- It is not simply Israel's current hardline Government
that is to blame for the subjugation of Palestinians, but Zionism itself.
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- Israel's Deputy Defence Minister, Ze'ev Boim, recently
wondered whether there was a genetic defect that made Arabs terrorists.
"What is it with Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular,"
he asked on Israel army radio. "Is it some sort of cultural deficiency?
Is it a genetic defect?"
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- The dismay this arouses will be discounted by some of
Israel's friends simply as evidence of the extreme nature of its present
Government, with its barrier wall and its "transfer" enthusiasts.
If only Ariel Sharon and his hardliners were replaced by moderates, they
say, we could return to a halcyon pre-Likud past that promised peace and
coexistence. But to believe this is to misunderstand the nature of Israel's
dominant ideology " of which Mr. Sharon and his Minister are nothing
more than devoted servants. It is not he that is the problem, but the Zionism
he espouses.
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- For those who have forgotten or never understood what
Zionism meant in practice, the Israeli historian, Benny Morris' latest
revelations and comments " published in the Israeli daily, Haaretz
and in the Guardian " make salutary reading. They have raised a storm
of controversy, perhaps because they were too honest about an ideology
that some would rather keep hidden. Mr. Morris, who first exposed the dark
circumstances of Israel's creation in his groundbreaking 1988 book on the
birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, explains the Israeli project
with a brutal candour few Zionists have been prepared to display.
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- Using Israeli state archives for his recently revised
study, he reminds us that Israel was set up by expulsion, rape and massacre.
The Jewish state could not have come into being without ethnic cleansing
and, he asserts, more may be necessary in future to ensure its survival.
This bald assertion should shock no one, for it is entirely consistent
with the basic Zionist proposition of an ethnically pure state. Palestine's
indigenous population was a clear impediment to this aim, which is why
the concept of transfer was so central to Zionist thinking long before
1948 " advocated by Zionism's leaders and expressed through a series
of specific expulsion plans from the mid-1930s onwards. These led inexorably
to the 1948 Palestinian exodus and the refugee tragedy that persists today.
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- In an attempt to evade responsibility, Zionists have
long tried to suggest that, but for the Arabs' "unprovoked" attack
on Israel in 1948, there would be no refugees. This idea is both pernicious
and false. Between January and the end of May 1948, a mere two weeks into
the war, a third of the Palestinian population (my own family included)
had left, most of them expelled. The "war" itself was more of
a civil conflict and could not alone have accounted for the mass exodus.
The Arab armies were notoriously ill-equipped and poorly trained and no
match for the superior Zionist forces.
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- The truth is that the problem for Zionism was always
how to keep Palestine without the Palestinians. And hence today's Israeli
anxieties about the so-called Palestinian "demographic threat."
As the intifada continues, despite draconian suppression, there is near
panic over a "demographic spillover" that might dilute Israel's
"Jewish character."
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- It is against this background that the monstrous barrier
wall in the West Bank can be understood. "The Palestinians will always
pose a threat and they must therefore be controlled and caged in,"
Mr. Morris explains. Hence, also, Mr. Sharon's offer last December of a
"unilateral" withdrawal from 40 per cent of the West Bank, and
his hardline deputy, Ehud Olmert's support for partition "because
of demography." But the problem also exists inside Israel, whose Arab
population is 20 per cent, and growing. It is estimated that by 2010, there
will be an Arab majority in the whole of Israel-Palestine.
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- If Zionism is to prevail, there are few choices. As Mr.
Morris says, it can only be by superior force to overcome "the barbarians
who want to take our lives." The Arabs have "no moral inhibitions,"
he claims, insisting that in Islam "human life doesn't have the same
value as it does in the west." Is this observation much different
from Boim's Arab genetic defect? And can the rights of such inferior people
equate to those of Jews? "The right of [Palestinian] refugees to return
... seems natural and just," Mr. Morris says. "But this `right
of return' needs to be weighed against the right to life and wellbeing
of the 5 million Jews who currently live in Israel." Apparently, Jewish
self-determination is an imperative that supersedes the rights of the people
at whose expense it was promulgated.
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- And in this he encapsulates the essence of Zionism. Though
creating Israel entailed Palestinian suffering, Mr. Morris argues, it was
for a noble aim. That is why Zionism is still a dangerous idea: at its
root is a conviction of moral rightness that justifies almost any act deemed
necessary to preserve the Jewish state. If that means massive military,
including nuclear, force, unsavoury alliances, theft of others' resources,
aggression and occupation, the brutal crushing of all resistance "
then so be it. No one should be under any illusion that Zionism is a spent
force, regardless of current discourse about "post-Zionism."
That a benign Zionism, sympathetic to Palestinians, also exists means little
while these basic tenets remain.
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- A project that is morally one-sided and can only survive
through force and xenophobia has no long-term future. As he himself says:
"Destruction could be the end of this process."
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- (Ghada Karmi is research fellow at the Institute of Arab
and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, England and author of In Search
of Fatima: a Palestinian story. Verso Press)
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