A SPECIAL SECTION ON ZIONISM

A SPECIAL SECTION ON ZIONISM In the Jewish tradition, there are two Jerusalems, not one. The first is the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of mankind's longing, the name we give to the end of days. As...

...According to the liberals, anti-Semitism is bound to disappear as civilization and enlightenment spread...
...The native population was either absorbed and assimilated or it was decimated or expelled...
...But arguments concerning the raison d"6tre of nations and states are double-edged, quite apart from the fact that the Jews faced extermination not only as a group but as individuals...
...The expulsion of ten million Germans from eastern Europe was almost immediately accepted as an established fact by the outside world and those unwilling to put up with it were denounced as revanchists and warmongers...
...Arab opposition apart, Zionism has been rejected from various angles...
...The overwhelmingly clear truth is that it is not...
...The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty — and more — to the murderers of the six million European Jews...
...Hence the fact that the territorial changes in eastern Europe have been accepted as irreversible, while those in the Middle East continue to be challenged by many...
...Others did not accept the idea of a national state as a historical necessity...
...Nonetheless, every significant Zionist theoretician and leader saw in the effort to recreate a Jewish national life the opportunity for spiritual adventure as well as the setting for physical safety...
...While others had done important spadework, the Balfour Declaration was essentially the work of one man — Chaim Weizmann...
...But while it helps to break down some of the barriers between Jews and non-Jews, it also undermines the spirit of liberal tolerance on which Jewish existence in the western world is based...
...Without the ancien regime there would have been no French revolution, without tsarism, no 1917...
...Zionism, the transplantation of hundreds of thousands of Jews, was bound to effect a radical change in Palestine, as a result of which the Palestinian Arabs were bound to suffer...
...It appeared when European philosophers of the seventeenth century began to argue that man was a being whose existence was independent from that of the State, that he need join a political community only if he did not lose by that association more than he gained...
...United States Representative to the United Nations, in Plenary, in explanation of vote on the resolution equating Zionism with racism and racial discrimination...
...The real challenge lies in connecting the secular place to the sacred dream, to sanctify the earthly Jerusalem — or, in more prosaic terms, to test the proposition that this reconstructed People can do what so many other nations have vainly sought to do — to build a political system that does justice...
...Arab intransigence was the natural reaction of a people unwilling to share its country with another...
...For European Jewry the issue was not an abstract one of preserving a historical connection, religious and national ties...
...As a strictly political movement, Zionism was established only in 1897, although there is a clearly legitimate sense in which its origins are indeed ancient...
...Most such persons could be said to have been "born" Jews, just as most Presbyterians and most Hindus are "born" to their faith, but there are many Jews who are converts...
...Even of those in sympathy with Zionism only a few went to Palestine...
...Up to the late 1930's mediate necessity was preached by Jabotinsky in the the budget of the World Zionist Organization was con- 1930's...
...For a yet more important matter is at issue, which is the integrity of that whole body of moral and legal precepts which we know as human rights...
...Most of the world believes in newer modes of political thought, in philosophies that do not accept the individual as distinct from and prior to the State, in philosophies that therefore do not provide any justification for the idea of human rights and philosophies that have no words by which to explain their value...
...The proposition to be sanctioned by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations is that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination...
...It is precisely a concern for civilization, for civilized values that are or should be precious to all mankind, that arouses us at this moment to such Text of General Assembly Resolution The General Assembly...
...The opposition of the ultra-orthodox Jews is based on a totally different system of beliefs and values, and there is no room for any debate between them and Zionists...
...The Congress of the United States, in a measure unanimously adopted in the Senate and sponsored by 436 of 437 Representatives in the House, declared its utter opposition...
...Now this is a lie...
...Zionism is guilty no doubt of many sins of commission and omission in its policy on the Arab question...
...Instead of reverting to the nation-state, the Jews should try to fulfill the role into which they were cast by history: that of an avant garde of a new world order...
...The very first point to be made is that the United Nations has declared Zionism to be racism— without ever having defined racism...
...That is to say, From the State of Israel Proclamation of Independence THf state cf israc will be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their dispersion, will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants, will be based on the principles of liberty, justice and peace as conceived by the Prophets of Israel, will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or sex, will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, education and culture, will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions, ond will loyally uphold the principles of the United Notions Charter it was not a movement of the Irish to free Ireland, or of the Polish to free Poland, not a movement of Algerians to free Algeria, nor of Indians to free India...
...And when these claims begin to be made — as they already have begun to be made — it is the small nations of the world whose integrity will suffer...
...On that occasion — to give some feeling for the intellectual precision with which the matter was being treated — the question arose, as to what should be the relative positioning of the terms "racism" and "Nazism" in a number of the "preambular paragraphs...
...The first task of the Zionist movement — a task that began in 1897 — was to secure the place itself, to lay persuasive claim to the one site where Jews might exercise their right to national self-determination, might therefore test their own capacity to build a just society...
...Since social and economic developments cause the gradual disappearance of national peculiarities, any effort to reverse this process is bound to be reactionary in character...
...Many of the members of the United Nations owe their independence in no small part to the notion of human rights, as it has spread from the domestic sphere to the international sphere and exercised its influence over the old colonial powers...
...And it also involved persuading the world...
...We are now coming into a time when that independence is likely to be threatened again...
...but for the deep and prolonged exposure to European civilization there would have been no national revival among the Jews...
...Zionism faced gigantic obstacles, it had to fight for the realization of its aims in the most adverse conditions and this was bound to affect the ultimate outcome...
...44 MOMENT JANUARY 1976...
...That is what every Zionist thinker has seen and what every Zionist has understood...
...which considered "that the racist regime m occupied Palestine and racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the some racist structure and being organically linked m their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being " Takmg note also of the political declaration and strategy to strengthen international peace and security and to intensify solidarity and mutual assistance among nonaligned countries, adopted at the Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of nonaligned countries held at Lima from 25 to 30 Aug 1975 which most severely condemned Zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperialist ideology Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination special passion...
...Israel would be reborn one day...
...But despite all concessions in the cultural or economic field, the Arabs would still have opposed immigration with an eye to the inevitable consequences of mass immigration...
...And that is why the assertion that Zionism is a form of racism is so utterly insane...
...From this very specific political philosophy stemmed the idea of political rights, of claims that the individual could justly make against the State...
...The critiques of the extreme Left and the liberal-assimila-tionist doctrine rest on the argument that Zionism is an anachronistic move ncnt, that assimilation is an inevitable historical process and that it has proceeded too far to be undone...
...Zionism was always informed by twin themes — the desire for "normalcy," to be a nation like all the other nations, to put an end to the intolerable condition of homelessness, and, at the same time, to create a Zion out of which the Law would go forth, to be a light unto the nations, to build a nation-state that would reflect the wisdom and experience of the Jewish People...
...The main source of Zionist weakness has been the fact that conditions for the realization of the Zionist dream were never favorable...
...They are more likely to be attracted by the Israeli way of life, idealism and the extent to which Israel is spared some of the afflictions occurring elsewhere in the western world...
...Tomorrow, terms like "national self-determination" and "national honor" will be perverted in the same way to serve the purposes of conquest and exploitation...
...How will the peoples of the world feel about racism, and about the need to struggle against it, when they are told that it is an idea so broad as to include the Jewish National Liberation Movement...
...The United Nations decision of November 1947 was in all probability the last opportunity for the Zionist movement to achieve a breakthrough...
...One cannot stress too strongly the force of circumstances: In a world without anti-Semitism Zionism would not have flourished...
...That aspect of the task, as we are so bluntly and so frequently reminded, is still to be completed...
...As this day will live in infamy, it behooves those who sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so that historians will know that we fought here, that we were not small in number — not this time — and that while we lost, we fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost...
...Herzl had written that the success of the idea depended on the number of its adherents and that "the Jews who will it shall achieve their state...
...If we destroy the words that were given to us by past centuries, we will not have words to replace them, for philosophy today has no such words...
...The President of the United States has from the first been explicit: This must not happen...
...It is too early to assess Zionism in terms of success and failure...
...Both the Balfour Declaration and the UN resolution of November 1947 came at the last possible moment...
...The discussion wound to its weary and inconclusive end, and we are left with nothing to guide us, for even this one discussion of "racism" confined itself to word orders in preambular paragraphs, and did not at all touch on the meaning of the words as such...
...But Zionism was not in a position of such strength, nor was there a danger of world war...
...Far more serious, grave and perhaps irreparable harm will be done to the cause of human rights...
...All national movements have come into existence and developed their specific character in opposition to and usually in the fight against outside forces...
...Today we have drained the word "racism" of its meaning...
...If a case can be made for a just distribution of property among individuals, the same applies (again on the level of abstract justice) to peoples and nations...
...It is easy not to be a hunter if you have no weapons, and Jews, through time, have been weaponless...
...The first, the heavenly Jerusalem, is an idea available to all people, and there are many who have adopted it...
...As we yearn for a time that will be wholly Shabbat, so we pray for a place that will be entirely Jerusalem...
...Lloyd George and Balfour were persuaded by Weizmann to issue the declaration, in the last resort, not because it was advantageous or expedient from the British point of view, but because they accepted that it was the right thing to do...
...The definitions have been loose, but recognizable...
...The Congress contemplates the following means to the attainment of this end 1. The promotion by appropriate means of the settlement in Palestine of Jewish farmers, artisans, and manufacturers...
...Still, one cannot but ponder the situation we have made for ourselves in the context of the Soviet statement on that not so distant occasion...
...Indeed, the term has only recently appeared in United Nations General Assembly documents...
...The creation of nation-states meant the perpetration of acts of injustice...
...This task involved persuading the Jews themselves, many of whom preferred the imagining of Jerusalem to its construction...
...The British government would probably have pulled out of Palestine anyway, and a civil war would have ensued...
...The Jewish state might nevertheless have come into existence — but without United Nations sanction and international recognition and, generally speaking, under very inauspicious circumstances...
...The percentage of mixed marriages has increased substantially...
...The Arab thesis of inevitable Zionist expansion is a case of self-fulfilling prophecy: the Arabs did everything in their power to make their prophecy come true, by choosing the road of armed resistance — and losing...
...Given the realities of Soviet power, it was clear that the new order in eastern Europe could not be challenged except through a new world war...
...Throughout its history Zionism failed to mobilize substantial financial support...
...A few years later the decision would, in all probability, have gone against Zionism...
...Evil enough in itself, The Basle Program "Zionism seeks to establish o home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law...
...the General Assembly condemned inter alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism Taking note of the declaration of Mexico on the equality of women and their contribution to development and peace, proclaimed by the World Conference of the International Women's Year, held at Mexico City from 19 June to 2 July 1975...
...It further involves "a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to domination over others...
...One or two years later the world situation would no longer have been conducive to a resolution giving the Zionists what they wanted...
...Had they not rejected the UN partition of 1947, most of Palestine would still have remained in their hands...
...It has decried life in the diaspora as physically unsafe and morally degrading, intolerable for proud, self-respecting Jews...
...This opportunity was not to recur...
...There is this danger, and then a final danger that is the most serious of all...
...Now it was the singular nature — if I am not mistaken, it was the unique nature — of this National Liberation Movement that in contrast with the movements that preceded it, those of that time and those that have come since, it defined its members in terms not of birth, but of belief...
...which promulgated the principle that "international cooperation ana peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neocolonialism, foreign occupation...
...The Jews were the first to be denationalized, but the other nations will gradually follow...
...To a large extent the early Zionist leaders shared this belief in human progress...
...to those persons of the Jewish religion, a Jewish form of what today is called a national liberation movement...
...With the rise of Hitler it became a question of life or death, and they felt no pangs of conscience: The danger facing the Jews was physical extinction...
...But most Jews were indifferent, and success did not depend on them alone, even if there had been more who wanted it...
...Rmehart & Winston © 1972 by Walter Laqueur the community, many Jews have been only partly aware of the peculiar character of their social existence, and this has caused some confusion among them...
...For, he explained, "Nazism contained the main elements of racism within its ambit and should be mentioned first...
...From the very beginning the smallness of the territory limited its absorptive capacity: it has served as a national home for less than one-fifth of world Jewry...
...Throughout their history the Jews have become (or remained) a group on the whole identifiable, with certain specific characteristics...
...Such faith can be accepted or rejected, it can be a matter of rational argument only to a very limited extent...
...1975 but more ominous by far is the realization that now presses upon us — the realization that if there were no General Assembly, this could never have happened...
...According to the radical Left, it will wither away with the overthrow of capitalism...
...1._ Zionism is a response to anti-Semitism...
...Does corruption follow necessarily, or can there be a State where justice comes alive...
...Lest I be unclear, the United Nations has in fact on several occasions defined "racial discrimination...
...There will be new forces, some of them arising now, new prophets and new despots, who will justify their actions with the help of just such distortions of words as we have sanctioned here today...
...Few nations and states can make such claims...
...Which is to say, in the terms of the International Convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, adopted by the 20th General Assembly, anyone — regardless of "race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin...
...Recalling also that, in its Resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of 14 December 1973...
...To be fully accepted, the assimila-tionist Jew had to conform to the standards and values of this society and to give up what set him apart from it...
...The idea of Jews as a race was invented by nineteenth century anti-Semites such as Houston Steward Chamberlain and Edouard Drumont, who saw that in an increasingly secular age, which is to say an age which made for fewer distinctions between people, the old religious grounds for anti-Semitism were losing force...
...As against that wondrous dream, there is also the earthly Jerusalem, the real — and therefore ordinary — city of real — and therefore ordinary — people, the city of traffic lights and traffic jams, of schools and of jails and of falafel stands, of all the stuff of life...
...This meaning is clear...
...Next, one after another, the great private institutions of American life pronounced anathema on this evil thing — and most particularly, the Christian churches have done so...
...This is to ignore the background of emancipation and to regard assimilation as a weakness of character rather than a historical process with a logic and a momentum of its own...
...Jewish religion, Zion as a symbol, the nostalgia for the lost homeland and other mystical factors played a role in the development of Zionism...
...Zionism has been challenged on the level of abstract justice: It has been argued mat the Jews had no right to a state of their own, because they staked their claim too late and because it was bound to affect the fate of another people...
...Nor is it certain that a cultural center would not have encountered Arab resistance...
...But securing the physical Jerusalem is, in any case, only the first, and, despite its complexity, the more elementary of Zionism's intentions...
...Zionism has preached the more or less inevitable "ingathering of the exiles...
...The United States and Russia, the former with great reservations, reached the conclusion that the partition of Palestine was the only workable solution...
...It would have been a guarantee for the peaceful development of the country...
...This is not to say that Zionism was bound to result in the evacuation or expulsion of many Palestinian Arabs from Palestine...
...Gromyko's words — "at the suppression of the National Liberation Movement in Palestine...
...The idea of human rights as we know it today is not an idea which has always existed in human affairs...
...Now I should wish to be understood that I am here making one point, and one point only, which is that whatever else Zionism may be, it is not and cannot be "a form of racism...
...The Messianic vision our prophets authored is freely shared with others...
...There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations...
...With a consistency in the matter which surely attests to the importance of this issue to that religious and political culture, Israeli courts have held that a Jew who converts to another religion is no longer a Jew...
...Others will speak for their nations: I will speak for mine...
...Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note one foreboding fact...
...To think that it is an idea now endorsed by the United Nations is to reflect on what civilization has come to...
...Witness, for example, the frequency with which America is referred to, from its inception, as "the new Jerusalem," and witness as well the importance of the word "Zion" in American thought...
...They developed from invasions, colonization, violence and armed struggle...
...November lO...
...Public opinion in many countries felt uneasy about the Jewish tragedy and, above all, about the fact that not more had been done to rescue Jews...
...They have tended to forget that for all practical purposes their status in society docs not depend on an act of will but is decided upon by non-Jews...
...The Zionists believed that without a country they were bound to remain the bastards of humanity...
...Racism, as defined by Webster's Third New International Dictionary, is "The assumption that . . . traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another...
...But he was at the time almost alone in voicing siderably smaller than that of any major Jewish local this demand...
...And how will the small nations of the world defend themselves, on what grounds will others be moved to defend and protect them, when the language of human rights, the only language by which the small can be defended, is no longer believed and no longer has a power of its own...
...The United States of America declares that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act...
...2. While the rise of Nazism and the Jewish catastrophe in Europe were not inevitable, there would have been a Jewish problem anyway, since nowhere in Europe were the Jews generally accepted as fully belonging to the community...
...Present day pluralistic western society is different in character: not only have the Jews much less of their own substance, but society itself has lost its moorings...
...The harm will arise first because it will strip from racism the precise and abhorrent meaning that it still precariously holds today...
...3. Zionism has always regarded assimilation as its main enemy, without clearly distinguishing between emancipation and assimilation...
...But it was based on the unrealistic assumption that Arab agreement could be obtained...
...It has been maintained that in these circumstances the Jews had no right to survive as a group...
...While nation-states have played a progressive role in earlier ages, nationalism has turned into an obstacle on the road to further progress...
...The Zionist movement and the yishuv matured in the struggle against the Arab national movement...
...1963...
...it was because the individual was seen as so separate from the State that he could make legitimate demands upon it...
...To the contrary, Zionists defined themselves merely as Jews, and declared to be Jewish anyone born of a Jewish mother or — and this is the absolutely crucial fact — anyone who converted to Judaism...
...But they did not expect that the new world order would soon come into being, and they feared that meanwhile persecution and oppression would continue...
...Others could do what they would with the vision, but we — so said the Zionists — could not exempt ourselves from the need to give it shape, content, life...
...Only an infinitesimal portion of American, British, French or German (before 1933) Jewry settled in the Jewish national home...
...It was not the Arabs' fault that the Jews were persecuted in Europe, that they had awakened to the fact that they wanted again to be a nation and therefore needed a state in the country in which they had lived two thousand years before...
...A great evil has been loosed upon the world...
...New justifications were needed for excluding and persecuting Jews, and so the new idea of Jews as a race — rather than as a religion — was born...
...It was...
...like the Jew, society is becoming rootless...
...The distinguished delegate from Tunisia argued that "racism" should go first because "Nazism was merely a form of racism . . ." Not so, said the no less distinguished delegate from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics...
...All others, sooner or later, clash with reality and the result cannot possibly live up to expectations...
...Not only will people begin to say, indeed they have already begun to say, that the United Nations is a place where lies are told...
...It was on the whole a selfless act, perhaps the last time that an individual succeeded almost single-handedly in inducing the government of a major power to take a decision irrespective of national interest...
...Not three weeks ago, the United States Representative in the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee pleaded in measured and fully considered terms for the United Nations not to do this thing...
...Assimilation involved a conscious effort in the nineteenth century, when society was imbued with tradition and had generally shared values and rigid standards...
...But political Zionism as distinct from mystical longings would not have come into existence but for the precarious situation of central and east European Jewry in the second half of the nineteenth century...
...In logic, the State of Israel could be, or could become, many things, theoretically including many things undesirable, but it could not be and could not become racist unless it ceased to be Zionist...
...Hence the conclusion that the desire of the Jews to survive as a national group runs against the course of world history...
...It is not, for instance, to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary...
...It was the historical tragedy of Zionism that it appeared on the international scene when there were no longer empty spaces on the world map...
...Sentence first — verdict afterwards," as the Queen of Hearts said...
...Zionism, in brief, is the product of Europe, not of the ghetto...
...7. Up to the 1930's the Zionist movement had no clear idea about its final aim...
...Had the Arabs accepted the Peel Plan in 1937, the Jewish state would have been restricted to the coastal plain between Tel Aviv and Haifa...
...They feared that a further influx of Jews would eventually reduce the Arabs to minority status in Palestine._ 8. The Arab-Jewish conflict was inevitable, given the fact that Zionism wanted to build more than a cultural center in Palestine...
...Daniel P. Moynihan at the General Assembly of the United Nations November 10,1975 The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act...
...That Weizmann and his supporters could be of considerable help to the allied war effort was a contributing factor, but not the decisive consideration...
...That was the philosophy from which the idea of domestic and international rights sprang...
...A military victory may be an episode in the history of a nation...
...The fact that they derived economic and other benefits from Jewish immigration is immaterial in this context...
...But as it is a lie which the United Nations has now declared to be a truth, the actual truth must be restated...
...Zionists are guilty of having behaved like other peoples — only with some delay due to historical circumstances...
...Bi-nationalism and parity were utterly rejected by the Arabs, who saw no good reason for any compromise as far as the Arab character of Palestine was concerned...
...Just on Friday, the President of the General Assembly warned not only of the trouble which would follow from the adoption of this resolution but of its essential irresponsibility — for, he noted, members have wholly different ideas as to what they are condemning...
...9. Seen from the Arab point of view, Zionism was an aggressive movement, Jewish immigration an invasion...
...The origins of Zionism and its subsequent fortunes are full of paradoxes...
...This is to say that racism was merely a form of Nazism...
...would have been in every respect a better solution for the Palestine problem...
...There are black Jews, brown Jews, white Jews, Jews from the Orient and Jews from the West...
...The course of world history has not confirmed the predictions of the optimists...
...The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism...
...It is equally clear that this assumption, this belief, has always been altogether alien to the political and religious movement known as Zionism...
...They were and are tolerated within the liberal order of western Europe...
...Nor is it altogether certain what success and failure mean in this context...
...Throughout history nation-states have not come into existence as the result of peaceful development and legal contracts...
...For historical reasons, and in view of the possibility for individuals to opt out of Zionism is a complex phenomenon, and any bnet account of it runs the risk of oversimplification...
...There is no "objective" socio-economic Jewish question in these countries, even though the concentration of Jews in certain professions may still create tensions and occasionally even constitute a political problem...
...It is something more today, for the furtiveness with which this obscenity first appeared among us has been replaced by a shameless openness...
...Following only American Jews themselves, the American trade union movement was first to the fore in denouncing this infamous undertaking...
...It was not a movement of persons connected by historic membership in a genetic pool of the kind that enables us to speak loosely but not meaning-lessly, say, of the Chinese people, nor yet of diverse groups occupying the same territory which enables us to speak of the American people with no greater indignity to truth...
...4. Being a latecomer among the national movements, Zionism from the very beginning was a movement in a hurry, forever racing against time...
...They were not willing to accept the yishuv as it existed in the 1920's and 1930's, let alone permit more Jewish immigration and settlement...
...Political movements never develop in a vacuum...
...In these circumstances political and economic motives are unlikely to be decisive in making individual Jews opt for Zionism...
...The establishment of a national home in one of the world's main danger zones, against the opposition of the Arabs and without any powerful allies, meant that the future of the state would inevitably remain uncertain for a long time to come...
...6. The Jewish state came into being at the very time when Zionism had lost its erstwhile raison d'etre: to provide an answer to the plight of east European Jewry...
...But the process of assimilation interrupted by Nazism has gathered fresh momentum...
...It seems to me," he said, and to his lasting honor he said it when there was still time, "It seems to me that before a body like this takes a decision they should agree very clearly on what they are approving or condemning, and it takes more time...
...Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms as well os the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination" Taking note also of Resolution 77 (XII) adopted by the assembly of heads of state and Government of the Organization of African Unity at its 12th ordinary session, held in Kampala from 28 July to 1 Aug 1975...
...Which is that the damage we now do to the idea of human rights and the language of human rights could well be irreversible...
...Traditional values have been jettisoned...
...THESES ON ZIONISM Zionism is the belief in the existence of a common past and a common future for the Jewish people...
...In the meantime the population of Israel also includes- large numbers of non-Jews, among them Arabs of both the Muslim and Christian religions and Christians of other national origins...
...To a certain degree Zionism is bound to be a disappointment...
...It could rely only on moral persuasion, not one of the most powerful levers in world politics before 1918, and almost totally ineffective thereafter...
...Eventually it reached the conclusion that it was pointless to seek Arab agreement and that it could achieve its aims only against the Arabs...
...The one occasion on which we know its meaning to have been discussed was the 1644th meeting of the Third Committee on December 16, 1968, in connection with the report of the Secretary-General on the status of the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination...
...Zionism seeks to provide the Jewish People a weapon — a nation-state — and to insure that the weapon be used for good and not for evil...
...The term derives from relatively new doctrines — all of them discredited — concerning the human . population of the world, to the effect that there are significant biological differences among clearly identifiable groups, and that these differences establish, in effect, different levels of humanity...
...2 The organization and uniting of the whole of Jewry by means of appropriate institutions, both local and international, in accordance with the laws of each country 3 The strengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and national consciousness 4. Preparatory steps toward obtaining the consent of governments, where necessary, in order to reach the goal of Zionism" -1897 Statement by Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan...
...The word "racism" is a creation of the English language, and relatively new to it...
...For Zionism, the secular form of religious mystique, is a child of assimilation...
...In all our postwar history there has not been another issue which has brought forth such unanimity of American opinion...
...It was, he said, "obscene...
...This cultural crisis, which may be protracted, may be conducive to assimilation while it lasts...
...The State of Israel, which in time was the creation of the Zionist Movement, has been extraordinary in nothing so much as the range of "racial stocks" from which it has drawn its citizenry...
...One of the earliest and most popular songs of the Zionist pioneers says "We have come to the land to build it and to be rebuilt by it...
...Palestine, later Israel, was intended as a refuge for the persecuted and the displaced, and surely no further justification than that was required...
...proclaiming the United Nations declaration on the elimination of oil forms of racial discrimination, and in particular its affirmation that "any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable and socially uniust and dangerous" and its expression of alarm at "the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures...
...It is "racism" — incomparably the more serious charge — which has never been defined...
...Probably a majority of those persons who became active Zionists and sought to emigrate to Palestine were born within the confines of Czarist Russia, and it was only natural for Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to deplore, as he did in 1948, in the 299th meeting of the Security Council, the act by Israel's neighbors of "sending their troops into Palestine and carrying out military operations aimed" — in Mr...
...Recalling its Resolution 1904 (XVIII) of 20 November...
...as the distinguished delegate declared, racism is a form of Nazism — and //, as this resolution declares, Zionism is a form of racism — then we have step by step taken ourselves to the point of proclaiming — the United Nations is solemnly proclaiming — that Zionism is a form of Nazism...
...The effects of Zionism on the Arabs should not be belittled...
...Despite all his efforts Herzl the result of steady immigration and settlement, of quiet did not get the help of the Jewish millionaires who he and patient work...
...It took the advent of Nazism, the holo-community in Europe or America...
...But vision that has no present home is merely fantasy, and the boldness of the Zionist movement lay precisely in its readiness to try the hardest thing of all — the translation of abstract beauty into palpable reality...
...The terrible lie that has been told here today will have terrible consequences...
...And that is why the creation of Israel did not make Zionism obsolete...
...But whichever way one looks at it, the conflict on immigration and settlement could not have been evaded since the basis for a compromise did not exist Zionism could and should have paid more attention to Arab grievances and aspirations...
...But this is not wonderland, but a real world, where there are real consequences to folly and to venality...
...Elsewhere they could at most strive for national minority status...
...Many of these persons are citizens of Israel, and those who are not can become citizens by legal procedures very much like those which obtain in a typical nation of Western Europe...
...Equally, on the level of abstract justice, the fact that a nation or a state has existed for a long time is not by itself a valid argument for its continued survival, unless it has made a substantial contribution to the advance of mankind...
...Indeed, the idea that Jews are a "race" was invented not by Jews but by those who hated Jews...
...What we have at stake here is not merely the honor and the legitimacy of the State of Israel — although a challenge to the legitimacy of any member nation ought always to arouse the vigilance of all members of the United Nations...
...But the modern Zionist movement arose in Europe in the context of a general upsurge of national consciousness and aspiration that overtook most other people of Central and Eastern Europe after 1848, and that in time spread to all of Africa and Asia...
...Not forsaken them now, not here, not anywhere, not ever...
...The four years after the Balfour Declaration were perhaps the last opportunity to transplant hundreds of thousands of Jews to Palestine and to create fails ac-complis without causing a major political upheaval...
...Nor should any historian of the event, nor yet any who have participated in it, suppose that we have fought only as governments, as chancelleries, and on an issue well removed from the concerns of our respective peoples...
...It never quite overcame the inertia of the Jews, it always lacked resources...
...Zionism has been, and remains, the Jewish effort to create a relationship between the two Jerusalems...
...Critics of Zionism have, however, often drawn the wrong conclusion from this indisputable fact...
...Wherever the Jews would have chosen to settle, they would have sooner or later come into conflict with the native population...
...Reminded that the United Nations was born in the struggle against just such abominations as we are committing today — the wartime alliance of the United Nations dates from 1942 — the United Nations Association of the United States has for the first time in its history appealed direcdy to each of the 141 other delegations in New York not to do this unspeakable thing...
...The nonreligious critique of Zionism appears in different variants, but it is based in the last resort on the same ideological assumptions...
...As this lie spreads, it will do harm in a second way...
...The abomination of anti-Semitism — as this year's Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov observed in Moscow just a few days ago — the abomination of anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction...
...But most of the world does not hold with that philosophy now...
...some of them appear a little less inexplicable in the light of the unique character of Jewish history and the position of the Jews in nineteenth century European society...
...What we have here is a lie — a political lie of a variety well known to the twentieth century, and scarcely exceeded in all that annal of untruth and outrage...
...For example many branches of Christianity have always held that from the standpoint of the biblical prophets...
...Herzl proclaimed that a Jewish state was a world necessity...
...This decision depends by no means only on the degree of their assimilation, their loyalty as citizens, or the contributions they have made in various fields to the prosperity, the culture and the defense of their native country...
...It is an idea which appeared at a specific time in the world, and under very special circumstances...
...The acid test of virtue requires an end to impotence...
...It was a contemptible idea at the beginning, and no civilized person would be associated with it...
...To note this is not to disparage the original impulses and the character of the movement...
...But later he and his successors mentioned the state only infrequently, partly for tactical reasons, mainly because they had no clear concept as to how a state would come into being...
...Once power is available, what then...
...However, in the concluding chapter of his A HISTORY OF ZIONISM, the distinguished historian Walter Laqueur provides so fine a crystallization of his insights that the excerpt printed here is one of the best brief discussions of Zionism with which we are familiar "Theses on Zionism" is an abridged version of this concluding chapter, and it is used with the kind permission of Holt...
...The Zionism had neither money, nor military power, nor even much political nuisance value...
...The freedom of caust and total Arab rejection of the national home to action of the Zionist movement was severely circum- convert the Zionist movement to the belief in statehood, scribed by its extreme poverty: Land could not be The bi-national solution (parity), advocated by the bought, sufficient support could not be given to new Zionist movement in a half-hearted way in the 1920's immigrants, and funds for political work in Palestine and, with more enthusiasm, by some minority groups, and in the diaspora were altogether inadequate...
...Two generations of Zionist leaders, from Herzl to Weizmann, believed that Palestine would at some fairly distant date become Jewish without the use of violence or guile, as worst fate that could befall the Arabs was the partition of Palestine and minority status for some Arabs in the Jewish state...
...only political movements whose histories do not extend beyond the Utopian stage retain their pristine virtue and cause no disappointment...
...The idea that a state was the normal thought would underwrite a major loan to Turkey and form of existence for a people and that it was an im-thus enable him to get a charter...
...But there are those of us who have not forsaken these older words, still so new to much of the world...

Vol. 1 • January 1976 • No. 6


 
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