Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Israel!
According to the Israeli Institute for Democracy, in its most recent report, "As of 2003, more than half (53 per cent) of the Jews in Israel state out loud that they are against full equality for the Arabs; 77 per cent say there should be a Jewish majority on crucial political decisions; less than a third (31 per cent) support having Arab political parties in the government; and the majority (57 per cent) think that the Arabs should be encouraged to emigrate." These are not new findings, as similar polls have been taken over the course of the last decade which showed similar results, the only change is the increase in the percentage of people who hold these views openly.
Let us review the Zionist record: A crucial goal of Zionism since its inception was to transform European (and later other) Jews into European Christians culturally, while continuing to call them Jews. This is a question that most Jewish opponents of Zionism had pointed out all along, namely that Zionism was the "worst kind of assimilationism". While Zionism opposed those assimilated Jews who insisted that they were German, English, American, or French, its opposition to them was not on the grounds that assimilation is bad in itself, but that anti-Semites would never allow European Jews, no matter how hard they tried, to be assimilated. But the Zionist model itself was assimilationist insofar as it insisted that Jews could become Europeans only in Asia, while in Europe, they would always remain Asiatics. It was this philosophy that made Israeli Jews see themselves as in the Middle East but not of it.
Zionism's insistence that European Jewish colonial settlers in Palestine were White Europeans is as old as Zionism itself. In his magnum opus, Der JudenStaat (The State of the Jews) published in 1896, Herzl unabashedly identified the Zionist state to be "the portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism". When negotiating later with the Portuguese Ambassador Count Paraty to locate an African territory to be colonised by European Jews (most likely Mozambique), Herzl asked Paraty to inquire of the Portuguese government the following: "Is there a territory sufficiently habitable and cultivable by Europeans?"
In his novel Altneuland, Herzl identified Palestinians as "dirty brigands", an important attribute that remains current and popular in contemporary Israel, where the erstwhile European anti-Semitic epithet of the "dirty Jew" has been transposed to "'Aravim Milukhlakhim" or "dirty Arabs".
Herzl was not alone in his understanding that European Jews were indeed Europeans embarking on a colonial venture. Zionist leader and later Israel's first President Chaim Weizmann did not mince words when in 1930 he explained what Zionism sought: "[we] wish to spare the Arabs as much as we can of the sufferings which every backward race has gone through on the coming of another, more advanced nation."
The Europeanness of the colonial settlers was so central to the Zionist project that it spanned the movement from left to right. Herzl's insistence that the Jewish colonial settlers in Palestine should speak German not Hebrew was not followed by his successors, but this in no way lessened their claim to be European. Thus, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of right-wing revisionist Zionism, in advising on how the revived Hebrew was to be pronounced, insisted that "There are experts who think that we ought to bring our accent closer to the Arabic accent. But this is a mistake. Although Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages, it does not mean that our Fathers spoke in [an] 'Arabic accent'... We are European and our musical taste is European, the taste of Rubinstein, Mendelssohn, and Bizet."
These commitments have been manifest in Israel since its creation. The positing of Israeli Jews as Europeans with world-class Western orchestras and musicians, scientists producing advanced technology, a social and political structure with a commitment to West European cultural and political principles and mores, including the central trait of being "peace-loving" and "democratic" was contrasted always with Palestinian war-like barbarians who lack culture or even a nationality. It is true that all along Zionism could not face the world with what it did and does to the Palestinians, as it understood that such an admission would lose it support, but, increasingly after 11 September, even that sense of shame disappeared.
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Excerpted from:
weekly.ahram.org.eg
Aravim Milukhlakhim!! Err... please, tell me... is my European accent good enough??? |
