Anti-Zionism: A Racist Ideology

Ziontruth

{Editor's note - please welcome Ziontruth, our first Israeli contributor, to the front page of Israel Thrives.  This is a very well thought through and interesting and, even, challenging, piece of writing.  I would very much recommend that you folks take the time to give this a nice, close read.  There may be all sorts of material in here that you might disagree with or be offended by, but all of it deserves close consideration. - Mike L.}

If you have done any measure of reading of anti-Zionist websites and forums, you will know all too well that the anti-Zionists of the world, especially those on the Progressive Left, consider Zionism to be racism. The comparisons of Jewish nationalism—the Jewish nation’s dream of renewing their political sovereignty on their one and only land in the world after two millennia—to South African apartheid, if not to Nazism, are abundant and often obligatory in those circles.

There is a saying in Judaism, “Anyone who finds fault, does so in his own fault.” This is the phenomenon known by the name projection today, and it applies to anti-Zionism to a T. In this article the racist nature of anti-Zionism will be shown.

I do not use the term “racist” lightly. In an age when Progressives have perverted it to refer to the slightest criticism of their ideology, needing no racial reference for that accusation, I stick to the traditional definition: Racism is discrimination against a group on the basis of their inborn, immutable inherited traits. It is a subset, not a synonym, of bigotry.

Racism is an offshoot of racialism, the very view that the genetic traits of people are significant. In fact we are probably all racialists when it comes to purely bodily manifestations such as height and eye color. Where racialists differ from non-racialists is in believing that more spiritual, mental capabilities, and indeed the fate of entire nations, is determined by genetics. Although this view could be criticized for denying free will, it is still not the same as racism, because the latter entails discrimination against groups on the basis of genetic traits, while the former is merely the view that those traits are significant. It is possible to be racialist and anti-racist at the same time: One example is the Harry Potter series of books, which are racialist because genetics definitely demarcate the impassable border between wizard and non-wizard, but are anti-racist because of their message that those wizards who wish to maintain supremacist rule over non-wizards are evil.

Now that the terminology is clear, it is time to apply the discussion to nations and nationalism, the topic of this article. In the majority of cases, national thinking has neither had an elaborate racial theory to buttress it nor been for the free-for-all that characterizes a refuge state like the United States of America. Nationality was a matter of ancestry, and racial exclusion was just an inevitable consequence of that. To take a modern example, a British nationalist would reject the notion that a black man could be British, and a Ndebele nationalist would do the same regarding a white man, not so much because of a consciously held racial theory but because it is of the highest probability that a black man is not ancestrally British, and a white man is not of Ndebele ancestry. Additionally, this racial exclusion is by no means a sufficient requirement: A British nationalist would not consider Polish immigrants to be fellow nationals, despite being as white as he is, nor would a Ndebele tribesman think himself to be of the same group as a Shona tribesman, although both are black. This is how nationality has been for most people throughout most of history, while racial theories are a recent development, most probably spurred on by the attempt to give scientific-sounding justifications for an imperialist thrust.

Having in mind the rule for nationality, let us now turn to an exception to that rule: The Jewish nation. The criterion of ancestry is not absent from the account of how the Jewish people came to be, nor from the way Jewishness is determined today, but quite early on the Jewish nation has taken into its fold people of different ancestry, to be virtual descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. One interpretation has this happen as early as the third generation, with the twelve sons of Jacob taking Canaanites for wives, after making sure they had relinquished idolatry. And although Judaism does not proselytize, and in some periods the rabbis expressed misgivings about converts, the descent of the Davidic Line from Ruth the Moabite is testimony to a nationalism that can go outside of ancestry. (This is not to say, however, that Judaism is an anti-racist ideology; that would be an anachronism foisted upon a religion that exists on its own terms.)

Thus, despite the policy of dissuading converts (the process a prospective convert is subject to at the hands of an Orthodox conversion panel sounds so much like, “Are you sure?”, “Are you sure you’re sure?”, ”Sure you’re sure you’re sure?” ad infinitum), the reality today is of a racially diverse Jewish nation, composed of those either born to a Jewish mother or having undergone conversion. That is how the Jewish nation is defined; that is the basic truth that the anti-Zionist deny in their falsified narrative.

I hear someone ask, “So, if the Jews are not a race, then wouldn’t it be right to say that Jew-hatred isn’t racism?” My answer is that it would be right, but that does not let Jew-hatred off the hook, nor does it negate the fact that anti-Zionism is racism. An ideology of hate does not need to be race-based in order to be countered; the fact that I as a Jew am the target of Jew-hatred is enough for me. And anti-Zionism, like Nazism in its day, is racist because it bases its Jew-hatred around a racist narrative. Jews are not a race, but the Nazis considered them to be one, so Nazi Jew-hatred was also a racism. Jews are not a race, but the anti-Zionists consider Jewish nationalism to be a racial supremacy project, so anti-Zionist Jew-hatred is also racism.

The Jewish–Arab conflict is, in fact, either a purely nationalistic conflict or a religious one, but definitely not a racial one. This is because the other side in the conflict, the Arab nation, is yet another exception to the rule of determining nationality. Maybe in the far past the Arab nation had a single line of ancestry, but today, in the stretch of the Arab world from the Atlas to Zagros mountain ranges, we find a “racial mishmash” (that’s the disparaging term anti-Zionists often use when referring to the Israeli Jews. And there was me thinking those people considered diversity as a good thing…) exhibiting the entire range of skin colors, eye colors and hair colors. In fact, in the Jewish State alone we have white-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed Arabs who could pass for Scandinavians in appearance, red-haired, green-eyed Arabs who look like Scots Highlanders, black Bedouins descended from slaves from Zanzibar (courtesy of the Arab slave trade), as well as the brown-skinned Arabs who are the only ones the anti-Zionists pretend exist.

A blond-haired, blue-eyed Arab settler girl in Judea and Samaria

In view of this, what makes the Arab nation? The one commonality throughout all this diverse mix is language, whether the various spoken dialects descended from the language of the Arabian Red Sea coast, or the modern adaptation of that language used as a lingua franca. This does not mean learning the language well is all it takes to become an Arab; things are more complex than that, you probably need to be accepted by one of the tribes, which is not a simple matter unless you should happen to be a war captive. Yet, even if it were as simple as learning the language, it would still be less simplistic than the Progressive Left thinkers make it to be. Theirs is a Manichean reworking of the Mideast Conflict along racialist lines.

The truth of this conflict is highly inconvenient for anti-Zionists of all stripes: It is that one nation, the Jewish nation, is under attack for its possession of its tiny piece of ancestral land, by another nation, the Arab nation, that is already in possession of a huge mass of land well beyond its ancestral homeland of the Arabian Peninsula. Both Arab anti-Zionists and Marxist ones (Soviet in the past, Progressives now) know that to let the truth shine in such unvarnished form would be to expose themselves as perpetrators and supporters of imperialist aggression and injustice against a nation—the very accusation they level against Zionism. They have, therefore, concocted a fictitious rendering of the conflict to turn the reality of the Jewish David against the Arab/Islamic Goliath on its head. For the Arab anti-Zionist side, they had only to cook up a new nation from scratch—the non-Jewish “Palestinian nation” that has been on the land from time immemorial but for some reason nobody had heard of before the 1960s. That was enough to make it possible for them to talk of “Zionist imperialism.”

On the Far Left side of the anti-Zionist camp, working in synergy with the faux-Palestinian fiction, another fictitious yarn was spun: That of anti-Zionism as a European White Supremacist Settler Colonial Movement (any combination of those terms is obligatory in the anti-Zionist literature). Since no lie can stand without a grain of truth behind it, they have pointed the truth that the push for Jewish nationalism really gained steam among 19th-century European Jewry, but of course, they bury all the other facts that completely destroy their maliciously false narrative.

The part willingly played by the Jews of the Arab world in Zionism is denied; pace the anti-Zionists, those Jews had lived in bucolic harmony with the Arabs until “European” Zionism disturbed the peace. The fact is that the few Israeli Jews still believing in the peace process today are nearly all of European extraction, while the Sephardim are, and have always been, the core of the Israeli Jewish right; the former are so because they have their white guilt and naivete, while the latter not only lack those, but also have far-reaching family stories shattering the Edward Saidian narrative of “Everything was fine between Jews and Arabs until the Euro-Zionists arrived” to a zillion pieces.

Jewishness itself is denied; specifically, the irracial (race-agnostic) definition of the Jewish nation. The less image-conscious anti-Zionists ask how “the descendants of the Khazars” could have Palestine as their ancestral land, not caring that, even if the Khazar Hypothesis were true (it is not—it has been refuted on all possible grounds), Jews of European extraction and Khazar descent would still be virtual descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob per Judaism’s traditional view. But even where the Khazar Hypothesis is banned, there is little substantial difference in anti-Zionism without it: Even without the belief that Ashkenazi Jewry is descended from the mass-converted Khazar nation, all hard-Left anti-Zionists hold that “a European-style colony” should never have been “implanted in the midst of the Arab world.” This deeply racist narrative tramples on the Jewish view to dust.

The anti-white racist obsession of the anti-Zionists can border on mania in some websites. In one of them, there is a pastime of picking news articles on Israel for European family names, saying, “What are those Goldbergs, Wassermans, Breslaus, Rabinovitches (etc.) doing in Palestine?” Were this done with Arab family names on European lands, the same people would be the first to scream at such heinous racism, yet here they glory in it. Implied is that anyone with a family name of Telhami, Khalili, Qudsi, Nabulsi or Masarwa automatically has an unimpeachable claim to the land. But oops! Those last two names are already a fly in the ointment: Nabulsi is from Nablus, the Arabic name for Shechem, but Nablus itself is from Greek (Neapolis, “New Town”)—how is it that the nation that has been on this soil from time immemorial has forgotten the original Semitic name Shechem and replaced it with a Greek one? And Masarwa means “Egyptian,” a reminder of the emigration (yes, emigration!) of Arabs from Egypt and Syria to Palestine from the late 19th century up to the 1940s when suddenly the land began to bloom (under whose hands, I wonder?); among those newcomers to the Land of Israel were such authentic “Palestinian” icons as Edward Said and Yasser Arafat. But it is much better for anti-Zionism’s racist fiction to ignore those facts and dwell on the European family names of some Israeli Jews.

The racism underlying anti-Zionism is not optional. I have encountered someone on the forums who thinks the Mideast Conflict is like that of the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, of two tribes not much different from each other. That person said he had little care for either of the sides. Were the anti-Zionists to accept the equality of the Jews and Arabs, rather than the superiority of the Arab (“Palestinian”) claim over the Jewish (“White Settler”) as they do now, anti-Zionism would lose most of its impetus. How many people are obsessed with the conflict in Sri Lanka? How many calls for BDS have been made with regard to the conflict in North Ireland? No, the anti-Zionists need to maintain the Manichean clarity of the South African analogy. Without their racism, the anti-Zionists would be viewed as howling at the wind, fighting for a far-flung hippie cause that most people have no concern with; not that “struggle for justice and morality against oppression and aggression” that they have made anti-Zionism to be. Take away the racist narrative of anti-Zionism and you have almost completely removed their sting.

Anti-Zionism would be illegitimate even if it were not racism; there is no right for anybody, anywhere to oppose the Jewish nation’s renewal of its self-determination on its one and only rightfully held piece of land in the world (a piece of land which, even at the most expansionist interpretation, does not exceed Algeria in size). However, the fact that anti-Zionism is racist at its core needs to be trumpeted far and wide; not only does it deflect the anti-Zionists’ charge against Jewish nationalism in the most perfect way, but it also forms an excellent basis for Zionists to start reversing anti-Zionism’s respectable image. The anti-Zionists say there is no room for racist ideologies in the 21st century; very well, that means there is no room for anti-Zionism.