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by Peter A. Belmont / 2010-11-22
© 2010 Peter Belmont
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This essay is a comment on the excellent i-am-zionisms-mandatory-object-so-dont-i-get-to-define-it on the MondoWeiss blog.
The author examined the question of whether Zionism is, or must be, racist. I demur, suggesting that this is the wrong question. If one wishes to “slam” Zionism-in-practice, as I do, slam it for brutality and thievery.
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I am neither a Zionist, nor an Israeli, nor a Palestinian, so perhaps I don’t get to “define” Zionism. Nor do I wish to. But I have eyes to see, and I shall describe it.
As IsraelMoses says, “”Comment #2: The Focus of the Debate Should Be on the Unlawful Brutal Conduct, not on Whether or Not it is Racially Motivated.”
Zionism is all about theft. This particular theft has been large, a whole country and a people’s way of life and connection to their land, stolen — and has been particularly brutal. The thieves have armed themselves with an ideology, which they call “Zionism”, which has been interpreted by the thieves to justify the theft as arising from need (“Jewish people need a homeland and self-determination in that homeland”) and to excuse the brutality as arising from necessity. They ignored that self-determination has almost always meant self-determination for the people already settled in a particular space, and not invaders stealing the space from others who themselves enjoyed a right (and a territorial right at that) to self-determination.
Who cares if Zionism is racism or not or even cares if the question has meaning?
The theft was on behalf of a group of people, calling themselves a “people”, and indeed “the Jewish people.” Did they claim this people was a race?. And, if so, would this make Zionism racist? Who cares?
But the victim of this theft would have been whoever held Palestine, whether Palestinians, Arabs, reindeer, lemmings, Martians, Alpha Centaurions, or otherwise. The victims were seen by the Zionists as a nuisance to be got rid of, not as a “race”, not even as “a people”, not even as a collection of human beings (look at the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians (1948) and of the Gazans 2006-2010).
Or, to put it another way, the Zionists talked themselves into the idea that forming a Jewish State was necessary. Armed and shielded with this self-determined “necessity”, they did what they convinced themselves that this “necessity” required (or permitted) them to do. It all followed logically. Or so they told themselves.
FOLLOW THE WATER
Zionists took so much land not because they needed the land (New York City has far less land and an equal number of people), not because they needed to displace the people from the land, but because they needed the water over and under the land, without other users of that water. Especially as they thought or hoped that all the world’s Jews would soon arrive. Thirsty. There is barely enough water today even for today’s Israelis, even after taking almost all the (remaining) Palestinians’ water. The early Zionists wanted Lebanon up to the Litani River. For the water. the Zionist enterprise has always been, in significant part, about water.
A bank robber goes to a bank to rob it because it has money and he needs—he tells himself he is entitled to take—the money. He doesn’t care what is the “race” of the banker or of the depositors. He takes the money for himself. He gives himself permission to steal. And if people resist, he shoots them. He tells himself, and he tells others, the taking and the shooting are necessary. (We jail small-time robbers.)
If Zionists were honest and a bit logical or mathematical, they would say, “Here are our axioms. We needed a country this big and with this much water. We didn’t initially need all of Palestine, but we did need so much that we knew we’d create a lot of enemies, so we took even more land, and later even more land than that, all to give ourselves strategic depth—and more water. As weaponry became more long-range—even though we had armed ourselves to be impregnable —we persuaded ourselves that we needed more and more strategic depth. When weapons available to our enemies can strike world-wide, we’ll need the whole world. And we’re well on our way, having captured the USA and Europe. You can see that it all followed from the axiom.”
And to that the poor Palestinian, or American, or anyone, a Jew here or there, can only say, “I don’t grant you your axioms. I understand that you wanted all this. But you didn’t need all this. And you were not in any case entitled to all of this. And now look what’s happened to you (and to the Palestinians). The effort you made to get what you wanted, by illicit means, indeed by extraordinarily brutal means, has trapped you into a pattern of ever greater use of brutal and illicit means. You have developed a criminal’s habits, perhaps an addiction, both as to hunger for more loot (land and water) and as to defiance of law and a good reputation. You are land and water junkies and control freaks and lovers of the practice of extreme brutality in defiance of all humane and civilized norms.”
As an outsider, it is not for me to “define” Zionism. I have described the practice of political Zionism. That should suffice.
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