No Peace, No Security, No Social Justice – No Future in Zionism!
– An open letter from anti-Zionist Jews to the workers, the poor, and the oppressed by Zionism –
Part B
By Adam Sharonksy
IV- State, Religion and Race
The Israeli state definition as a Jewish state turns into a virtual race state. This is not because all Jews belong to a certain race or because there exists such a thing as race.[1] The Zionist idea adopts the Nazi “race theory” definition for who a Jew is (especially on the question of the Law of Return). A state based on those ideas must fanatically impose a racial hierarchy – a social order in which some ethnic groups equal more than others in all areas of life, from healthcare to personal security.
While declaring that they are creating a political entity to protect the Jews from anti-Semitism the Zionists created virtually the only state where Jews (for example Ethiopians) suffer from systematic and institutional racism. The racist Zionists just like anti-Semites will argue that there is no contradiction between the Zionist blood idea (Israel’s national poet H.N.Biyalik said this: “I too, like Hitler, believe in the power of the blood idea”) and the “chosen people” idea in the Jewish religion.[2] However, while race is a closed club to which one is born and dies with, one can join the “chosen people” by conversion and can leave by conversion to another religion. There is nothing more false and outrageous than the argument that the Zionist idea represents faithfully the “vision of the Jewish prophets” and the Jewish idea in any of its various shades.[3]
In reality the Zionist movement, like similar colonization movements in history, [4] [5] has used the Bible and Judaism cynically and turned it into a tool at the hands of its colonial race policies as it adopts the elements it needs and disowns the ones that don’t fit.[6]
However, this cynical use of the Jewish religion by the Zionist movement has a heavy price in terms of civil liberties for Israeli citizens. A major casualty (but not the only one) is the separation of religion and state – the ban on public transport on Shabbat (Saturday – the major part of the weekend as friday is a workday for many), and limitations on opening of stores on Shabbat, religious marriage and burial, limits on non-kosher food and on alternative kosher systems, etc.
Liberal Zionists raise the illusion that religion and state could separate in the Zionist state eventually. Even worse, in more than a single occurrence, the liberal Zionist propaganda turns into anti-Semitic incitement against the Haredim, who represent Ultra Orthodox Judaism. They accuse the Orthodox Parties of blocking the opportunity to expand the Democratic rights of Israeli citizens because they support religious cohesion and because they oppose “equal burden” i.e. the burden of occupying and oppressing the Palestinian people.
While we have sharp criticism against the Orthodox leadership (and the people it represents) that acts as a fig leaf for the Zionist State, we have no illusion as to who needs who more. Orthodox Judaism was already established a century before the creation of the state and will most likely exist after its destruction by a regional revolution by Arab and Jewish workers. The Zionist movement needs the religious mythology in order to justify its claims for ownership of Palestine and fundraise and recruit supporters from the Jewish bourgeois who believe that by supporting Israel they support the continuation of the Jewish tradition and Torah study. In reality, the state of israel causes defamation for Judaism and Jews and is a no more than a death trap for them.
Liberal racist Zionists like Yair Lapid, chairman of the “Yesh Atid” (There is a Future) party that tried to create a coalition government without the Ultra-Orthodox and quickly found out that to the Ultra-Orthodox sector other sides indeed exist. When the Zionist hush money stops coming in, they talk about social justice and the adoption of the Arab league proposal (“from seeing that we live in a space that is mostly Muslim”) and on the high price israelis need to pay in welfare, healthcare, and education to fund the settlements.[7]
V – Discrimination and Exploitation of Jews in the Zionist Race State
As demonstrated above, the Zionist state uses the Jewish religion cynically and, as a result, Orthodox Judaism to further its goals. However, racism is an entire social system that ranks people according to arbitrary ethnic religious and gender criteria and therefore the race policies don’t stop at Jews and non Jews and not surprisingly Israeli society is a hierarchy ordered by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation etc. At the top stands the secular white cis man. It is not an accident that all the prime ministers belong to that group, except for Golda Meir who was a white woman.
The Israeli state was created by the Ashkenazi (white European Jews) elite. It exploits the loyalty of its Mizrahi (Jews who emigrated from parts of the historic Islamic Empire) citizens, Ethiopians, citizens from the former Soviet Union, women, LGBT,[8] non Orthodox Jews, [9] etc and uses them against the Palestinians, whether as a “demographic weapon” or cannon fodder, and in exchange they receive the “right” to enrich the pockets of the Zionist bourgeois as cheap laborers, live in slums, and suffer from persecution and police violence without the freedom to develop their own religion and culture at their pace and according to their conditions. They can only be consoled with the fact that compared to the palestinian workers and refugees, their situation is somewhat better.
Today an increasing number of citizens from oppressed groups inside the israeli society talk openly, mainly on social media, firstly about the impossibility of efficiently fighting racial discrimination against them without fighting against racism towards Palestinians and without refusing to sacrificing their living standards and even their lives themselves to serve the national oppression policies directed against Palestinians and secondly, while the Ashkenazi elite regards their loyalty to the Jewish state as trivial, it has no reason to provide more than an appearance of fixing social injustice from which they are suffering, while it gives them a mere crumbs of the pie of suppression and dispossession of the Palestinians.
IV- Is zionism a Solution to Antisemitism?
Since its birth, the Zionist movement tried to recruit Jews on the basis of claiming that only a Jewish state and Jews becoming “a nation like all other nations” can save them from discrimination, persecution and pogroms. As it lays on anti-Semitism to strengthen its social economic and political power, anti-Semitism became the zionist movement’s best friend. So much so, that its leaders have cooperated with the worst racist anti-Semites in europe, including the Nazi movement[10] in order to escalate the situation so much as to present itself as a solution. A lot has been written about that by historians.[11]
As in the past, in the preset every anti-Semitic incident in europe and around the globe has turned into a big “party” in Zionist media and politics and the prime minister uses that to call upon Jews to “return to their homeland” and live in security (in the most dangerous country for Jews around the world). However, in contrast to the past, the Israeli state today, which presents itself as the representative of all Jews, is the number one cause for the rise of anti-Semitism influenced by the national oppression of the Palestinians. The confusion between Judaism and Zionism, common among anti-Semites, is a direct product of the Zionist policies. The way to fight anti-Semitism is to fight against all forms of racism alongside the anti-Zionist movement, through open separation from Zionism and creating a struggle for a society free from racism, i.e a socialist society.
[1] כבר בשנת 1950 קבעה הקהילה המדעית העולמית כי כל בני האדם שייכים לאותו מין וכי קיומה של חלוקה לגזעים אינו אלא מיתוס. http://www.newsweek.com/there-no-such-thing-race-283123
[2] ובהם גם המשורר הלאומי חיים נחמן ביאליק המצוטט מפורשות כאן:
https://goo.gl/AKjO57
[3] http://goo.gl/CNA6Lm
[4] http://www.ensignmessage.com/IsraelitesinSA.html – חלק מהלבנים בדרום אפריקה מאמינים עד עצם ימינו כי הם צאצאי השבטים.
[5] https://www.academicvideostore.com/video/liberia-promised-land – המתיישבים השחורים שהגיעו מארצות הברית לליבריה האמינו כי הם צאצי השבטים וכי הם שבים ל”ארץ המובטחת”.
[6] למשל, כאשר ניסה האח דניאל לטעון כי הוא אמנם איש דת נוצרי אך יהודי לפי תורת הגזע הציונית, ולכן הוא זכאי להתאזרח מיידית במדינת ישראל, פסק בג”ץ כי אינו זכאי לכך והחוק תוקן ב-1970 על מנת למנוע בקשות דומות בעתיד. העובדה שהאח דניאל פעל להצלת יהודים בתקופת השואה עניינה את השופט כשלג דאשתקד.
[7] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/iw/originals/2013/08/ultra-orthodox-abandon-israeli-right-wing.html#
[8] לסביות, הומוסקסואלים, טרנסג’נדריות.ים, ביסקסואליות.ים, א-מיניות.ים וקוויריות.ים.
[9] משיחיים, קראים, רפורמים, קונסרבטיבים ועוד.
[10] http://www.nrg.co.il/online/11/ART2/689/496.html
[11] https://archive.org/details/ZionismInTheAgeOfTheDictators
למה אין אותיות גדולות במסמך?! תוכל לתקן?
_Marked as resolved_
_Re-opened_
כי תירגמתי מהנייד
ואו! כל הכבוד
טוב עשיתי את זה כבר בעצמי
תרגמתי גם את חלק ג ואני באמצע חלק ד
יופי!!!