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| Sunday, 30 November 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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The dream (nightmare) of Zionism in Palestine by DR. AZZAM TAMIMI Uninformed individuals may be tempted to believe that the problem in the Middle East, known sometimes as the Palestinian question, is the result of a religious conflict between Muslims and Jews. Those influenced by certain sectors of the media will also be under the illusion that this problem is of a territorial nature and can best be resolved by the two conflicting parties agreeing to share everything and anything: land, water, peace and security. Both assumptions are wrong; there is no better proof than the history of the conflict itself. The roots go not so far in history; just to around the middle of the nineteenth century. This was the time when Europe, both East and West, was having a real problem dealing with its Jewish communities. This was also the time when the superpower struggle for hegemony over the world was heading the direction of bringing to an end one of the oldest empires: the Ottoman Caliphate. The world scene was opportune for the crystallisation of a new ideology among certain members of the 'assimilated' secular Jewish elite in Europe, an ideology based on the notion that the Jews were a nation that deserved a state of their own, most appropriately in the 'Promised Land', Palestine, the very heart of the Muslim world. It took two world wars and a Holocaust to accomplish such a dream. Israel was finally established in 1948 on the lands and the homes of the Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, who had been living in the land for many centuries. However, the project could not have been possible without the perpetration of massacres, such as Deir Yassin and Al-Dawaymah that sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing for their lives to become the oldest refugee community the world has known so far. Furthermore, for Israeli to remain secure in an ocean of hostility billions of dollars needed to be pumped into it on annual basis to provide it with military, economic and technological superiority over the rest of the region in which it has been planted. However, the founding fathers of Zionism would, if revived today, not recognize Israel as the project they once dreamt of and strived for. The disappointment might just kill them again. The Zionist dream of establishing a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, the alleged 'promised land' has turned into a nightmare. More than two thirds of world Jewry today remains posted far away from Palestine and an increasing number of Jews see Israel, the embodiment of the Zionist dream, more as a liability than an asset. Even the financial assistance provided by 'Diaspora' Jews is offered in many instances not without reluctance and perhaps more out of atoning for the sin of not migrating than out of a 'religious' or 'national' duty toward the Zionist entity in Palestine. An increasing number of Jewish intellectuals within as well as without Palestine are today embarrassed by Israel. The policies and strategies of successive Israeli governments, but most notably the current Sharon-led one, have constituted a heavy moral and psychological burden on the conscience of ever increasing Jewish individuals and communities. Some, though few still, have even come out with daring unequivocal expressions of disgust and dissociation. Jewish dissociation from Zionism was highest during the ideological formative years of the last decade of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. Then due to the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe, with the eventual catastrophe of the Holocaust. Jewish opposition to this fundamentally secular and nationalistic project reached a record low. Few voices of dissent could be heard for many years apart from those of the adamant and resilient Neturei Karta, the anti-Zionism ultra-Orthodox Jewish movement that believes Israel to be illegitimate and Zionism to be a heresy. Today, not only have the numbers of Neturei Karta's affiliates been on the rise but many other Jewish organisations and renowned figures from all walks of life have either joined the anti-Zionist camp or have dared condemn the racist Apartheid nature of Israel. While no more willing-to-migrate Jews are to be found anywhere in the world today, the original lawful inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians, are coming back. The 'Promised Land' without a people has proven after all to have been densely populated. Despite a century of betrayals, dispossessions and massacres, the Palestinians are as determined as ever to stay foot, reproduce and bequeath the struggle for regaining their land and freedom to their sons and daughters. Zionism started as a romantic vision whereby the Jews were to be provided with a third alternative; they needed no longer be either forced to assimilate or barricade themselves within the ghetto. Its founding fathers, who could not hide their contempt for religion and religious people, promised the Jews delivery from persecution at the hands of a thankless Christian world. Their means was to bring the 'Jewish People' together to Palestine to form a state of their own. In reality, the Jews turned to be numerous peoples rather than one people and many of their mosaic communities did not appreciate being uprooted from their own cultural milieus and natural habitats. After World War II, and in the aftermath of the establishment of the Zionist State in Palestine, the Zionists had difficulty persuading more Jews to leave their home countries and migrate. Without a further influx of Jews, and despite the banishment of about a million Palestinians, the newly founded state was likely to suffer a demographic crisis. Deceit was the means by which the most secured Jewish communities in the world were uprooted and forced to migrate. In Europe and America, the Holocaust industry guaranteed an outpouring of sympathy and support while conspiracies, were hatched elsewhere to bring about a massive transfer of entire communities. The early fifties of the twentieth century saw the removal of the Iraqi Jewish community, the most ancient Jews in the world, after Zionist terrorists conducted a bombing campaign against Iraqi synagogues pretending that Arab nationalists were responsible. In the eighties the Falashas, whom many people do not believe were Jewish, were smuggled out of Ethiopia to compensate for the demographic imbalance. In the early nineties, as Israel was actively embroiled in suppressing the Palestinian first intifadah, around a million Soviet Jews were denied access to the United States but allowed to leave the Soviet Union only for Israel. Since then, there has hardly been any tangible new intake and Zionists are looking around the world in case they find another 'lost tribe' to bring it 'back home.' With more Ashkenazi affluent Jews leaving Israel for prolonged periods to live elsewhere in the world where it is safer and less worrisome, the demographic problem is becoming ever more severe. Theodor Herzl's vision of a 'Jewish State' that "stretches from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates" is no where to be found but in his own Diaries. Territorial expansion in the aftermath of the June 1967 six-day war is being gradually undone. Sinai was returned to Egypt in exchange for signing the Camp David treaty and the remaining occupied territories, the Gaza Stripe, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, continue to be a liability. The 1982 invasion, and subsequent occupation, of Lebanon turned to be a nightmare despite initial jubilant proclamations that a further piece of the 'promised land' was being purified and redeemed. During the invasion campaign of 1982, the military rabbinate in Israel exhorted all Israeli soldiers to follow the footsteps of Joshua quoting the alleged Biblical promise in Deuteronomy 11:24" "Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours; our border shall be from the wilderness, from the river Euphrates, to the Western sea." Seventeen years later, the Lebanese redeemed their Southern strip and liberated their land thanks to the inability of the Israelis to sustain losses among their troops. Zionism was once again on retreat and the lesson was learned by the Palestinians under occupation. Today, not only is Israel not expanding, it is actually retreating behind a wall. Constructed for security considerations, the wall separating the Palestinians from the Israelis is undoubtedly augmenting the suffering and loss of the Palestinians. However, a sizable segment of the Israeli intellectual community identifies the wall-building with 'suicide'; Israel is voluntarily entering its own ghetto. Setting up a Jewish empire at the centre of Muslim heartlands was not the only failed vision of Zionism. Theodor Herl promised the world during this time that "supposing his Majesty the (Ottoman) Sultan were to give us Palestine: we could, in return, undertake to regulate the finances of Turkey. We should there form an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism." Today, the Zionist state is the only remaining political regime in the world to be based on Apartheid; a racist state that divides humans into more classes than did the defunct white-minority regime in South Africa. Israel today is the only country in the world that issues official licences to its military personnel and security agents to kill with impunity non-Jews, to torture them, to dispossess them of their land, to demolish their houses and turn them homeless, to deny them the support and sympathy of the world and to employ the state-of-the-art warfare technology to kill their dream and strip them of their humanity. Israel's parliament, the Knesset, is the only such assembly in the world that legislates in favour of the use of torture to extract confessions from Palestinian detainees. If that is not barbarism, what is? Over the past three years, Zionism has not only shown its real face to the world but has also proven its utter vulnerability and even mortality. On the one hand, it is becoming ever more evident that a Zionist state simply cannot live in peace with itself let alone with it surroundings. The inherent racism and anti-other nature of the state-community simply limit its viability. On the other hand, the ever-increasing brutality with which the Zionist regime is dealing with the Palestinians is a clear sign of desperation and panic. This, historians say, has been the experience in every single colonial endeavour that did not succeed in obliterating the indigenous population. This was the case in Vietnam, in South Africa and in many Latin American countries where the imperialist colonial project eventually collapsed. In other words, the pain and distress the Palestinians are enduring are all but the prelude to the imminent collapse of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine. Sharon's scorched land policy in the West Bank and Gaza may go down in history as the very final chapter in the Zionist episode. |
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