AuGmENTor said:
Yeah cause I wanna know what one is also.
Well I can sorta give you my take on Zionism and its origins - I'm just copying & pasting this from another forum I used to post on. 'Bulldog' was the person I was arguing with, and it should be noted that when using terms like "Jewish role" and so on, I am referring to the actions of immigrant zionist jews in historical Palestine. And the Jewish State (a Jewish supremacist regime), was essentially the goal of many of the early Zionists - and it is certainly was was eventually created in Israel.
It's quite long (a series of posts) but I hope its informative.
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Part 1
To be honest, I'm not sure what Bulldog's point really was. He seemed to dispute that the creation of Israel has been a major factor in antagonism between Jews and Muslims.
You see, there are several Zionist myths about the Creation of Israel, myths that are given creedence for whatever reasons in 'popular culture' (using this term as counterposed to the 'historical record').
One of the main ones used to be that Palestine was a 'land without a people' waiting for a 'people without a land'. And that prior to the creation of Israel, the arab countries sent a load of arabs (and presumably arab-christians) to Palestine with forged lineages. This is of course nonsense. Certainly there was no state of Palestine, not because the Palestinians were 'incapable' of organising a state, but because Palestine had been under various imperial occupations (the last one before 1948 was the British 'mandate'). If one were to apply that logic universally, then one could not speak of a 'Welsh people' or Wales for example.
Another myth is that, the Palestinians were not ethnically cleansed. Some have argued that the Palestinians, instead of being forced to leave, recieved radio broadcasts urging them to leave their lands, at which point the surrounding arab armies would 'drive the Jews into the sea' and then the Palestinians could come back. More nonsense, as proved by Irish scholar Erskine Childers, who made a study of arab radio transmissions, most of which had been recorded by the British and US. He found that "[t]here was not a single order or appeal or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put." (
The Spectator)
That Palestinians were ethnically cleansed is now accepted by most scholars. Or as Israeli scholar Benny Morris (one could hardly call him pro-Palestinain) says, they were "partially ethnically cleansed", and indeed he argues that the Israelis
didn't go far enough in murdering/expelling the Palestinians. He might be morally reprehensible, but at least he's honest. Avi Shlaim of Oxford Uni puts it more bluntly: "What Israel carried out in 1948 was ethnic cleansing."
Why are these myths important? Because all are or were integral parts to the justification of the creation of Israel - and some are still widely accepted in 'popular culture'.
Now, we come to the argument that 'the Jews' (or Jewish People) had a right to a 'land of their own'.
Bulldog says something to the effect that 'Belgians have a country, Chinese have a country, Tibetans want one, etc'. Well first, perhaps Belgium was not the best choice to illustrate this, given that Belgium is made of two 'peoples' - the Flems and the Waloons. But whatever, lets leave that aside.
This is essentially a nationalist argument, and while I am generally an opponent of nationalism (bourgeois nationalism at any rate), I will try and address this on its own terms, given that I do believe in the right to national self determination.
First off, I should point out that I am in no way in favour of the destruction of Israel, or expelling/murdering Jews. Neither am I an anti-semite (or rather, anti-Jewish). Common arguments used against critics of Israel. And I am not arguing that today, those who live in Israel have no 'right' to live there. It would be like me arguing that Protestants have no 'right' to live in Ireland, ridiculous. In fact, the very first book I ever read about Zionism was Leon Uris' Mila 18, a novel about the Warsaw Ghetto, which at the tender age of 14 had a deep effect on me.
Nationalism usually arises out of Imperialism (on a macro or micro level), it has to do with things like self government, borders, economic control and so on, and often to do with tensions between different groups in society - Welsh and English in Britain to use an example.
But lets go back to about 1890. What is, for example, a Russian Jew? I'd say its a person of the Jewish faith who lives in Russia. What is an Irish Muslim? A person of the muslim faith that lives in Ireland. So, in most European countries, we have [Insert country] Jews, people who had probably been living there for many generations - and who sometimes suffered attacks, verbal and physical. And it was in these conditions that the idea of Zionism arose. It didn't suddenly arrive on the scene in 1948. In fact, one could draw comparisons with Marcus Garvey's 'back to Africa' ideals and those of the early Rastafarians in Jamacia (a mixture of Christianity, Zionism and Garvism). They were people who by historical accident or design, found themselves in often hostile areas and wished to 'go home'.
Zionism had been gaining influence in the West (and not just among Jews) in the early part of the century, for a variety of reasons - including anti-semitism ("get them out"), and again, one can see some paralells with Garvey, who iirc was even given money by the Klan to fund his Black Star Liner project. But many, if not a majority of, Jews (both religious and secular) opposed Zionism, some seeing it as blasphemey (only God could bring about teh conditions of the restoration, not humans) and secularists seeing it as pointless, arguing that Jews that should align themselves with progressive movements in their respective adopted states and work to defeat anti-Jewish racism.
It was not until the rise of the Nazis that large numbers of Jews understandably began to align themselves with Zionism, and of these probably most were non-religious Jews. Noam Chomsky for example was (and still considers himself) a secular-zionist. And, it would probably be closer to the truth to call the Zionism of this era socialist or labour-Zionism. However, despite this, Israel was not formed as a secular-socialist (or social democratic) state, with equal rights for all - it was formed as a Jewish state, seized Palestinian lands, expelled vast numbers of Palestinians and so on.
I won't go into the arguments for and against the legitimacy of the principle Israel's creation, only to say the idea that Jews have an inalienable right to land because 'God' gave it to them is patently absurd. As a friend of mine said, "I guess that makes Israel the oldest piece of real estate in the world" - and that whatever my own opinions on it may have been at the time (and who can say what they would have been had I grown up in the 20s or 30s), the idea that Israel can now be 'uncreated' is also absurd. I believe in a two-state democratic secularlist (and preferably socialist) solution, where equal rights for all are ensured ad enforced, and where the Palestinian refugees have the right to return or recieve compensation (according to their own wishes, not those of others).
So does the fact that there was a Jewish Nationalism (comparable to Black Separatism in the US) automatically mean that the right to a state along ethic lines is garaunteed? Well, I guess the answer is yes and no. It's not as simple as holding a plebiscite, because Jewish people were spread all over the world - its a question of first finding a homeland to relocate to. So if you ask me, did the Jews have a right to their own land in 1948, I'd give an equivocal 'yes' - but if you ask me did the Jews have the right to colonise
Palestine and create a Jewish State, then the answer is an unequivocal 'no'. Just as the answer would be with relation to Black Muslim separatists - in fact the idea of a state with the supremacy of any race or religion over others is abhorrant to me.
Now we get to another myth of Zionism - 'arab anti-semitism' in the period before the creation and after (lets say 1930 to 1950). It is often represented as this irrational, racist, anti-Jew ideology, that the arabs 'hated Jews' simply becasue they are Jewish.
This is another ridiculous assertation. Did the Irish rise against the British Empire simply because they hated 'the British' and 'Protestants'? Or to use the example of the Palestinians even, was the 1936-7 uprising against the British an example of 'racist arab anti-whiteism' - or was it an anti-colonial struggle against both the British rulers and the immigration of Jewish would-be colonisers (many of whom became the British colonial police and crushed the rising - a telling indicator of what a Zionist state would look like)?
Well, you're free to say anti-semitism if you chose, but that's not what the Peel Commission found - it found the underlying causes to be arab nationalism (on the rise all across the ME), desire for national independence and self government, an end to Zionist colonisation and the end of transfer of Arab lands to Jewish colonisers and eviction of Palestinian peasants. Amazingly enough, those were also the demands of the uprising - nothing about hatred of Jews there. It was Palestinian nationalism, plain and simple. As with the 1948 war, it wasn't anti-semitism that motivated the arab armies - it was pan arab nationalism. This too is recognised by Benny Morris. The fact is that had the immigrant Jews instead been immigrant Romanis, the results would undoubtedly have been the same.
Finally Bulldog says in a sarcastic manner "It was all perfect before then" - a strawman if ever I saw one. I don't think anyone would argue that the Middle East (or anywhere else for that matter) has ever been 'perfect'. How could anything be 'perfect' under Imperialism? Of course, it is worth looking at arab-Jewish relations before 1948. Before 1948 there were about, iirc, 1 million Jews living in the Middle East in arab countries. Most of them lived relatively peacefully alongside their arab neighbours, and it was not until after the creation of Israel that persecutions of these people began. That is not an excuse for persecution, but to understand the reasons behind the actions one has to look them in their historical context - ie, the 'partial ethnic cleansing' to use Morris' term, of Palestinain arabs.
So back to the orginal point, to which Bulldog appears to have taken his initial offence - I would say that the single main reason for the huge animosity between arabs and jews (and lest we think it otherwise, many Jews are now racist against arabs just as many arabs are now racist against Jews) was the creation of Israel and all that it entailed. There was no anti-Jewish gene in arabs, but as always with nationalism, easy scapegaots eventually end up being made.
And I don't think this ultranationalism/mutal racism is insurmountable. Not at all. It is my belief that the ordinary citizens of Israel and of the arab countries - as with the working people of all nations - have far more in common with each other than with their own establishment elites, and that united in struggle they can overcome both their exploitative leaderships and their own differences with each other. That is my fundamental belief on the Irish question, as it is with the Israeli-Palestinain question.
