Israel And Colonization Of African Americans
Israeli politicians have one singular goal: to engineer a permanent demographic majority in Mandatory Palestine that will allow them to maintain their repression of Palestinians under the facade of democracy. This can be accomplished in two ways, killing or expelling Palestinians from Greater Israel and attracting new Jewish immigrants. Both are unofficial Israeli state policies. Thus it was no surprise that after the Paris massacres Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored the Jews of France and Europe: “Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home.” The idea that your home is determined by your ethnicity rather than your life experience is not a new one. It is common among racists who believe biology is more important than language and culture, famously embraced by opponents of equality for African Americans before the Civil War.
The Zionist political movement was founded by Theodor Herzl, a European atheist from a Jewish family. Many of the founding fathers of the Israeli state, such as David Ben-Gurion, were also atheists whose belief in the Bible only extended as far as it served their nationalist identification. As Shlomo Sand writes in The Invention of the Jewish People: “the Bible became an ethnic marker, indicating a common origin for individuals of very different backgrounds and secular cultures yet all still hated for their religion, which they barely observed. [1]
The Zionist aspiration was to band together based on an imaginary shared ancestry to achieve political domination. At first, Ben-Gurion recognized – as all serious historians today do – that the Palestinians were descendants of the Judean peasants who inhabited the land at the time of the Arab conquest. “Historical reason indicates that the population that survived since the seventh century had originated from the Judean farming class that the Muslim conquerors had found when they reached the country,” wrote Ben-Gurion in a book coauthored with Itzhak Ben-Zvi, the future Israeli President, in 1918. [2]
Later, when Palestinians resisted Zionist machinations for a Jewish state on their land, it became apparent that it would be impossible for Zionists to integrate what they saw as an inferior culture into their political scheme. This caused Ben-Gurion and others to simply eschew their former historical understanding in order to strip the native population of any rights they enjoyed as the rightful owners of their land, and justify the dispossession required for Zionists to subvert them. Sand writes that after the Palestinian revolt of 1936-39, “the descendants of the Judean peasantry vanished from the Jewish national consciousness and were cast into oblivion.” [3]
Zionists understood race and ethnicity as the true determinant of one’s political association. But they proved they valued political domination above all, eagerly punishing people who identified with their neighbors and shared cultural values over ideas about biological origins. It is now understood that European Jews are descendants of the Khazars, who ruled an empire of converts to Judaism in present-day Russia. But even if the Biblical version of Judaism were true, the idea that a race of people share immutable similarities that should be the basis of a political association is a racist one.
For one thing, it perverts the idea of “home” as a product of biology rather than an individual perception. Writing about the “socially and psychologically .. delicate” impact of immigration, Orly Noy describes the process her family went through 36 years ago to immigrate to Israel from Iran. “According to Isareli parameters, we are seen as a successful aliyah story. However, not a day goes by in which I’m not painfully aware of how we were torn from our home, from our language, our most intimate cultural codes – and how those deep scars remain with my parents to this day.”
When Netanyahu and Israeli politicans cavalierly call for Jews across the world to “return” to their “home,” it demonstrates their desire to solidify their political power at the expense of the people they proclaim to care about. Instead of viewing Jews as individuals who speak many languages, have roots in countries all over the globe, and have attachments to the places where they have grown up and live their lives, they are seen as a vehicle for political power.
As Joseph Massad says, Israel demands a “right to be racist state that discriminates by law against Palestinians and other Arabs and grants differential legal rights and privileges to its own Jewish citizens and to all other Jews anywhere.” These legal rights include the “Law of Return” that allows Jews from anywhere in the world to move to Israel and obtain citizenship, while Palestinian refugees are denied entry to Israel by the “Prevention of Infiltration Law.”
Opponents of Zionism have fought back against Israel’s colonization of another people based on a racist political philosophy that justifies oppression and subjugation.
The Israeli colonial project shares many similarities with the ideas of many Americans in the pre-Civil-War era United States who believed the abolition of slavery should be tied to a project to colonize African Americans, in Liberia, Central America or the Caribbean, or elsewhere.
The most famous proponent of the colonization idea was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had inherited the idea from his political idol Henry Clay, who helped to found the American Colonization Society in 1816.
Supporters of colonization of African Americans generally believed that as an inferior race, blacks did not belong in the United States and should therefore leave the country to prevent a threat to whites. As Zionists see Jews as sharing a common ancestral home, so did American colonization proponents see Africa as the home of blacks.
Lincoln himself evolved on the topic throughout his political career, but he was never an abolitionist who believed blacks deserved equal rights. He opposed slavery as an institution and supported the application of the principles of the Declaration of Independence to slaves, but he never believed in equality between blacks and whites.
“I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality … I … am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position,” Lincoln said in 1858. [4]
Even after the start of the Civil War, Lincoln made clear his support for the gradual emancipation to be coupled with colonization.
Both Zionism and white supremacy are guilty of propagating the myth of race as a biologically legitimate fact, when it is in fact nothing more than an artificial social construct. People who believe in the division of society by race and ethnicity propagate racist ideas that reduce people to classifications that have no legitimacy other than what people choose to believe.
Not surprisingly, African Americans almost unanimously opposed colonization. At a convention of blacks in Springfield, Illinois in 1858, the gathering declared: “We believe that the operations of the Colonization Society are calculated to excite prejudices against us, and they impel ignorant or ill disposed persons to take measures for our expulsion from the land of our nativity… We claim the right of citizenship in this, the country of our birth … We are not African.” [5]
The famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass was equally adamant about African Americans belonging to the country where they lived and were raised. He blasted those who sought colonization to expel blacks from the United States: “Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition. We live here – have lived here – have a right to live here, and mean to live here,” Douglass wrote.
Despite Zionists purporting to act in the interest of global Jewry, they are essentially playing the same role as American white supremacists. While white supremacists sought to expel African Americans to ensure white rule over the United States, Zionists seek to import Jews to ensure Jewish rule over Mandatory Palestine.
The notion of ethnic supremacy is incompatible with a decolonized nation where all citizens enjoy equal rights regardless of what imaginary ethnic group you believe you belong to.
Works Cited
[1] Sand, Shlomo. The Invention of the Jewish People. Verso, 2010.
[2] as cited in Sand, 2010
[3] Sand, 2010
[4] as cited in Dilorenzo, Thomas. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. Random House LLC, 2009.
[5] as cited in Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.
January 18, 2015 -
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, United States, Zionism
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