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Hidden with code "Policy Violation" |
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Announcement :: Civil & Human Rights |
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Zionisms Racist Face |
Current rating: 0 |
by Noorwood AKA DAN "Woodhead" Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
07 Jul 2004
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Now its ‘Jews-only’ neighbourhoods |
Ironically, by imposing the new ‘Jews-only’ policy on the country and people of Israel, the extreme-right has painted itself into a corner. Far from excluding non-Jews from the public sphere, it is the Zionists who have been forced into ghettos of their own making
Right up to the third quarter of the 20th century, we were told that there were ‘whites-only’ neighbourhoods and premises dotted all over the American landscape. My father, who was studying in the United States at the time, told me of how he, along with thousands of other ‘coloureds’, was forced to sit at the rear end of the bus and had to use special toilets and exits designated for use by the ‘coloured races’ only. When we look back to those bad old days, a part of us still feels sickened inside. Racism, in all its forms, is always unpleasant, repugnant and fundamentally evil.
Over the past few decades, human rights organisations have cheered the advance of egalitarianism and equality. None of us would want to go back to the times when people were being routinely discriminated against on the grounds of their colour, belief, class or origins. Well, think again, for all is not well in the so-called ‘promised land’ of Israel.
On Sunday (July 7), the Israeli cabinet under Ariel Sharon endorsed a controversial new bill that would allow state-owned areas within Israel to be reserved for residential use by Jews alone. This, in effect, amounts to a ‘Jews-only’ residential policy which would effectively prohibit non-Jews from living in predominantly Jewish areas. Call it what you will:
apartheid, discrimination, racism, anything, as long as you condemn it for what it is. Israel’s government has shown that despite the advances that have been made by the human race over the past few decades, there are still those bigots and racists who believe that they and they alone have the right to decide who lives where and how and with whom.
The new policy introduced by the Israeli cabinet flies in the face of world opinion, which has already condemned Israel for its discriminatory practices and declared that Zionism is a racist ideology based on an essentialist understanding of Jewish identity which also sees Jews as distinct and superior to others. If such a policy had been carried out by any other government — the United States, Britain, Germany or any Asian, African or Arab country — the world would be up in arms in shock and horror. But once again, the only muted protests to be heard are within the Arab world and among the liberal Israeli intelligentsia.
The move also goes against the fundamental tenets of what Israel was meant to be: a pluralist society that respected religious, ethnic and linguistic difference and diversity. Among the few dissenting voices to speak out against the move by Ariel Sharon’s cabinet was Shulamit Aloni, herself a former cabinet minister and one of the founders of the Meretz party: “If we are not already totally an apartheid state, we are getting much, much closer to it,” she argued.
Speaking to the newspaper Ha’aretz, Aloni pointed out that Israel is “also moving farther and farther away from the founding document of the state of Israel”, which promised “development of the country for the benefit of all its residents” and “complete social and political equality to all its citizens, regardless of religion, race, or gender.”
But who can tell what Israel was, and what it was meant to be? After decades of creeping militarisation of its society, Israel today is a state on the warpath, bent on denying its Palestinian and Arab neighbours the same rights that it demands for itself. Whatever semblance of democracy and liberalism there was has been wiped out, thanks to the steady and relentless encroachment of the extreme-right on Israel’s national politics. And the constant arrival of more and more East European Jews into the country has long destroyed its Arabic-Mediterranean character. The dream of a pluralist and democratic Israel that could live in peace with its Arab neighbours died long ago, a long time before the tanks and bulldozers ploughed their way into Jenin and Ramallah.Two important factors need to be borne in mind when considering the moral abyss into which Israel has plunged:
Firstly, Israel’s slide towards religious exclusivism shows just how and why it is so dangerous to allow the democratic political process to be hijacked by religious fundamentalists and extremists. The Zionists’ move to enforce further segregation between Jews and non-Jews is rooted in the belief that religious communities cannot live together, and need to be kept apart for their own good. (It is important to note that during the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe in the 1930s, many conservative Jews actually supported the racist policies of the Nazis and Fascists at first, on the grounds that they preferred to be alienated and kept apart from non-Jewish Europeans. The end result was that they signed their own death warrant by endorsing such moves.)
The second factor that needs to be borne in mind is the fact that cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, though often complicated and difficult to manage, are still better than the politics of narrow communitarianism in the long run. The ultra-orthodox Zionists who support Ariel Sharon’s policy may think that by doing so they can preserve the ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’ of their race and culture, but they are seriously deluded in thinking so. For cultures interpenetrate, overlap and cross-fertilise one another. That is how the most developed and dynamic cultures and civilisations have thrived and prospered. Cultures that become introvert and exclusive merely degrade and end up in a state of stasis, as was the case when medieval China closed its borders to the world and closed in upon itself.
The net result of such blatantly racist and discriminatory policies would be increased tension, apprehension and hostility between Arabs and Jews in Israel and without. Israel’s own tarnished image as a nation practising the politics of Apartheid will simply be reinforced even more, isolating it even further on the stage of global politics.
Ironically, by imposing the new ‘Jews-only’ policy on the country and people of Israel, the extreme-right has painted itself into a corner. Far from excluding non-Jews from the public sphere, it is the Zionists who have been forced into ghettos of their own making. Israel remains a nation under siege, but the siege in question is a mental one that can only be lifted when the extremist Zionists in the country come to terms with the fact that they share a common humanity with the very same people they want to keep off their lawns and sidewalks.
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for global justice in the international political order |
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