Is Israel racist?
Patrick Marnham The press has unaccountably overlooked the news about Jim Baatright, the American basketball professional. Baatright is now allowed to play for Makabi of Tel Aviv, although he is not a Jew. Normally the Israeli sports authorities ban gentiles, but last November Baatright converted to the Jewish faith; so now he is a sort of Jew--`Jew-ish', as Dr Jonathan Miller put it in Beyond the Fringe. For most people the Jewish faith is hard to acquire (the Jews are more choosy than the Catholics for example), but in Baatright's case things were speeded up. The Chief Rabbi of Israel was able to do this because Baatright (luckily) remembered the existence of a Jewish grandmother back in the Bronx. This was good for Israel, good for Makabi and maybe good for Baatright ; it was also a rare exception to the laws which govern life in Israel.
One eminent Israeli who has repeatedly criticised these laws is Dr Israel Shahak,, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. 'I ask you,' he wrote in his newsletter, 'is this racism or not ? And if it is not racism, what is ?'
It is no accident that Shahak is a relatively little-known figure outside Israel, for he has long concluded that his country is 'a racist state in the full meaning of the term', and, given his credentials, he is at least as well qualified to decide as Abba Eban (and better qualified than Walter Laqueur or Daniel Moynihan). Shahak entered Israel after a childhood spent in the Warsaw ghetto and Belsen. In due course he served in the Israeli army. He appears to be a model citizen, but the
Israeli establishment has run a campaign against him in which it has been variouslY proposed that he should be dismissed, exiled, imprisoned or committed for compulsory mental treatment. The reason for this unfriendliness is Dr Shahak's determination, as chairman of the Civil Rights League, to advocate one standard of official behaviour towards Jews and Arabs, in face of the Israeli state's institutionalised double standard.
Most of Shahak's work for the Civil Rights League has concerned serious cases of injustice (such as torture or collective punishments) which have occurred in the Occupied Territories, but more recently he has also publicised his views on the racist nature of Zionism, the founding philosophy of Israel. Writing in Pi-Ha'Aton, the weekly student paper of the Hebrew University, he said: 'In this state people are discriminated against in the most permanent and legal way and in the most important areas of life, only because of their origin . . . In the state of Israel one who is not a Jew is discriminated against simply because he is not a Jew . .
Shahak's examples include the right to dwell or carry on a business in the place of your choice, the right to work in any capacity and the right to equality before the law and in all areas of government policy. In each case these rights are enjoyed only by Israeli Jews and denied to the country's half-million Arabs. do lidt wish to debate justification for this racist policy,' wrote Shahak. 'The most important fact is that it exists ... [later] we can debate why such racism is forbidden against the Jews but becomes acceptable when it Is carried out by the Jews.'
Israeli racism is not limited to discriminde tion in housing, jobs, education and health, according to Shahak. In his view the pressures which government policY exerts on Israeli society are resulting in a, process of Nazification. As an example 0; this he gives the cult of an Israeli nation a' hero, Meir Har-Zion, who has been singled, out for praise by Moshe Dyan and Genera' Arik Sharon among others. 'In his diaries Meir Har-Zion revealed not only what an assassin he was, but als° how much he enjoyed—purely and simPlY enjoyed—murder. How much he enjoYed killing an Arab with a knife, because he could then feel that he was a male. He described how he asked his commander for permission to kill an unarmed Arab shepherd, with a knife, and then described how his comrade held him while Har-Zion plunged the knife in his back and blood splashed from the wound ... Does a people whose national hero is Meir Har-Z10° deserve a title [but Nazi]? Would we gtve another name to a people whose ber,° enjoys killing Jews with a knife .. . ? VVasn t it the Nazi Horst Wessel who spoke of the pleasure of Jewish blood dripping from Ins knife? The article in which Shahak drew. attention to this cult was first accepted and then rejected for publication by the newspaper Ha'Aretz, with the comment that it would never publish any contributions from him.
The possibility of an Israeli racism, Which apparently seems so impossible to Many people, is not even paradoxical to ir Shahak. Nor is he the first to comment on the association of the two. The origins of Zionism lie in the nineteenth-century racism of Europe; the two were entwined like the ivy and the tree, and Zionism has never established an independent viability. Zionism has a vested interest in a continuing anti-semitism; if anti-Jewish racism (to use a more exact phrase) had not existed then Zionism would have had no reason to exist. For nearly a century European racists and Zionist Jews dreamed of a Jewish exodus from Europe. In 1791 the German philosopher Fichte spoke of 'deporting' the Jews to Palestine in order to Protect Europe from 'the hostile state of Jewry'. But there was no conveniently empty land for the Zionists to occupy until German Nazism provided them with the necessary impetus to drive out the Arab Population of Palestine. Isaac Deutscher was among those who recognised the existence of this fertile partnership between Zionism and the enemies of Jewry. In his essay Who Is a Jew ?he wrote: `It is a tragic and macabre truth that the greatest `redefiner" of the Jewish identity has been Hitler; and this is one of his minor posthumous triumphs. Auschwitz was the terrible cradle of the new Jewish consciousness and of the new Jewish nation . . . I Would have preferred the six million to survive and Jewry to perish'. The Jewish racial identity, as redefined by Hitler, and as observed in Israel, now rests on a doctrinal purity of which Hitler would have thoroughly approved—a fatt which Dr Shahak has gone to some pains to illustrate.
A fundamental (but little-known) Zionist Premise about the nature of anti-semitism Provides an example. In Zionist ideology anti-semitism is not, as one might naïvely suppose, merely a pernicious doctrine with Potentially murderous consequences, which, lIke any doctrine, can be opposed and rejected. On the contrary, for Zionists, anti-semitism is an intrinsic aspect of nonlewish human nature. We are all guilty !?eter Simple please note). Dr Shahak, and nis colleague from the Civil Rights League, ri Davis, reject this `horrible' doctrine of inherent or collective guilt. Zionists contend that the West has a duty to support Israel to atone for the centuries of persecution suffered by European Jews. Shahak and Davis's reply to this argument was klblished in a letter to Free Palestine. We should like to make it clear that we not °IllY do not believe, but are engaged in a serious struggle against, the doctrine of either collective or inherited guilt. In the liarne of those doctrines, the Israeli tovernment destroys the houses of suspects ,4nd throws relatives and families, including eabies, into the cold. In the name of this doctrine Jews were held "guilty" by anti
semites, and especially by Nazis, for any sins that their ancestors or individual co-religionists may have committed. In the name of a parallel doctrine, the Zionists make all the Arabs or all the Palestinians guilty of any act committed by a single Arab or a single Palestinian organisation.'
The doctrine of collective gentile guilt may find its ancestry in some of the unreconstructed tenets of the Jewish faith (about which most European Christians remain, after 2,000 years, totally ignorant). In his essay For Judaism of Truth and Justice (Documents from Israel, Ithaca Press) Shahak asks: `What would be our [the Jews'] reaction if we learned that it is still written in the Catechism, "It is permissible to experiment with a drug upon Jews to test its efficacy" ? Would we be content with the excuse that Catholic doctors do not apply this today ?' And yet it is apparently the accepted teaching of the Halakha that medical experiments can be carried out on gentiles, and this ruling is taught in Israel today without being questioned. Shahak suggests that it should be removed from the teachings of Judaism.
The predictable Zionist response to Dr Shahak is to stigmatise him as a Jewish anti-semite, 'a self-hater'. He thus joins a distinguished company including Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee from Nazism, whose views on the nature of totalitarianism attracted much Zionist abuse. Dr Arendt used the abundant evidence of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis to illustrate the close relationship between monstrous centralised oppression and routine bureaucratic efficiency. But for Zionists—who recognise only two classes of humans, Jews and anti-semites—her
books were a form of treachery. Bruno Kreisky, the Austrian _Chancellor, is another Jew who has attracted Zionist abuse. Kreisky has the temerity to regard himself as an Austrian, whose loyalty is to the country which has elected him to lead it. Acting in what he judged to be the best interest of Austria he drew attention to the 'mafia-like' activities of Simon Wiesenthal, the Jewish Nazi-hunter, whom he described as the agent of a foreign power (Israel). Recently he was described by a writer in the Jewish Chronicle as a 'frightened man ... the timorous, hand-wringing type of Gohts Yiddel one thought had become extinct.'
Since 1948 Zionism has been able to claim that it is indistinguishable from modern Judaism and that it is the sole defender of the best interests of the Jewish people. This has never been true, but before Dr Shahak the argument frequently went by default. The existence of a growing number of Jews, mainly Israeli Jews, who agree with Shahak renders this pretence increasingly implausible. Shahak carries the argument further by saying that not only is Zionism a Jewish heresy, not only is it racism, but it represents the most serious current threat to the security of Israel. 'The primary duty of all citizens of Israel, and also of all those Jews in the Diaspora who define themselves as the supporters of Israel, is to struggle against the racism and the discrimination which Zionism has established in the state of Israel, and which is directed against all the non-Jews who live in it', says Shahak. Without such an improvement he believes that Israel can never expect to enjoy a stable peace. Such a peace, if it ever came, would have to be based on the same principles of justice which he has urged the Israeli government to adopt internally. Justice for the Palestinians would mean a return to their ancestral homes, or, where these have been destroyed or occupied, a return to habitations in the immediate neighbourhood. This right, in Shahak's opinion, transcends any rights which Israel may have in its own sovereignty.
When Dr Shahak was asked why he.was not a Marxist he replied that he 'distrusted all revealed religions.' This leaves him in an exposed position, but an effective one from which to mount his criticism of those liberal intellectuals who have attempted to portray Israeli society as just and democratic. He describes their assertion as a 'pretence, which was false and was known by most people to be false from the beginning . . . Those who offered to the State of Israel (their modern God, or rather their idol) the sacrifice of their personal and intellectual integrity, now stand empty-handed. They gave away their best part and not only is, the idol not satisfied, demanding more and more, but the sacrifice itself was in vain : the pretence begins to totter and will sooner or later fall. It is good that it is so, for it was an evil pretence from the beginning.'
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