaim Weizmann, in a letter to that other European racist Lord Balfour (author of the Balfour Declaration), described "the Arabs" of Palestine as "superficially clever and quick witted", "treacherous" by "nature", "backwards", and with a tendency towards corruption, inefficiency, and arrogance.3 The corollory to this presumption of superiority was Zionism's total disregard for the rights and desires of the Palestinians. Zionist assertions that Palestinians, as a distinct ethnic-cultural entity, do not even exist, are a gross, but by no means uncommon example. First articulated by Israel Zangwill (who coined the phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land"), such assertions have been a recurrent feature of Zionist propaganda. Golda Meir herself (Israel's former Prime Minister) stated in 1969 that "there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, they do not exist".4 More recently, in From Time Immemorial, Joan Peters has lent an academic gloss to this Zionist rhetoric. In the ultimate of racist negations, she argues that "the Palestinians" are simply a "fabrication", and that the majority of Arabs living in Palestine prior to 1948 were immigrants, "nomads" with no historical or psychological ties to the land.5 In keeping with the spirit of lebensraum, Zionists have long advocated the mass expulsion (or "transfer" in Zionist Newspeak) of "unwanted" peoples from desired lands. Palestinian claims to the land were seen as irrelevant - a fact commensurate with their (imagined) status as "backwards", "inefficient" and "nomadic" peoples. Contrary to standard mythology, however, forcible expulsion of the Palestinians and the creation of a "demographically homogenous" (i.e., Apartheid) state, was the goal of all early Zionist leaders - not simply "extremists" like Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, or Meir Kahane. Director of the Jewish National Land Fund, Joesph Weitz, for example, wrote in his diary on December 19, 1940 that "there is no room for both [Arab and Jewish] peoples in this country". The only solution, according to Weitz, was to expel the Arabs, "to transfer them all". "We must not leave a single village, not a single tribe."6 Even David Ben-Gurion, who is widely hailed as a "moderate" and considered the "father" of modern Israel, favoured such measures. He told the Jewish Agency: "I am for compulsory transfer [of the Arabs]; I don't see anything immoral in it".7 His criticism of the "extremists" in the movement was tactical, not based on principle. As he wrote in his War Diaries on September 2, 1948, his goal was "to expand the borders of the state in all directions" - well beyond the territory outlined in the UN Partition Plan of 1947. Like Jabotinsky and other open fascists, Ben-Gurion's ideal state did not include the Palestinians, but for practical political reasons he recognized that this goal could not always be stated, nor necessarily achieved.8 In practice, the U.S., Nazi, and Zionist versions of lebensraum were all used to rationalize genocidal policies against so-called "sub-human" groups, including the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children (whether these atrocities were carried out by official armies, or officially-sanctioned "settlers" is irrelevant). The genocide against the indigenous peoples of North America (which Hitler admired, and offered as a model for German expansion), is well-documented.9 Indian women, children, and elders were slaughtered in a continuous series of military actions until the late nineteenth century. Contrary to "wild west" mythology, these atrocities were not "aberrations" or "tragic mistakes". From the extermination of the Pequots in the early seventeenth century, to the massacres at Blue River (1854), Sand Creek (1864), Sappa Creek (1875), and Wounded Knee (1890), genocide was a systematic, conscious policy, designed to facilitate the expansion of "real" (i.e., European) settlers.10 The massacre of Palestinians by Zionists, and the motivations behind them, is similarly well-documented. In his book The Revolt, Menachem Begin openly boasts about the deliberate slaughter of some 250 Palestinian men, women, and children from the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948 - which was carried out in a joint operation by his Irgun army, and the LEHI (or Stern group) under the command of Yitzhak Shamir.11 Ben-Gurion, leader of the Zionist movement at the time, publicly denounced the actions of the Irgun, but did nothing to disband or reign them in. Terror operations like the one at Deir Yassin (exceptional only for its extensive documentation) had predictable and desired consequences: the mass flight of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and country during and after 1948. Zionist leaders of all stripes were ecstatic. Chaim Weizmann, for example, referred to the exodus as "a miraculous clearing of the land", one which would greatly simplify "Israel's task" - namely, the creation of a state for and only for Jews.12 It is important to note, however, that the violation of Palestinian human rights is not simply an historical fact. It is very much an ongoing, and contemporary one. Since Deir Yassin, the Israeli military has been responsible for a continuous series of atrocities - from the Qibya killings of October 1953 (which even pro-Israel commentators compared to the Nazi massacre at Lidice), to the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in 1982 (which was carried out by Lebanese Phalangists under supervision of the Israeli army).13 And since the largely non-violent Intifada ("uprising") began in 1987, human rights violations in the Occupied Territories (the West Bank and Gaza) have increased dramatically - human rights groups estimating that some 400 Palestinians were killed, and over 20,000 injured, by Israeli "security forces" in the first year alone.14 Attempts to portray the recent massacre of 48 Muslim worshippers at a Hebron mosque as a "tragic" aberration - the work of an "extremist" settler (U.S.-born physician Baruch Goldstein) - are about as convincing as the crocodile tears shed for the victims by Yitzhak Rabin and Jean Chretien.15 No doubt Goldstein was an "extremist", but Israel has a long tradition of such fanatics. The biggest ones (like Begin or Shamir) are usually inside the government. Furthermore, the distinction between the Israeli army (IDF) and the settlers is almost meaningless from the perspective of the Palestinians. The settlers constitute the advance force of a colonizing power - one whose presence in the Occupied Territories is in clear violation of international law. As an integral part of the occupation, they have ready access to weapons and other military equipment, and routinely cooperate with or participate in "policing operations", intimidation campaigns, and the collective punishment of Palestinians. More importantly, as the Jerusalem Post noted (November 13, 1988), the "Council of settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza" adopted a resolution which authorized settlers to fire upon Palestinian stone throwers, even when their lives are not endangered.16 Ultimately, much more could be said about Israel. In addition to the direct, physical terror and coercion outlined above, Israel's Apartheid-like "legal" structure, its invasions of Lebanon (in 1978 and 1982), its violation of a range of international laws and covenants (such as UN resolutions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and various Geneva Conventions), as well as its military support for repressive regimes like South Africa and Guatemala, are all worthy of criticism.17 But in the final analysis, one thing is clear: Israel is a theocratic state, with a history of violence and racism comparable (in function and form, if not in scale) to South Africa or Nazi Germany.18 And Zionism, at least in its present form, is an ideology which presupposes the legitimacy of this state - an ideology which exonerates the actual historical aggressors, and condemns the victims. At best, the remarks by Goldman, Hecht, Olude and Dearing demonstrate a serious ignorance about the origins of Zionism, as well as the nature of Israeli history. Given the injustices inflicted upon the Palestinians since 1948, Dearing's assertion that the historical persecution of the Jews - culminating in the Holocaust - obligates us to support Zionism and Israel, is astonishing. In fact, to exploit one of the most genocidal outbursts of the twentieth century in order to defend a state that systematically violates the human rights of another people, can only be described as perverse. Not only does it deny the humanity of the Palestinians, but it diminishes the tragedy of the Holocaust. As Nachum Goldman, former president of the World Zionist Organization, wrote in 1981: "Jewish suffering during the Holocaust no longer will serve as a protection ... To use [it] as an excuse for the bombing of Lebanon, for instance, as Menachem Begin does, is a kind of 'Hillul Hashem' [sacrilege], a banalization of the sacred tragedy of the Shoah [Holocaust]".19 Those who truly wish to learn from the Holocaust, and to give it meaning, must use it to prevent today's war crimes. In a world where information and the mass media are increasingly in corporate hands, and where vested interests kill to maintain their power and privilege, this will not be easy. In a world where nationalism, ideology, and religion tend to undermine critical thinking, this will not be popular. But moral indignation - if it is not to be dismissed as hypocrisy and opportunism - must not be conditioned by arbitrary patriotism, personal gain, or the popularity of one's position. Dictators are dictators, atrocities are atrocities, and victims are victims. Period. Notes 1 Comparisons of Manifest Destiny and lebensraum have already been done,
as have studies of "settler colonialism" in North America, Ireland,
Israel, and South Africa - but no systematic study (that I am aware of)
has compared and contrasted lebensraum and Zionism. See Frank Parrella's
M.A. thesis, Lebensraum and Manifest Destiny (Washington, D.C.: 1950)
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