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Hanna Braun lebt in Großbritannien. Sie wurde 1927 in
Deutschland geboren und flüchtete 1937 mit ihren Eltern nach Palästina.
Bis Hitler an die Macht kam, hatte sie keine Ahnung, daß sie Jüdin ist. Die
Familie war völlig assimiliert. 1958 verließ sie Israel. In Großbritannien
wurde sie zur Antizionistin. Sie ist in der Palestine Solidarity Campaign www.palestinecampaign.org
aktiv.
Braun hat sich 1991 an Ausgrenzung und Verfolgung in Deutschland
und an die Zeit in Palästina/Israel erinnert unter dem Titel:
Memoirs
of an Anti-Zionist Jew
.doc-Datei
(11 Seiten), Fassung von 2006 .
2001 hat sie die Geschichte des Zionismus skizziert und 2006
leicht überarbeitet:
A
Basic History of Zionism and its Relation to Judaism
Dort merkt sie an: Der Staat Israel war auf das angelegt, was er heute ist.
Es sei hohe Zeit für eine Boykott-Kampagne nach dem Muster der
Anti-Apartheid-Kampagne.
Braun hat eine Resolution unterzeichnet gegen das israelische
Gesetz über das Recht der Juden auf Rückkehr und für das Recht auf Rückkehr
der Palästinenser: The Return Statement.Against the Israeli Law of Return - For the Palestinian
Right to Return. Die Resolution trägt inzwischen die Unterschrift unzähliger
britischer und anderer Antizionisten.
T:I:S, 26. Dezember 2006
*
A
basic history of Zionism and its relation to Judaism (2006)
I would like to start with a quotation by Amira Hass, a very courageous Israeli
journalist who lives in Ramallah. She writes for the most respected though by no
means left-wing daily "Ha'aretz" (Il Ard in Arabic, one of many
examples of the great similarity of the Arabic and Hebrew languages; both
derived from an ancient form of Aramaic). Although threatened several times with
sacking, as well as with numerous death threats, she carries on.
Hass ends one of her recent articles with this question: is transfer (expelling
as many Palestinians Arabs as possible from what’s left of their land) an
inseparable part of the founding ideology of the state of Israel, or a twisted
mutation, which should not be allowed to rise up against its creator?
Whereas the increasing number of refusenicks and Israeli peace activists
believes the latter (and I respect their sentiments), I, like Hass, do not share
them; my belief is that the state of Israel was bound to end up with what we
have today.
In order to understand the circumstances that led to the birth of Zionism I
shall sketch an outline of the history of Judaism and the Jews.
Even in biblical times there was a great deal of ethnic and even religious
mixing in ancient Judea and Israel, which never constituted an entirely
ethnic/religious entity. A cursory reading of the Old Testament reveals that
practically all the biblical prophets were perpetually railing against this
mixing, particularly in religious terms and intermarriage. Moreover, even during
that time, there were Jewish communities established in Arab lands, in Persia,
as well as in East and North Africa. With the destruction of the Temple and the
final fall of their autonomous Roman colony of Judea in 70 AD, the important
families such as the High priests (Cohanim/Cohens), priests (Levyim/Levys),
members of the Sanhedrin, the Judaic internal court that handed Jesus over to
the Roman authority, and others, felt insecure. There had been a number of
revolts and uprisings against their hegemony and their collaboration with Rome,
Jesus being one non-violent example, and so they decided to leave when the
Romans pulled out. Most of the indigenous subsistence farmers, craftsmen and
small-time traders stayed put and continued their lives as before. Some of these
inhabitants were early Christians and form the ancestors of many of today's
Palestinian Christians, others remained vaguely Jewish. Modern research shows
that when Islam arrived in the area in 638 AD many of these Jews converted and
that their descendants form a considerable part of today's Palestinians.
Numerous surnames, such as Moussa, Dini, Mansoor and Canaan inter alias are even
nowadays shared by Arab Jews, Muslims and Christians. (Incidentally, people with
the surnames Da Souza and Sassoon were originally from the Jewish community in
Suza, the ancient capital of Persia). Those who left with the Romans later
dispersed to other parts of Europe and even to central Asia, where there were
some trading outposts. A considerable part of European Jews, however, consisted
of Khazars, inhabitants of an important kingdom in the early middle ages,
roughly between the Caspian and the Black Seas. One of their Khans or kings
converted to Judaism around 740 AD and made Judaism the state religion. In the
9th century Khazaria finally fell to the Viking hordes and its inhabitants
dispersed throughout much of Europe. Thus the idea of a "return" of
European Jews to their roots is something of an absurd myth.
The various Jewish communities in Asia (including what is termed the Middle
East) and North Africa were on the whole well integrated into their respective
societies and apart from some isolated incidents did not experience the
persecutions that later became so prevalent in Europe. In Palestine, for
instance, Muslims repeatedly protected their Jewish neighbours from marauding
crusaders; in one instance at least, Jews fought alongside Muslims to try and
prevent crusaders from landing at Haifa's port, and Salah ad-Din Al-Ayoubi
(Saladin), after re-conquering Jerusalem, invited the Jews back into the city.
The Jews under Moorish rule in the Iberian
Peninsula flourished and experienced a renaissance mirroring that of the great
Islamic civilisation and culture at the time. As Christianity spread from the
north of Spain, Jews were again protected by Muslim rulers until the fall of
Granada-the last Moorish kingdom to pass into Christian hands-when both Jews and
Muslims were expelled at the end of the 15th century (Jews in 1492 and Muslims
some 10 years later). Most of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula settled in
North Africa and the lands under Ottoman rule, including Palestine, and
continued their peaceful co-existence with Muslims in those countries. It is
interesting to note that some of these displaced Jews who had settled in Safad
(Palestine) wrote laments about their expulsion from their “promised Land”,
which for them had been Spain.
The bulk of Portuguese "converted" Jews
(these were forced conversions and such Jews from Spain and Portugal were called
Marranos, i.e. swine, by the Christian Authorities, who suspected them of still
practicing their old religion in secret) settled in Amsterdam in the
Netherlands, presumably because they had long established trading connections in
that city. They reverted to their original religion and in 1655 were invited
hence to Britain by Oliver Cromwell. Many of them were glad to resettle since at
the time the Netherlands had just freed itself from the Spanish yoke in 1648 and
the shadow of the dreaded inquisition was still uncomfortably close.
The fate of Jewry in European countries, mainly in Eastern Europe, was very
different: persecutions, killings and burnings were widespread and Jews were
forced to live in closed ghettos, particularly in the Russian Empire, where they
were confined to the "Pale” of Jewish settlement, an area which consisted
of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Byelarus or White Russia. Anyone who wished
to move outside these borders needed special permission, although there were
large communities in the western and south-eastern part of what had been Poland,
but became part of Prussia and Austria respectively. By the mid-19th century
some of the more progressive Jewish communities had established themselves in
the big cities of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev.
In central and western Europe religious tolerance, followed by the granting of
full citizens' rights and emancipation, came relatively early, in the wake of
general liberalisation. However, Russian rulers remained opposed to any
liberalisation, including religious tolerance and emancipation, and as late as
1881, Tsar Alexander the third initiated a series of particularly vicious
pogroms to divert unrest amongst the population, at a time when Britain, for
instance, boasted a Jewish prime minister.
Total segregation was not always imposed from outside, however, but was
frequently enforced from within by highly authoritarian rabbis who exercised
absolute power over their congregations, often including the right to life and
the imposition of the death penalty (via denunciation). Thus it was a major
decision for anyone to leave these congregations and to look for a broader
education (known as "enlightenment"). In Eastern Europe
"enlightenment" was a relatively late phenomenon and it found
expression initially in the early-19th century, in a revival of Hebrew language
and literature and in the modern idea of Jews seeing themselves as a people.
This distinction between a people and a religion was of course anathema to
Orthodox Jews, who still today regard Hebrew as a sacred language to be used
solely for prayers and religious studies and the Jewish people and religion as
indivisible. The concept of Jews as a people closely mirrored the relatively new
European idea of a homogeneous nation state. An exception to this was the
socialist "Bund" organisation whose members rejected nationalism and
later Zionism.
Some of these early proto-Zionists, calling themselves "Hovevei Zion"
(Lovers of Zion), started the first settlements in Palestine in the 1840's with
the help of Jewish philanthropists such as the Rothschilds and the Montefiores
who themselves were not Zionists, and a larger number of immigrants followed
after the Russian pogroms of 1881-82. These settlers distinguished themselves by
their deliberate segregation from the indigenous population and their contempt
for local customs and traditions. This naturally aroused suspicion and hostility
in the locals. (There were long established religious Greek and German colonies,
mostly in the midst of Palestinian towns, to which the locals showed no
objection). This exclusivity was largely based on a sense of superiority common
to Europeans of the time, who believed they were the only advanced and truly
civilised society and in true colonial fashion looked down on
"natives" or ignored them altogether.
However, beyond that there was also a particular sense of superiority of Jews
towards all non-Jews. This belief in innate Jewish superiority had a long
tradition in rabbinical religious Jewish thinking, central to which was the
notion of the Jews as God's chosen people. Moshe Ben Maimon (Maimonides) had
been an exponent of this theory and quite often thinkers with a more humanist
outlook, e.g. Spinoza, were excommunicated. The accepted thinking in religious
communities was that Jews must on no account mix in any way with gentiles for
fear of being contaminated and corrupted by them. This notion was so deeply
ingrained that it quite possibly still affected, albeit subconsciously, those
Jews who had left the townships and had become educated and enlightened. Thus
the early settlers from Eastern Europe transferred the "Stettl"
(townlet) mentality of segregation to Palestine, with the added belief in the
nobility of manual labour and in particular soil cultivation. In this they had
been influenced by Tolstoy and his writings.
The "father" of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), came
from a totally different perspective. Dr. Herzl was a Viennese, emancipated,
secular journalist and author who was sent by his editor to Paris in 1894 to
cover the Dreyfuss affair. Dreyfuss had been a captain in the French Army who
was falsely accused and convicted of treason, although he was acquitted and
completely cleared some years later. The case brought to light the remainder of
a strong streak of anti-Semitism prevalent in the upper echelons of the French
Army and in the French press, with profound repercussions in emancipated Jewish
circles. Herzl himself despaired of the whole idea of emancipation and
integration and felt that the only solution to anti-Semitism lay in a Jewish
Homeland. To that end he approached various diplomats and notables, including
the Ottoman Sultan, but mainly European rulers, the great colonial powers of the
time, and was rewarded for his effort by being offered Argentina or Uganda as
possible Jewish Homelands by the British.
Herzl would have been quite happy with either of these countries, but when the
first Zionist Congress was convened in Basle in 1897 (it was to have been in
Augsburg but had to be transferred at the last moment because of local
rabbinical protests), he came up against Eastern European Jewry, by far the
greatest majority of participants, who, although broadly emancipated and
"enlightened" (orthodox Jews at that time completely rejected any
Jewish political movement and did not attend the congress), would not accept any
homeland other than the land of Zion. Not only had some of them already settled
in Palestine, there were strong remnants of the religious/sentimental notion of
a pilgrimage and possibly burial in the Holy Land. The last toast in the
Passover ceremony is "Next year in Jerusalem" although this was a
religious/sentimental rather than a national aspiration, and it was common
amongst the orthodox communities to purchase a handful of soil purporting to
come from the Holy Land to be placed under the deceased's head.
Herzl was quick to realise that unless he accepted the "Land of Zion",
i.e. the Palestinian option, he would have hardly any adherents. Even so this
solution was only definitely accepted after his death, during the 5th
Zionist Congress. Thus the Zionist movement started with a small section of
mainly eastern European Jews who saw the solution to anti-Semitism in what they
termed as a return to their "roots" and in a renewal of a Jewish
people in the land of their ancestors. Herzl wrote his book "Der
Judenstaat" (The State of the Jews) in which he wrote, inter alias, that
the Jews and their state will constitute "a rampart of Europe against Asia,
of civilisation against barbarism", and again regarding the local
population, "We shall endeavour to encourage the poverty-stricken
population to cross the border by securing work for it in the countries it
passes through, while denying it work in our own country. The process of
expropriation and displacement must be carried out prudently and discreetly. Let
(the landowners) sell us their land at exorbitant prices. We shall sell nothing
back to them."
Some early Zionists, such as Max Nordau, a French Zionist who visited Palestine,
were horrified; Nordau burst out in front of Herzl: "But we are committing
a grave injustice!" Some years later, in 1913, a prominent Zionist thinker
and writer, Ahad Ha'am (one of the people, the pseudonym of Asher Ginzburg),
wrote: "What are our brothers doing? They were slaves in the land of their
exile. Suddenly they found themselves faced with boundless freedom ... and they
behave in a hostile and cruel manner towards the Arabs, trampling on their
rights without the least justification ... even bragging about this
behaviour."
But these early Zionists' dismay at the injustices to, and total lack of
recognition of, the indigenous population was silenced and indeed edited out of
Jewish history and other books, as was some of Herzl's writing. The widely
perceived Zionist truism of "a land without people for a people without a
land" prevailed and within a matter of a few years the immigrants were
perceived as "sons of the land" (Bnei Ha'aretz or Ibna El-Ard) whereas
the inhabitants were seen as aliens.
The Arab population of Palestine was well aware of the Zionist danger; as early
as 1896 a math teacher in Jerusalem wrote in the newspaper
"Philisteen": "I have no problems with Jews; it's the Zionists
that I am most concerned about." In 1916, after there had been an agreement
with the British Government that after the fall of the Ottoman Empire Palestine,
Lebanon and Syria (the fertile triangle) would gain independence, leaders of the
Arab communities called upon every Arab Muslim, Christian and Jew to rise
against the Ottomans. Quite a few of the old indigenous Arab Jews did so, while
the European Zionists shunned such an idea and formed a small “Zion Mule
Corps”, which carried out some small-scale operations on behalf of the
British. This Corps was rightly regarded with suspicion by the British, who
disbanded the unit after the end of WW1. Secretly, however, this small group
armed themselves so as to be ready for attacks and ambushes.
Following renewed efforts and lobbying after Herzl's death, the Balfour
Declaration in 1917-shortly after Palestine was conquered by Britain-that
granted Zionists a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, set the official seal of
approval on their aspirations. Protests and representations by local Arab
leaders were brushed aside. Lord Balfour wrote in 1919: "In Palestine, we
do not even propose to consult the inhabitants of the country and (Zionism's)
immediate needs and hopes for the future are much more important than the
desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who presently inhabit
Palestine". This idea was closely mirrored by an early Zionist, Israel
Zangwill, who wrote in 1920: “There should be an Arab exodus based on race
distribution…..a trek like that of the Boers from Capetown”.
Settlements grew slowly for a long time, but the systematic occupying of village
lands that had not been officially documented since the respective inhabitants
had known for centuries what acreage belonged to each family, as well as the
frequent buying up of lands from absentee landlords, which left tenant farmers
homeless, contributed to the first Palestinian uprising in 1921-22 and other
outbursts of hostilities, including a massacre of some 65 Jews in Hebron in
1929, after orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe had founded a "Yeshiva"
(a religious study centre) in the town and had aroused the suspicions and
hostility of the indigenous population who prior to this had lived in peace and
harmony for hundreds of years with their non European Jewish neighbours. (A
small number of the original, non- European community, still lived in Hebron
until recently and repeatedly petitioned successive Israeli governments to evict
the new rightwing religious settlers who cause endless trouble to the
Palestinian population).
Another contributing factor to growing Arab
hostility was the policy of neither employing Arabs nor buying their produce.
This was termed "Hebrew work for Hebrew workers". Zeev Jabotinsky the
revisionist rightwing Zionist, wrote in 1939:”We Jews, thank God, have nothing
to do with the East….the Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz Yisrael”
(One wonders how this sounded to the many Arab and Eastern Jews in Palestine and
elsewhere). The slogan of Hebrew work for Hebrew workers was very much in force
when I came to Palestine in 1937. It was, however, not entirely and strictly
enforced and there were various examples of co-operation and good neighbourly
relations. This was particularly evident in Haifa, where our next-door
neighbours were Arabs and where large sections of the downtown area were mixed.
This lasted until the "liberation" of Haifa, when most of the Arab
population of the city were expelled and only a small, run down area (Wadi
Nisnas) remained in what became effectively a ghetto. There were other such
examples in Jerusalem and other places.
For many years Zionism remained a minority movement of mainly Eastern European
Jews, excluding the whole religious establishment and most central and western
European Jews. (My family's views on Zionism were fairly typical of western
European Jews who regarded this ideology as a help-line to those Jews, mainly
eastern European ones, who had trouble making ends meet). Last but not least,
Zionism was quite meaningless to non-European communities, who unbeknown to
Herzl and his contemporaries, form the majority of us. These communities were
ignored by early Zionists and indeed the latter had little interest in their
aspirations till the establishment of the state of Israel and after the
"independence" war of 1948-49. Following this the new state unleashed
a massive propaganda campaign to induce the Sephardi (of Spanish origin) and
Oriental Jews to "ascend" to the land of their ancestors, mainly to
for demographic reasons- in 1948 only about one fifth of the population and
about 10% of the land were Jews or in Jewish hands-but also as cannon fodder.
The same happened in the 1980s with the Jews of Ethiopia. However, upon arrival
these non-European newcomers were treated very much as inferior second- class
citizens. They were sprayed with DDT at their point of entry and within less
than a fortnight the men were drafted into the army, while their families were
usually accommodated in inferior reception camps or abandoned Arab houses. This
European dominance is still prevalent in modern Israel where for example the
national anthem even nowadays speaks about Jewish longing for the East towards
Zion, whereas for many of the non-European communities Palestine lies to the
West. Sadly, this has led to some groups of Sephardi and Oriental Jews becoming
extreme right-wing chauvinists, so as to “prove" their credentials.
Immigration ("Aliyah" = "ascent" in Zionist parlance) took
off in seriously large numbers with the rise of Hitler, who initially declared
himself quite sympathetic to Zionism, as had other right-wing anti-Semites
before him. New Jewish settlements mushroomed by leaps and bounds, leading to a
bitter and prolonged Palestinian uprising from 1936 till 1939, when it was
crushed by the British mandatory powers. But it was not until the end of WW2
that the demographic issue came openly to the fore. Numerous delegates from the
Jewish “Hagana” (“Defence” underground movement) in Palestine arrived at
the displaced refugee centres in Europe in order to prevent survivors from
immigrating to any countries other than Palestine, occasionally by force.
Illegal ships packed with survivors tried repeatedly to land in Palestine. On at
least one occasion the occupants of the ship “Exodus”, setting out from
Germany, after being prevented from landing by the British authorities, were
offered asylum by France and Denmark, but the then leader of the Jewish Yishuv
(settlement), David Ben Gurion, forbade this solution, deliberately forcing the
hapless survivors to land back in Germany, purely for propaganda purposes. Ben
Gurion also stated repeatedly that had there been a possibility prior to WWII to
save one million Jewish children by sending them to Britain or only half that
number by sending them to Palestine, he would have always opted for the latter.
With the foundation of the state of Israel in
1948 Zionism started to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Jewish
society. After the six day war in 1967 the vast majority of Euro/American Jews
became fervent supporters of the Israeli state and since that time we have
witnessed an increasing and deliberate confluence of Judaism and Zionism, to the
extent that today it is widely regarded as treason and self- hate for a Jew to
criticise the state, let alone Zionism. In my view, this development was almost
inevitable given the preconception of an exclusive Jewish state. If it is not a
religious state, i.e. a theocracy, what is a Jewish state and what purpose does
it serve? It is certainly not an ethnic entity; one only has to walk through
Israeli streets to realize that we are as diverse as the countries we have
originated from. As for the argument that Israel provides a bolthole, a safe
haven from anti-Semitic attacks, this is hardly sustainable because firstly,
Israel today is extremely powerful with huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons and
secondly, at present it is probably the most unsafe country for Jews to reside
in. Moreover, the claim that nothing like the holocaust should ever happen again
is true, but only insofar as it applies to the whole world. We are not seeking
“homogenous” ethnic states all over the world to rid us of the threat of
genocide, and Israel is no exception to this. In a post-colonial world the
notion of a homogenous nation state based on demography is completely
unacceptable and ridiculous. How then, can Israel and the majority of its
citizens justify their claim and indeed be convinced that theirs is a modern,
democratic society? (I shall demonstrate later that Israel was never a democracy
to its Arab citizens and is no longer a democracy to its own people.) The last
resort, when all logical justifications fail, is that God has promised the land
to his people, namely us. (This rather begs the question of where it leaves a
non-believing Jew). I have found over the years, and particularly in the last 30
or so years, that the numbers of young people wearing the skullcap and generally
observing at least some of the religious laws has increased dramatically and I
believe this is no coincidence.
The religious establishment has gone along with the general flow and has,
indeed, profited from it. Since the late 50's there has also been a notable and
frightening change in the orthodox community, which led to the establishment in
1974 of the "Gush Emunim" (the block of the faithful), initiated by
Rabbi Tsvi Yehuda Kook the younger in the USA. This is the fundamentalist
movement which believes in accepting the state of Israel and striving to make it
entirely and exclusively Jewish in all areas that the Torah mentioned as God's
promise to his people. (They do not appear to have noticed that nowhere in the
Old Testament does God say that the Jews will take the land from its
inhabitants). Gush Emunim also form the backbone of continuing and expanding
settlements inside the Occupied Territories. Prior to this time orthodox Jewry
played no important role in politics except in pressurising successive
governments to introduce more Jewish religious regulations into state law. The
ultra-orthodox group "Neturei Karta" has never recognised the state of
Israel and is exempt from army service.
Although Gush Emunim is small in numbers, they
wield disproportionate influence and power since successive Israeli governments
covertly (and nowadays overtly) endorsed their aspirations. Their followers have
been allocated special army units so as to enable them to observe Jewish
religious laws and rituals in every detail (although even in the regular army
only Kosher food is served and the Sabbath is observed as far as possible).
These units have a reputation as dedicated crack-troops. What is less well known
but silently condoned is their refusal to give medical aid or even drive wounded
persons to hospital on the Sabbath unless they are Jews. But in my view this is
an extremely short-sighted and dangerous road, leading in the end to a
fundamentalist theocracy much like that of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The
fundamentalists' belief is that the Messianic age is already upon us and that
any obstacles to a total elimination of any non-Jews in the promised land, i.e.
the whole of what was Palestine including the Holy Mount, is God's punishment
for sinful Jews, namely all those who are humanist and secular. This fully
exonerates, and indeed sanctifies, a man like Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29
Palestinians praying in the Ibrahimi mosque, as well as the assassination of PM.
Yitzhak Rabin. Like the Hamas movement, which was initially encouraged by
Israel's secret services, this is another genie that, having been let out of the
bottle, can no longer be controlled.
This version of a Jewish theocracy is not
accepted by secular Israelis who form the bulk of the population but most of
whom still cling to their belief that Israel is a modern democracy. It was never
a democracy to its Arab population, starting from birth, when Israeli nationals
receive Jewish, Arab or Druze nationality rather than Israeli one, and
continuing with the Histadrut’s (the most powerful trade union) continued
policy of promoting the rights of Hebrew workers and Hebrew culture. Arab
citizens cannot serve in the army, which in turn deprives them of further/higher
education grants and other help available to those who have completed their
three years compulsory service. The budget for Arab-Israeli towns and villages
is approximately one third of that of their Jewish counterparts. Land is still
continuously expropriated from Arab and Bedouin villages and settlements, while
according to recent statistics by Human Rights Watch some 250,000 persons,
descendants of those who managed to hide or flee to nearby hills when the
Israeli army destroyed their villages in 1948, can never reclaim their lands
even though their former villages have been razed to the ground and are
uninhabited and despite many of them still holding the title deeds. Moreover, no
Israeli land can be sold to Arabs.
Only a month ago the government tried to oust
Arab MKs from the Knesset (parliament) when they expressed support for their
fellow Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Fortunately on this occasion
the High Court overturned this ruling.
Democratic rights of Jewish Israelis are also
increasingly being eroded. The number of “refuseniks”, young people refusing
to enlist in the Israeli Army, is growing despite the personal cost to
themselves. Israel refuses to recognise conscientious objectors and imprisons
them repeatedly, so that some of them have now served a prison sentences for a
total of almost two years. In addition they forfeit the various benefits that
veterans receive such as grants for higher education/apprenticeships, help with
employment and housing. Academics are nowadays far from secure in their academic
freedom: one of them, Prof Ilan Pappe of Haifa University, was about to be
expelled and only an international protest forced the University’s authority
to suspend the expulsion. Likewise, a MA student at the same university who
wrote his dissertation on yet another massacre he unearthed (in Al-Tanturah),
was initially awarded a distinction for his paper; however, a year later his
degree was withdrawn altogether and he was expelled from Haifa University.
The Israeli Peace Bloc (Gush Shalom) has likewise
come under fire. Some months ago they wrote an open letter to all officers
serving in the Occupied Territories which warned them that by ordering their
troops to execute actions in breach of the Geneva Convention of Human Rights
they could be liable to be brought before the international court of Human
Rights at a later date. PM Sharon was incensed and claimed that the activists
were betraying Israel “to our enemies” (sic). He wanted them tried for
treason but at the time there was no Israeli law to try them under. This was
speedily amended by a sweeping new law, now in place, which makes the provision
of any information of whatever kind that might harm Israeli security a
treasonable crime.
It seems a bitter irony that a movement that
initially saw itself as progressive, liberal and secular should find itself in
an alliance with, and held to ransom by, the most reactionary forces, but in my
view this was inevitable from its inception although the founders, and most of
us (including people like myself, growing up in Palestine in the thirties) did
not foresee this and certainly would not have wished it.
Nowadays the deliberate blurring of the
distinction between Zionism and Judaism, which includes a rewriting of ancient
as well as modern history, is exploited to stifle any criticism of Israel's
policies and actions, however extreme and inhuman they may be. This,
incidentally also plays directly into anti-Semitic prejudices by equating
Israeli arrogance, brutality and complete denial of basic human rights to
non-Jews with general Jewish characteristics.
Growing up in Israel makes it quite difficult to
see all the historical falsifications and myths that underpin Zionist ideology
except for academics, and some of them have indeed researched and publicised the
truth, often at great cost to themselves.
Zionism has now assumed the all-embracing mantle
of righteousness; it claims to represent and to speak for all Jews and has
adopted the slogan of "my country right or wrong," with the West
tolerating Israel's continuous breaches of human rights that it would not
tolerate if perpetrated by any other country. Few Western states and not many
Jews dare take a stand against Israel, particularly as many of the former still
feel a sense of unease and guilt about the holocaust which Zionists Jews inside
and outside Israel have exploited in what to me seems an almost obscene manner.
In the USA, the Jewish Zionist lobby is still strong enough to keep successive
governments on board. Moreover, the USA regards Israel as an important strategic
ally in its fight against Middle Eastern "rogue" states that have
supplanted the Soviet Union as the great satanic enemy of the free world. The
latest phenomenon is that of American Christian Fundamentalists who advocate the
return of all Jews to their God-given land. I fear that unless and until
Israel is judged by the same criteria as other modern states, this is unlikely
to change. It is the duty of everyone, and particularly of Jews with a
conscience and a sense of justice to speak out against the falsifications of
history by the Zionist lobby, and the dangerous misconceptions it has led the
West to accept.
It is also high time to build a boycott
campaign similar to the anti-apartheid one against Israel. (Called for by Nelson
Mandela and Archbishop Tutu among others).
Hanna Braun, London, September 2001 (updated February 2006).
Bibliography:
Jewish History, Jewish Religion by Prof. Israel Shahak (died 2nd July 2001)
Fundamental Judaism in Israel, Prof. Israel Shahak
A History of the Jews, Ancient and Modern, Ilan Halevi
Western Scholarship and the History of Palestine, Rev. Dr. Michael Prior (ed.)
Arab Nationalism and the
Palestinians 1850-1939; Abdelaziz A. Ayyad
Image and Reality of the
Israel-Palestine Conflict; Dr. Norman Finkelstein
The Making of the Arab-Israeli
Conflict; Prof. Ilan Pappe
Israel’s Holocaust and the
Politics of Nationhood; Idith Zertal
The Myths of Zionism; John Rose
T:I:S,
26. Dezember 2006
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