[Marxism] Zionism = racism?

[Dbachmozart@xxxxxxx]

from The Magnes Zionist -
 
 
The Association of Citizen Rights in Israel published its annual report,  in 
which it claims that Israeli racism is at an all-time high. You can read  
about in Haaretz _here_ (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/932384.html) . The 
report is  available in Hebrew _here_ 
(http://www.acri.org.il/story.aspx?id=1630) ; I couldn't find an  English 
translation of it yet.  
The report focuses on various discriminated sectors in the Israeli  
population, but leading them all, is, of course, the Israeli Palestinians. The  
report 
"notes a 26-percent rise in the number of racist incidents against Arabs  and 
twice as many Jews reporting a feeling of hate towards Arabs."  

Among Jewish respondents, 55 percent support the idea that the  state should 
encourage Arab emigration from Israel and 78 percent oppose the  inclusion of 
Arab political parties in the government. According to a Haifa  University 
study, 74 percent of Jewish youths in Israel think that Arabs are  "unclean." 
Actually, I checked that last statistic, because I wanted to see what  Hebrew 
word for "unclean" was used. The Haifa study is from 2004 and covered  1600 
high school students in Israel. 69% of the Jewish students think that Arabs  
are not smart, 75% that they are not educated, 75% that they are not cultured,  
and 74% that they are not clean (nekiyim). 75% of the students think that they 
 are violent.  
According to the ACRI report, studies of Israel media show that Arab  
citizens are portrayed negatively, as threats, and in a stereotypical fashion.  
Apologists for Israel will cite as mitigating factors the ongoing  conflict, 
security concerns, the second intifada and the rocket attacks on  Sderot, 
etc., etc, thus displaying their own racist tendencies to lump together  all 
Arabs 
(citizens, terrorists, Hamasniks, etc.) in the same category.  
The truth is that much of this racism is independent of the security  
situation, but follows inevitably and inexorably from how most Jews in Israel  
conceive of the Jewish state. I would like to make this point clear. Not all  
varieties of Zionism are racist, some are not racist at all; some are blatantly 
 
racist, and some are implicitly racist. The political Zionism enshrined in the  
State of Israel founding dogmas is at best implicitly racist, at worse  
explicitly and unabashedly racist.  
By "racism" here I mean bigotry against a certain ethnic group/people,  
though not necessarily on purely racial ground.  
If you define Israel as a state of the Jewish people, you have excluded  
non-Jews from the nation belonging to the state, be they "citizens" or not. So  
it 
doesn't take a leap of logic to contemplate excluding non-Jewish political  
parties from the parliament of the Jewish state, especially if they are not  
willing to mind their place but wish to assert their rights. Liberal talk of a  
"demographic threat," where the threat is from the citizens of the state, is  
likewise racist. It is thus not surprising that most of the country suppots 
the  idea that the state should encourage Arab emigration from Israel. I am not 
 
saying that this is necessary; if the Arabs knew their place and kept to it,  
allowing their rights to be trampled upon, then the Israeli Jews would have 
no  difficulty. Israeli racism is not eliminative racism; it allows 
Palestinians to  live and to flourish provided that they know their place and 
don't get 
too  uppity.  
Of course, many Israelis I know really don't mind being called racist,  since 
they see nothing wrong with being racist with respect to Arabs. To ACRI's  
poll, they will reply, "Big deal." Still, I am told that in Israel and 
elsewhere 
 there are still Jewish liberals who are troubled by these surveys.  
Perhaps they will say that increased racism, like massive violations of  
human rights, is the troubling, but necessary price to pay for a Jewish ethnic  
state.  





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