Zionism as a Racist Ideology

This 2003 Counter Punch essay on Zionism is as relevant as ever.

Zionism is Israel’s Manifest Destiny. It is a racist and expansionist ideology used to justify Israel’s atrocious human rights transgressions and its militant colonization of Palestine. The terms, notions and symbols framing Zionist discourse are really the parameters and substance of a more sophisticated and oblique racist discourse -- currently the most acceptable space to dump one’s conscious or unconscious racial contempt for those "brown people," the Palestinians.

Race, itself a social construct, is a central defining feature in the construction of Israeli Jewish identity. Consequently, Zionism is used to justify and slander the reality of Palestinian dispossession, and is a driving force behind the distribution of power relations far in favor of Israel, the region’s ‘super-power.’

Israel’s colonialisms, the expropriation of indigenous land and subjugation of the natives, are accountable for the inequities that inform Palestinians political powerlessness, especially the political vulnerability affected through the systematic refusal of equal citizenship. Israel, being in the position of power, has erected a hierarchy of racial and ethnic inequality in order to grant and preserve for itself social, economic and political advantages. Israeli law has made any sort of Palestinian resistance illegal, and it has rigorously denied Palestinian self-determination, thereby turning the OPT’s into economically dependent colonies. Israel has firmly affixed Palestinian status to that of total illegality in order to deliberately exclude them from the Israeli national polity for as long as possible. But because of Israel’s assiduous colonization of the West Bank, a two state solution is becoming increasingly impossible. The only long-term viable option is a one-state solution, a democracy of equitable political and national rights.

Award winning author on US immigration policy and history, May Ngai writes in her introduction to Impossible Subjects: The “illegal alien might be understood as a caste unambiguously situated outside the boundaries of formal membership and social legitimacy” (2). This political category in the US, the illegal alien, is akin to the status of Palestinians in their own land due to Israeli imperialism.

Zionism is not a virtuous ideal, it is an ideological means for racially and ethnically engineering an Israeli Jewish state, which under current conditions, is tantamount to the imposition of an apartheid state on Palestinian ancestral homeland.

The vast majority of these house demolitions, 95 percent, have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically to displace non-Jews and assure the advance of Zionism. In Jerusalem, from the beginning of the occupation of the eastern sector of the city in 1967, Israeli authorities have designed zoning plans specifically to prevent the growth of the Palestinian population. Maintaining the "Jewish character" of the city at the level existing in 1967 (71 percent Jewish, 29 percent Palestinian) required that Israel draw zoning boundaries to prevent Palestinian expansion beyond existing neighborhoods, expropriate Palestinian-owned lands, confiscate the Jerusalem residency permits of any Palestinian who cannot prove that Jerusalem is his "center of life," limit city services to Palestinian areas, limit development in Palestinian neighborhoods, refuse to issue residential building permits to Palestinians, and demolish Palestinian homes that are built without permits. None of these strictures is imposed on Jews. According to ICAHD, the housing shortage in Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem is approximately 25,000 units, and 2,000 demolition orders are pending. READ MORE

- mr