A Society Created Around Discrimination -

by Jose Villa

While the Boers and Ulster Protestants can show that they were the majority of the population of some part of their lands for many centuries and that they had some historical-territorial continuity, the Israeli Jews only started to arrive to Palestine in this century. They arrived from all the corners of the planet. The Jews from Western or Eastern Europe, Yemen, Mesopotamia, Maghreb, Central Asia, Kurdistan, the Caucasus, South Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Australasia, India or Ethiopia had different histories, cultures, histories, traditions, religious practices, languages and races. Some of them evolved in a near complete isolation from other Jewish communities. There are tens or even hundreds of different Jewish religious congregations. The only thing that unites all of them is their common belief in the first Testament and in a common vindication of the old Jerusalem faith.

Hebrew, a `dead' classical language only used for religious rituals and education, was modernised and transformed into the new `national' language.
In
order to develop Hebrew, Zionists undermined Ladino, the traditional Jewish mother tongue of the Jews in the Ottoman empire based in old Spanish, and Yiddish, the traditional European Jewish language based in old German. The Bolsheviks, on the contrary, massively promoted Yiddish. Publications, higher education institutions, schools and even a territory (Birobidjan) where set up for the development of the Yiddish culture and language.

Arabic was the language spoken by the overwhelmingly majority of the population in Palestine until 1948. Around half of the Jews that came to Israel after 1948 came from Oriental countries where most of them had Arabic as their mother tongue.

Like all discriminatory society Israel had a system based in different levels of privileges. The Arabs are the most oppressed but among the Jews the oriental Jews are oppressed by the Azkanazim (Jews from European origins).

The Black Jews (Falasha) suffer racism and discrimination. The Chief rabbinate does not fully recognises their Jewish status. They are a sort of inferior Jew.

Israeli society is also divided amongst religious believers. The most orthodox minority (like the small Naturei Carta) are against the Israeli state because they think that a Jewish state could only be created with a Messiah and that the actual one tries to eliminate the Jewish traditional community in order to create a modern secularised state. The majority of the orthodox (the
`crows') wants a fundamentalist Talmudic and segregationist state. They even attack non-orthodox Jews when they drive cars on the Sabbaths (holy
Saturdays)
or when they see women with `improper' clothes. Many Israelis wants a modern and secularised life.

Most nation-states were created claiming the continuity of a people which lived in the assigned territory for many centuries. Most of the nations,despite having an official religion, adopted some secular and non- confessional legal basis. Pakistan was divided from India around religious allegiances. However, most of the people that inhabited Pakistan where the native population.

In India Marxists are against the creation of Khalistan. A Sikh state could be based in a community which is the majority of the population of certain parts of the Punjab. However, it would be created under religious and segregationist communalist basis and would became a reactionary tool against the most secularised Sikhs and the Indian population.

The Israeli nation can not offer any territorial-historic continuity. Until the last century less than 5% or even 1% of Palestine where Jews. The Jews which arrived in that land had different histories and they and their immediate ancestors lived mainly in other countries or continents. Their only territorial claim to that land was that of descent from the old Israelis who inhabited that land 2,000 years ago. The Welsh, Gaelic and Bretons could claim Britain and even most of Western Europe because the Celts where the majority of the population 2,000 years ago. Different regions in the Balkans and Eastern Europe could have been claimed by Albanians, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Germans, Hungarians, Turks or Polish because only one century ago they used to be the majority of the population. With this kind of territorial claims the Canaanites or the Philistines, who inhabited Palestine before the Jews -as the Bible related- bloody invaded them, could have better claims. In fact, The Palestinians can claim to be the direct descendants of them.

A Jewish state can be created only around some religious allegiances because that is the only thing in common that all Jews share. A secular state would mean a republic based on a constitution in which every citizen has equal rights. In the Bolshevik Soviet Union, Jews, who were only 2% of the population, were allowed to lead the Red Army, the two main Soviets and the ruling International Party. Would an Israel entity allow an Arab to became prime minister, mayor of Jerusalem or chief of the army? This is impossible because the state is founded on religious segregation.

A Jewish state in a territory that was populated by a heterogeneous Jewish minority until less than half a century and under the expulsion/oppression of its native people, can only survive by means of its Apartheid character.

Can we recognise the right of a Jewish Israeli nation?.-

Palestinians (and progressive Jews) should not recognise the right of Israel to exist. A two-state solution would imply that the Palestinians must renounce most of their lands from which they were pushed in the last five decades.

In Argentina, Australia and the USA the native population was largely wiped out and new modern White settler nations where created on the basis of massive European emigration. We cannot demand that these big countries should be given back to their original peoples. The indigenous populations where reduced to few hundreds of thousands. On the other side tens of millions now constitute industrialised societies.

In these countries we defend the First Nations rights to use their mother tongue in their education and every day life, to have lands and even to achieve self-government in the areas that remain under their control.

Palestine does not offer the same scenario. The Zionists could not annihilate large chunks of the local population. There are more than four million Palestinians living under Israeli control or in neighbouring countries.

The Palestinian working class and intelligentsia are among the Middle East's most enlightened and militant ones. Palestinian fighters are at the forefront of the region's anti-imperialist struggles. Palestinian demonstrations are a very much supported source of inspiration especially for the hundreds of millions of Arab and Muslim masses.

The idea that the Arabs have to accept the colonist entity as a nation with the right to have its own state, is a demand to surrender made by the most pro-imperialist wings of the ruling classes. The left-wing Palestinians are resisting that capitulation.

If the Arab left came to terms with Israel it would reinforce the Islamic fundamentalist attempt to monopolise the anti-Zionist Arab sentiment. That would be a colossal tragedy.

A bi-national Israeli-Arab state would be an unworkable contradiction. Palestine is the historical denomination of a territory. It does not have an exclusive, segregationist or religious connotation. Christians and Muslims, and even some non-Zionist Jews, used that term. Israel means by its inception the desire to create a separate and pure Jewish communalist state.

It is possible to talk about a bi-national or bi-lingual country in Belgium or Wales. In these places different linguistic-cultural communities developed alongside each other without any strong degree of discrimination.

In Spain, Iran, the Andes, India and other countries it is possible to argue in favour of the right of self-determination for all its components or even for a multi-national federation. Basque, Kurds, Quechuas, Tamils are oppressed nationalities which had historical roots in territories in which they had been the majority of the population for centuries.

A bi-national Israeli-Palestinian state would not be based on the equality of both communities. The Arabs have the worst jobs and not have the same rights as the Zionists.

Israel and Aliya are inseparable. Israel needs to grant citizenship to every Jew no matter if he/she was born in Argentina or Australia and has never been before in the country. Israel provides housing, jobs and benefits to the Jewish emigrants while the Arab native population are denied their rights to return to their lands or homes and they cannot have important positions in the state, the police or the army.

Marxists oppose Aliya. We are, of course, in favour of free frontiers and against people's displacement. We want open borders for all the Jews, Gypsies and other peoples who suffer discrimination. However, we have to oppose colonialist emigration. We opposed the French or Italian attempts to resettle poor peasants or workers as colonial tools in Northern Africa. We rejected the Rabat's kingdom mass march on Western Sahara because they wanted to solve a land problem in Morocco at the expenses of the Sarahui local population. A democratic secular Palestine should welcome citizens from all countries but they could not accept émigrés which try to create a segregationist state at the expense of the original people.

In Ecuador the Council of Indian Nations (CONAI) demand that this state should accept its multi-national character. The achievement of that goal would imply a great conquest for all the Indian peoples. In Palestine the native population are not fighting just to be considered as one of the cultural and national components of the state. Israel is, by definition, based in a Jewish supremacist and segregationist platform and in the necessity to ethnically cleanse Plaestine. The Palestinians are claiming their land back. Their historical aim was to refuse to recognise the state that deprived them of their lands and citizenship.

We are not in favour of a bi-cultural Northern Ireland or of a bi-national White/Black South Africa. It does not mean that we are in favour of a clerical Catholic all-Ireland or for expelling all the Whites from South Africa. It means that the former privileged community have to accept that they should cease to consider the rest of the population as inferior and to accept that they should be an equal minority.

We are for the destruction of a purely Jewish segregationist and confessional state. But that does not mean that we want to drive all Jews to the sea or to support another genocide. We want to convince as much Jews as we can that the best thing for them is to unite with the Arab workers in order to create a secular non-religious and non-racist egalitarian republic.

The communists promoted the Yiddish culture and they designated a territory for Jewish colonisation. The Jews did not arrive in Birobidjan as a racist segregationist colonist who tried to exclude the native peoples. They coexisted peacefully with the locals. Today, for example, Birobidjan's Slav majority is very keen in maintaining the Jewish identity of that country as a means of attracting investments, technology and people to develop it.

In countries where the Jews constituted a compact oppressed majority in some territories (like the Falasha in Ethiopia) it was possible to advocate their right of self-determination, including autonomy or separation. However that right could not be extended to a group of people that wants to come into a new country in order to cleanse the local population.

Zionism needs to trample on the rich cultural and linguistic traditions of the Arab, Ladino, Yiddish, Falasha and other Jewish communities in order to create a new Hebrew oppressive nation which is forged in bloodiest battles against the Arab natives. We need to emphasise the fact that the Israeli Jew community is, in fact, a multi-ethnic amalgam. Zionists try to unite them
against a common enemy: the native Arab peoples. We should not help them
in
doing that.

We need to defend many of these communities against the Zionists attempts to deny some of their most progressive traditions (like the Yiddish working class
movements) and its discriminatory conditions in Israel. Begin and Likud tried to use the Oriental Jew resentment against the Azkenazim in a reactionary
way:
trying to transform them into the most patriotic anti-Arab pro-Israeli force.
We should address the oriental Jews explaining that their enemies are not the Arab neighbours or natives but the capitalists and Zionists.

Our demand is for a socialist, secular, multi-ethnic and democratic Palestinian republic. In that country live scores of communities: non- religious Jews and Arabs, secularised Russian-speaking Jews, Ladino-speaking Jews, Yiddish-speaking Jews, Arab-speaking Jews, Muslim and Chritians and
non-
religious people, Hebrew-speakers, different Christian congregations (Armenians, Copts, Catholic, Orthodox, Maronnite, Protestants, etc.), Muslims (Shias, Sunni, etc.), Druses, Bedouins, non-Talmudic Jews (Samaritans, Falasha, Karaite), tens of Hasidic and non-Hasidic Jews, Bahai, etc.

All these communities should have equal rights. No single community should impose its own religion onto the state. A secular constitution with a secular civic code should regulate their activities. There would not be special treatment for those of the same religion which come from other countries. Palestinians should have the right to return.

A democratic multi-ethnic Palestine could only be achieved as a result of a socialist revolution based on workers councils and militias. It would also be part of a socialist federation of the Middle East. In that context not only Palestinians would have the right to return but also Arab Jews would have the right to return to Syria, Morocco, Iraq and other Arab countries. Kurds, Assyrian and other nationalities would achieve self-determination and equal rights.


Chris

This little moron who posted the statement from the zionist group has been debunked on this article and in the subsequent comments:

 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/01/283820.html

The "israeli" zionist aggressors talking about "self-defence"!!! What a joke - take it back to the racist hate site LGF you troll.

"SECURITY" sells. Security has become the key fundamental principle for all Americans. Security is the context by which you should explain Israeli need for loan guarantees and military aid, as well as why Israel can't just give up land. The settlements are our Achilles heel, and the best response (which is still quite weak) is the need for security that this buffer creates."

From the Wexner Analysis (Luntz) -

"The Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee got its hands on this document, entitled Wexner Analysis: Israeli Communications Priorities 2003, was prepared for the Wexner Foundation, which operates leadership training programs such as theirthright Israel project which offers free trips for young Jewish Americans to Israel, by the public relations firm the Luntz Research Companies and the Israel Project."

Read more:
 http://www.counterpunch.org/israel04292003.html
 http://electronicintifada.net/artman/uploads/luntzwexneranalysis.pdf


"The document spells out the tactics that Israel and its US advocates
should use to maintain support for Israel and its hardline policies.
The Luntz Research Companies is a leading public relations and
opinion research firm."

SPIN GONE MAD - JUSTIFYING "ISRAELI" WAR CRIMES AND AGGRESSION ...

First of all the state of Israel does now exist and has done so for decades with 5 million Jews and 1 million arabs making it their home. Israel is also not a racist state, arabs and other ethnic minorities have the same rights as other Israeli citizens including the right to sit in the Israeli parliament as an MP. Israel also became a majority Jewish state because neighbouring arab countries expelled hundreds of thousands of Jews during the arab/Israeli war of 1948/49.

About apartheid in "israel":

The overwhelming majority of non-Jewish citizens are Arabs and they are subject to various forms of discrimination.

[snip]

The Government does not provide Israeli Arabs, who constitute 20 percent of the population, with the same quality of education, housing, employment opportunities, and social services as Jews. In addition, government spending and financial support are proportionally far lower in predominantly non-Jewish areas than in Jewish areas.

The Government provides proportionally greater financial support to religious and civic institutions in the Jewish sector compared with those in the non-Jewish sector, i.e., Muslim, Christian, and Druze. For example, only 2 percent of the Ministry of Religious Affairs budget goes to the non-Jewish sector. The Ministry's 1998 budget actually reduced the percentage.

In civic areas where religion is a determining criterion, such as the religious courts and centers of education, non-Jewish institutions routinely receive less state support than their Jewish counterparts.

Evangelical Christian and other religious groups also have complained that the police have been slow to investigate incidents of harassment, threats, and vandalism directed against their meetings, churches, and other facilities by two ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups, known as Yad L'achim and Lev L'achim.

The Government confers automatic citizenship and residence rights to Jewish immigrants, their families, and Jewish refugees under the Law of Return. This law does not apply to non-Jews or to persons of Jewish descent who have converted to another faith.

The Government designates religion on national identity document, but not on passports.

Orthodox Jewish religious authorities have exclusive control of Jewish marriages, divorces, and burials. They do not recognize marriages or conversions to Judaism performed in Israel by non-Orthodox rabbis.

Jehovah's Witnesses complained of inadequate police response to numerous incidents of harassment, assaults, theft, and vandalism during the period covered by this report, reportedly by two ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups, known as Yad L'achim and Lev L'achim.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Further evidence of this racist Zionist state's practices against those who are non-Jews can be found here at the U.S The State Department website.

 http://www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/irf/irf_rpt/1999/irf_israel99.html

[snip]

The zionists have peddled the mythology of turning 'deserts into orchards' with the active collaboration of the west. Their claim to Palestine is based on a complete perversion of historical facts sprinkled with Biblical references to geography. The zionists - most of them secular fanatics who have nothing to do with Judaism - have reduced the Bible to a real estate manual.

The zionist colonial settler enterprise was launched by shedding the blood of the Palestinians. It has been sustained through terror, the most common characteristic of the zionists, for 50 years. More than 475 Palestinian towns and villages were completely wiped out. There is no trace left of them anymore.

Soon after the June 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed Israeli general, had boasted to a group of visiting Jews from the US that the present generation had expanded the boundaries of the State of Israel this far. Now it was upto the next generation to take them further. He also candidly admitted that hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns had been wiped out.

Contrary to zionist propaganda, now admitted even by some Israeli historians, the Palestinian inhabitants of these once-thriving towns did not flee on orders from the Arab regimes. They fled in the face of the zionist terror machine. Deir Yasin (April 9, 1948) was but one example of numerous zionist atrocities perpetrated against innocent civilians. Palestinian women were parade naked in the streets. Many of them were bayoneted to death before their bodies were dumped in wells. At least 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in this campaign to settle European Jews in Palestine. This obscenity is being celebrated today as a great achievement.

Many leaders of the zionist terrorist gangs - Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir et el - later became prime ministers of the 'only democracy in the Middle East'. The 'most powerful democracy' in the world - the US - has such a close relationship with the 'only democracy' that massive annual handouts are bestowed upon it even while American citizens are denied many of their basic needs.

[snip]

Read more from:

"50 years of zionist forgery and land grab"
 http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/special-edition/terrorism50/landgrab.htm




The moron from the Zionist Nazi solidarity group really should read this article by one of his fellow "israelis" - one who even served in the "israeli" army:


"Collective Self-Deception - The Most Common Mistakes of Israelis" By GILAD ATZMON
 http://www.counterpunch.org/atzmon08282003.html

"Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military. He is the author of the new novel A Guide to the Perplexed. Atzmon is also one of the most accomplished jazz saxophonists in Europe. His new CD, Exile, was just named the year's best jazz CD by the BBC. He now lives in London and can be reached at:  atz@onetel.net.uk"

The above posting is misleading as there was no forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian arabs. Most of the arabs left at the request of neighbouring arab states so that the arab states could go to war with Israel without inflicting arab casualties. Many Jews therefore begged arabs to stay as if they stayed they would effectivly be human shields. Also during the war of 1948 to 49 around 700,000 Jews were expelled from neighbouring arab countries. No one heres about the Jewish refugee crisis today because those Jews were quickly absorbed into Israeli society. The Palestinian refugees however have been kept in refugee camps by arabs states as political pawns.

Also before the creation of the state of Israel Jews were not safe in arab countries and were frequently subjected to massacres and pogroms whenever they got too successful. Jews also had to pay a tax to Islamic states for the right to practice their own faith and not have to convert to Islam. So the arab claim that Jews were well protected under the Muslim Ottoman Empire is false.