(a personal view from Pete Gregson, chairperson of One Democratic Palestine)
Seeing protestors flock to the streets in opposition to Israel’s reforms of the judiciary and hearing their cries that “Israel will cease to be the democratic Jewish state” serves to remind me just how deluded most Israelis are.
They clearly think their unfair system is worth defending; Ha’artez observed in May 2022 that it was ‘the occupation’s Rubber Stamp’ and noted ‘Our supreme legal institution upholds land theft, supports home demolitions as a punitive measure, signs off on detentions without trial, allows the prolonged blockade of two million people in the Gaza Strip and hasn’t prevented entire communities from being evicted from their homes.’. When Palestinians are being abused, there is precious little protest, but when it comes to reforms that protect corrupt Prime Ministers, even the Zionists get worried.
But what is astonishing is that these protestors also think they live in a democracy. Well, if you claim to be Jewish, I guess it is. But of course, it is not. The dictionary says a democracy is a “system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.”. This definition underlines the doublethink of protesting Israelis- they consider the state of Israel to exclude Gaza and the West Bank, but as they well know, their Government controls these areas – they control the physical entries and exits, they control everyone’s movement, they control the currency, they restrict the freedom to self-govern- they essentially control Gaza and the West Bank, in spite of Palestinian efforts to the contrary. The world’s press know this, yet they continue to accept Israel’s claims to be a democracy. The Palestinians living in the occupied areas don’t get to vote for the Knesset, so of course it is not a democracy. So there are two states of Israel- one real, one imaginary. The real one does as it likes, secure in UK/European/US support; the imaginary one exists in the minds of the protestors. What the Palestinian Authority amounts to is an “Administrative Area” but its an area that Israel clearly controls. The West Bank (1.7 million) and Gaza (2.1 Million) number nearly 4 million people. Those people in Israel who get to vote for the Knesset (6.8 million self-defining as Jews and 1.6 million Arabs- a total of 8.4 million) thus exclude an oppressed 4 million who have no say. Israel governs the lives of 12 million in all, but almost one-third are excluded from the power to vote for the government. So this is not a democracy- these 4 million have massive restrictions to their freedom to travel, study, work and trade- they are essentially prisoners of a racist state that discriminates against them because of their ethnicity.
There is also the Palestinians driven into exile outside Israel’s borders; they number 7 million. Without their full right to return there can be no democracy in Palestine. It is unreasonable to expel and disenfranchise the majority and claim to be democratic. Clearly the Jewish settlers are a minority and have no right to rule over that much larger Arab population that is really twice their size or more.
So, we have a deluded population in Israel- a population so deluded that they think they live in a democracy. But it’s a bogus claim, because one-third of the population within its borders aren’t allowed to vote for the people that govern them. It is a fundamental characteristic of any democracy that the whole population gets to choose who governs them. But our press merely reports that many Israelis are unhappy about Netanyahu’s attacks on their “democracy”, thus entrenching the fallacy that this is a democracy. Israelis even brag that because they have proportional representation, they have a great democracy, better than ours! No media pundit tells these protestors they are deluded. Palestinians have known for a long time that Israel is not a democracy, but it seems most of the world still accepts the Zionists’ baseless claim that it is.
The second part of the protestor’s claim, that Netanyahu undermines the democratic Jewish state, shows they are deluded on the Jewish question too. I’ve written in the past as to why I think Zionists are not Jews; I’ll say why again here. I see Jewishness as being fundamentally a religious matter- Catholics believe in God, Jews should believe in Jehovah. If I stop believing in God, I am an ex-Catholic. I could argue that secular Jews are ex-Jews. Secular Jews continue to boast of their Jewish identity because they consider themselves an ethnic group. In this assumed ethnicity they claim to be descended from the ancient Hebrews. But this link is tenuous in the extreme. Palestinians have 100% genetic matching to the ancient Hebrews- the fact that most of them converted to Islam or Christianity is at the root of their persecution – Zionists choose to simply see them as illegal immigrants in Israel! The Zionists who occupy Palestine claim their Jewishness is that of the ancient Hebrews, but one only needs to look at their European features to see the falseness of this claim. The Zionists exploit the fluidity around what determines Jewishness in their claim to the land of what once was the ancient Israelites, but in their actions they reject key tenets of the Judaic faith. The Torah declares there can be no return of Jews, en masse, until the Messiah comes. But the religious right in Israel ignore this. Israeli rulers ignore the fact they are actually Europeans- they claim an ethnicity that is not theirs. The Zionists assume heritable rights to the land they occupy, but these are bogus rights. Israel is clearly a European settler colony, not a Hebrew one.
If we want to grow a true anti-apartheid movement on Palestine, we need to point this out. Because if we do not, the Zionists will continue to claim they have the right to occupy that land. Israel is founded on a lie. Even if they could prove a sound link to the ancient Hebrews (and they cannot), their taking of Palestinian homes would still be brutal and unfair. The Israelis convince the world that their “Jewishness” excuses their actions- and our Western governments- who continue to suffer enormous collective Holocaust guilt- accept this. We need to tell our parliamentarians that Israel is not the Jewish state. It just calls itself that to justify land theft. In truth, it is a European colony. Allowing Zionists to call themselves Jews empowers their ethnic claim to be the “Jewish State”. They do this because Zionists (like the Nazis before them) claim Jews to be a race apart.
The term “antisemitic” was coined (in 1879) by the German political agitator Wilhelm Marr, to replace Judenhaß (literally “Jew-hatred”), in order to make hatred of Jews seem rational. Marr was really a rather crude racist, under the misapprehension that Jews were semitic (ie from the Middle East) which is simply not the case, with most Jews in the world not originating from there. But the Zionists (and Jews generally) welcome this term, because it underlines their claim to be of the Levant. (note that Semitism is a linguistic concept: Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and others are Semitic languages. Semitism has absolutely nothing to do with race/ethnicity. It is the Khazar Jews who have used Marr’s misrepresentation to their advantage and have managed to elevate anti-Semitism above all other forms of racism.)
So these European Jews convince themselves and much of the world that they are descendants of the ancient Hebrews, and the use of the term “antisemite” strengthens this bogus claim. Their land claims are quasi-religious and founded on a very selective reading of holy scripture – they use the bits of the bible and the Torah that suits their claim to Palestine, but ignore the bits declaring the diaspora to be an act of God. But they can’t have it all ways. When Jews decide to embrace Israel, they abandon their Torah and therefore abandon what essentially defines Jewishness. Zionists use the injustices of the Holocaust to paint themselves as the world’s victims, but it was their enemies, the Bundists, (the secular Jewish socialist movement who believed in staying put in Eastern Europe, rejecting the Zionist claims to Palestine) who perished in the Holocaust; the Zionists then built their racist colony on the ashes of those that opposed them.
Out of Holocaust guilt, the UN has largely given Palestine over to those calling themselves Jews. When, back in the 40s, many of these Jews lost their homes because of the Nazis, we let them take Palestinian homes in Israel as compensation. But they were never ours to give.
Many in the West came to believe that preventing ‘Jews’ migrating to Palestine was somehow antisemitic. Support for Jews now seems to include encouragement for Jews to move into Palestine, and further their racist endeavours. Zionists proclaim Israel as the Jews’ sanctuary, but it is a false sanctuary, built on stolen land- legitimised by their claim to be Jewish.
It appears that the Zionists absorbed much of the Eugenics movement that began in 1883 and continued up till the 1940s. Their practise of populating Palestine throughout the 30s and during the war was focussed on bringing in young healthy Europeans, self-defining as Jews, who saw their brave new world in Palestine.
Tony Greenstein writes about how the Zionists welcomed the Nazi Nuremberg race laws. They wanted to see their Jewish identity articulated as a race apart. They, like the Nazis, weren’t interested in whether a Jew practised Judaism. The Zionist’s obsession with race reflected a Nazi preoccupation with race. The Israelis today are acting out the labels the Nazis gave them- that to be Jewish is to be different- to be a matter biologically determined by the mothers’ ancestry (as if fathers have little to do with it) and of course, to be a victim of antisemitism. The Zionists embrace a meaningless race theory to mark out their territory, much as the Nazis did to them as they took their homes and property. The Nazis forced them to wear a yellow star because Jews look, generally, like everybody else in Europe. These people were fundamentally Europeans, albeit with forefathers who had converted to Judaism.
If we consider the wider diaspora, it is clear there is no such thing as a Jewish race. Jews comprise many different ethnicities: there are Arab Jews, Chinese Jews, Indian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Ugandan Jews, Afro-American Jews, etc. The only ethnicity within the Jewish group that keeps claiming the Jews are a single race are the Khazar/European Jews. And it is the Khazar Jews only who created Israel illegally, and who keep making a big deal about anti-Semitism – and thus keep milking the (Western) world for $trillions and other concessions. It was they who insisted that Israelis declare on passports a nationality as “Jewish” (rather than Israeli), entrenching the idea that to be Jewish means to be of a race apart.
The race element is transparent to many; 40% of Americans now believe that Israel treats Palestinians as the Nazis treated the Jews (according to a new survey from the Anti-Defamation League, who support of the idea that Israel is a democratic Jewish state. This is a remarkable indication of Israel’s sinking reputation in the US).
What is galling is that whilst Zionists are preoccupied by race in marking out their claim, any use of the term “racist” to describe what they do to the Palestinians is guaranteed to get you into trouble. Thus we see the IHRA definition used to ban anyone who describes Israel as a racist endeavour, declaring their comment amounts to “antisemitism” – which is then used as a pretext for their expulsion from their union or Party (as I was expelled for so doing). The Israelis colonial claim rests on their claim to represent the Jewish “race”. We are discouraged from observing that in Israel it is actually Europeans who are oppressing Arabs, but that is what is happening.
So Zionist claims to be building a Jewish state is as false a claim as their democratic declarations- as colonising immigrants, mostly Europeans, they have fewer rights to be there than the native population; they most certainly have no right to govern that population. It’s no surprise that the USA, which is itself a European colonial project, is Israel’s greatest supporter. We must all declare that Israel is not what it claims it is; it is a deeply flawed creation, neither Jewish nor democratic, which can only be fixed by its ending. Its ceaseless drift to the right shows it is moving beyond remedy; the only remedy can be to enfranchise all who live between the river and the sea into one true country- one democratic Palestine.
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This article was republished in Redress at www.redressonline.com/2023/01/israel-democratic-jewish-state-surely-that-should-be-racist-european-colony/
Also see Peter Beinart’s excellent article: You can’t save democracy in a Jewish state | Jewish Voice for Labour