Abstract
This contribution is part of the collection ‘Antisemitism, Anti-Racism and Zionism: Old Debates, Contemporary Contestations’. 1
It might be difficult for a Palestinian to debate if Zionism is a racist ideology or not while living and witnessing daily the racist practice of the Israeli Zionist state. We are banned from taking certain roads because only Israeli settlers are allowed to use them; banned from the most holy places for Muslims and Christians in Jerusalem because the city has been declared the unified capital for the Jewish state of Israel; banned from using the only airport in Palestine (Lod airport) because it is only for Israelis; banned from travelling via Jordan without Israeli permission because the state of Israel controls all borders; banned from residing in Jerusalem if we have dual nationality even if we were born and raised in Jerusalem; banned from Israeli citizenship if we marry an Israeli; and banned from building our own houses without an Israeli permit that Arab residents of Jerusalem never get—and, if we do build them, having them demolished by the state and being forced to pay for their demolition. These are just a few examples of the flagrant racist discrimination experienced if your ‘origin’ is not that of an Israeli Jew in the Israeli Zionist state.
The fact that there are debates around whether Zionism is a racist ideology or not, and whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism or not, might show how successful the Israeli and Zionist powerful propaganda machine has been in covering up the obvious racist policies applied to every Palestinian every day. In her principled and clear stand on Zionism, antisemitism and racism, Nira Yuval-Davis (1984) at an early stage supported and approved United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on 10 November 1975 by a majority of seventy-two votes to thirty-five (with thirty-two abstentions), which ‘determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination’ (UNGA, 1975). It is interesting to note that the rationale for the Resolution did not look at the mixed-up history of the ‘Jewish question’ nor the Holocaust; rather, it was based on the actual practices and policies of the Israeli state, on its internal policies vis-à-vis Palestinians and its foreign policy that allied itself with the South African apartheid regime. In Resolution 3151 on 14 December 1973, the UN General Assembly condemned, inter alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism (UNGA, 1973).
It is also interesting to note that the decision to introduce the Mexico Resolution was based on women and feminist activism playing a crucial role in producing this Resolution. The ‘Declaration of Mexico on the equality of women and their contribution to development and peace 1975’ (UN, 1976), proclaimed by the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, held in Mexico City from 19 June to 2 July 1975, promulgated the principle that international cooperation and peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence; the elimination of colonialism and neocolonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms; as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination.
Thus, the declaration saw Zionism as an ideology that is harmful for the peace and security of the whole world—not only for Palestinians.
Palestinian women at this conference played a crucial role in pushing for this Resolution, as they did at the 1985 UN Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi. 2 Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular were not much concerned by the internal Jewish debate on the ‘Jewish fear’ for their security in the countries where they reside, or about the European feeling of guilt vis-à-vis the Holocaust and its repercussions, since the ‘fear’ and ‘pogroms’ have nothing to do with Arab history or culture. Women at these conferences and in their movements were driven by the real and recent history of the state of Israel. They were well aware that the Israeli state—not Jews in the world—was responsible for their calamity and the destruction of their society: that it was the Israeli state which controlled by force and extreme brutality their land to drive out its inhabitants and destroy their culture and physical existence.
Since its promulgation at 1975, the state of Israel used all opportunities to revoke Resolution 3379, which tarnished its self-made image as the oasis of democracy in a supposedly savage Middle East. Thus in 1991, under the guise of the ‘peace process’, the state of Israel did whatever it took to have the Resolution revoked. It made revocation of Resolution 3379 a condition of its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference, which was in progress in the last quarter of 1991. And on 16 December 1991, UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86 (UNGA, 1991), which revoked the determination in Resolution 3379 that had called Zionism a form of racism, was adopted.
Resolution 46/86 was raised under pressure from the administration of US President George H.W. Bush. The text of the revocation was simply: ‘The General Assembly Decides to revoke the determination contained in its resolution 3379 of 10 November 1975’ (ibid.). The motion was supported by 111 nations (including the ninety nations who sponsored the Resolution) and opposed by twenty-five nations; thirteen nations abstained. The 1991 motion never explained the reasons for the revocation of the 1975 Resolution and if Zionism had changed its racist nature and brutality against Palestinians. Meanwhile, the right-wing Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir admitted only a few years after the Madrid Peace Conference that Shamir’s intention in engaging with ‘peace talks’ was to prolong them for decades in order to gain time to create more Jewish colonies and to create facts on the ground, meaning to transfer land from Arab hands to Jewish settlers’ hands.
Palestinians realised that relying on Western governments or the UN system, dominated by the powerful, would not help them in their struggle for freedom; thus, their attempts to systematically reveal the racist practices and policies of the Israeli state and their call to sanction, boycott and divest from it found great success in a short period of time. To counter this success, the Israeli state and its propaganda machine started to revive the mix between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
In a recent article well-supported by many different references, Joseph Massad (2019) sheds light on the old alliance between antisemitism and Zionism. He states that the strategy of equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is, in fact, a strategy to conceal and distract from the very real, old antisemitism that has always been an ally of the Zionist movement—an alliance that goes back to the 1890s and continues to this day. He reveals that the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl (2007 [1896]), explained in his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State that the Zionist project shares with anti-Semites a desire to empty Europe of its Jews in order to send them to a colonial territory outside Europe. Herzl (quoted in Massad, 2019) famously declared that ‘the governments of all countries scourged by antisemitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want’ and that ‘not only poor Jews’ would contribute to an immigration fund for European Jews, but also ‘Christians who wanted to get rid of them’. Herzl added in his diaries: ‘The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies’ (ibid.).
When a surge of antisemitism arose in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century in relation to admitting Jewish refugees fleeing Russian pogroms, it was Herzl who counselled British antisemitic officials that supporting Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine would spare them from admitting Jewish refugees into Britain. 3
When former British prime minister Arthur Balfour shepherded the Aliens Act of 1905 (1905) through the House of Commons to ban Eastern European Jewish immigration, his concern was to save the country from the ‘undoubted evils’ of Jewish immigration. Massad (2019) adds that, like Chamberlain, Balfour had in mind another colonial destination for Jewish immigrants. The point is not that Balfour was first an anti-Semite and then became pro-Jewish when he issued the Balfour Declaration of 1917, 4 but rather that his pro-Zionist views were mobilised by his antisemitism (John, 2012).
It is interesting to witness nowadays, as Yuval-Davis (2020) indicates in her recent reflection on her 1984 Spare Rib text, that antisemitism is no longer regarded as right-wing and linked to white supremacy anymore but, as Massad (2019) also notes, rather something that is endemic on the left. This is a left that is active and successful in revealing the evil of Zionism not only for Palestinians but also for non-Israeli Jews—who began to level criticism against Israel after 1967 in the US and Europe and after the many wars launched by Israel against Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon in 1982 and 2006 and in Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, 1987, 2002, 2008, 2014 and 2018.
In his eye-opening article, Massad (2019) affirms that, while the Israeli government has recently devoted huge financial resources to challenging anti-Zionist criticism—including US$72 million to combat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement (JTA, 2017)—its response in 1972 was less drastic, if no less effective. At an annual conference in Israel sponsored by the American Jewish Congress, former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban laid out the new strategy: ‘Let there be no mistake: The New Left is the author and the progenitor of the new antisemitism … the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new antisemitism’ (Massad, 2019). If gentile critics were castigated as anti-Semites, Eban described two US Jewish critics (Noam Chomsky and I.F. Stone) as suffering from a complex of ‘guilt about Jewish survival’ (ibid.). Their values and ideology—meaning anti-colonialism and anti-racism—according to Eban, ‘are in conflict and collision with our own world of Jewish values’ (ibid.).
I concur here with Massad that Eban’s identification of Israeli colonial and racist policies with Jewish tradition was part and parcel of Zionism’s act of implicating all Jews in Israel’s actions and ideals. Meanwhile, Yuval-Davis (1984, p. 19) states that ‘This feeling of threat, as well as the occasional cynical use of antizionism as a cover for antisemitism, can disappear, only if the hegemony of Zionism weakens among non-Israeli Jews’. I could add that this conflation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism will disappear when all freedom lovers, including feminists, combat the Zionist racist and colonial project in Palestine and the rest of the world through boycott, divestment and sanctions against the state of Israel.