By Yossi Schwartz, ISL the RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine, 27.12.2021
The Zionist state is an apartheid state
In 1975 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 determined that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. Needless to say Israel and the USA opposed this resolution. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the United States ambassador to the United Nations said that the United Nations is about to make anti-Semitism international law. In Israel, they changed the name of a street from the UN (for its support of the 1948 resolution) to Zionism.
In 2001 hundreds of rights groups gathering in South Africa accused Israel of apartheid. However, the main Human rights groups like the HRW opposed this accusation. At that time Human Rights Watch representative, Reed Brody, said that it was wrong to equate Zionism with racism. The Zionists cheered!
Since then, HRW has changed its mind and argues that Israel is an apartheid state.
It is useful to know on what legal ground as the Zionist legal expert deny this accusation: “The crime of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute consists of three primary elements: an intent to maintain a system of domination by one racial group over another; systematic oppression by one racial group over another; and one or more inhumane acts, as defined, carried out on a widespread or systematic basis according to those policies. Among the inhumane acts identified in either the Convention or the Rome Statute are “forcible transfer,” “expropriation of landed property,” “creation of separate reserves and ghettos,” and denial of the “the right to leave and to return to their country, [and] the right to a nationality.” Two primary groups live today in Israel and the OPT: Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. One primary sovereign, the Israeli government, rules over them. A stated aim of the Israeli government is to ensure that Jewish Israelis maintain domination across Israel and the OPT. The Knesset in 2018 passed a law with constitutional status affirming Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” declaring that within that territory, the right to self-determination “is unique to the Jewish people,” and establishing “Jewish settlement” as a national value. To sustain Jewish Israeli control, Israeli authorities have adopted policies aimed at mitigating what they have openly described as a demographic “threat” that Palestinians pose. Those policies include limiting the population and political power of Palestinians, granting the right to vote only to Palestinians who live within the borders of Israel as they existed from 1948 to June 1967, and limiting the ability of Palestinians to move to Israel from the OPT and from anywhere else to Israel or the OPT. Other steps are taken to ensure Jewish domination, including a state policy of “separation” of Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza, which prevents the movement of people and goods within the OPT, and “Judaization” of areas with significant Palestinian populations, including Jerusalem as well as the Galilee and the Negev in Israel. This policy, which aims to maximize Jewish Israeli control over land, concentrates the majority of Palestinians who live outside Israel’s major, predominantly Jewish cities into dense, under-served enclaves and restricts their access to land and housing while nurturing the growth of nearby Jewish communities” [i]
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance was founded in 1998 by the Swedish Prime Minister Persson as a Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research. There was nothing wrong in principle to research and educate young people about the Jewish holocaust, but it was wrong to research and educate young people only about the Jewish holocaust when other people for example Africans and Native Americans suffered from worse genocides and when Israel committed 30-40 massacres to drive out the Palestinian people in 1947-8.
In 2016 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) meeting in Bucharest, adopted the document known as the IHRA saying that it may be considered anti-Semitic to describe Israel as a “racist endeavor”. Since then the role of the IHRA has been to conflate criticism of Israel with Anti-Semitism. To silence and suppress the evidence exposing the Israeli state’s atrocities against Palestinians, As I write this article the Zionist soldiers have received new instruction that has revised its open-fire policies for the West Bank, permitting them to shoot Palestinians who had thrown rocks or firebombs at cars of the army or the settlers even when the Palestinians no longer present an immediate threat as they try to escape. In simple words to murder Palestinians who resist the Zionist oppression in cold blood…
This order is part of the counter revolutionary attacks
We live in a historical period characterized by the counter-revolutionary attacks of the capitalist ruling classes on our democratic and other social rights and at the same time by the growing resistance of the masses. Due to this resistance among other things the crimes of the ruling classes against the enslaved black people, the natives of North America, the colonized people in many countries have been further exposed. Statutes of the persons who were in charge of these crimes have been removed and demands for reforms like real restitutions have been called for. In this context, the political sympathy with the Palestinians is growing among the masses and the nature of Israel as an apartheid state is understood by many. Links are forged by the struggles of the American blacks, Native Americans, women, those who struggle against the counter-revolutionary offense under the empty slogans of fighting the Corona while fighting us, and the struggle of the Palestinians against the Zionist apartheid state. At the same time, the capitalist ruling class is using the IHRA and the counter-revolutionary measures they alleged are necessary to fight the corona to defend Israel and persecute those who oppose the Zionist crime. This May during the Pro Palestinian large demonstration in London according to the organizers: officers had sought to engage with people who had gathered to demonstrate and encourage them to disperse to help protect themselves and others during this public health crisis. Where this approach did not work and officers were met with hostility, they took enforcement action.” [ii]
One of the reflections of the growing isolation of the Zionist state is the fact that even the Israeli Human rights organization Btselem has called Israel an apartheid state beginning in January this year.
“Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations. B’Tselem strives to end this regime, as that is the only way forward to a future in which human rights, democracy, liberty, and equality are ensured to all people, both Palestinian and Israeli, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” [iii]
Belarus and the Holocaust
There is no doubt that the genocide of the Jews in WWII was one of the worse crimes in history. In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, comprising 1.7% of the total European population. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world’s Jewish population at that time, estimated at 15.3 million. Accepting the standard estimation of the Jews who were killed one way or another by the Nazis and their helpers close to 40% of the Jews were killed. It was a holocaust.
However, this holocaust does not give the Zionists the moral or the legal right to expel the native Palestinians from their country as Israel did in 1947-8 or to persecute the millions of Palestinians it occupied in 1967.
The Jewish holocaust was not the only holocaust in history as the Zionist claim. In Belarus a few days ago Lilia Ananich, submitted a draft law titled “On the Genocide of the Belarusian People,” a bill the Zionists and their supporters see as damaging to the memory of the Jewish Holocaust, if not outright denial of it. Can you imagine they say, the Jews were included among the Belarusian people, just like the Turkmen, Gypsies, Russians and other Soviet citizens who lived on Belarusian territory and were murdered by the Nazis?
Historian Timothy Snyder writes, “Belarus was both the epicenter of European mass killing and the base of operations of anti-Nazi partisans who contributed to the victory of the Allies.” According to Snyder, one in five citizens of Belarus was killed in the war. The percentage of Jews was even higher: According to Timothy Snyder,” the Germans murdered 800,000 Jews (roughly 90% of the Jewish population) in hundreds of killing sites just outside towns. After just two years of German occupation, the once-thriving Jewish communities in Belarus were there no longer. The non-Jewish population was subjected to Nazi terror, too. Hundreds of thousands were deported to Germany as slave laborers, thousands of villages and towns were burned or destroyed, and millions were starved to death as the Germans plundered the entire region. Timothy Snyder estimates that “half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.” [iv]
“Thus, there is nothing wrong with a law that refers to the Genocide of the Belarusian People and includes the Jews among them. It would be better if the law would mention that among the victims were 800,000 Jews 90% of the Jewish population of Belarus. That 83% of the victims were gypsies and so on. According to the Soviet census of 1939, 3,362 Roma lived in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Christian Gerlach estimates that the Germans murdered no fewer than 3,000 Roma in occupied Belarus. It is possible, however, that the actual number of victims was even higher.” [v]
This of course would not change the Zionist attack on the law because it is essential for the Zionists to claim that only the Jews have suffered from a holocaust. Claiming that only the Jews suffered from a holocaust is not only good business it also useful politically to justify the crimes against the Palestinians.
One of the problems with the Zionists is that by insisting that only Jews have suffered from a holocaust they deny that other people have suffered from holocausts. They are professional holocausts deniers of other people.
The genocide of the Native Americans by settler colonialists
This week in the news we can find information about the genocide of the Native Americans in California by the settler colonialists the brothers of the Zionist settler colonialists.
The Native Americans of what is today the state of California, like many indigenous people around the world, experienced a sharp population decline following contact with the European Colonialist settlers from different countries. Researchers have estimated the Indian population of California before the arrival of the Spanish missions in 1769 as high as 700,000 (later American ethnographers estimated that the Indian population in the latter part of the 19th century was only over 300; 000). The Indian population declined to about 100,000 in 1849, during the Gold Rush to about 30,000 in 1870, and 15,000 to 25,000 during the decade 1890-1900. According to the anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns approximately 18 million Native Americans lived in North America before the arrival of the settler colonialists [vi]. In 1800, only about 600,000 Indigenous people remained in the United States [vii].
The main cause of the decline of the indigenous population in California, as in the rest of the United States, is generally considered to have been the disease that the Europeans infected them with. Needless to say, the Native Americans did not get any medical care. However, many other Native Americans were killed by an organized genocide.
“In 1848, California became the property of the United States as one of the spoils of the Mexican-American War. Then, in 1850, it became a state. For the state and federal government, it was imperative both to make room for new settlers and to lay claim to gold on traditional tribal lands. And settlers themselves—motivated by bigotry and fear of Native peoples—were intent on removing the approximately 150,000 Native Americans who remained” [viii]
…” They were assisted by the government, which considered the so-called “Indian Problem” to be one of the biggest threats to its sovereignty. The legal basis for enslaving California’s native people was effectively enshrined into law at the first session of the state legislature, where officials gave white settlers the right to take custody of Native American children. The law also gave white people the right to arrest Native people for minor offenses like loitering or possessing alcohol and made it possible for whites to put Native Americans convicted of crimes to work to pay off the fines they incurred. The law was widely abused and ultimately led to the enslavement of tens of thousands of Native Americans in the name of their “protection.” [ix]
Peter Hardeman Burnett, the state’s first governor stated: “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected,” he told legislators in the second state of the state address in 1851. “While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.” [x]
He was very active in the genocide of the Indians. The state of California, with the help of the U.S. Army, stored a massive arsenal. These weapons were then given to local militias, who were paid for killing native people. State militia’s raided tribal outposts, shooting and sometimes scalping Native Americans. Soon, local settlers began to do the killing themselves. Local governments put bounties on Native American heads and paid settlers for stealing the horses of the people they murdered.” [xi]
The historians Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn in their work from 1990 wrote that the part played by genocide in the destruction and crippling of so many societies spread over a vast area and colonized by settlers of many different nationalities and social systems is complex and still poorly understood. The opinion of many experts is that genocide was one of five major factors that undermined Indian civilizations; the others were disease, warfare, geographic removals and relocations, and the destruction of traditional ways of life. [xii]
Thus, the Zionist historians who claim that the Jewish holocaust was unique mystify the real reasons for the holocausts. In the site of the Jewish agency we find:
“The Nazis (Hitler and his cabal of true-believers) were fervently convinced that they were locked in a cosmic battle with the forces of Jewish evil for control over the whole world. They were convinced that Jews were the source of all of the evil in the world and that evil would exist as long as the Jew remained in the world. They knew that their struggle (Mein Kampf) was the battle to the death against the multi-faced Jewish enemy. Only one side could emerge victoriously; the other would be eliminated And only the Jew was seen in these terms; only the Jew was the total embodiment of evil; only the Jew was without any place in the world of the future, and only the Jew was to be totally murdered to the very last one. The final solution (die enclosing) applied to Jews and to Jews alone and it meant the death of every Jew. This is the uniqueness of the Jew within the Holocaust.” [xiii]
Really? And what about Peter Hardenman Burnett, California first governor who stated: “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected“
In modern times holocausts are rooted in the capitalist mode of production and genocides will continue until we destroy the imperialist system and replace it with socialism. The growing inter conflict between Western imperialism plus Japan on one hand and Russian and Chinese imperialism on the other is a real threat to the existence of the human race and unless we will destroy the imperialist states and replace them with socialism the holocausts of the past will be seen as a children’s game.
Down with the imperialist states!
For humanity to live, imperialism must die!
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/15/thousands-join-london-march-in-solidarity-with-palestine
[iii] https://www.btselem.org/
[iv] https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/resistance-during-holocaust/holocaust-belarus
[v] https://www.romarchive.eu/en/voices-of-the-victims/belorussia-belarus/
[vi] Henry F. Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemisphere Estimate~” Current Anthropology 7:415
[vii] Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust, and Survival: A Population History since 1492,
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987)
[viii] https://www.history.com/news/californias-little-known-genocide
[ix] Ibid
[x] Ibid
[xi] Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and
Case Studies (New Haven, 1990) P 176.
[xii] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/20/indigenous-group-seek-justice-for-california-gold-rush-massacre [xiii] https://archive.jewishagency.org/meanings/content/24039