Mouood Mouood English Edition
Ergo, in this way, yes, the apartheid Israel-South Africa analogy is appropriate. The leading international force that sponsored both systems of “domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons” was the US. Without unfaltering US support for apartheid South Africa, justice would have been achieved many years before; without indefatigable US support for apartheid Israel, justice would have already been achieved. As celebrated historian Rashid Khalidi has insisted, “the United States is precisely the enabler of all of this.”
In short, once again, yes, I would argue the apartheid Israel-South Africa parallel is indeed a logical analogy. As with any analogy, it has flaws, and there are perhaps better historical analogies from which to choose namely, the European settler colonialist project in what we now call the Americas, but, for those unfamiliar with the history behind the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the South African example is informative and effective.
Q: What do you think is the root for the racially-driven, egregious hate crimes against the Palestinians by the Israeli settlers and other residents of the Occupied Territories and East Jerusalem (Al-Quds)? There are reports of Israeli citizens approaching the Palestinian people on the streets, shouting “Death to Arabs” on them and insulting them aggressively. Why do the Israelis, who have actually occupied the homeland of the Palestinians and displaced thousands of them, hate the Palestinians such vehemently?
A: It should be recognized that, for centuries, Jews and Arabs lived in lived in relative peace in the Middle East and elsewhere. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a religious conflict, but it should also be recognized that, for centuries, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and those of other belief systems lived in relative peace in the Middle East as well.
Those ignorant of the historical roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claim Jews and Arabs have been “fighting forever.” Such a position is blatantly un-historical and incorrect. The problem is not that Jews are inherently racist against Arabs or that Arabs are inherently racist against Jews. Jews and Arabs are both Semitic peoples who speak Semitic languages and share a common history. The problem is simply the racist, colonialist movement of Zionism.
The “Father” of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, openly spoke of “the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea,” calling it “something colonial.” He appealed to British colonialists including genocidal mining magnate Cecil Rhodes for support. Ohio State University Presidents’ Club Professor of Law John B. Quigley documents the colonialist origins of Zionism in his 2005 book The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective. Quigley cites the correspondence between Herzl and Rhodes, noting how explicitly the Father of Zionism referred to his nationalist ideology as a form of a colonialism.
In the 1947-1948 war that founded the state of Israel, Zionist militias forcibly expelled 800,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Even before the war began, fascist Jewish militias such as Irgun and Lehi indiscriminately bombed Palestinian civilian areas. Both of these groups modeled themselves after European fascist movements. Lehi in fact aligned itself with the Nazis and Italian fascists. Its goal was to help Nazis deport Jews to historic Palestine and to create what it called a purely Jewish state based on “nationalist and totalitarian principles.”
The Jewish Agency and leaders of Jewish organizations around the world regularly condemned Irgun and Lehi as terrorist groups. In April 1948, the two militias carried out the infamous Deir Yassin massacre, slaughtering over 100 civilians, including women and children. In June 1948, Irgun was disbanded; former Commander Menachem Begin created the Herut party out of its ashes. In the wake of this bloodbath, leading Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, published a letter in the New York Times, warning about “the ‘Freedom Party’ [Herut], a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and fascist parties.” Einstein, Arendt, et al. were particularly concerned about the visit of Menachem Begin to the United States in order “to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States.”
That Zionism has explicitly colonialist and fascist origins is indubitable. A movement that is rooted in such obscenely racist ideologies, therefore, does not suddenly become progressive and peaceful. Even so-called “left”-leaning Israeli Prime Ministers still exhibit unmitigated bigotry. While publicly insisting that there “were no such thing as Palestinians,” that they “did not exist,” Meir regularly espoused overtly racist beliefs, going so far as to say that peace “will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
In 1947, in the midst of proto-Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, the supposedly “leftist” founder of Israel, and later the ethnocracy’s first prime minister, ordered the military to no longer worry about differentiating between “innocent” and “guilty” Palestinians. “Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion” of the indigenous Arab population, Israel’s Founding Father commanded. He later maintained that “[w]e must do everything in our power to ensure that they never return.”
Once again, Zionism is an explicitly racist and colonialist ideology, so “left”-wing Zionism is oxymoronic; it does not exist.
Not long ago, it was not controversial to point out that Zionism is overtly racist. In 1975, with the ratification of General Assembly resolution 3379, the United Nations determined “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the US wrestled back hegemony over the UN and forced the revocation of the resolution—yet the fact that the preponderance of the international community voted on the statute (72 to 35) attests to its accuracy.
The racism that we see today, therefore, is not exactly new. One might argue that the level of racism has reached a new high, but it has been present since 1947 and before. Israeli mobs shout “Death to Arabs” because the Israeli state is fundamentally structured upon the death of Arabs, and because the hyper-nationalist ideology of Zionism says that Arabs must be killed in order to maintain the ethno-religious purity of that state.
This form of institutionalized racism is a self-feeding cycle, an Ouroboros, if you will. In its seven decades of existence, Israel has gradually continued to expand, annexing more and more Palestinian territory, in flagrant violation of international law. Such has been the case with every settler colonialist project. The settler colonialist will never be content; as long as the settler owns less than 100 percent of the land, it will want more. Consequently, in order to continue expanding, the Israeli settler colonial project, like those of the US and Australia, has relied on violence. The easiest way to motivate this violence is with racism, and with religious extremism, but I do not want to overstate the importance of religion in this conflict.
The problem is, if you ethnically cleanse a people for 67 years, and militarily occupy them for 47, and treat them as “human animals”—to quote present Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu—they are not going to like you. And if you kill and imprison that people’s leading nonviolent activists, they are going to eventually turn to violent forms of self-defense and resistance.
Israel, like any aggressor and oppressor, creates false pretenses to justify its continued aggression and oppression. If Palestinians violently resist their incremental genocide, they are “terrorists,” sub-human “snakes” – in the words of Member of Knesset Ayelet Shaked – who supposedly “do not value human life.” Instead of pointing out the real root causes of Palestinians’ violent resistance, namely, colonization and occupation, Israel claims that is it “part of their culture,” of their religion, of their own DNA.
