Racial Supremacy and the Zionist Exception

Racial Supremacy and the Zionist Exception

By David Lloyd
Information Clearing House
August 27, 2017

Politicians from Senators Marco Rubio and Orrin Hatch to
Chuck Schumer and Ron Wyden have been outspoken in
their condemnation of Saturday’s Unite the Right March
in Charlottesville and the vicious acts of terror it spawned.

Criticizing Donald Trump for his reluctant and temporizing
comments, they condemn the hate and are rightly appalled
by the white supremacist chants of “Blood and Soil” and
“You Won’t Replace Us”—or, as it became, “Jews Won’t
Replace Us”.

Though they have so far fallen as far short as Donald Trump
from calling it by its real name, American fascism, they have
been forthright in calling out this assembly of virulent racist
movements.

Meanwhile, the same senators are united by their ardent support
for a racist regime that is no less inspired by racial supremacy and
an ideology that demands ethnic cleansing.

All have signed on to a bill that would protect the state of Israel
by imposing civil and possibly criminal penalties on anyone who
protests its ongoing violations of Palestinian rights, including
illegal settlement and dispossession, by advocating for the boycott
of its economic, academic and cultural institutions.

In doing so, they have placed protecting Israel and its racially
discriminatory policies above the rights of activists who are inspired
by the same commitment to justice as the demonstrators who
opposed the open display of racism and anti-Semitism in
Charlottesville.

The contradiction between condemning US racism and support for
the racist ideology of Zionism has become steadily more glaring.

The ugly chants and intimidating violence of the fascist right
have met with almost universal disgust, including naming the
lethal ramming of non-violent protesters an act of terror.

At the same time, Americans have had to confront the fact that
white supremacy is an intrinsic if shameful element in their history
and institutions whose consequences have yet to be overcome.

The brief moment when the premature claim that the United States
was “postracial” has run its course.

But the same awareness has yet to extend to the remarkably similar
and equally consequential world-view of Zionism.

Zionism has always recognized that in order to create and maintain
“a Jewish state for a Jewish people” it would have to dominate and
displace the native Palestinian population.

Early Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky recognized the necessity of
ethnic cleansing; more recently, Zionist historians like Benny Morris
have acknowledged that Israel could only have been founded on the
back of the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians.

But, as with any settler colony, the fear remains that what Israel
calls the “Judaization” of the state and the lands they have illegally
occupied remains incomplete.

So what is euphemistically called the “transfer” of Palestinians
continues, in the Negev, in Galilee, in East Jerusalem and on the
West Bank.

Meanwhile right-wing Israeli youth rampage through the Palestinian
quarter of the Old City chanting the same virulent racist
supremacism as American fascists while Israeli police arrest the
counter-demonstrators.

American white supremacists express their fury at being replaced
by an increasingly diverse population and speak of a “demographic
genocide”.

Although their rage has a long history in American genocide and
racial segregation, it is met now with disbelief and widespread
antagonism.

Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed “Jewish State” of Israel and its
officials not only speak openly of the “demographic threat” or
“time-bomb” posed by the Palestinian population in Israel and
in the territories it illegally occupies, they develop policies to
enact their fantasy of an Israel cleansed of all but a tiny minority
of Palestinians.

These measures include not only the demolition of Palestinian
homes in the Negev or in East Jerusalem, but also laws like the
Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, which prohibits Palestinians
outside Israel from gaining citizenship, or even permanent or
temporary residence, if they marry an Israeli citizen.

This law, which denies the basic right to family unification
to thousands of Palestinian families, was upheld by Israel’s
Supreme Court in 2006 and renewed in 2016.

Even at the height of apartheid, the South African Supreme Court
balked at accepting a similarly framed law on the grounds that it
would have adversely affected African social life.

Likewise, a version of redlining, an old American practice that
maintained segregated communities, is commonplace in Israel
and protected by law.

Adalah, the Israeli Human Rights organization, maintains a
database of some 50 laws like this that discriminate against
Palestinians in Israel, constituting a system tantamount to
if not—as some well-informed observers claim—worse than
apartheid.

Though some idealist Zionists like Martin Buber once believed in
the possibility of sharing a Jewish homeland in Palestine with its
indigenous inhabitants, that dream has long been overtaken by the
ugly reality of a supremacist state and its system of discrimination
and dispossession.

It is increasingly difficult and painful for liberal Zionists—to use a
pitiful oxymoron—to defend a system that so violates the sense of
justice and equality that they elsewhere defend.

How can one condemn white racists for fighting to preserve their
privileges and supremacy in their “homeland” while defending the
right of Israel to maintain a regime based on exactly those values?

Rabbi Matt Rosenberg had no response when leading fascist
Richard Spencer asked him “Do you really want radical inclusion
into the State of Israel?”

If he was left speechless, it is because there really is no response:
Israel’s racist regime is based on no less supremacist, no less racist
ideas and demands than America’s fascists espouse.

It is the practical outcome of the ideology of Zionism and its
practices of discrimination and dispossession have historically
been furthered just as much by the Labor Party beloved of
liberal Zionists as they now are by the currently governing Likud.

And from the long-standing courting of right-wing and anti-Semitic
US evangelists to the Zionist Organization of America’s support for
alt-right publisher and financier Stephen Bannon, the affinities run
deep between Zionism and the American right.

Ron Wyden and other progressive Democrats may be writhing in
the contortions it takes to do the bidding of Israel and its Zionist
lobbyists while claiming to defend civil liberties and social justice
at home.

It is hardly surprising.

The two are fundamentally incompatible.

Zionism has become a toxic stain that contaminates whatever
comes in contact with it.

It turns liberal media, journalists and academics into the
mouthpieces of repression and censorship; it spawns defamation
and blacklists of scholars and activists in the name of anti-racism;
it dons the mantle of democracy and liberalism to promote a
supremacist ideology and a racial state.

But it remains what it is: a racist ideology with all-too-marked
affinities with the white fascism that most of its supporters
hasten to condemn.

It is time for consistency and to end the exception made for
Zionist racial supremacy.

In solidarity with those who protested fascism in Charlottesville,
and with those who continue to protest police killings,
deportations, Islamophobic travel bans, and homophobic laws,
progressives across the board must condemn Zionism and cease
to offer uncritical support of the state of Israel.

Instead, they should stand with the activists who demand justice
for Palestinians even as they protest racism in the US.

It is no longer possible to serve the agenda of supremacism
in one place and decry it at home.

As progressive senators and an increasing number of former liberal
Zionists have learnt, the contradictions of doing so are unbearable
and the political costs are insidious.

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