Democratic Palestine : 39 (ص 10)
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- عنوان
- Democratic Palestine : 39 (ص 10)
- المحتوى
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the struggle against Israeli occupation and colonial policies
and for a new democratic order: a common state which will
realize and express the freedom, self-determination and
common life of all the inhabitants of the country (residents
and refugees) - regardless of their language, culture, relig-
ion, ethnic nationality or gender - as equal citizens.
We wish to emphasize that this call is consistent and
compatible with the demand of the PLO for the establish-
ment of an independent state of Palestine. We consider the
establishment of an independent Palestinian state in Pales-
tine as an important step in our struggle, Israelis and Pal-
estinians inside and outside Israel against the Israeli rule of
apartheid and segregation and for a common life based on
equal rights for all the inhabitants of the unified country and
its Palestinian refugees.
Israeli citizenship by force of the Law of Return ne-
gates the modern concepts of citizenship as defined and
created by the American constitution and the French revolu-
tion some two hundred years ago. Against Israeli Jewish
ethnic nationalism whose legal expression is Israeli citizen-
ship by force of the Law of Return, we call for a common
democratic non-sectarian state based on a common political
nationalism for all the inhabitants of the country: Palesti-
nians (the residents of the occupied territories, the refugees,
and the Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel) and the
Israelis (the immigrant society and their descendants, citi-
zens of the state of Israel by force of the Law of Return)
whose legal expression will be one democratic citizenship
like American citizenship or British citizenship.
The construction of the common political nationalism
which is not based on historical past, ethnicity, language or
religion, but on common existence and common struggle for
a life together and for a common citizenship is the only pos-
sible solution to the contradiction that has been posited bet-
ween the Israelis and the Palestinians. Essential to the con-
stitution of common political nationalism is the abolition of
all legal structures of discrimination (e.g. Law of Return
1950, Israeli Nationality Law 1952, Jewish National Fund
Law 1953, Israel Lands Law 1960).
We make a sharp distinction between Judaism and
Zionism. The Zionist movement, regardless of the good
intentions of many Jews who worked within its framework
and those whose lives were saved, was not, and has never
been the national movement of the Jewish people. The
founders of the Zionist movement came out of a minority of
assimilated Jews who aimed to take advantage of the plight
of the persecuted Jewish masses in Europe in order to pro-
mote their political aims: to build in Palestine under the
auspices of the imperial powers an allegedly Jewish settler-
colonial state as a claimed solution to the problem of anti-
Semitism in Europe. The Zionist movement and the state of
Israel which it established in 1948 have not offered a solu-
tion to the problem of anti-Semitism. But they did offer,
however, the opportunity for this minority of European
Jews, who were excluded from the ruling elites in Europe,
an opportunity to lead a settler-colonial project based on the
expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homeland and
their replacement with immigrants defined by the state as
Jews. Instead of leading Jewish communities to struggle
10
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against anti-Semitism in their own countries, the Zionist
leadership shrank away from confrontation against anti-
Semitism. Unlike the Jewish Bund and other socialist and
democratic parties who led the struggle of the Jewish masses
against anti-Semitism, the Zionist movement accepted the
basic assumptions of anti-Semitism, and a part of its leader-
ship also collaborated with the anti-Semitic forces to prom-
ote the transfer of Jewish communities out of their home-
land countries to Palestine and subsequently to the state of
Israel. Opponents of Zionism, e.g., the orthodox Jewish
Neturei Karta, the Jewish Bund as well as Jewish liberals
and socialists, have been correct in their analysis and their
rejection of Zionism. The Zionist movement has always
been a settler-colonial movement which destroys the human-
ity of its adherents and places the masses of Jews in
unnecessary and unjustified danger. Contrary to Zionist
claims, the Zionist political program of mass concentration
of Jews in Palestine did not save the Jewish community in
Palestine prior to 1945 from the Nazi Holocaust. The truth
is that the Jewish community in Palestine was saved from
annihilation under the prospective Nazi German occupation
of Palestine thanks not to Zionism, but because of the vic-
tories of the Red Army in Stalingrad and of the British army
in El Alamein. The historical lesson from the Holocaust is
not that of an ‘essential’ or ‘eternal’ anti-Semitism on the
one hand, and a ‘chosen’ Jewish people on the other. The
historical lesson from the Holocaust is that the only solution
to the problem of anti-Semitism is the defense of democracy
against fascism wherever it occurs in the world; not the
Zionist solution of collaboration with anti-Semitism to pro-
mote Jewish transfer.
The state of Israel was established in the 1948-49 war as
the creation of the Zionist movement (World Zionist
Organization/Jewish Agency). The Zionist community in
Palestine (Yishuv) fought and occupied approximately 75%
of the territory of Palestine in order to establish the state of
Israel, claiming to do so in the name of the Jewish people.
In the first two decades following its establishment, the gov-
ernment of the state of Israel worked to consolidate the dis-
possession of the Palestinian people in the territories that
came under its sovereignty following the 1948-49 war. Most
prominently, the resettlement and concentration of the
Palestinian population in the south (the Naqab/Negev) in
reservation areas and the massive dispossession of their
lands and the policy officially known as the ‘Judaization of
the Galilee’ directed to further alienate the remaining Pal-
estinian population in the north from the remnants of their
lands.
The war of 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank,
Gaza Strip and Golan Heights are the continuation of the
war of 1948-49 and represent fundamental Zionist colonial
policies aiming to occupy and dispossess the Palestinian
people. The Palestinian national struggle against the occupa-
tion on the one hand, and the Israeli policies of settlement
and colonization on the other hand, are therefore not a sym-
metrical struggle between two peoples on the same territory,
but the continuation of the historical struggle between the
colonial Zionist movement and the state of Israel on the one
hand, and the colonized, dispossessed and opressed Palesti- - هو جزء من
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