Updated 2024-08-29
[MEK Note: Zionism orchestrated the Nakba, the violent mass slaughter of some 100 villages’ residents and forced exodus of 750K Palestinians to make Israel. Today you don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, just someone who blindly supports the state of Israel with no regard for the oppression, occupation, genocide, and ongoing Nakba II of Palestinian people by Israel.]
Zionism – Wikipedia
Zionism is a nationalist movement that emerged in the 19th century to enable the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, a region roughly corresponding to the Land of Israel in Jewish tradition. Following the establishment of Israel, Zionism became an ideology that supports “the development and protection of the State of Israel”.
From 1897 to 1948, the primary goal of the Zionist Movement was to establish the basis for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and thereafter to consolidate it. In a unique variation of the principle of self-determination,[19] The Lovers of Zion united in 1884 and in 1897 the first Zionist congress was organized. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a large number of Jews immigrated to first Ottoman and later Mandatory Palestine, and at the same time, diplomatic attempts were made to gain worldwide recognition and support. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism has continued primarily to advocate on behalf of Israel and to address threats to its continued existence and security.
Creating an alliance with Great Britain and securing support for some years for Jewish emigration to Palestine, Zionists also recruited European Jews to immigrate there, especially Jews who lived in areas of the Russian Empire where antisemitism was raging. The alliance with Britain was strained as the latter realized the implications of the Jewish movement for Arabs in Palestine, but the Zionists persisted. The movement was eventually successful in establishing Israel on May 14, 1948 (5 Iyyar 5708 in the Hebrew calendar), as the homeland for the Jewish people.
In the Israeli Declaration of Independence Major aspects of the Zionist idea are represented in the Israeli Declaration of Independence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism
Global Impact of Zionism – USCPR Zionism impacts not only Palestinians, but people across the region and world. The most glaring example is how the Zionist settler colonial project extends beyond Palestine. Israel’s military occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights continues in parallel to its occupation of Palestinian lands, both defined by the forced displacement of the majority of the native population and construction of illegal settlements.
Israel’s ability to maintain its settler colonial project depends on the complicity and active support of other oppressive regimes. Concurrently, the US backing of brutal regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere is intimately connected with the “special relationship” that Israel enjoys with US imperialism. Through US support to such regimes, Israel’s domination in the region is ensured.
Israel has also built economic and political power by exporting the strategies and tools developed repressing Palestinians to dictators, colonial regimes, and apartheid states across the world. Israel has armed and trained violent regimes from Apartheid South Africa, to Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe), to Central and South America, to North Africa and Southwest Asia, including the Middle East. https://uscpr.org/activist-resource/global-impact-of-zionism/
Fact Sheet: Rabbi Dov Lior Dov Lior is an influential extremist Israeli settler rabbi and leading figure in the religious Zionist movement. https://imeu.org/article/rabbi-dov-lior-a-case-study-in-state-sponsored-incitement
2024-08-20 Religious Zionism MK calls settler violence ‘a drop in the ocean’ compared to Arab terrorism Religious Zionist MK Zvi Sukkot characterized the serious incidents of violence committed by settlers in the West Bank as a “super marginal phenomenon, a drop in the ocean compared to Arab terrorism,” the Religious Zionist MK said on Sunday. .https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/religious-zionism-mk-calls-settler-violence-a-drop-in-the-ocean-compared-to-arab-terrorism/ar-AA1p8Pyy
2024-08-14 OPINION: Israel: Leader of the Free World For eight decades after the end of World War II, America’s proudest title was “Leader of the Free World.” Today, both on grounds of practical leadership and grasp of what it means to be free, we are yielding the title to Israel. In order to remain free, we, and the world, must pass the Israel Test. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/opinion-israel-leader-of-the-free-world/ar-AA1oMNKv?
2024-07-23 Zionism Imprisons Palestine; De-centering ‘Jewish Values’ in Anti-Zionist Organizing Prior to Israel’s current genocide in Gaza, that area was often referred since 2007 as an open air prison due to Israel’s complete control. Our first guest this morning argues that if we explore the violence of zionism – that is, not just Gaza but zionist control more broadly – as a prison, then an abolitionist challenge to it, can come into view. Our guest is Fathi Nemer, a researcher and writer who published a piece in Scalawag Magazine called “Imprisoning Palestine: Zionist colonialism through an abolitionist lens”, in which he and his co-author argue that Israel’s siege on Gaza is not the only carceral structure that zionism has imposed, but rather that the entirety of Palestinian life under zionism is a process of imprisonment. Read the article here: https://scalawagmagazine.org/2023/06/abolitionist-palestine/ Check out Fathi Nemer’s website here: https://decolonizepalestine.com/
More than nine months of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza also means more than nine months of a movement against zionist aggression, which has developed more engagement than ever before in the movement for Palestinian lives and dignity. That organizing work is complex and doesn’t come without internal nuance and disagreement. For example, what does it mean for one group of people to take on leadership and accept funds for the liberation of another people? In this segment, we’ll be talking about anti-zionist Jewish organizing, and what it could look like for Jewish people interested in the liberation of Palestine to de-center themselves. Our guest is Anna Rajagopal, a Jewish anti-zionist organizer who lives and organizes in Houston. Her latest piece for Mondoweiss is titled, “No need for ‘Jewish values’ in the fight for Palestine”. Read Anna Rajagopal’s piece here: https://mondoweiss.net/2024/06/no-need-for-jewish-values-in-the-fight-for-palestine/ https://kpfa.org/episode/law-disorder-july-23-2024/
2024-06-24 ‘Faith in Dialogue’ Won’t Stop Zionist Violence I spoke at academic institutions, civic organizations, and to religious groups. However there were always two groups which kept me away from their members:
Most synagogues — It was easy enough to explain this. Most organized Jewish institutions are partisan. They were and mostly still are, dedicated to the dream of a Jewish state functioning as a safe haven in an anti-Semitic world.
The downside of racism felt toward, and oppressive policies applied against, the Palestinians were realities they chose not to deal with. Even today, in the midst of overwhelming evidence of Israel’s failure to preserve either Jewish lives or Jewish ethics, most synagogues will not allow anti-Zionists to speak, even if they are Jewish.
The other group, Black churches, was at first harder to comprehend. During the struggle for racial justice in the U.S., culminating with the civil rights legislation of 1964-1965, there was an alliance between American Jewish and Black organizations.
That alliance was not as smooth and solid as it is popularly believed, but it was real in the sense that you had two groups who saw something to be gained by supporting each other. Black American success in the mid 1960s actually loosened the alliance because it created the space for a Black reassessment of Zionism.
However, that reassessment did not reach those Black Americans who were religiously motivated to identify with a biblically imagined picture of Jewish history. Or, as the authors we are about to analyze put it, “our shared history of slavery and oppression and our common biblical commitment to the prophetic traditions of justice and equality.” https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/24/faith-in-dialogue-wont-stop-zionist-violence/
2024-06-10 Palestine Post: Zionist Attacks in West Bank plus PYM Launches ‘Masks Off Maersk’ Campaign Our guests this morning are Rehab Nazzal and Nadya Tannous https://kpfa.org/episode/law-disorder-june-10-2024/
2024-04-27 Genocide Joe Biden is Very Clear Here. As unintelligible as Genocide Joe’s speeches are today, think long and hard about what he says in this video. He is very clear and he is absolutely right. He doesn’t talk about defending Judaism, protecting Jews and the right of Jews, in particular Arab Jews to live in this region that they have lived in for thousands of years. He is defending US capitalism’s political and economic interests in the region. He is defending US capitalism’s colonial outpost there. He is defending Zionism. https://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2024/04/genocide-joe-biden-is-very-clear-here.html?
2024-03-13 Palestine Talks | Lauren Booth on Zionism “falling apart” Writer and activist Lauren Booth illuminates what she believes accounts for the global surge of pro-Palestinian solidarity, how her own travels to Palestine shaped her as a person and challenged her Western views – emphasising the value of individualism over community – and the strength of Palestinians in opposing Zionist and colonial violence, from which key moral lessons – bearing on both Islam and universal principles of justice –can be learned. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y-c69DC0-0&list=PLUW304lJeu3Vg_nM0WQfWDZTDyu6h6PlD&index=8
2024-3-06 Palestine Talks | An Anti-Zionist Roundtable with Miko Peled and Sami Al-Arian In this exclusive TRT World roundtable discussion featuring Israeli American activist and writer, Miko Peled, and Palestinian activist and professor Sami Al-Arian, who is the director of Center for Islam and Global Affairs based in Istanbul, Zionism is explored as a means of developing anti-Palestinian fear in its followers, a persecutory force against those who – in accordance with key moral principles and international law – stand up for the rights of Palestinians, and, finally, is embedded within American institutions of power.
Drawing largely from their own lived experiences, including remarkable challenges in relation to Zionism they have had to overcome, Miko Peled, who eventually rejected his Zionist upbringing to become an unwavering and outspoken ally to the Palestinian people, and Sami Al-Arian, who was wrongly imprisoned in the United States after having been framed by Zionist supporters for aiding “terrorism”, speak to how pro-Palestinian solidarity, education and activism can upend Zionist oppression worldwide and lead to a future where both Palestinians and Israelis alike can actually live together – as equals.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AOr1Rfn15Y&list=PLUW304lJeu3Vg_nM0WQfWDZTDyu6h6PlD&index=9
2024-03-04 Not in Our Name: On Jews Rejecting Zionism Watch this powerful speech given by the artist, writer and anti-imperial organiser, Morgan Bassichis (@morgankindof), at our recent event in London, where they told the audience about the latest in Jewish anti-Zionist organising in the United States.
“American media tries to characterise the massive growth of anti-Zionism amongst American Jews as merely a marginal position amongst young people – but we know better. It is not a generational rift. It is an intergenerational legacy.
“We are proud to come from generations of Jews who opposed each and every form of oppression, including Zionism. Who saw Zionism for what it was, a false solution for the crimes of European antisemitism, that would be used to dispossess indigenous Palestinians of their land. Who connected their own activism against racism and patriarchy at home, to wars and colonialism abroad, and saw a common enemy: white supremacy and empire.” https://www.instagram.com/p/C4GMYrWt4l-/
2024-02-07 Palestine Talks | Professor David Miller reveals how Zionist lobbies fuel Islamophobia British professor David Miller explains to TRT World how the Zionist movement is a key pillar in the industry of Islamophobia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AryAIDPbL4k&list=PLUW304lJeu3Vg_nM0WQfWDZTDyu6h6PlD&index=13
2024-02-05 Many Jews and Jewish Organizations Recognized the Dangers of Zionism. They Were Right Jewish organizations that now are staunch supporters of the Israeli state were concerned with the same issues that Palestinians protest now. At the November 1917 issuance of the Balfour Declaration of the British government in favor of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, many American Jewish Committee members and officers had observed that, if successful, the goal of a Jewish state to rule the multi-ethnic land of Palestine would lead to oppression of non-Jews.
In 1919, AJC President Louis Marshall asserted an AJC statement on the Balfour declaration had been definitive in rejecting political Zionism. In April last the American Jewish Committee defined its position in terms which could not be misunderstood, which indicated that, while it hailed with satisfaction the Balfour Declaration, it did so because of the two conditions annexed, namely, that it would not affect the rights of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine and that it was not to be regarded as in any way affecting the status of Jews who lived in other lands. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/jewish-organizations-against-zionism
2024-01-22 Don’t Let Zionists Weaponize Jewish Suffering When Nazi Germany barreled into the Eastern Front, they justified their brutality, particularly against Jews, as a prevention against the same kind of barbarism. “The broadly conceived propaganda campaign even distorted events like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as proof that Jews would destroy Germany if they were not destroyed first,”
While demonization and dehumanization are hallmarks of genocide, the victims are also often reframed as perpetrators. Genocide denial is common because those who participate often, at least for a time, cannot accept the fact that they’re the guilty ones.
During the mass murders of alleged communists in Indonesia between 1956 and 1966, which saw as many as nearly 3 million people killed by the far-right government, militia leaders appeared on television to brag about finding a more “efficient” way to execute communists.
As the body count in Gaza rises now above 24,000 and human rights groups around the world use the word “genocide” to describe the brutal Israeli assault on civilians areas, much of the sympathetic press continues to frame Palestinians as the genociders. Statements such as “Palestinians are engaging in an attempted genocide of Jewish people”, “Hamas has made clear in its words and actions that it is committed to the genocide of the Jewish people, whether they live in Israel or not.”
While it should be clear that Hamas can’t be conflated with the Palestinian people or even broadly defined as the Palestinian “resistance,” Israel has not made those distinctions clear. “The war is not just with Hamas, the war [is] with all the civilians,” “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,”, Israel’s approach to what is often called “mowing the lawn” in Israel, lived up to this framing, using blistering force in civilian areas that has led to an astounding body count in just a matter of months.
The survival of Jewish exclusivity in Israel is always reframed around the survival of Jews, so those seeking to change that are often treated as the genociders amongst us, even as they lose every method of self-sufficiency and survival. Who knows what they would do to us? https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2024/01/22/israel-jewish-holocaust-gaza
2023-12-02 The Chris Hedges Report with Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi on Zionism’s 100-year war against Palestinians. The conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, which has reached a terrifying crescendo with the savage obliteration of Gaza, is the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Jewish Zionists in Israel backed by major imperial powers, starting with the British and a century later with the United States. This century-long assault by Israel has one objective – to force an indigenous people from their land. The historian Rashid Khalid breaks what he calls “the hundred years of war on Palestine” into six periods.
The first is the British support for Jewish Zionists during the British occupation of Palestine from 1917 and 1939. The second declaration of war is the 1947-1948 Nakbeh, or catastrophe, that saw Zionist militias ethnically cleanse 750,000 Palestinians from historic Palestine and carry out a series of massacres. The third is 1967 war when Israel seized the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and expelled another 250,000 Palestinians. The fourth declaration of war on Palestine was Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut, followed by the departure of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) fighters to Tunisia and the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The fourth war against the Palestinians began with the first intifada, or uprising in 1987, continued with the second intifada and is taking place with the Israeli brutal assault on Gaza. The backdrop to this century of war by Israel on the Palestinians is the failure by Arab leaders to offer meaningful support to the Palestinians, in fact these leaders often colluded with Israel to weaken the Palestinian resistance movement. Joining me in the studio to discuss Israel’s settler colonial project, how it is being played out in Gaza and its consequences, is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonization and Resistance, 1917-2017.” https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-chris-hedges-report-with-columbia
2023-11-15 The Long View of Palestine, Israel and War Zionism existed decades before the founding of Israel in 1948. Zionism was tied to the Balfour Declaration (1917) that called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland far before the Nazi Holocaust. Zionism did not take on its most vicious cast until the end of World War II when the movement became much more than a resettlement program for Holocaust survivors. At the very heart of Zionism is the racist belief that Jews occupied a position of superiority that saw other peoples as subservient to the needs of a state that became increasingly militarized and less tolerant. There were few who differed from the assessment of Israel being ground zero in the Middle East, seen as a bulwark against the former Soviet Union and a part of the projection of US power. Oil was in the mix, but it wasn’t oil that made the husband of a cousin say: “The only good Arab is a dead one.” What had happened to the humanism that I had learned was part of Judaism even in its most secular iteration?
During and following the 1948 Palestine war about 700,000 Palestinians were driven off of their land. Over 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed by Zionist militias and then the Israeli army. The various occupations, embargoes, and wars placed exclamation points in Israel’s racist domination of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), and Operation Protective Edge (2014), were but the latest examples of Israeli brutality against the Palestinian people euphemistically called in Israel “mowing the lawn.”
The first premise of casting an enemy as a lesser human being is to dehumanize them. An example of how effective that strategy has been can be viewed in the YouTube video by journalist Abby Martin as she interviews the so-called man/woman on the street in Israel. “Empire Files: Israelis Speak Candidly to Abby Martin About Palestinians,” (2017). https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/15/the-long-view-of-palestine-israel-and-war/
2023-11-24 “Why I STOPPED Being A Zionist” Thanks to the Israeli military’s brutal assault on Gaza, many stalwart Zionists are waking up to the reality of the occupation and what life is like for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. We highlight one video published by a young American Jewish woman who explains everything she’s learned recently about the occupation and why she’s had to let go of her former Zionist beliefs. Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss what it takes to shake someone’s core inculcation after a lifetime of propaganda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rnl8LOL3rdo
2023-11-21 Anti Palestine TikTok In this video we examine a handful of short form content pieces from supporters of Israel, and connect this content to broader Zionist attitudes. this one’s not an easy watch but i hope it gives at least one person some context on what Israel is doing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdlJqlzOGgU
2023-11-15 Why Africans / Black Folks Should Oppose Zionism: Some Aspects of a Racist Imperialist Ideology in Africa and the Americas Colonized people must be in solidarity with the oppressed and by definition, that means being anti-zionist. Political Zionism is a racist ethno-nationalist imperialist ideology and movement founded in the late 19th century that mis-uses Judaism to justify the settler colonial occupation of Palestinian land as a state reserved only for Jews. Christian Zionism, which actually preceded political Zionism, is the belief that the biblical land of Israel should be controlled by Jews thereby ensuring the second return of Jesus which will bring salvation to Christians.
Zionism in Africa long preceded the founding of Israel, and the relationship goes back to at least the South African Zionist federation founded in 1898. The Zionist movement considered east African countries for resettling Jews before agreeing on Palestine. Overall, Israel has been a partner to colonialism, Neo-colonialism, economic exploitation, militarization, war and balkanization in Africa. The US, being Israel’s closest imperialist partner, has often coerced countries, through the threat of sanctions, into relations with Israel.
Long before the years of Apartheid, South Africa’s relationship with Zionism and then Israel was extremely close, as evidenced in the settler class collaboration between Chaim Weizmann, Israels’ first president, and the infamous general Jan Smuts, former prime minister and one of the racist founding fathers and military leaders of South Africa. The common ideological roots of this relationship were white settler supremacy supposedly sanctioned by God. It extended from weapons sales including cooperation towards enabling South Africa to build a nuclear bomb, to the lucrative trade in diamonds controlled by the infamous De Beers diamond cartel which controls 90% of the world’s rough diamonds. Israel was long the largest diamond cutting country. https://blackagendareport.com/news/1680/47/Why-Africans-Black-Folks-Should-Oppose-Zionism-Some-Aspects-of-a-Racist-Imperialist-Ideology-in-Africa-and-the-Americas
2023-11-08 “It’s the Zionism, Stupid!” The foundational issue in the ongoing and existential conflict between Israeli settlers and indigenous Palestinians, not a continued and historical hatred of Jews, as many Zionists claim. But why do we make the distinction that opposition to Zionism is not automatically opposition to Jewish people? I believe that to understand this is to understand what Zionism is and the contradictions therein.
First, Zionism itself is not entirely synonymous with Judaism. Although it is true that the Zionist movement was “officially” organized by Theodor Hertzl in Austria in 1896 to establish a Jewish homeland in response to the bigotry and repression against Jews, it is important to understand that Hertzl was not himself an Orthodox, or “observant” Jew; he was more secular than religious. Hertzl, according to the website JewishHistory.org, did not envision a Jewish homeland as a place that Jews like himself who were fully assimilated into Western society would want or need to emigrate to. Rather, Hertzl viewed a Jewish homeland as a place where poor Jews from Eastern European nations who did not assimilate into those societies could relocate and rebuild their lives in peace.
But from the beginning, there was always a conflict among the proponents of Zionism regarding the role of the Jewish religion in the movement. Hertzl considered Zionism a purely practical solution to Jewish persecution, providing a way to materially save Jewish people without focusing too much if at all on promoting or preserving Jewish religious tradition. This was the posture of the first four Zionist Congresses, which adopted resolutions that were neutral on the issue of the Jewish religion, identified then as “Jewish culture,” declaring that the movement would never do anything to oppose the Jewish faith, but it would also not do anything to support or promote it, either.
It is important to note, nevertheless, that there is still a large segment of Orthodox Jews who oppose the establishment of Israel on the religious grounds stated above. One of those groups, and perhaps the most vocal and visible, at least in the US, is the Neturei Karta, which is among other Orthodox Jewish communities in Jerusalem that have been consistent targets of Israeli oppression along with Palestinian Muslims and Christians, as well as Ethiopian and other African-descended Jews and immigrants.
So Israel is a state that exists through the logic of indigenous dispossession and apartheid. There is one set of rights and freedoms for European-descended Zionist immigrants and their descendants. But this set of rights depends on racial discrimination against non-European descended people of all faiths, including Palestinian, African, and other Arab Jews and their descendants. This is the basis for popular resistance to the state of Israel today, not the simplistic and false allegations of hatred of Jews. https://blackagendareport.com/news/1659/47/Its-the-Zionism-Stupid
2023-11-07 Arendt on Zionism – KPFA – Against the Grain Why was the political philosopher Hannah Arendt so critical of mainstream Zionism? What did her criticisms have to do with how she understood nationalism and historical antisemitism? According to Jonathan Graubart, Arendt sought to delink Jewish nationalism from Israel’s state project; she also condemned Herzlian Zionism for subscribing to a view of eternal antisemitism. (Encore presentation.) Jonathan Graubart, Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Other Pariahs Temple University Press, 2023 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/arendt-on-zionism/id78900506?
2023-11-07 America’s Christian Zionists: Israel’s strategic weapon? Benjamin Netanyahu stated in a recent speech that the “prophecy of Isaiah ” would be fulfilled. This is a reference to a Christian evangelical belief in the second coming of the Messiah, which opposes the mainstream Christian belief that the Messiah was Jesus himself. So why do Christian evangelicals — who constitute a significant voter bloc in the US Republican Party — support Israel?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bprofax5SPk
2023-11-02 Albert Einstein Called Zionists “Criminals”! Albert Einstein knew a great deal, and came to much of that knowledge before anyone else. One little-known insight of Einstein’s? That the Zionist project to create the state of Israel on land occupied by Palestinians was a bad idea he wanted nothing to do with. In a recently surfaced letter Einstein wrote in 1948 the Jewish scientist even described Zionists as “criminals.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQFXStBP9Ro&t=6s
2023-10-19 Professor Ilan Pappé-Crisis in Zionism, Opportunity for Palestine? A lecture by Professor Ilan Pappé, Professor of History, Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, UK October 19th, 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OcjOP8iUCU&list=PLcKTcNwy7BrF2fsCRkNDSpVvfpG6_RKiW&index=3
2023-10-15 What the media forgets to tell you about Israel and Gaza The missing context for what’s happening in Gaza is that Israel has been working night and day to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their homeland since even before Israel become a state – when it was known as the Zionist movement.
Israel didn’t just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands, and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettoes inside those borders – as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders. The ‘settler’ project, as we call it, is a misnomer. It’s really Israel’s ethnic cleansing program. Israel even has a special word for it in Hebrew: ‘Judaisation’, or making the land Jewish. It is official government policy.
Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme, and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier. https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/what-the-media-forgets-to-tell-you
2023-08-08 Zionism’s Ethnic Cleansing Political Zionism, as laid down in the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, has been brutal from the beginning—a colonial racist movement aimed to take someone else’s land for its own exclusive use. The only way to accomplish this goal was through forced population transfer. This crime, so hideous that it is deemed a war crime and a crime against humanity, served as the foundation of Zionism as well as Israel, where the forcible removal of Palestinians and the installment of its own identified privileged settler group on that same land formed the basis of the state.
While Zionist forces have used military might over the decades to advance this goal, the Zionist movement has also sought to mask this process by placing its atrocities under a legal umbrella. In Zionist logic, not just the mighty sword but also the mighty gavel of the judge would hammer down on Palestinian rights and existence.
The Israeli narrative itself describes its own establishment by historic birthright and political turmoil. Zionism wanted to appear modern, democratic, and enlightened—not murderous, supremacist, and authoritarian. In 1948 already, Israel issued a series of military orders to place its crimes within a set of legal regulations. The Absentee Property Military Order, later formed into the Israeli Absentee Property Law, was created to further appropriate Palestinian land and belongings by the appearance of a system ruled by the rule of law. According to that rule, Israel declared that all Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons who were forced out of their homes by the same regime that was prohibiting them from returning were absentees, and therefore all their land and property would be confiscated and transferred to Israeli state ownership. Although a clear violation of international law and principle, the law facilitates ethnic cleansing through legal venues.
Another example is how the state has established “legal” means to prohibit all Palestinian villages and neighborhoods from expanding in size. In practice, this has meant that since 1948 these places have been unable to grow to accommodate their inhabitants, which have quadrupled. A similar regulation was put in place in the territory occupied in 1967, with the same devasting result. The laws and regulations Israel put in place to advance its policies of forced population transfer are almost endless. For instance, in the 1967 occupied cities and areas, more than 2,000 Israeli military orders exist alongside Ottoman, British, and Jordanian laws. Israel chooses which regulations to apply in a specific situation to get the maximum result. And if the law does not exist, a new military order is formulated. This contradictory approach to all international legal principles forms the basis of Israel’s legal illegality. http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/novdec_23/novdec_23_05.html
2023-06-20 Professor Avi Shlaim answers question about whether Zionism is a racist ideology “Most certainly Zionism is a racist ideology and it is largely responsible for the Nakba.” During the UK premiere event of the film Tantura, hosted by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) in May, British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim answered a question by Dr Azzam Tamimi about whether he considers Zionism to be a racist ideology and responsible for the Nakba. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTQOudBMf7Q
2022-11-16 Fact Sheet: The Religious Zionism Coalition Religious Zionism is an extreme right-wing Israeli political coalition made up of three overtly racist, Jewish supremacist, homophobic parties: Religious Zionism, Jewish Power, and Noam. They united for the 2022 election campaign under deals brokered by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud party they are allied with.
As with almost all of the other Zionist political parties in Israel, the parties in Religious Zionism strongly support Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise on occupied Palestinian land and oppose Palestinian statehood or self-determination in any part of Palestine/Israel. The two main objectives of the coalition’s official 2022 platform are expanding settlements, including legalizing more than 100 so-called settlement “outposts” built without official Israeli government approval, and further restricting the ability of Palestinians to build homes on their own land in the occupied West Bank, which is already severely limited by Israel.
Religious Zionism is closely associated with Rabbi Dov Lior, who is something of a spiritual leader to Jewish Power. An influential former chief rabbi of the West Bank settlement where Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich and Jewish Power leader Itamar Ben-Gvir live, Lior is notorious for his virulent racism against Palestinians and other non-Jews and for being the spiritual advisor to generations of violent Jewish extremists. https://imeu.org/article/the-religious-zionism-coalition
2022-11-02 How Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, in conversation with Tony Greenstein | EI Podcast On episode 68, we speak with activist and blogger Tony Greenstein, a veteran of the Palestine solidarity movement in the UK, about his new book “Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponization of Memory in the Service of State and Nation.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9evhLCuA_k
2021-06-05 Challenging the Zionist Narrative of Palestine | Dr. Yasir Qadhi, Dr. Hatem Bazian, Miko Peled https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlZZfniE7u0
2019-09-00 Israel–Palestine Today: A Values-Based Approach I want to begin instead with the political reality in Israel–Palestine, where Zionism, the operative ideology of the state of Israel, is put into practice. I believe this reality demands a politics very different from what Walzer recommends—a politics that Walzer would likely deem anti-Zionist, but that those on the left committed first and foremost to the values of freedom, democracy, and equality should support. “There is one duty,” Ignazio Silone once wrote in Dissent, “that we cannot evade: to be aware of what is happening.” So let us first take stock of what is happening in Israel–Palestine today.
Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, there is one sovereign state, Israel, which governs, in some places directly, in others indirectly, the lives of roughly 13 million people. Of those 13 million, approximately half are Jews, who enjoy full citizenship and social rights, regardless of where they choose to live. The other half are Palestinians, who live under a range of oppressive systems: codified second-class citizenship in Israel proper; residency, always under threat, without franchise in East Jerusalem; military rule in the West Bank; and siege by air, land, and sea in the Gaza Strip. There are terms to describe similar, now-defunct regimes that enforced separate legal systems and hierarchies of laws, privileges, and rights on the basis of ethno-national identity, but we need not delve into their particular applicability here; for now, we can call this the “one-state reality.”
The one-state reality is not new. Israel has occupied East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank for more than half a century—longer than the apartheid regime lasted in South Africa. (It is also worth remembering that Palestinians within Israel lived under martial law from the state’s founding until 1966.) And though few in number and politically powerless, there were Israeli Jews who, after the 1967 war, called for an immediate withdrawal from the newly occupied territories, the most strident and tireless among them the members of the Israeli socialist organization, Matzpen. They were anti-Zionists. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/israel-palestine-today-a-values-based-approach/
2015-11-21 Arno J. Mayer, David Helvarg Ralph discusses the history of Zionism in Israel, the nature of empire, and also France’s response to terrorism with distinguished Princeton University historian Arno J. Mayer. https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/arno-j-mayer-david-helvarg-4a4#details
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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