Racism and Conquest in Palestine: 1. posted by Richard Seymour

Early Zionist racism

Plan Dalet, the Zionist plan for the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what would become the State of Israel, undercuts the mythology that Haganah and the Irgun were compelled by war to expel the Arabs and commit the massacres that they did. (Uri Milstein, an authoritative Israeli military historian, suggests that "every skirmish" in the 1948 war "ended in a massacre of Arabs"). And the reasons for this are reasonably well known - both Labour and Revisionist wings of Zionism were committed to the Greater Israel which would have fluid, biblical borders rather than be contained in a defined land mass. The Zionists had never any intention of accepting even the unfair division of Palestine proffered by either the Peel Commission or, later, the UN. Ben Gurion explained in 1937 that "Transfer [of Palestinians] is what will make possible a comprehensive Jewish settlement programme. Jewish power will increase our possibilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale." Later, he told the Zionist Congress, "we will abolish partition and spread throughout all of Palestine" (quoted in Benny Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 24. See, for more on this, Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall, particularly pp 16-19, or Ilan Pappe's The Making of the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1947-1951).

What remains to be explained is the ease with which these massacres could be carried out, what Norman Finkelstein calls "the unprecedented facility with violence demonstrated by the Jews who conquered Palestine. There is a particular, condescending kind of racism involved in Labour Zionism, for one. After all, David Ben Gurion had it that the "Hebrew worker [would] stand at the vanguard of the movement of liberation and reawakening of Near Eastern peoples". Elsewhere, he averred that the Arab workers would see the profit in the Zionist enterprise since they would see their lot improve by working with sophisticated European labourers who would teach them skills etc. This was mighty generous of Ben Gurion, for it was he who had also accused the Arabs of "destroying" the Land of Israel, even going so far as to claim that the earth had remained fallow for the entire time of the (mythical) period of Jewish Exile, writing of the "foul miasma" that arose from the earth after being "ploughed for the first time in 2000 years". (See Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 1995, p111; John Rose, The Myths of Zionism, 2004, p14).

Of course, the racism on the Revisionist side was always more immediately noxious. Vladimir Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini, believed simply in the superiority of the Jews as a people. The infamous Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, once wrote that:

"We are different, we are a chosen one, and a special one, selected for purity and holiness. There is no reason to being a Jew, unless there is something intrinsically different about him. No, we are not equal to Gentiles, we are different. We are higher."

Anti-Arab racism had in fact been evident from the first wave of settlers in 1882, who (Anita Shapira reports) behaved as if "they were the rightful lords and masters of this land", while they believed Arabs "respected strength and that the language of physical force was the only idiom [they] understood". When any of the natives got out of line, the colonial instinct was to reach for the whip. Ahad Ha'am wrote in 1891 that the Zionists behaved "hostilely and cruelly to the Arabs, encroaching on them unjustly, beating them disgracefully for no good reason" - and they did not "hesitate to boast about their deeds". The Arabs were seen as 'sly', 'underhanded', 'cruel', 'cunning', 'immoral', 'lazy' and so forth. Hebrew writer Y H Brenner wrote, upon arriving at Haifa, "there's another sort of alien in the world that one must suffer from. ... Even from that filthy, contaminated lot, you have to suffer." Uri Zvi Greenberg, a Labour Zionist in the 1920s, was also the author of Hebrew hate literature against the Arabs, describing the Arab as "a murderer, knife honed and dipped in poison". Anita Shapira recalls that socialist Zionists like Ben Gurion were "not repelled" by Greenberg's "malevolent description of Arabs" because they "answered to their 'gut perceptions' of reality". Another Labour Zionist, Tabenkin, expatiated frequently on the need for peace, yet managed to pepper his statements with descriptions of Arab barbarism, and the insistence that they "understood one thing only, namely, force".

As the Arab revolt reached its peak, the labour Zionist press denounced the Arabs as "murderers", "bands of robbers", "desert savages", "jackals", "barbarians" and so forth. Eliezer Yaffe, an anarchist, derided the "savages of the desert, who live by the sword, by robbery". Indeed, as the Arab revolt went on, the fabled "purity of arms" (in which the Zionists would allegedly never harm Arab civilians) was quietly dispensed with and young Jewish men were recruited by the British. They inflicted collective punishment on Arab villages deemed to be hiding rebel gangs and were, as recorded in some posts below, quite ruthless in the use of torture and execution. (Norman Finkelstein, op cit, pp 111-4).

One recalls this correlation between anti-Arab racism and the Zionist "facility with violence" when Ehud Barak says that lying is a cultural trait of the Arabs , or when Benny Morris - a supposedly left-wing Israeli historian - finds the time to condemn Ben Gurion for being too soft on the Arabs and not expelling the whole ruddy lot of them from the entire land of Israel. Zionism is a racist ideology and a racist practise. Future posts will talk more about the structural racism of the Israeli state and modern racism against the Palestinians.