RacecardIsrael and Palestine
Is anti-Zionism the same as anti-Semiticism? Can gentiles legitimately criticize Israel? Are Israelis or Zionists "playing the racecard" to quell legitimate opposition?
Nothing prepares you for the vicious racism of many, but not all, Israeli soldiers and settlers and other Israelis against the Palestinian people. ..
Jewish writer’s answer to Israel’s question | My Israel Question | By Antony Loewenstein | Melbourne University Press, 2006 | 340 pages, $32.95 | REVIEW BY KIM BULLIMORE
Australian Jewish writer and journalist Antony Loewenstein has set the cat among the pigeons with his first book, My Israel Question. Loewenstein has been variously accused of being “a self-hating Jew”, who is part of “the pro-Hezbollah cheerleading squad”, an ally of deceased Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi and a part of a cluster of “dumb leftist Jews who vilify Israel”, while suffering from a “Demidenko-Darville” disorder. His work, according to Zionist detractors, is an “ill-informed rant”, a work of “vanity” that should “lie in the tip alongside such other works as Mein Kampf and the Protocols of Zion”.
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In the wake of the Ashrawi affair, Loewenstein travelled to Israel to experience for himself the occupation of Palestine. In the first section of My Israel Question, Loewenstein reveals many of the dissenting voices in Israel: Uri Avnery, Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. While these voices are a welcome inclusion, Loewenstein unfortunately gives little space to a critique of the contradictory nature of “left Zionism” in either Israel or Australia.
Loewenstein’s heartfelt account of his journey into the Occupied Palestinian Territories reveals the shock that many have experienced, including myself, when you first travel into the region. Nothing can prepare you for the way Palestinians are treated at the hands of the Israeli military. Nothing prepares you for the vicious racism of many, but not all, Israeli soldiers and settlers and other Israelis against the Palestinian people. ...
Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that
The Moral Bankruptcy of Israel's Founding Idea The Coming Collapse of Zionism | By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON |Former CIA Analyst | September 12, 2006
Is it only observers outside the conventional mainstream who have noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon and simultaneously on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most deluded to see, the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?
Can it be that the deluded are still deluded? Can it truly still be that Israel's bankruptcy is evident only to those who already knew it, those who already recognized Zionism as illegitimate for the racist principle that underlies it?
Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming the ultimate collapse of Zionism and, with it, of Israel itself as the exclusivist state of Jews?
Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that excludes any possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples. Israel's destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the natural next step in the evolution of such a founding ideology. Precisely because that ideology posits the exclusivity and superiority of one people's rights, it can accept no legal or moral restraints on its behavior and no territorial limits, for it needs an ever-expanding geography to accommodate those unlimited rights.
Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to its total domination over its own space -- not merely of the space within Israel's 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well, extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet seen fit to set for itself. Total domination means no physical threat and no demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews always outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all natural resources, all neighbors are powerless and totally subservient. This was the message Israel tried to send with its attack on Lebanon: that neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon that nurtures Hizbullah should continue to exist, for the sole reason that Hizbullah challenges Israel's supreme authority in the region and Israel cannot abide this effrontery. Zionism cannot coexist with any other ideology or ethnicity except in the preeminent position, for everyone and every ideology that is not Zionist is a potential threat. ...
These Arab parties want every Israeli to be treated as an equal citizen irrespective of ethnicity. Such a platform is technically illegal in Israel ..
Hurtling towards the Next Intifada:: "An Interview with Jonathan Cook | By Andrea Bistrich
09/01/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Your book has been released in Britain and is about to come out in the US. Already it is widely praised by various experts and academics related to the Middle East. Why does the “Jewish and democratic State” need to be unmasked?
I chose the word “unmask” because it was the term Ehud Barak used about Yasser Arafat after the failure of the Camp David negotiations in June 2000: he said he had unmasked the Palestinian leader as no partner for peace. But in fact the reverse happened: the Camp David failure and Israel’s subsequent actions during the second intifada unmasked those like Barak who claimed that Israel was a partner for peace.
The nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is irreconcilable as long as Israel sees itself as a “Jewish and democratic” state. This is the premise of my book. The Jewish and democratic myth keeps Israelis both from examining the essentially undemocratic nature of their state -- what social scientists often term an ethnic state or an ethnocracy -- and from finding a peaceful solution to their conflict with the Palestinians.
Can you explain the problems of a “Jewish and democratic state” in more detail?
Most educated Israelis are made uncomfortable by the idea that Israel is simply a Jewish state; it sounds a little too like an Afrikaner state or a Catholic state. So the “democratic” is added as a kind of public denial that Israel is an ethnic or religious state. The Jewish and democratic idea is crucially important to Israel and Israelis: it is, for example, the central tenet of the 1992 Basic Law on Freedom and Human Dignity, the nearest thing Israel has to a Bill of Rights. This document defines Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and, in contradiction, also excludes equality as one of its principles. That’s because most Israelis believe that equality applies only to Jews inside Israel, not to the one in five Israeli citizens who are not Jewish but Palestinian.
These one million or so Palestinians are the remnants of the Palestinian majority that once inhabited Palestine. They have been given citizenship but are treated as a sort of abscess -- or cancer, as they are often referred to -- in the Israeli body politic. Israel has not tried to integrate or assimilate them. Why? Because, as non-Jews, they threaten the Jewishness of the state. So they have to be kept apart, separate, as pseudo-citizens. Although usually ignored in discussions about the regional conflict, Israel’s relationship to its Palestinian “citizens” is, I think, revealing about what Israel wants to be and how it sees itself. For Israelis, “Jewish and democratic” means democratic for Jews only. The opposite of a Jewish and democratic state would be a “state of all its citizens” (what we think of as a liberal democracy), which has been the main campaign platform of Israel’s Arab political parties since the Oslo agreements were signed in the 1990s. These Arab parties want every Israeli to be treated as an equal citizen irrespective of ethnicity. Such a platform is technically illegal in Israel, and parties and candidates can be banned for promoting it.
In other words, the overriding concern in Israel has nothing to do with being democratic and everything to do with being Jewish -- at all costs. This is backed by polls of Israeli Jews which show an overwhelming majority reject the idea of Israel being a liberal democratic state.
All of this is the context for my main argument, which is that the recent developments in the conflict have been almost entirely driven on the Israeli side by concerns about demography, about Palestinians becoming a majority in the region and Israel being compared to an apartheid state like the old South Africa. The question facing Israel has been how to ensure the Jewish state remains entirely in the hands of Jews, and how to distort the reality entailed by this so that Israel can continue to claim it is both Jewish and democratic.
The disengagement from Gaza last year and now the convergence plan for the West Bank are about two things: protecting Israel as a “Jewish and democratic” state in the sense that Palestinians, citizens and non-citizens alike, will be excluded from any say in its future; and emasculating the region’s Palestinians by locking them up in a series of ghettoes so that they pose no threat to the Jewish state because they are powerless to assert their rights as a single national people and their historical rights to most of their own land. Israel is hellbent on achieving these two goals because in fact they are inseparable: the more space in what was once known as Palestine Israel takes for itself, the weaker the Palestinians will become. In that way, Israel thinks -- wrongly, I believe -- its future as a Jewish state is more secure. ...
