Zionism: Red in Tooth and

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Harry Sloan sketches the history of Zionism - racist against the Arabs and a deathtrap for the Jews REFUGEES by the million; homeless by the hundreds of thousands, dead by the thousand: the toll of Palestinian and Arab victims of the violent Zionist regime in Israel continues to rise daily.

Yet a consistent and influential propaganda campaign conducted both by the Zionists and by their imperialist sponsors in. Britain, USA, and internationally has ensured that in the eyes of many workers the state of Israel is still seen as a sort of 'underdog" surrounded by hostile and potentially genocidal Arab regimes.

What are the facts?

Since the fall of the Jewish state of Palestine in 70AD there had, until 1948, been only two periods in which the Jewish people had their own state. In the fifth century there was a state in the Yemen; and between the eighth and tenth centuries there was a Jewish state on the Lower Volga.

But the Jewish people had not as a result ceased to exist: far from it. Even before the Roman conquest some three-quarters of Jews lived outside Palestine.

Their widespread position merchants, traders and moneylenders led them at first to an increasing economic role under feudal societies, but then increasingly into rivalry and conflict with the emerging bourgeoisies.

Progressively the Jewish communities were subjected to ferocious attacks, their property and wealth confiscated, and expelled from all the western countries.

ALDI ARABIA Anti-Zionism is fuelled by Line Arab masses.

Theodor Herzl It is no accident thereore that by the end of the lineteenth century the vast najority of Jews were livng in the most economicilly backward, still heavily endal countries of Europe - Eastern Europe, and especially Poland.

But the late 1800s brought profound social upheavals in Eastern Europe. Feudalism began to crack and decay - with no development of any dynamic native capitalism to take its place. The Jews, concentrated in the urban centres, found themselves caught in a vice.

Used as scapegoats by the landowners and non-Jewish capitalists, they suffered both the anger of poverty-stricken peasants seeking work and the aggression of the non-Jewish petty-bourgeoisie seeking to lever them out of a contracting market.

As a result there was pogroms. In 1879 the German leader Bismark launched an • anti-Semitic campaign, followed by similar agitation in Austria, Russia and in France.

There were varied responses to this rising tide of attacks. Many Jewish people actively embraced revolutionary and socialist imperialist exploitation politics seeking a fundamental change in society. Many others simply kept • their heads down, hoping they would escape the violence:

But a third response was to seek escape from non-Jewish society altogether, to form a Jewish state. This notion was put forward in developed form by an Austrian Jew, Theodor Herzi, who had been appalled by the antiSemitism in France at the time of the Dreyfus case.

Herzl's book, A Jewish State (1896) became the centrepiece of the modern Zionist movement. It focussed the problem as locating a homeland for the Jews, in a situation where the imperialist powers had already carved up the world's habitable land space. After discarding a number of alternatives (including the vast territories of Argentina!) the preferred choice for this new "nation" was the ancient land of Palestine.

Zionism and imperialism The fact that Palestine was already populated by a vast majority of non-Jewish people (500,000 Arabs to 24,000 Jews in 1881) did not trouble Herzl: but it did mean from its very inception the Zionist dream of a Jewish state required the active collaboration and participation of the imperialist powers.

To the imperialists in exchange Herzl and his co-thinkers offered the prospect of a pliant force in a potentially hostile Arab world:

«We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism"

(Herzl, A Jewish State) This myth - of "civilising" Jews enlightening 'barbarous" Arab states - is still energetically fostered today: yet the attraction of the scheme then - as now - was that Herzl's offer to the imperialists coincided with a rise of Arab nationalism which meant that the imperialist leaders themselves were forced to contemplate new measures to control the Middle East.

The first congress of the Zionist Movement took place in Basle in 1897; by 1914 the movement of Jews into Palestine had raised the population to 85,000 -compared with 654,000 Arabs. This influx had taken place with the approval of the Ottoman Empire, of which Palestine was a province.

But in the conflicts of World War I the Ottoman Empire lined up against Britain and France: And the British imperialists, heavily lobbied by Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, and seeking to utilise the Jewish people as military and diplomatic support, issued in November 1917 the notorious 'Balfour Declaration' 'His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the jewish people ...

Naturally the Palestinian people were not consulted over this issue: indeed at the time of its release Britain had no authority to hand over Palestine to anyone. But in 1922 the country was placed under British administration. The first High Commissioner was pro-Zionist Sir Herbert Samuel, and Jewish immigration continued to build up.

117,000 Jews entered Palestine between 1919 and 1931, when they made up 17.7% of the population. The Zionists set up their own Jewish National Fund, with the objective of purchasing land from Arab feudal landlords.

They then began evicting Arab tenant farmers. An organised campaign barred sales of Jewish lands to Arabs. Similarly policies of "Jewish labour" and "buy Jewish" set out to exclude the Arab majority from the Jewish sector of the economy.

Doors Jews By the 1930s Hitler's onslaught on the Jews in Europe brought a massive surge of immigration -as Jews found themselves barred from refuge in Britain and other imperialist countries.

Between 1932 and 1938 217,000 Jews entered Palestine, bringing the population in 1939 to 429,605 out of 1,500,000 - 28%.

This build-up of an imported, pro-imperialist, colonising population in Palestine did not take place without resistance.

There was harassment of Jewish settlements by dispossessed Palestinians in 1920-21. In 1929 there were more substantial confrontations, and a wave of strikes and street demonstrations in the 1930s culminated in the 1936-39 general a followed events 6-month by a mass revolt in the countryside, which was savagely crushed by British troops backed by the Zionists.

Indeed the Zionist "state within a state" had developed from 1920 onwards its own army, the Haganah, used to defend Jewish property and in alliance with the British to repress and intimidate the Arab majority.

By 1937, the British in the throes of this struggle floated a scheme for the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state: this was rejected by the Zionists, who would accept nothing short of a Jewish Palestine.

Matters were then frozen by the start of World War 2, in which the British attempted to secure Arab support by restricting further Jewish immigration to 75,000 and imposing other curbs on the Zionists.

In was indeed during the war period that the hostility of the imperialist leaders to the Jews reached its peak. As Hitler's gangsters herded Jews into the concentration camps and extermination centres, the non-fascist countries of Europe and America closed their doors to Jewish immgration. Decrees limiting entry of Jewish refugees from Nazism were passed in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium. A 32-nation conference at Evian in July 1938 agreed that none of the participants except the Dominican Republic could take in the victims of Nazism.

The USA, too, joined the restrictions. In 1943, when the exterminations reached their peak, the US restricted Jewish immigration to a total of only 4,705.

Only Palestine declared itself an open refuge for Jews - and there the quotas were imposed by British imperialism.

Britain and 1944-47 So while they joined the Allied war effort against the Axis powers, the Zionist leaders did so with great political reservation. They continued to protest at the quotas and the signs of an accommodation towards the Arabs.

By 1944 extreme right wing Zionists began terrorist actions against the British, whom they with subbrand asy, now began to colonial oppressors"

The first organisation into the field of armed struggle against the British was the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Miiltary Organisation) - involving one Menachem Begin. Irgun's at first "unofficial" struggle gathered strength at the end of the war when the Haganah also joined in the terrorist raids and assassinations.

In February 1947 the British announced they would withdraw from Palestine, and hand over responsibility to the UN. The UN in turn called for the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, with international status for Jerusalem.

The Arabs however fought back against this carve-up of their lands imposed upon the majority (the 600,000 Jews were still only one third of the Palestinian population and owned only 10% of the land). In the UN's "Jewish" state, half the population would be Arab!

In the run-up to the British withdrawal of May 1948 a ferocious guerrilla war was waged by the Zionists with the aim of seizing additional territories not ceded to them by the UN, and driving out the native Palestinian population from the "Jewish" areas.

The Zionist forces were better armed (by the British) and better organised than the Palestinian resistance: and their brutality was horrific. Reprisal raids led by the Irgun and other right extremists included the massacre of all 254 inhabitants of the Arab village of Deir Yassin. Before the British left, some 300,000 Arabs had been forced from their homes and become refugees.

• When regular armies of the surrounding Arab states moved in, attempting to safeguard the Arab areas, they were confronted and heavily defeated. The additional territory seized by the Zionists included the Arab cities of Jaffa, Acre, Remleh, Lydda and Beersheba.

The number of Palestinian refugees rose to 750,000 - and despite undertakings made in 1949 to the UN, the Zionists refused to allow them to return to their homeland. On the other hand the racist 'Law of Return' of the Israeli state offers free immigration to any Jew from anywhere in the world.

COLONISATION I believe that it is trul Jerusalem do not want it to there because they want it.

Moshe Dayan

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Territories seized by SYRIA We must ask ourselves: What sort of Israel do we want? I say: A Jewish Israel, with no question marks and no doubts. A Jewish Israel, without the daily fear whether the minority now constitutes 50 per cent or st Bank Arabs revolt against Zionist repression But they are not human beings, they are not people, David Hacohen, Israeli Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Knesset.

Daily violence is the means to preserve minority rule In 1956 the Zionist military machine moved into action again - this time against Egypt fin agreement with Britain and France). Only under US pressure were Israeli forces subsequently withdrawn to the 1948 borders.

By the late 1960s there was a growth of Palestinian pressure on the Arab bourgeois governments -rising from the dispossesied and the oppressed in he refugee camps and vithin the Zionist state.

In 1967 a huge Israeli build-up triggered an Egyptian reaction: UN 'peace-keeping" forces were withdrawn from the faza Strip and Sinai and major blitzkreig opened a lew expansionist war which brought the seizure if all that was left of Palesine as well as the Sinai Peninsula and the South Nest corner of Syria.

The 'triumph' Zionism By this time the number I exile had topped one Palestinian refugees million, with a further $40,000 refugees under Lionist occupation.

Yet the unbroken trength of the Palestinian niltancy was demontrated in the battle of Al-. Karamen in the Jordan River Valley, where armed ontingents torced back a ubstantial thrust by the Lionist army.

The further Arab/Zionst war of 1973 however Ince again confirmed the bilitary superiority of the hat the Arabs of East annexed, but we are not raeli Minister of Defence; oted in Davar, 10.8.1967 they are Arabs.' Zionist forces over the Arab states; the Zionists annexed Jerusalem and began planting military settlements in Palestinian territory on the West Bank.

Zionism has therefore largely achieved its mission: it has established a racially exclusive Jewish state, red in tooth and claw from its decades of unremitting struggle to drive the native people of Palestine from their homes and land.

But the Zionists have never in a real sense been "under-dogs" in their selfallotted battle against the Arab people. They began as the chosen proteges of British imperialism: and since the war they have been able to count upon huge military and economic assistance from the imperialist nations - above all the USA.

The imperialists see the Zionist state as an assistant — albeit an unruly and volatile one - in the task of controlling the Arab regimes of the Middle East.

It is for this reason that despite what are seen as periodic embarrassing excesses by the Zionist leaders and occasional attempts by the US and other imperialists • to pull them into line, Begin today knows full well that there is no way the flow of arms and aid will halt.

Nor will the occasional crocodile tears in the Tory press for the death toll in the Lebanon lead to any real exposure of the nature of the Zionist state and its myths.

The Zionists of course claim that to oppose them is to be anti-Semitic: thus they try to equate the PLO with Hitlerism. Yet the fact is that most Jews are neither Zionists nor residents of Israel: and Zionism is a political expression of a particularly virulent form of colonialism whose own logic is genocide against the Palestinians.

Zionist theory itself is in fact heavily racialist in tone and content. Not only is this the case in relation to the Arabs, but also in terms of non-Jewish whites.

Leo Pinsker, a precursor of political Zionism, proclaimed that anti-semitism is a disease.

'Judophobia is then a mental disease; and as a mental disease it is hereditary; and having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable."

Theodor Herzl himself made no sécret of the fact that Zionism is in effect an acceptance of anti-semitism which he sees as "futile" and "empty" to combat.

Zionism and anti-semitism Indeed anti-semitism - and the fear of it - has even been exploited quite cynically by the Lionists themselves in the hopes of stampeding Jews into Israel.

Thus in 1950 and 1951 a series of outrages were directed against the Iraqi Jewish community. These ranged from assaults on rabbis to the bombing of Jewish shops, businesses and cafes as well as synagogue. RACISM not.' But it has been proved that they were carried out by Israeli agents, in league with some Zionist supporters, and with cover provided by Britain.

The Zionists, in line with view of anti-Semitism, claim that the Palestinians wish to smash their state and drive the Jews into the sea:

Yet the Palestinians are committed only to the destruction of the discriminatory state which denies rights to Palestinians (and which also discriminates against Jewish workers of non-Jewish origin).

The Jews have certainly suffered genocidal attacks - but rarely at the hands of Arabs. Until 1967 for instance, Jewish communities lived at peace in many Arab states including Egypt. Arab opposition to Israel is an opposition both to Zionist atrocities and to imperialist exploitation which keeps the Arab masses in crippling poverty while the TIS nil monomol. ies suck out the national wealth of their countries - and feed back subsidies to the Zionist military machine.

This same top-heavy state structure also places a huge extra burden upon the backs of the Jewish working class. Indeed the Zionist state has not fulfilled any of its promises to workers.

While its capitalist class grows fat and prosperous, plunging its armed forces again and again intr war, Jewish workers contend with poverty, inflation, unemployment and (for non-Europeans)

They also bear the brunt of the incessant military action which is the only way this voracious colonialst state can protect itseli against the antagonised Arab masses.

The Zionists claim that it is they who "made the desert bloom" , and who Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister, quoted in Davar 6.6.1969 have raised living standards for all in the region. Yet they fed at first off British imperialism and wealthy Jews in Europe, and have. profited ever since from huge allocations of foreign aid.

In 1968 Israel received 10% of the aid to all underdeveloped countries - the équivalent, in proportion to its population of 20 times the aid to any state in the "Third World' Its military machine and entire economy are totally dependent on US subsidies, and its technology is the spin off of the advanced Western economies.

In any event the wealth thus accrued is of little benefit to the super-exploited Palestinian people held as a captive workforce in Israel - still less the 2,285,000 refugees in exile.

The claim that Israel is a "democracy" is rendered farcical when we recall that United Nations Partition Plan for a jewish State in 1947 in 1947 and 1948 Territories seized by in June 1967 .Territory ceded back under Camp David de Mediterranean CAIRO EGYPT 3,000,000 Jews now control the whole of Palestine (as well as parts of Syria and Egypt) while 4,000,000 Arabs are deprived of the most basic rights.

And adverts suggesting that the Israeli yellow "union" confederation the Histadrut and Labour Party are evidence of a freely functioning labour movement will ring hollow when we recall that. the T LIOLA. VLAU Zionist Histadrut dates back to 1920 and the first struggles to dispossess the Palestinians and is also the country's largest employer. The Israeli Labour Party has played a shameless and active role in promoting Zionist expansionism.

It was Labour leader Golda Meir who declared with arrogant racism that:

"It was not as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."

(1969)

What then is the solution to the Palestinian problem? If the racist state of Israel must be overthrown does this not mean that the Jews must be driven out?

On the contrary, the overwhelming military predominance of the Zionists, the weak position of the Palestinian refugees, and the isolation of the Palestinian working class Beirut JORDAN GULF GULF OF SUEZ Gulf of Aqaba SAUDI ARABIA Red Sea in Israel means that the defeat of Zionism cannot seriously be contemplated without a struggle to mobil• ise the Jewish working class in the struggle against their own capitalist rulers.

And with their fellow ''Zionists" exploiting them to the hilt, the capitalist land of Zion is no dream solution for jews, while it is hell for the Palestinians."

point that it is necessary not simply to map out demands for the right of return for Palestinian people, and the formation of a secular, democratic state for both Arabs and Jews, but to couple these to the socialist demands of working class revolution.

And at the same time Palestinian militants in exile should be energetically fighting alongside left wing forces for socialist revolution in the other Arab regimes of the Middle East.

To the barbarism brought by the Zionists to the Middle East, and the servile support for capitalism exhibited by bourgeois Arab regimes, it is necessary to counterpose revolu tionary policies which through the development of a Socialist United States of the Middle East can offer a material basis for the cooperation and development of Arab and Jewish workers.

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Socialist Organiser no.91 July 1 1982 Page 10)

Socialist Organiser AGM

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FELER UP!

rising tide of anti-Semi- tism, producing riots and

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