    Zionism, Antisemitism, and the People of Palestine

    By Noel Ignatiev

    Zionism as a political movement developed in the late 19th century. Its
    founder, Theodore Herzl, was influenced by two phenomena: the extent of
    French anti-Semitism revealed by the Dreyfus Trial, and nationalist
    ideals then popular in Europe. Herzl held that Jews cannot be
    assimilated by the nations in which they live, and that the only
    solution to the “Jewish question” was the formation of a “Jewish state”
    in which all the Jews would come together. The early Zionists
    contemplated as the site of the future state Argentina or Uganda, among
    other locales. Herzl favored Palestine, because, although an agnostic,
    he wanted to make use of the custom, widespread among Jewish mystics, of
    going on pilgrimages to the “holy land” and establishing religious
    communities there.

    In 1868, there were 13,000 Jews in Palestine, out of an estimated
    population of 400,000. The majority were religious pilgrims supported by
    charity from overseas. They encountered no opposition from the Muslims,
    and their presence led to no clashes with the Arab population, whether
    Muslim or Christian.

    In 1882, Baron Rothschild, combining philanthropy and investment, began
    to bring Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe to build a plantation
    system along the model the French used in Algeria. They spoke Yiddish,
    Arabic, Persian, and Georgian. Significantly, Hebrew was not among the
    languages spoken. The outcome of Rothschild’s experiment was
    predictable: Jews managed the land, while Arabs worked it. This was not
    the result the Zionists had in mind; a Jewish society could not be based
    on Arab labor. Consequently, they began to encourage the immigration of
    Jewish farmers and workers.

    In 1917 British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, seeking support for
    Britain’s efforts in World War I, issued his famous declaration
    expressing sympathy with efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in
    Palestine. The Zionists immediately seized upon this statement, which
    they interpreted to mean support for a Jewish state. At the time of
    Balfour’s declaration, Jews comprised less than 10% of the population
    and owned 2.5% of the land of Palestine.

    The problem of building a Jewish society among an overwhelming Arab
    majority came to be known as the “conquest of land and labor.” Land,
    once acquired, had to remain in Jewish hands. The other half of this
    project, known as Labor Zionism, called for the exclusive use of Jewish
    labor on the land acquired by the Jews in Palestine. The Labor Zionists
    maintained this dual exclusionism (or apartheid, as we would now call
    it) in order to build up purely Jewish institutions.

    To achieve the conquest of the land, the Zionists set up an arrangement
    whereby land was acquired not by individuals, but by a corporation,
    known as the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF acquired land and
    leased it only to Jews, who were not allowed to sublet it. Thus land was
    acquired in the name of “the Jewish people,” held for their use, and not
    subject to market conditions. The idea was for the JNF to gradually
    acquire as much land as possible as the basis for the expected Jewish
    state.

    Naturally, in order for the land to serve this function, Arab labor had
    to be excluded. Leases from the JNF specifically prohibited the use of
    non-Jewish labor on JNF plots. One way to achieve this goal was to lease
    land only to those Jews who intended to work it themselves. In some
    cases, when land was bought from Arab absentee landlords, the peasants
    who resided on and worked the land were expelled. Jewish landholders who
    refused to exclude Arab labor could lose their leases or be faced with a
    boycott.

    The conquest of labor pertained not only to agriculture but also to
    industry. The Labor Zionists formed an institution to organize Jewish
    labor and exclude Arabs: the Histadrut. The Histadrut was (and largely
    is) an all-Jewish combination trade union and cooperative society
    providing its members with a number of services. From the beginning it
    was a means of segregating Arab and Jewish labor and bringing into
    existence a strictly Jewish economic sector. Even when Arab and Jewish
    laborers performed precisely the same job, Jewish workers were paid
    significantly higher salaries. These policies were the death knell for
    any attempt to organize labor on a non-racial basis. The “laborism” of
    Labor Zionism killed and continues to kill efforts at building a unified
    labor movement.

    Despite these policies and even with the encouragement of the British
    government, in the thirty years following the Balfour Declaration, the
    Zionists were able to increase the Jewish-owned portion of the land of
    Palestine to only 7%. Moreover, the majority of the world’s Jews showed
    no interest in settling there. In the years between 1920 and 1932, only
    118,000 Jews moved to Palestine, less than 1% of world Jewry. Even after
    the rise of Hitler, Jews in Europe did not choose Israel: out of 2.5
    million Jewish victims of Nazism who fled abroad between 1935 and 1943,
    scarcely 8.5% went to Palestine. 182,000 went to the U.S., 67,000 to
    Britain, and almost 2 million to the Soviet Union. After the war, the
    U.S. began to encourage Jewish settlement in Palestine. Aneurin Bevin,
    postwar British Foreign Minister, publicly blurted out that American
    policy mainly arose from the fact that “they did not want too many of
    them in New York.” The Pakistani delegate to the UN was to make the same
    point sarcastically:

    "Australia, an overpopulated small country with congested areas, says no,
    no, no; Canada, equally congested and overpopulated, says no; the United
    States, a great humanitarian country, a small area, with small
    resources, says no. This is their contribution to the humanitarian
    principle. But they state, let them go into Palestine, where there are
    vast areas, a large economy and no trouble; they can easily be taken in
    there." (Weinstock, 226).

    The U.S. limitation on the number of Jews allowed into the country
    coincided with Zionist policy, as enunciated by David Ben-Gurion, first
    prime minister of Israel: “If I knew that it would be possible to save
    all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only
    half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for
    the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these
    children, but also the history of the People of Israel.” (Yoav Gelber,
    “Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1932-1945) Yad Vashem
    Studies, vol. XII, 199.)

    This policy of attaching more importance to the establishment of Israel
    than to the survival of the Jews led the Zionists to collaborate with
    Nazism and even be decorated by Hitler’s government. The best known case
    was that of Rudolf Kastner, who negotiated the emigration to Palestine
    of some of Hungary’s most prominent Jews in return for his help in
    arranging the orderly deportation of the remainder of Hungary’s Jews to
    the camps. For his efforts, Kastner was praised as an “idealist” by no
    less an authority than Adolf Eichmann. (The best study of Zionist-Nazi
    relations is Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.)

    The Zionists knew they had to rid themselves of the Arab majority in
    order to have a specifically Jewish state. Although 75,000 Jews moved to
    Israel between 1945 and 1948, Jews still constituted a minority in
    Palestine. The 1948 war afforded the Zionists an excellent opportunity
    to rectify this; as a result of the war, more than three-quarters of a
    million Arabs fled their homes. The case of Deir Yasin, in which Israeli
    paramilitary forces, under the command of future prime minister Menachem
    Begin, massacred over 250 civilians, sending a message to Palestinians
    that they should depart, is the most well known example of how this
    flight was brought about. In his book, The Revolt, Begin boasted that
    without Deir Yasin there would have been no Israel, and adds, “The Arabs
    began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yasin’” (quoted in Menuhin, 120).
    Recent writings by Israeli revisionist historians have refuted the
    longtime insistence of Israeli officials that the departures were
    voluntary. Some of the refugees went to neighboring Arab countries;
    others became refugees in their own country. Those 750,000 expelled from
    their homes and their descendants, who together total 2.2 million
    people, make up the so-called refugee problem. Although the United
    Nation has repeatedly demanded they be allowed to return, the Israeli
    government has refused to agree. The war ended with the Zionists in
    control of 80% of Palestine. In the next year, nearly 400 Arab villages
    were completely destroyed. This was no accident but the result of
    deliberate policy, as shown is the following statement by one of the
    most authoritative officials of the Zionist state:

    Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in our country
    for both peoples together… The only solution is Eretz Israel, or at
    least the western half of Eretz Israel, without Arabs, and there is no
    other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring
    countries, transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain…

    Joseph Weitz, Deputy Chairman of the Board of directors of the Jewish
    National Fund (JNF) from 1951 to 1973, former Chairman of the Israel
    Land Authority (Davis, 5).

    Moshe Dayan, former Prime Minister, stated in a famous speech before
    students at the Israeli Institute of Technology in Haifa in 1969:

    Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not
    even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you
    because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not
    exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahial arose in the place
    of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the
    place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman.
    There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a
    former Arab population (Ha’aretz, April 4, 1969, quoted in Davis, 108).

    It is a mistake to draw a moral line between Israel and the Occupied
    Territories; it is all occupied territory. The 1967 war, as a result of
    which Israel conquered and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank of the
    Jordan River, and the Sinai Peninsula, was a continuation of the process
    that began in 1948. It will be drearily familiar to any who know the
    history of the displacement of the Indians from the lands they occupied
    in North America. Today it would be called “ethnic cleansing.”

    The first census of the state of Israel, conducted in 1949, counted a
    total of 650,000 Jews and 150,000 Arabs. The legal foundation for the
    racial state was laid down in two laws passed in 1950. The first, the
    Law of Return, permitted any Jew, anywhere in the world, the right to
    “return” to Israel. This right did not apply to non-Jews, including the
    Palestinian Arabs who had recently become refugees. In addition, the
    Absentee Property Law confiscated the property of Arab “absentees,” and
    turned it over to the Custodian of Absentee Property. Arab refugees
    within their own country were termed “present absentees” (what a
    phrase!), and not allowed to return to their property. A number of
    refugees who attempted to do so were termed “infiltrators,” and some
    were shot in the attempt. Confiscated property accounted for the vast
    majority of new settlements. These confiscated lands, in accordance with
    the procedures that were established in the Mandate period by the JNF,
    have become Israel Lands, with their own administration. This
    administration, controlling 92.6% of all of the lands in Israel, only
    leases these lands to Jews.

    Unlike many countries, including the United States, the Israeli state
    does not belong, even in principle, to those who reside within its
    borders, but is defined as the state of the Jewish people, wherever they
    may be. That peculiar definition is one reason why the state has to this
    day failed to produce a written constitution, define its borders, or
    even declare the existence of an Israeli nationality. Moreover, in this
    “outpost of democracy,” no party that opposes the existence of the
    Jewish state is permitted to take part in elections. It is as if the
    United States were to declare itself a Christian state, define
    “Christian” not by religious belief but by descent, and then pass a “gag
    law” prohibiting public discussion of the issue.

    If one part of the Zionist project is the expulsion of the indigenous
    population, the other part is expanding the so-called Jewish population.
    But here arises the problem, which has tormented Israeli legal officials
    for fifty years, what is a Jew? (For a century-and-a-half U.S. courts
    faced similar problems determining who is white.) The Zionists set forth
    two criteria for determining who is a Jew. The first is race, which is a
    myth generally and is particularly a myth in the case of the Jews. The
    “Jewish” population of Israel includes people from fifty countries, of
    different physical types, speaking different languages and practicing
    different religions (or no religion at all), defined as a single people
    based on the fiction that they, and only they, are descended from the
    Biblical Abraham. It is so patently false that only Zionists and Nazis
    even pretend to take it seriously. In fact, given Jewish intermingling
    with others for two thousand years, it is likely that the
    Palestinians - themselves the result of the mixture of the various peoples
    of Canaan plus later waves of Greeks and Arabs - are more directly
    descended from the ancient inhabitants of the Holy Land than the
    Europeans displacing them. The claim that the Jews have a special right
    to Palestine has no more validity than would an Irish claim of a divine
    right to establish a Celtic state all across Germany, France, and Spain
    on the basis that Celtic tribes once lived there. Nevertheless, on the
    basis of ascribed descent, the Zionist officials assign those they have
    selected a privileged place within the state. If that is not racism,
    then the term has no meaning.

    The Zionist commitment to racial purity has led to expressions of
    bigotry at the highest levels of Israeli society that would inspire
    outrage in respectable circles in the U.S. An Israeli company has
    required thousands of Chinese workers to sign a contract promising not
    to have sex with Israelis. A company spokesman said there was nothing
    illegal about the requirement. Israeli law forbids the marriage of a Jew
    with a non-Jew. (Associated Press, December 23, 2003)

    Prejudice breeds arrogance: this past January the Israeli ambassador to
    Sweden destroyed an art installation in a Stockholm museum which he
    found offensive. The work commemorated a young Palestinian woman who
    killed herself and nineteen others in an attack in Haifa. (It does not
    become Americans, who learn as schoolchildren to recite the last words
    of Nathan Hale, “My only regret is that I have but one life to give for
    my country,” to denounce Palestinian patriots as “suicide bombers.”) The
    museum director pointed out that if the Ambassador did not like the
    exhibit he was free to leave. (Agence France Press, 17 January 2004)

    The Zionists are so desperate to increase the loyal population of the
    state that they are willing to admit hundreds of thousands of people,
    mainly from the former Soviet Union, who do not meet the official
    definition of a Jew because they have only a male grandparent or are
    merely married to a Jew. Since there is no such thing as Israeli
    nationality in Israel (there being only Jewish nationality and
    “undetermined”), these people, who do not qualify as Jews, are therefore
    registered as “under consideration.”

    Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Recently the
    Israeli press reported on a group of Indians from Peru who had converted
    to Judaism and moved to Israel, where they were relocated on what was
    once Palestinian land. Nachson Ben-Haim (formerly Pedro Mendosa) said he
    had no problem with that. “You cannot conquer what has in any case
    belonged to you since the time of the patriarch, Abraham.” Ben-Haim said
    he was looking forward to joining the Israeli army to defend the
    country. Ben-Haim and his coreligionists had moved to Israel with the
    agreement of the Jewish community in Peru, which did not want them
    because of the Indians’ low socioeconomic status.” (Ha’aretz, 18 July
    2002.)

    The Peruvian case points to the second criterion for being recognized as
    Jewish: conversion by an approved religious official, which means
    Orthodox rabbis only. In Israel today, Conservative and Reform rabbis
    are prohibited from leading their congregations, there is no civil
    marriage for Jews, and - in a measure reminiscent of medieval Spain - all
    residents support the established church, in this case the Orthodox
    rabbinate. The stranglehold of organized religion in a state where the
    majority of the Jewish population is secular and even atheistic is the
    price paid to maintain the Biblical justification for Zionist
    occupation. “God does not exist,” runs the popular quip, “and he gave us
    this land.”

    Israel is a racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of
    ascribed descent or the approval of the superior race. In this respect
    it resembles the American South prior to the passage of the Civil Rights
    and Voting Rights acts, Ireland under the Protestant Ascendancy, and,
    yes, Hitlerite Germany. But in its basic structures it most closely
    resembles the old South Africa. It is therefore not surprising that
    Israel should have developed a close alliance with South Africa when
    that country was still under apartheid. After the first talks held in
    1970 between Shimon Peres and South Africa's defense minister, Botha,
    cultural, commercial, and military cooperation between the two racial
    regimes developed. These relations were publicly celebrated during the
    visit of South African Prime Minister Vorster to Israel in 1976 - the same
    Vorster who held during the Second World War the rank of general in the
    pro-Nazi Organisation Ossewabrandwag

    Of course Israel’s greatest support comes from the United States, $3 to
    $5 billion a year, more than what the U.S. gives to any other country
    and exceeding the total of U.S. grants to the whole of Africa south of
    the Sahara. Every shell fired into a Palestinian village, every tank
    used to bulldoze a home, every helicopter gunship is paid for by U.S.
    dollars.

    Is one permitted to say above the level of a whisper that U.S. policy
    toward Israel has something to do with Jewish influence in the U.S.?
    Perhaps Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa can
    get away with it: “The Israel government,” he observed, “is placed on a
    pedestal [in the U.S.] People are scared in this country to say wrong is
    wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful” (Guardian 29
    April 2002).

    Not only does Zionism shape U.S. policy, it stifles discussion of
    alternatives. To cite a personal example: Two years ago a PBS reporter
    interviewed me on the eve of the UN-sponsored conference on racism about
    to be held in S. Africa. I made some remarks about Israel, and
    afterwards I asked her if she would use what I said. “Of course not,”
    she replied. “I agree with you, and so do all the journalists I know,
    but we can’t run any criticism of Israel without following it by at
    least ten refutations.” Harvard Professor Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer
    of the Middle East Forum have begun a website, Campus Watch,” to
    denounce academics deemed to have shown “hatred of Israel.” Students are
    to inform on professors.

    The greatest ideological weapon in the Zionist arsenal is the charge of
    antisemitism. Students and faculty members at Harvard begin a campaign
    to make the university sell off its stock in companies that sell weapons
    to Israel (modeled on past campaigns seeking divestment from South
    Africa), and the president of Harvard denounces the organizers of the
    campaign as “antisemitic in effect, if not in intent.” A faculty
    committee at the Massachusetts College of Art invites eminent poet Amiri
    Baraka to deliver a lecture, and members of the Critical Studies faculty
    circulate a petition calling upon the college president to denounce
    Baraka as an antisemite, citing as its main evidence a poem he wrote
    about the historic oppression of black people in which he refers to
    reported actions by the Israeli government prior to the World Trade
    center attack. As the Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen points out:

    …When Palestinians attack soldiers of Israel’s occupation army in their
    own village, it’s antisemitism. When the UN general assembly votes 133
    to 4 to condemn Israel’s decision to murder the elected Palestinian
    leader, it means that every country on the planet except the U.S.,
    Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands is antisemitic….

    This is ironic, he says, given present reality:

    …With one revealing exception (Israel, where non-orthodox religious Jews
    are discriminated against), Jews enjoy full religious freedom wherever
    they are. They have full citizenship wherever they live, with full
    political, civic and human rights like every other citizen…..

    Nowadays, an Orthodox Jew can run for the most powerful office on earth,
    the president of the United States…. A Jew can be mayor of Amsterdam in
    “anti-semitic” Holland, a minister in “anti-semitic” Britain, a leading
    intellectual in “anti-semitic” France, a president of “anti-semitic”
    Switzerland, editor-in-chief of a major daily in “anti-semitic” Denmark,
    or an industrial tycoon in “anti-semitic” Russia…. [A]nti-semitic
    Germany gives Israel three military submarines, anti-semitic France has
    proliferated to Israel the nuclear technology for its weapons of mass
    destruction, and anti-semitic Europe welcomes Israel as the single
    non-European country to everything from football and basketball leagues
    to the Eurovision Song contest, and has granted Israeli universities a
    special status for scientific fund-raising.

    “The use of alleged anti-semitism is morally despicable,” says HaCohen.

    …. People abusing this taboo in order to support Israel’s racist and
    genocidal policy towards the Palestinians do nothing less than desecrate
    the memory of those Jewish victims, whose death… is meaningful only
    inasmuch as it serves as an eternal warning to the human kind against
    all kinds of discrimination, racism, and genocide (“Abusing
    ‘Antisemitism’”, Sept. 29, 2003; some of Ran HaCohen’s writings can be
    found at www.antiwar.com).

    If I accomplish nothing else in this talk, I hope to create space for
    some who are repelled by Israeli actions but are held back from
    condemning Zionism by a desire not to be antisemitic.

    Does what I have just said mean that I dismiss the possibility of a
    revival of antisemitism? No, it does not. History shows that
    antisemitism ebbs and flows, and that it may return. Time prevents me
    from exploring that history in any depth; let me instead recommend two
    books: The Jewish Question by Abram Leon and The Origins of
    Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (in particular the first part,
    “Antisemitism”). For now I will say only that antisemitism (or more
    accurately anti-Jewish sentiment) is rooted neither in human nature or
    Christian theology; it is the product of social relations, including the
    historic concentration of Jews as representatives of commerce in
    non-commercial societies. The peculiar occupational distribution of
    European Jews led members of the dispossessed classes among the
    non-Jewish population to direct their animosity toward the Jews as the
    visible agents of oppression. “Antisemitism,” as the 19th-century German
    Socialist August Bebel put it, “is the socialism of fools.” It is not
    beyond historical explanation (as is implied by a term like “The
    Holocaust,” which takes antisemitism out of history and relocates it the
    realm of natural phenomena).

    But of course the Jews by themselves could not determine U.S. Middle
    East policy, any more than the Florida Cubans by themselves could
    determine U.S. Caribbean policy. By no means does all the organized
    support for Israel inside of U.S. politics comes from Jews. Aside from
    imperialist interests - and it is not clear whether Israel is an asset or
    a liability in this regard - Israel has gained support from a surprising
    quarter. From the Guardian, Feb. 28, 2002:

    At first sight, the scene is very familiar: one that happens in
    Washington DC and other major American cities all the time. On the
    platform, an Israeli student is telling thousands of supporters how the
    horrors of the year have only reinforced his people’s determination.
    “Despite the terror attacks, they’ll never drive us away out of our
    God-given land,” he says.

    This is greeted with whoops and hollers and the waving of Israeli flags
    and the blowing of the shofar, the Jewish ceremonial ram’s horn. Then
    comes the mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, who is received even more
    rapturously. “God is with us. You are with us.” And there are more
    whoops and hollers and flag-waves and shofar-blows.

    But something very strange is going on here. There are thousands of
    people cheering for Israel in the huge Washington Convention Centre. But
    not one of them appears to be Jewish, at least not in the conventional
    sense. For this is the annual gathering of a very non-Jewish
    Organization indeed: the Christian Coalition of America.

    …[T]here is little doubt that, last spring, when President Bush dithered
    and dallied over his Middle East policy before finally coming down on
    Israel's side, he was influenced not by the overrated Jewish vote, but
    by the opinion of Christian “religious conservatives” - the
    self-description of between 15 and 18% of the electorate. When the
    president demanded that Israel withdraw its tanks from the West Bank in
    April, the White House allegedly received 100,000 angry emails from
    Christian conservatives.

    What's changed? Not the Book of Genesis…

    What has really changed is the emergence of the doctrine known as
    “dispensationalism”, popularized in the novels of the Rev. Tim LaHaye
    and Jerry Jenkins….

    Central to the theory… is the Rapture, the second coming of Christ,
    which will presage the end of the world. A happy ending depends on the
    conversion of the Jews. And that, to cut a long story very short, can
    only happen if the Jews are in possession of all the lands given to them
    by God. In other words, these Christians are supporting the Jews in
    order to abolish them.

    Oh yes, agreed Madon Pollard, a charming lady from Dallas who was
    selling hand-painted Jerusalem crystal in the exhibition hall at the
    conference. “God is the sovereign. He'll do what he pleases. But based
    on the scripture, those are the guidelines.” She calls herself a fervent
    supporter of Israel…

    This conference began with a videotaped benediction straight from the
    Oval office. Some of the most influential Republicans in Congress
    addressed the gathering including - not once, but twice - Tom DeLay
    [majority leader of the House of Representatives, arguably the most
    powerful man on Capitol Hill].

    “Are you tired of all this, are you?” he yelled to the audience.

    “Nooooooo!” they roared back. “Not when you're standing up for Jews and
    Jesus, that's for sure,” he replied.

    … Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, [was] reportedly greeted
    “like a rock star” by Christian evangelicals in Jerusalem last month.

    … DeLay was followed by Pat Robertson, the coalition's founder, sometime
    presidential candidate and the very personification of the successful
    American TV evangelist. Robertson… cites the stories of Joshua and David
    to prove Israel's ownership of Jerusalem “long before anyone had heard
    of Mohammed”.

    These are the people my grandfather warned me about - the people who want
    to ban Darwin from the schools, who want to send to camps people who
    have sex with members of their own sex - and antisemeets (as he used to
    say), Jew-haters to the backbone of their souls.

    Osama Bin-Laden was telling no more than the truth when he said that the
    Muslim world is facing an alliance of Zionists and Crusaders.

    Before I get around to proposing solutions, I want to address the
    present state of the Israeli peace movement. As everyone knows, there
    are forces inside of Israel who oppose the government now in office.
    Some of these people, particularly the soldiers who refuse service in
    what they call the occupied territories or who refuse to carry out
    atrocities such as bombing civilians, and those who encourage them, are
    people of exemplary courage. Yet all of them, with one notable exception
    (to which I shall return), are handicapped and in the long run rendered
    ineffective by their acceptance of the fundamental premise of Zionism,
    the legitimacy of the Jewish state. “Land for peace” implies the
    permanent partition of Palestine. It was under the leadership of the
    Labour Party, with which much of the opposition is affiliated, that the
    initial dispossession and exclusion of the Palestinian people from their
    homeland took place and the expansion into the West Bank, the Gaza Strip
    and the Golan Heights was carried out.

    History has shown, in Ireland, India, and everyplace else it has been
    tried, that partition of a territory along lines of descentwhether
    called “racial” or “religious”is a guarantee of permanent war. It is
    understandable that some Palestinians, having been subjected to torture
    for over two generations, have reluctantly agreed to accept as a
    substitute for justice a Palestinian State built on less than a fourth
    of their original land. But they are making a mistake. Such a State, if
    it is ever established, will be a Bantustan, a reservation where the
    only attributes of a free nation will be a flag and a national anthem. I
    am no more a Palestinian Zionist than I am a Jewish Zionist.

    What solution, therefore, do I propose? A simple and moderate one:
    within historic Palestine, the area between the Mediterranean Sea and
    the Jordan River, live ten million people. I propose that there be
    established there a single state, in which every person who declares his
    intention to live there and adopt citizenship be recognized as a citizen
    and have one vote. I propose further that the special advantages given
    to Jews be terminated, that the Palestinians who were forced into exile
    after 1948, and their descendants, be granted the right to live there,
    and that the state undertake practical measures to make it possible for
    them to do so by building housing and extending to them to right to rent
    or buy, if necessary providing funds to help them. I propose further
    that both Hebrew and Arabic be declared official state languages to be
    taught in the schools, that all residents be granted the right to
    publish newspapers and maintain cultural institutions in any language
    they choose, that the special position of Orthodox Judaism be ended and
    that the state declare freedom of worship and make no law respecting an
    establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

    It is a simple and, I repeat, a moderate program. It does not entail
    driving anybody into the sea, and it recognizes the elementary right of
    people to live where they choose.

    Some might object that such a thing is impossible, that after all the
    blood that has been shed and the bitterness that has accumulated, it
    will not be possible for Jews and Arabs to live peacefully together. To
    that argument I have three responses: the first is the experience of
    South Africa, a place whose history of bitterness is no less than
    Palestine’s; there the establishment of majority rule did not cause the
    gods to weep or the earth to open and swallow the people. My second
    response comes from Sherlock Holmes: after you have eliminated all the
    impossible solutions, Watson, the one remaining, no matter how
    improbable, must be the right one. My third response is to cite recent
    indications that the idea of the single democratic secular state - once
    the official goal of the PLO and then abandoned under U.S. pressure - is
    once again emerging as a pole of discussion. Its reemergence is in part
    a response to Israel’s gobbling up so much territory that nothing is
    left for a Palestinian state. The new reality is acknowledged by no less
    than columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who quotes a prominent Israeli Arab:

    If Palestinians lose their dream to have an independent state, then the
    only thing that might guarantee for them a dignified life will be asking
    to live in one state with the Israelis. When this struggle starts, it
    will find allies among the one million Palestinian Arabs inside Israel…
    We will say, ‘Don’t evacuate even a single West Bank settlement. Just
    give us the vote and let us be part of one community.’

    Friedman reports a poll showing that 25 to 30 percent of Palestinians
    now support the idea of one state - “a stunning figure, considering it’s
    never been proposed by any Palestinian or Israeli party.” He calls it
    “the law of unintended consequences.” (New York Times, Sept. 14, 2003)

    The one exception to my earlier generalization about the Israeli
    opposition is a fraction of Orthodox Jews in Israel, who reject the
    State of Israel on religious grounds; according to them, the exile from
    the holy land was divinely ordained, and therefore the Jews are to live
    among the nations in every corner of the earth and not attempt to
    establish a State before the coming of the Messiah. Allow me to read
    from a statement by one of them, Rabbi Mordechi Weberman:

     "It is precisely because we are Jews that we march with the Palestinians
     and raise their flag! It is precisely because we are Jews that we demand
     that the Palestinian peoples be returned to their homes and properties!
     Yes, in our Torah we are commanded to be fair.

     We are called upon to pursue justice. And, what could be more unjust
     then the century-old attempt of the Zionist movement to invade another
     people's land, to drive them out and steal their property?…

     We have no doubt that would Jewish refugees have come to Palestine not
     with the intention of dominating, not with the intention of making a
     Jewish state, not with the intention of dispossessing, not with the
     intention of depriving the Palestinians of their basic rights, that they
     would have been welcomed by the Palestinians, with the same hospitality
     that Islamic peoples have shown Jews throughout history. And we would
     have lived together as Jews and Muslims lived before in Palestine in
     peace and harmony.

     To our Islamic and Palestinian friends around the world, please hear our
     messageThere are Jews around the world who support your cause. And when
     we support your cause we do not mean some partition scheme proposed in
     1947 by a UN that had no right to offer it.

     When we say support your cause we do not mean the cut off and cut up
     pieces of the West Bank offered by Barak at Camp David together with
     justice for less than 10% of the refugees.

     We do not mean anything other than returning the entire land, including
     Jerusalem, to Palestinian sovereignty!

     At that point justice demands that the Palestinian people should decide
     if and how many Jews should remain in the Land….

     We have attended hundreds of pro-Palestinian rallies over the years and
     everywhere we go the leaders and audience greet us with the warmth of
     Middle Eastern hospitality. What a lie it is to say that Palestinians in
     particular or Muslims in general hate Jews. You hate injustice. Not
     Jews.

     Fear not my friends. Evil cannot long triumph. The Zionist nightmare is
     at its end. It is exhausted. Its latest brutalities are the death rattle
     of the terminally ill.

     We will yet both live to see the day when Jew and Palestinian will
     embrace in peace under the Palestinian flag in Jerusalem. And ultimately
     when mankind's Redeemer will come the sufferings of the present will
     long be forgotten in the blessings of the future. "

     (http:www.marchfor justice.com/becauseweare jews.php)

    I am not a believer, but I find Rabbi Weberman’s words moving.

    One last point: I spoke earlier about the possibility of a resurgence of
    antisemitism in the United States. In 1991 George H.W. Bush, the father
    of the man who sits in the White House and the only member of his family
    ever to have been elected president, demanded that the Israelis stop
    building new settlements in Palestinian territory. Unlike previous
    presidents, Bush sounded serious, threatening to block billions in loan
    guarantees if Israel disobeyed. As might have been predicted, the
    dominant voices among American Jews were outraged, and Bush responded by
    complaining at a press conference that “Jews work insidiously behind the
    scenes.” On another occasion he reminded critics that the U.S. gives
    “Israel the equivalent of $1,000 for every Israeli citizen,” a remark
    that detractors took as antisemitic. Later on Bush’s Secretary of State
    James Baker made his famous “fuck the Jews” remark in private
    conversation, noting that Jews “didn’t vote for us anyway.” And it was
    true: when he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush got smallest percentage
    of the Jewish vote of any Republican since 1964.

    The present occupant of the White House seems for the time being to have
    recouped much of his party’s loss of favor among Jews, in part due to
    his appointment of so many to positions of power and influence in his
    administration. But I will go out on a limb and make a prediction
    (something I rarely do because I hate to be wrong): one-sided support
    for Israel, while it may win votes among American Jews and some
    fundamentalist Christians, is not necessarily wise from the standpoint
    of U.S. oil interests, and may even cost votes among that increasing
    number of Americans who can pick up the newspaper almost any day and see
    another story about Israeli tanks surrounding the residence of the
    Palestinian president, or massacring children, or assassinating a
    crippled half-blind cleric. I predict that if Dubya manages to extend
    his control of the White House in 2004, he will present the bill to
    whoever is in power in Israel, and that bill will include withdrawal
    from some of the territories occupied after 1967. If the Israelis
    respond negatively to this demand, which there is every reason to
    believe they will, and are supported by American Jews, which there is
    every reason to believe they will be, the younger Bush, already
    born-again, will be reborn yet one more time and will start making
    remarks about special minorities with divided loyalties and so forth. In
    other words, he will stoke up antisemitism, carefully of course, as
    befits the leader of the free world. And he will find a tremendous
    response, more than anyone anticipates, from many ordinary people who
    are tired of picking up the tab for the number one outlaw state in the
    Middle East, the state that has defied scores of United Nations
    resolutions, been condemned by the UN more than any other member or
    non-member, the only state in the Middle East that possesses actual
    weapons of mass destruction.

    Cynthia McKinney, Afro-American Congresswoman from Atlanta, was the most
    outspoken critic in Congress of U.S. Middle East policy, including
    unconditional support for Israel. As a result, Jewish groups around the
    country targeted her and, by channeling money to her opponent, succeeded
    in defeating her bid for reelection in 2002. Were they within their
    legal rights to do so? Of course they were; there is no law barring
    people in one district from contributing to a campaign in another. But
    do they think their intervention went unnoticed by black voters in
    Atlanta and around the country?

    If American Jews insist on identifying themselves with Israel, equating
    anti-Zionism with antisemitism, should they be surprised if others make
    the same mistake?