ZIONISM AND JUDAISM: NOT THE SAME THING

Judaism is a religion that is more than 3,000 years old. Its practitioners are Jewish, but Jews comprise a larger ethno-religious group, meaning that even Jews who are not religious still often identify with the culture/ethnicity.

Zionism is a political movement that was born in the 1880’s as a result of discrimination against and persecution of the Jews. The purpose of Zionism was to establish a safe homeland that was specifically—and exclusively—Jewish, to which Jews from anywhere in the world could immigrate.

Many different regions were originally considered as potential locations for this Jewish homeland, including Uganda, Argentina, and Turkey. ['Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict', by Phyllis Bennis, pg.175] The Zionists recognized that the place would need to be relatively underdeveloped and that they would need the power of a colonizing country behind them. Ultimately, they decided upon Palestine, which was taken over by Britain at the end of World War I, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. The Zionists recognized that they could appeal to more Jews by emphasizing historic, religious links to Palestine.

An oft-quoted, Zionist slogan for Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”—an attitude that totally ignored the fact that hundreds of thousands of indigenous Arabs—Christian and Muslim—already occupied the land. However, the Zionists found sympathizers among the British rulers, who grew tired of the growing conflict between newly arrived Jewish immigrants and native Palestinians and turned the problem over to the United Nations. Out of that action, with the backing of Britain, Israel was born.

Many Jews were not, and are not, Zionists. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, “Jewish tradition and religion clearly instruct Jews to await the coming of the promised Messiah at ‘the end of times’ before they can return to Eretz Israel as a sovereign people in a Jewish theocracy…In other words, Zionism secularized and nationalized Judaism.” ['The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', pg. 10-11.] Some of the conservative branches of Judaism, in particular, objected to the establishment of Israel by the hand of man rather than by the hand of God.

However, the Zionist founders of Israel were secular and apparently felt that the end goal of an Israeli homeland justified any means needed to obtain it. The diaries of men like David Ben-Gurion, as well as the military archives of the Zionists, hold many details of the 1948 expulsions and massacres of 750,000 Palestinians from their own land. [‘Endnotes’ in 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', pp. 262-281]

These methods continue today in an effort to force as many Palestinians as possible to flee. For example, during Israel’s military attack on the Gaza Strip in December, 2008 to January, 2009, Israeli forces killed over 1400 Palestinians: 926 were civilians, including 313 children and 116 women. [Bennis, pg. 194] Any criticism of Israel’s actions is met by an effective tactic of the Zionists: a charge of anti-Semitism. Norman Finkelstein writes of these highly publicized charges that, “The main purpose behind these periodic, meticulously orchestrated media extravaganzas is not to fight anti-Semitism but rather to exploit the historical suffering of Jews in order to immunize Israel against criticism.” [Norman Finkelstein, 'Beyond Chutzpah', pg. 22]

Many Jews inside and outside of Israel object to the violation of human rights to which the Palestinian occupants of Gaza and the West Bank are subjected every day. Multiple human rights organizations—again, within and outside of Israel—are dedicated to changing the policies of Israel. Jewish writers such as political scientist Norman Finkelstein, professor and philosopher Noam Chomsky, analyst Phyllis Bennis, and historian Ilan Pappe work tirelessly to expose the lies and mischaracterizations of the Zionists, as well as the human suffering of the Palestinians. In this high-tech age, it is becoming more and more difficult for Israel to violate with impunity both international law and the basic tenets of humanity.

THE NAKBA: THE CRISIS OF ETHNIC CLEANSING

Under the forests of Israel lie what are officially termed “ancient” ruins. In actuality, they are the remains of Palestinian villages, evacuated by forced migration or massacre, destroyed and bulldozed under in 1948 and then seeded over with trees. The mass expulsion of Arabs from Palestine, by Zionist forces, actually began in 1947, well before there was either an Arab-Israeli war, or even a nation of Israel. The area was still supposedly under British protection, but the Zionists who were planning the establishment of their new country felt the need to eliminate as many Palestinians as possible before the fact—and the British watched as the plan was carried out.

Palestinians and Jews had co-existed peacefully in Palestine since the 1880’s, when a massive immigration of Jews began. Therefore, the Arabs didn’t agree with the British (and consequently, the United Nations) plan to partition historical Palestine into two states once Britain was ready to give up control of the area. Little did the Arabs know or expect that the Zionists planned, almost from their first arrival, to expel the indigenous people and take over the land.

Many of the Jews who settled in Palestine fought with and were trained by the British during World War II, so they had an effective fighting force that they soon equipped with modern weapons. The Palestinians, a mostly agricultural people, possessed few weapons besides antiquated rifles. The only modern army among the surrounding Arab nations belonged to Jordan but Israel was careful to make an agreement with Jordan’s king, well before the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war, that if he would keep the Jordanian army out of the conflict, Israel would divide up the land with him.

David Ben-Gurion, one of the Zionist founders of Israel, wrote in his diary on October 7, 1947 that there “are no territorial boundaries for the future Jewish State.” [from 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, pg. 37] Ben-Gurion and a group called “The Consultancy” planned to cleanse Arabs from the territory coveted by the Zionists. Forced expulsions began with attacks on Palestinian villages in December of 1947, five months before Israel was declared a country and before the beginning of the Arab-Israeli war.

The first attacks were preceded by the distribution of threatening leaflets, warning the Palestinians that war was coming to their village. Jewish military forces (particularly the Hagana and Irgun units) would enter the village at night, fire their weapons into homes, blow up the stone and mud houses with the occupants still in them, and generally create panic. As this type of action went on, the brutality increased. Sometimes, as villagers fled their homes, they were fired upon. Some—women and children included--were killed immediately. Others were rounded up, the men separated from the women, a number of the men were accused of being “infiltrators” and then they were shot. The remaining villagers were forced to flee to other villages—or other countries, like Jordan—with only the clothes on their backs.

Some Arab countries sent small units of volunteers to help the Palestinians when the war between the Jews and Arabs actually began in February, 1948. The Jordanians, of course, stayed out of the conflict (with the exception of defending east Jerusalem) because of their collusion with the Zionists. The Communist Party arranged to purchase modern weapons from Eastern Europe for the aspiring Israeli nation. Eventually, Israel also purchased a modern air force and the last months of the Nakba included intimidation of the Palestinian villages by aerial bombardment.

By the time Israel officially declared their independence, on May 15, 1948, between 175,000 and 250,000 Palestinians had already been forced from their homes. The push to cleanse Palestine of the Arabs only increased with operation after operation carried out by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). These persisted even during times when truces were called.

As just one example, the village of Dawaymeh, whose population was swollen by refugees from other villages, was taken over by Israeli troops on October 28, 1948. Soldiers in armored vehicles surrounded the village on three sides, leaving one side open for the residents to flee. They shot at people indiscriminately, pursuing them as they sought shelter in a mosque and a nearby holy cave. The next day, bodies filled the streets, the mosque, and the entrance to the cave. Ilan Pappe writes that the eyewitness accounts of Jewish soldiers who took part in the massacre reported “babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death.” [Ilan Pappe, pg. 196]

By the end of 1948, over 750,000 Palestinians had been forced to flee or had been massacred, their villages burned, looted, and razed. Official Israel set about creating a fictionalized narrative about what happened during the year of the Nakba, claiming that the Palestinians left their villages voluntarily. They then attempted to obliterate the destroyed villages by bulldozing them under, planting forests over them, and claiming “ancient” ruins as proof of a long Jewish history in Palestine. The effort to cleanse the Arabs from Palestine—which is still going on—became an effort to cleanse the collective memory of the Nakba.