Thursday, August 26, 2004

Introducing Zionism

Zionists form the opposite side of the conflict we are studying here; they are the adversaries of the Palestinians who dispute with them the right to exist in this land. Zionism is the ideology that motivated the Jews of the world to settle in Palestine, creating the whole problem and establishing the Zionist state “Israel” through the efforts of its main body, the World Zionist Organization (WZO).

Since Zionism is the adversary of the Palestinians in this struggle, where is the place of “Israel” then? Isn’t “Israel” the adversary of the Palestinians? What is Zionism then? What does it call for and why? What is its relation with Judaism and are they different? What are the main bodies of Zionism and how did they manage to occupy Palestine and achieve their goals? What is the World Zionist Organization and how is it different from the Jewish Agency? What are the main trends in Zionism and what is the stand of the Jews of the World towards Zionism, can we say every Jew is a Zionist and vise versa? What is anti-Semitism and is it equal to anti-Zionism? And finally what is the Islamic stand towards both Judaism and Zionism?

Zionism, as defined by Zionists, is a political ideology that calls for the “return” of the “Jewish people” to their “homeland” to which they have “historical and religious rights”. i.e. the land of Palestine. It is a movement that depends and utilizes many concepts from Judaism, but that does not necessarily make it equal to Judaism. Zionism emerged as the main response for the Jewish Question that faced the Jewish People around the world, especially in Europe. It considered that the only solution to the problem of the Jewish people is to have their own home and state, just like any nation in the world. In other words to find “a land without people to a people without land” as the Zionist rhetoric says, and this land is obviously Palestine. To achieve their goal, the Zionists formed an international organization (World Zionist Organization WZO- est.1897) that took the burden to create this homeland and transfer the Jewish people to it. At some point, however, and for strategic and political reasons, the organization needed some alternative guise; hence, the Jewish Agency was established in 1929 as a wider body representing all Jews, not only Zionist Jews. But it was under the control of the World Zionist Organization, and both organizations were more or less the same body for most of the time. Their administration, being interconnected, make it rather difficult to understand their individual structures.

Throughout the years, many trends emerged within Zionism, that, to some extent, reflected some trends in Judaism itself. Since Judaism and Zionism are not synonyms, not all the Jews of the world support Zionism, though most do.

Before we proceed in the discussion on Zionism, we have to note an important feature of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, namely that both parties do not just dispute over rights, but over facts as well. With such dispute over facts, there is little room for developing intelligent argumentation, because facts are verifiable empirically only. For example, for a long time, especially during the 1930s-1960s, the Zionist propaganda in the U.S. convinced most of the Americans that the Zionists have been migrating to a land without a people, thus the famous slogan was: “A land without a people for a people without a land”. However, United Nations sources say that there are now 3,521,130 Palestinian refugees around the world, leave alone another 1.5 millions of refugees not registered with the UNRWA (Palestinian Sources estimate that there are 9,545,000 million Palestinians around the world in the year 2002). Indeed, American Zionists do thus far insist on this “fact”(!), although those inside Palestine admit that there was a people in this land before they came, to whom they, however, accept no moral responsibility because they left “willingly”! Likewise, the American Zionist Organization published a booklet named “Deir Yassin: History of a Lie” in which it ridiculously denied the well-known massacre of Dier Yassin in which the “Israeli” forces killed all the inhabitants of the village on the 9th and 10th of April 1948. In other words, a form of consistent fabrication and concealment of historical facts is practiced by this body to validate the Zionist religiously based claims.

This section aims at introducing Zionism in all its theoretical and practical dimensions in the most concise possible manner. It goes first to Judaism as a religion and to the Jews as a people, and then introduces the various brands of Zionism in an attempt to clarify the relationship between them. The section then will deal with the historical roots of Zionism, reasons behind its emergence and how did it come to existence. The third station will be with the Zionist Organization itself, then we move to the Jewish groups around the World and finally sum up with the position of Islam towards the concept.

This section is devoted to Zionism and its various bodies; it will not deal with the Zionist State, “Israel”, which will be discussed in a separate section.

# ANTENNA SHARON | 4:33:00 pm |