Zionism and Racism

We here reprint Abdeen Jabara’s paper “Zionism and Racism,” originally published by the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG) in 1976, with the permission of the author. This is the first full reprint of the original paper, which was previously excerpted and reprinted in Al-Moharer (2008) and Mondoweiss (2013). Jabara’s paper challenges Israel’s objections to the 1975 UNGA Resolution 3379, which determined that Zionism constitutes a form of racism. Jabara uses legal analysis, citing international law defining “racial discrimination,” to prove that racism and racial discrimination are built into Zionist logics and structures, underpinning the functioning of the Zionist state.

Abdeen Jabara 

The vote in the United Nations’ General Assembly on the night of Monday, November 10, 1975, in which Zionism was designated a form of racial discrimination was perhaps one of the most momentous decisions of that body since its Partition of Palestine some twenty-eight years earlier.

One could witness the momentum for the vote building up when on Sunday, November 9, the New York Times dutifully reported two separate statements condemning the Resolution being circulated by “black intellectuals” and “Christian clergy.” The pressure brought to bear by the U.S. and its West European allies on Third World countries which had voted for the Resolution in Committee was described by one participant as being no less than the pressures exerted by the U.S. on behalf of the Partitioning of Palestine in 1947.

The strategy of the U.S. was clear—split black Africa from the Arabs. The vehicle for this strategy was the threat to withhold western support for the U.K. Decade to Combat Racism. Not only did this strategy fail, but its failure demonstrated the vast changes which had occurred in international politics over the three decades of U.N. existence. This change is the decline of American power.

The cries of moral outrage and indignation which went up had an unreal quality to them. In none of the commentaries in the western corporate media, the editorials, the news columnists, the television commentators did we hear or read one substantive fact about the nature of Zionism as a political philosophy and the fashion in which that philosophy is concretized in the laws and institutions of the State of Israel.

An article written by Tom Buckley, a close friend of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Patrick Moynihan, appearing in the N.Y. Times magazine section of December 7, 1975, throws a great deal of light on some of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the U.S. position on the Resolution.

With Moynihan that night at the Waldorf Towers, listening to his shouts, his groans, his rhetorical flourishes, were Suzi Weaver, who is on leave from the Yale University faculty to serve as his special assistant, and Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, which is published by the American Jewish Committee. Podheretz is an old friend and fellow old leftist or neoconservative, depending on how you look at it.

When it came to the politics of the Middle East, an area in which he has never set foot, Moynihan was happy to take his direction from the State Department, he had told me, but when it came to Zionism, Jewish history, anti-Semitism and related topics, Podheretz is Moynihan’s haven.

Here Moynihan revealed that, at best, his sources of information on “Zionism, Jewish history, anti-Semitism and related topics” were ones with a particular political persuasion with regard to the politics of the Middle East and U.S. policies in that area.

Out of that conversation that evening in the Waldorf Towers came another incisive comment.

“I think we’ve got them another way,”  he went on. “The resolution doesn’t define what racism is. And we looked through all the documents and we couldn’t find any place where the United Nations had defined what racism is. The closest thing to a definition, and Suzi found it, dated from debate in 1968. The Soviet Union – the Soviet Union, mind you – said that racism and Nazism were the same thing! Identical! So if Zionism is racism it means that Zionism is Nazism, and if that isn’t lunacy, I don’t know what is.”

Obviously, Moynihan was not aware of, or didn’t want to deal with, the International Convention on Racial Discrimination which does define what racism is.

Moynihan’s ignorance was to be the basis of his defense at the U.N.

The action of the U.N. General Assembly was predicated on the duties and obligations imposed by the International Convention on Racial Discrimination. Since Israel is not a signatory to this Convention, it is not bound by it in the sense of a treaty obligation, even though many of the provisions in the Convention codify or have acquired the force of customary law. Accordingly, the Convention may provide a juridical basis for alleged human rights violations even though the state whose conduct is the subject of a complaint has not undertaken to implement the measures of the Convention.

The report filed in 1971 by the Syrian government the Committee on Racial Discrimination illustrates this. The Racial Discrimination Convention requires the parties to the Convention to submit reports on “the legislative, juridical, administrative or other measures” which they have adopted to give effect to its provisions. Syria’s 1971 report stated that since Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights in the June, 1967 War, some 110,000 Syrians had been subject to “discriminatory and racist policies and practices” in violation of Article 5 of the Convention. The report concluded by calling upon the parties to the Convention to take action to eliminate these practices. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, while noting that Israel was not a part to the Convention, issued a decision stating that: (1) it took note of information “to the effect that racial discrimination is being practiced in that part of Syrian territory which is known as the Golan Heights and which is under Israeli occupation,” and (2) it wished to draw the attention of the General Assembly to the situation.

It is important to note, however, that the U.N. Resolution of November 10 encompasses a political and philosophical movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which preceded and is considerably larger than the present day state of Israel, however much Israel may be the object and focus of that movement.

The Racial Discrimination Convention defines racial discrimination as:

[A]ny distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin, which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

Article 5 specifies a number of rights which the parties to the Convention undertake to guarantee “without distinction as to race, color, or national or ethnic origin.” The right to equal treatment before judicial tribunals, to freedom of movement and residence, to return to one’s country, to form and join trade unions, to housing and to education are among those guaranteed.

Thus, the definition of racial discrimination is clearly set forth as an international legal norm. There are essentially four requirements contained in this definition before an idea or act may be designated a legally impermissible practice of racism.

1. There must be a distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference.
2. These distinctions, exclusions, restrictions or preferences must be based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin.
3. These distinctions, exclusions, restrictions or preferences must have either (a) the purpose or (b) the effect of impairing the equal exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
4. The freedoms which are impaired must be in the political, economic, social or cultural field.

It is against the above-enumerated criteria that we may ask whether Zionism is a form of racial discrimination. And in order to answer this question, we must know two things: (1) what Zionism is, and (2) how Zionism is practiced or manifests itself.

Zionism is a nationalist political movement. It was organized as such in a visible manner in 1897 in the creation of the World Zionist Organization. It claims that all people who are Jews are members of a single nation, and that this nation has first by virtue of being a “nation dispersed” and then by virtue of certain international agreements, political rights in Palestine. Zionism arose out of two fears: fear of anti-semitism and fear of assimilation.

A reading of Herzl’s The Jewish State reveals that Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, operated on a basic thesis:

1. The Jews constitute a people or nation in the psychic and cultural sense, but they lack the attributes of political nationality;
2. Anti-Semitism and Jewish suffering (“the eternal Jewish problem”) is an inevitable consequence of the Jews’ “abnormality,” that is, their statelessness;
3. Judaism as a civilization or culture is in danger of extinction unless the Jews are enabled to defend themselves physically and to express their unique nature spiritually;
4. A national state is the only institution or means which can guarantee such self-expression and self-defense;
5. Jewish survival and continued Jewish contribution to the mainstream of [world culture] can be ensured only if the Jews obtain an independent national state. To these assumptions the modern Zionist movement added the proviso that only Palestine, because of its unique associations with Jewish genesis and historical development, could provide the territory for the future Jewish state.

Zionism, it should be emphasized, states that hatred of Jews is an ineradicable element in non-Jewish societies and that safety for Jews, or a solution to what was seen as a specifically Jewish problem, could only be had in a society in which Jews constituted the majority.

In 1897 the founders of Zionism set out with a two-fold task: (1) to gain international recognition of and support for the Zionist program, and (2) secure acceptance by Jews in the various countries of the world of the “Jewish People” concept.

Anthropologists [have] generally agreed that Jews are not a separate race and there has been a great deal of confusion among Jews and non-Jews alike as to whether to use the term race, religion, nation or culture to clarify the nature of Jewish identity. This question has not been resolved in Israel today. The legal test for citizenship, for instance, under the Law of Return is a religious one while the identity cards of Jewish Israelis [designate] Jewish as being a nationality designation. 

Receiving the support of a Great Power for the Zionist program of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1917 in the Balfour Declaration, the World Zionist Organization was prepared for the colonizing effort after the War. The object was British control over Palestine while unlimited Jewish emigration would lay the groundwork for the creation of a Jewish state. Indeed, in its early days the Zionist movement had no difficulty in seeing itself as a colonizing movement when it called its first bank the Colonial Trust Company and its settlements department the Department of Colonization.

With British control of Palestine accorded the license of the League of Nations after World War I, the vehicle for the creation of a closed Jewish settlement in Palestine (Yishuv) was the Jewish Agency, an alter ego of the World Zionist Organization. The three slogans raised by the Jewish Agency in carrying out the settlement of Jews in Palestine were: conquer the land, conquer the work and purchase Jewish goods.

What this meant in practice was that the native Arab population, both Christian and Moslem, were to be excluded from any participation in the political, social, economic, or cultural life of the Jewish settlement. This exclusion was obtained through an official boycott of Arab goods, or Arab labor, of mixed government schools and of local governing bodies by the Jewish settlement.

One concrete example of this exclusion is contained in the creation, development and operation of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF was set up in 1901 at the Fifth Zionist Congress with the object of purchasing land in Palestine. The first purchases by the JNF in Palestine occurred in 1905. The extensive acquisitions by the JNF and development of a land policy occurred only after the British mandate came into being. Under the terms of the Charter of the JNF, land purchased by it was to be held in perpetuity “as the inalienable property of the entire Jewish people.”

Use of the land was organized under a system of long term leasing for specified purposes for periods of up to ninety-eight years. These leases, with the approval of the JNF, could be sublet, sold, mortgaged, bequeathed or given as a gift subject to one overriding condition contained in the lease: the lessee must be Jewish. Non-Jews could not be employed on the land or even in work connected with cultivation of land. Violation of this term of the lease made the lessee liable to damages and cancellation of the lease without compensation. As John Hope Simpson noted in 1930 as one of the causes of Palestinian Arab unrest:

“The land has been extraterritorialized[.] It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or anytime in the future.”

During the mandate the JNF became the largest private landowner in Palestine.

The issue of two Christian Arab villages in northern Israel in 1973 illustrates the fashion in which these principles take place in the thinking of Israeli state leaders. In 1948 the inhabitants of the two villages Birem and Ikrit were moved out by the Israeli army with the promise that they would be allowed to return after hostilities. The land was turned over without compensation to the JNF. The Supreme Court of Israel upheld the right of the inhabitants to return to their villages, but the military immediately declared the people to be a security risk and the Cabinet voted that the people should never be allowed to return to their land although they were citizens of Israel. Mrs. Meir made the statement that to return the land to the Arab Israelis would constitute an erosion of the Zionist principle. This principle is that once Jews own land, it can never be alienated to anyone who is a non-Jew.

This extraterritorialization of land ownership in Palestine meant that the rights of ownership rested not just in the Jews or Jewish settlement in Palestine, and now Israel, but in all Jews everywhere which the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency claims to represent. After the state of Israel came into being in 1948, the heads of various departments of the Jewish Agency became the ministers of the various Ministries of the State. The World Zionist Organization and its arm in Israel, the Jewish Agency, were charged in the Status Law of 1952 with being the “authorized agency” which would continue to operate in Israel for: (1) “the development and settlement of the country”, (2) “the absorption of immigrants from the Diaspora,” and (3) “the coordination of the activities in Israel of Jewish institutions and organizations active in those fields.” Section 5 of the Law states that “the ingathering of the exiles” is the “central task of the State of Israel and the Zionist Movement in our days.”

The JNF, after the creation of the State, would continue under the control of the WZO although a separate governmental body, the Israel Lands Authority, was created. The most significant consequence of the Agreement between the JNF and the government was that the restrictive JNF policies regarding the sale and leasing of land were applied to lands, all state lands, which, together with JNF constitute 94.5 percent of the land in Israel.

What had occurred in Israel after the State was created was the transfer of the great majority of Arab owned land to the State. This was accomplished through the enactment and enforcement of a series of laws. These were, inter alia, the Law of Emergency Articles for the Exploitation of Uncultivated Lands (1948); Law for the Requisition of Land in Times of Emergency (1949); Law for the Acquisition of Land (1953); and the Law on the Acquisition of Absentees’ Property (1950). In 1948, when Israel was created, not more than [6.5] percent of the land in Palestine was owned by Jews, but as mentioned above, ownership of 94.5 percent of the land in Israel today rests with the National Lands Authority and JNF.

More recent legislation has reinforced the intention of these laws. The first of these is the Agricultural Settlement Law passed by the Knesset on August 1, 1967. According to the terms of this law, the use of state land by a lessee for a “non-conforming use” subjects the lessee to termination of his rights in the land and the water allocated for it. A non-conforming use includes vesting any rights in the land or its crops in a tenant. The real effect of the law is to prevent Jewish lessees from sharing their land in any manner with the local Arab inhabitants.

The work of the World Zionist Organization/Jewish Agency in Israel today is contained in periodic reports of its activity and of the Zionist Congresses held every four years. These reports consistently refer to the work being done on behalf of Jewish housing, Jewish agriculture, Jewish fishing and these are either public institutions or quasi-public institutions where Jews are advantaged, as opposed to those who cannot qualify as members of the Jewish people. This is why status in Israel as to whether one is a Jew or not a Jew is very important in the actual daily living of the people in Israel, Jews and non-Jews.

A recent piece of legislation which is demonstrative of the exclusionary principles which logically are attendant to Zionist philosophy is the Discharged Soldiers Law of 1970, as amended. The amendment passed in 1970 is a family subsidization plan to increase the Jewish population in Israel. Since 99 percent of Arabs in Israel may not serve in the defense forces and since only discharged soldiers and their families are entitled to family allowances, this means effectively that the Arab population of Israel is barred from family allowances even though it is the most economically disadvantaged.

The principal law in Israel relating to citizenship in the state is the Law of Return of 1950, as amended. The Law of Return establishes the “right” of every Jew to immigrate to the State of Israel. No person other than a Jew has this right. Amendment No. 2 of 1970, Paragraph 4(b) states that: “For the purposes of this law ‘Jew’ means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and is not a member of another religion.” As for the Palestine Arabs in Israel, their citizenship rights are controlled by the Nationality Law of 1952. For a Palestinian Arab to be considered an Israeli citizen, regardless of whether he was born in Israel or has lived there most of his life, it must be established that (a) he or she was registered as a resident of Israel on March 1, 1952, by virtue of the Population Registration Law of 1949; (b) he or she was a resident in Israel on April 1, 1952; and (c) he or she was, from the date of the establishment of the state and until April 1, 1952, in Israel or in an area that was attached to it after the establishment of the state, or had entered Israel legally during that period. There are, because of the provisions of this law, several tens of thousands of Arabs residing in Israel who are forever barred from citizenship in the state, and this statelessness is inherited by the individuals’ children and childrens’ children. The only recourse then for citizenship is to apply between the 18th and 21st years of age. Such persons are not encouraged by any program of notice regarding citizenship rights.

We have examined the more salient aspects of the political philosophy of Zionism and the legal framework in which it exists in the state of Israel today. Essentially, the foregoing items can be defined as being based on the principle of exclusion. A necessary and immutable germ of Zionism was, then, the idea that it could realize its objective only through a process of exclusion, [whose] objective itself was exclusionary. The process by which this was to be accomplished was one which had occurred numerous times in the world under different motivations and impetus factors. This process was that of colonization, the process of settling on a land. The land may or may not be inhabited by other people, if the land is inhabited by persons other than the colonizer, the colonizer has three options to deal with the indigenous population. The colonizer may: (1) eliminate by genocide all or part of the indigenous populace, (2) subjugate the indigenous populace in a defined system of inclusions and exclusions, or (3) the colonizer may push the indigenous populace outside the parameters of the area that the colonizer wishes to colonize.

It was the latter two of these which were central to Zionism: pushing the bulk of the population out and subjecting the remainder to a system of inclusions and exclusions. It was, as Jacque Berque wrote, “a total colonialism” because the native Palestinian Arab could derive no benefit from it.

Of course, if the modus operandi of Zionism was to push the bulk of the indigenous population out and subjugate the remnants, it was essential to have laws to facilitate this subjugation. These were provided in the adoption in toto of the draconian Emergency Laws of the British Mandatory Authorities. These are the “security” measures which the British administration in Palestine instituted to deal with the Palestinian Arab rebellion of 1936 and later Zionist guerilla activity against the British. What they do, essentially, is to take the matter of state security out of the jurisdiction of the civil authorities and place it in that of the military.

As soon as the Zionists in Palestine proclaimed the creation of the State of Israel, the British Emergency Laws were the new state. The Palestinians were divided into three regions, each under a military commander.

The military governor had the power to declare an area closed and restrict entrance and exit to it (Article 125). Passes were required for movement into and out of these areas. The governor was empowered to issue an administrative order for police supervision of any person.

An individual under such an order may be restricted in his movements and must inform the police of them; his contacts with other persons may be rigorously controlled; his professional work may be supervised and restricted; he must inform the police of his whereabouts at all times, appear at the nearest police station when so required, and remain indoors between sunset and sunrise; the police have access to his home at any hour of the day or night (Articles 109 the administrative and 110). Article 111 allows detention of anyone whom the military government may decide to detain, for any reason whatsoever, for an unlimited period without trial and without charge. The military government may confiscate or destroy a person’s property if the military government suspects that a shot has been fired or a bomb thrown from such property (Article 119). Moreover, the military government may expel a person from the country (Article 112) or confiscate a person’s property (Article 120). A total or partial curfew may be imposed in any village or area (Article 124).

The English language Jerusalem Post newspaper reports on August 18, 1975, a new government plan to expropriate thousands of acres of additional land in the Galilee region of Israel for the purpose of establishing new Jewish settlements on it. It reports that “small towns and settlements in Galilee can no longer grow because of a land shortage.” The Jewish population in Galilee has declined during the past [fifteen] years from 58 to 52 percent and the plan is now to arrest the trend by more intensive settlement. Earlier, in July, the Israeli Finance Minister Yehoshua Rabinowitz had stated that the government planned to channel 32 percent of the new settlements to Galilee and that this would necessitate the expropriating of land.

For instance, the public school systems which exist in Israel demonstrate completely how the tenets of Zionism are applied. There is one system of primary and secondary schools for Arabs and another system of schools for Jewish Israelis. Jewish Israelis are completely prohibited from attending Arab schools while an Arab Israeli may attend a Jewish school only by special state authorization.

All Israeli government ministries or departments have special sub-departments on Arab affairs to which an Arab Israeli must apply in any dealing with the ministry. For instance, the Israeli Ministry of Health is divided into the “general health” office for Jews only while a sub-department exists for minorities.

All municipal governmental units receive subsidies from the national government. The official figures reveal that those towns whose population is Arab receive substantially less per capita than those whose population is Jewish. A table compiled by a member of the Knesset and published in one of Israel’s largest circulation Hebrew dailies, Yediot Ahronot, on October 10, 1975, give[s] some of these statistics.

ARAB AND JEWISH SETTLEMENTS BUDGET STATISTICS

Settlement	Number of Inhabitants	Ordinary Budget Given by the Ministry of Internal Affairs	Yearly Budget Given per Inhabitant
Shefar’am (Arab)	15,000	3,900,000 IL	213.00 IL
Kefar Kana(Arab)	7,000	1.255,000 IL	140.50 IL
Azata (Jewish)	5,500	17,000,000 IL	3,100.00 IL
Dalyat El Carmel(Arab)	7,000	1,650,000 IL	235.75 IL
Migdal Ha’emek(Jewish)	12,000	15,107,539 IL	1,220.00 IL

What is important to remember about the discrimination which exists in Israel between Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis is that this discrimination is not only sanctioned by the state and may not be challenged in a court of law but that it is a fundamental precept upon which the state is founded so that it is incorporated as an integral part of the law of the land. In the examination of any society, it is important to distinguish between discrimination as it exists between individual citizens or private parties, on the one hand, and discrimination as a part of public policy or state action, discrimination contained not in just the way the laws are applied but in the terms of the law itself. This distinction is important because it reveals the basis upon which the state is organized. For instance, in the U.S. there may and does exist discriminatory application of the laws and in many instances the laws themselves may in their terms discriminate between citizens without a reasonable basis. The law of the land, however, is that all citizens will receive equal protection of the laws and where the laws are not equally applied or there is an invidious discrimination in the terms of the law, the citizen may challenge it in a court. The goal of constructing and maintaining a Jewish state made the “national” discrimination a necessary part of the state itself.

The two [principal] defenses of Zionism raised by Israeli Ambassador Yosef Tekoah in the United Nations debate was that Zionism was 1) an anti-imperialist movement, and (2) was the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.

It is important to deal with these defenses [seriously] since it seems likely that they will constitute the thrust of the movement that is under way to defend Zionism.

As for the defense that Zionism is an anti-imperialist movement little commentary is required. Zionism as a movement is neither imperialist nor anti-imperialist. That it could realize itself and continues to do so through a complete alliance with the major imperialist powers does not make it imperialist. It would be more correct to state that there exists an organic and symbiotic relationship between Zionism and imperialism. It can be stated categorically, however, that Zionism is not anti-imperialist and it is inconceivable, given its foundation as a political philosophy, that it would become anti-imperialist in the future. The nature of Zionism as being directed at a land populated by a non-Jewish people would compel this conclusion.

With regard to the claim that Zionism is the “national liberation movement” of Jews, there is a much debated question as to whether Jews constitute a nation. A nation has been generally defined as a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture. It is not necessary here to debate whether Jews collectively are a nation or a people as commonly defined. Zionism is a nationalistic movement and as Zionism was conceived by its founders, it was seen as a movement of liberation of Jews from the dangers of anti-semitism and assimilation.

Historically, movements of colonization have been undertaken by minorities who desired to retain the particular characteristics of their groups rather than forego them. Does the desire to maintain group identity and the organization of the group with a program to maintain that identity qualify as a liberation movement? 

First, there can be no doubt that any group, or members of that group, should not be obliged to relinquish its particularism, religion, culture, language or expression of self where those characteristics do not violate the rights of others.

According to this principle, the Jews or any other national or religio-ethnic group should be free to maintain their specific expressions of their individual or collective consciousness of existence. To the extent that Jews or any other people are prevented or prohibited through discriminatory legal structures from doing so, they have the right to resist and rebel. They have the right to undertake a struggle for change of the system which denies them equal rights, if they are not accorded equal rights.

There is only one unconditional rule attached to the right of national liberation. This rule, this qualifier, was set forth above. No man or people may achieve national liberation at the expense of another people. Given this fact, any movement including Zionism which seeks to solve the national problem of one people at the expense of another may not properly be called a movement of national liberation.

Far from being the national liberation movement of Jews, and hence leading to greater security for Jews, Zionism has isolated Jews in the Middle East and the world community. Rather than bringing peace and security to Jews in Israel, it has brought them interminable conflict and war without any [foreseeable] conclusion. Rather than giving Jews in Europe, the Soviet Union, the United States and Latin America greater hope for the future of successful communal existence on a multi-national basis, it has sought [to] polarize them in support of a movement that alienates Jews from the social and political struggles of their societies. In this connection it is interesting to note the recent statement of Morris Amitay, head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the principal Zionist lobby in the U.S., that AIPAC’s success stems “from the fact that we are single-issued.” This is in conformity with the Zionist dogma that Jewish security can only be had in self-segregation as a caricature of the East European ghetto. More recently the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith charged that pro-Palestinian information in the U.S. was “not only a dagger pointed at the heart of Israel,” but “likewise poses a threat to the security of the american Jewish community and Jewish communities everywhere.” (Emphasis added)

In 1968, after the jubilation and euphoria in Israel from its stunning June 1967 victory, Moshe Dayan, in a speech before an officers’ school, quoted several passages from the writings of Arthur Rupin, the grandfather of Zionist colonization in Palestine, which were written in 1936:

“We are aiming at relations (between the Zionist colonists and the Palestinians) which we will be able to defend against our own consciences and against the League of Nations as a just solution without renouncing the fundamentals of Zionism.”

And in another quotation from Rupin written in 1928, Dayan said:

“It became clear to me how hard it is to realize Zionism in a way compatible with the demands of universal ethics.”

What is interesting about Dayan’s use of these quotations is that they were made after a stunning military victory and that they were made before an officers’ school. The intensity of the moral conflict between Zionism and universal ethics were revealed a half century after Zionism had achieved so many of its objectives. Even the state machinery designed to mold a strong Zionist national consciousness created a plaque of self-doubt and questioning.

Zionism, in its three quarters of a century of existence as an organized political movement, has made major gains.

1. It has been able to gain imperial backing for the Zionist program.
2. It has mobilized many Jews around the world to support it politically, materially and physically.
3. It has established a Jewish state in Palestine.
4. It has secured the recognition of the state by western capitalist countries.

One flaw in these series of gains is that the Palestinians have refused to acquiesce in their national oppression. This is hardly surprising. In taking up arms in pursuit of a democratic secular state they are waging a struggle not just on behalf of themselves but on behalf of all men and women who oppose national oppression and exploitation.