Here is an example of why Zionism is racist and has a warped view of reality. The Israeli Knesset has passed into law an attempt to impose without any consultation the division between Christian Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians in order to make them into to separate nationalities and to assert the fraudulent claim that Christian Palestinians are not Arab. The article is published today in the Jewish Daily Forward Magazine. Most Christian Palestinians disagree with this proposal which was imposed by a right-wing Zionist without any consultation with the Christian Palestinian Community. Zionism has all but destroyed the Palestinian Jewish community. As I have written elsewhere the national designation of Palestinian included Jews, Christians, Muslim and even non-believers. As I pointed out before and have written about Palestinian Jews were opposed to the influx of European Jews into their Palestinian homeland. There is no religion called Palestinian. There were Arab Jews, Arab Christians and Muslim Arabs co-existing relatively well before Zionism entered into the political equation and created a divide that has all but destroyed the Jewish Arab community. Again there is no religion called Arab. Palestinian is like being a Canadian or an American it is a neutral form of nationality that has no racial or religious component. This is totally opposite to how the Jewish State defines its Jewish nationality. However, Zionism does not see the world that way. The Israeli political authorities and Courts have have refused to see the World in a manner where different religions and different ethnic/racial groups could be equal and share a common nationality like Canada. Instead Zionists what to build a political structure that has never existed before in Palestine (the name used for over 2,000 years) or Israel the name used for the past 66 years Israel. Zionists have tried to invent a new concept of Jewish nationality and hammer together a new concept of identity Jewish Nationality by bringing together Jewish groups have have virtually nothing in common joining white European Jews from a dozen or more different countries many speaking Yiddish, other speaking German or Hungarian, or English, or Lithuanian or Russian, or Polish, or French or an host of different languages and try to merge them with Spanish Jews, Arabic speaking Arab Jews (from Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Tunsia, Morrocco, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon) Iranian Jews, Black Ethiopian Jews, Indian Jews, Burmese Jews, Chinese Jews (Cochin Jews) and converts like Sammy Dais Jr, Marilyn Munroe and Elizabeth Taylor each with the respective national identity and language of their original country and virtually nothing in common with the other Jews gathered together in the Jewish State. These groups had nothing in common except contradictory definitions of what it was to be Jewish. None of these groups had any commonality that would provide the basis of Nation state in the normal concept of the term. This is why there is no Constitution for the Jewish State and no definition of what it is to be Jewish in the Jewish State. Zionists were careful to try to avoid conflict between the secular and religious streams within the Jewish community. In fact the Jewish religious community is again divided between Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox that are strongly anti-Zionist and do not recognize the Jewish State. There are many more divisions within the religious Jews community. For that matter there are many divisions with in the secular Jewish community right-wing, left-wing, humanist, community etc. On top of that there are various positions on the character of the Jewish State some what an excusive Jewish State. other want a Jewish majority State others support a Bi-national State (Martin Buber etc). There are also Jewish Religious nationalists that combine the worst of both the nationalist and religious streams. Many of the European Jews were atheists who did not believe in God and want to transform Judaism from being a religion to a secular national identity based on White European ethnic or racial identity. As one Israeli academic stated the definition of Zionism is that God does not exist but he gave us the Land of Israel. The White European Jews had great difficulty accepting Black Jews from Ethiopia and these Jews were initially rejected and when even accepted face severe discrimination in the White Jewish dominated Jewish State. Arab Jews, Iranian Jews, Indian Jews (Bene Israel) and Jews of other nationalities and ethnic background faced similar problems and these problems continue even to this day. As noted below and I quote Meretz party chair Zehava Gal-On put it: “Perhaps we should also divide the Jewish population into Poles, Yemenites and Moroccans?” This is the twisted logic that emerged out of the late 19th and early 20th Century that saw national identity tied to race, ethnicity and religion with terrible consequences for the groups that did not fit the preferred definition. All non-conforming groups were excluded. We all know what happened to Jews, and Roma and other non-conforming social groups. This way of thinking is very similar to the way the White minority constructed Apartheid in racist South Africa where Blacks, Coloureds and Asians were excluded from political and economic power on the basis of race. blogs.forward/forward-thinking/193740/how-de-arabizing-christians-serves-israel/?#ixzz2uwXfto6R Jewish Daily Forward March 3, 2014 How De-Arabizing Christians Serves Israel By Emily L. Hauser Last week the Knesset voted to force yet another division onto the Palestinian people. The Palestinians are already divided in a myriad of ways: There are those who live in the Diaspora and are divided there, from America’s well-fed middle class to Syria’s hungry refugee camps; there are those who live in the West Bank, and those in Gaza, each under a different kind of military occupation; there are Palestinians who live in Israel’s capital city but aren’t given Israeli citizenship, and those who live elsewhere in Israel and do have citizenship (if often of a second-class variety); there are Bedouin Palestinians who have citizenship and are even drafted to the army, but if anything, are treated even less equally than their non-nomadic Palestinian brethren; and long ago, Israel decided that those living within Israel’s borders aren’t even Palestinian: They’re Arabs. Israeli Arabs. Last Monday, by a vote of 31-6 (out of a total 120 Members of Knesset, so one has to wonder where everyone else was), Israel’s legislative body passed a law the ultimate goal of which is, according to its sponsor, “to distinguish between Muslim and Christian Arab citizens and to heighten involvement of Christians in Israeli society.” Haaretz reported that in an earlier interview with Israeli daily Maariv, coalition whip and rising star on the Likud’s right flank MK Yariv Levin described his intention quite clearly: My legislation will provide separate representation and separate attention to the Christian public, separate from the Muslim Arabs … This is a historic and important move that could help balance the State of Israel, and connect us and the Christians, and I’m being careful about not calling them Arabs because they aren’t Arabs. So to understand: A population that is native to Arab Palestine, speaks Arabic, prays in Arabic, and has, throughout the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, resisted occupation alongside its Muslim brothers and sisters — is not only not Palestinian, but not Arab. Because a Jewish member of Israel’s legislative body has decided that they’re not. There is nothing innovative here, of course. Levin is simply following in the footsteps of many, many Israeli politicians who came before him. As Hillel Cohen notes simply in his 2010 book Good Arabs: “Israel created divisions among its minority communities by treating them differently.” It’s a tactic as old as human hatred, after all. Unsurprisingly, however, Christian Palestinian-Israelis have taken issue with Levin’s blithe removal of their community from the “Arab” column. MK Bassel Ghattas, a Christian from the northern town of Rameh, called Levin’s move “very dangerous,” adding, “the whole attitude is colonialist. It is the white man mentality of telling the natives what is good for them.” Elias Hawila, a Christian Palestinian-Israeli medical student from Haifa, told a reporter that he “strongly objects to the government’s false notion of integrating the Christian population… Palestinians were always made up from different religions and all are an integral part of Palestinian society.” Israel’s Jewish left has also objected — as Meretz party chair Zehava Gal-On put it: “Perhaps we should also divide the Jewish population into Poles, Yemenites and Moroccans?” In considering Levin’s actions, it’s important to remember that a handful of Palestinian-Israeli Christians do volunteer to serve in Israel’s armed forces; the new law is part of a broader effort to expand those numbers. Among those wearing the uniform, there is some support for the move: “It makes justice for Christian needs and solves discrimination against them within the Arab community that the state has falsely put them in for 65 years,” Lt. (res.) Shadi Halul, head of the Christian IDF Officers Forum, told the Times of Israel. On the other hand, medical student Hawila called the effort to draft Christians “ludicrous.” The Jewish people knows a little about such disagreements. Just ask Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, currently protesting conscription in their tens of thousands. Or maybe ask American-Israeli Jews seeking to marry within their tradition in the Jewish state, only to be told that their rabbi isn’t the right kind of Jew. Likewise, the Jewish people knows a little bit about being told by the outside world who is and is not to be counted among us. History should at the very least teach us this: Nations get to have this fight among themselves. Jews have no more right to define and delineate the Palestinian nation than Palestinians have to define and delineate ours. But this is far more than a question of the rules by which we play the Nationalities Game. Whether or not Levin believes his own propaganda is an open question, that hardly matters — the consequence of turning his “Christian Arabs aren’t Arabs” ideology into law will be to drive yet another wedge into an already splintered people, making it that much more difficult for them to achieve equal rights within Israel proper, or a nation-state for their brothers and sisters in the Palestinian territories. Which, I have reason to suspect, may be the real point.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 04:43:15 +0000
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