Want to fight anti-Semitism?
Stand up for Palestinian rights
By Leslie Feinberg
As if a half-century of Israeli crimes against the
Palestinian nation is not monstrous enough, they are carried
out in the name of all Jewish people. But Zionism does not
represent all Jewish people. Zionism is a reactionary, racist
ideology.
Zionism is colonialism.
The Israeli settler state, claiming to establish a
"homeland" for Jews, has driven millions of Palestinians from
their homeland into a forced Diaspora. And it has done so at
the behest of the imperial powers that stand behind its
military and sponsor its very existence.
Israel was never established by the imperialist powers to be
a safe haven for Jews. The capitalist governments of Western
Europe and the United States, riddled with anti-Semitism, could
have cared less when the Nazis were massacring Jews and other
peoples. They saw the advance of Hitler's armies as a weapon
against their main class enemy: the Soviet Union. And they
applauded the fascist crushing of the labor unions.
The Pentagon brass even rebuffed cries to bomb the rail
lines used to transport boxcars jam-packed with victims into
the concentration camps. And the U.S. turned away Jewish
refugees who tried to reach the shores of North America after
the war.
Instead, what a cruel pretext it was indeed to herd Jewish
people, fleeing Europe after World War II, into a "safe haven
from persecution." That "haven" became so dangerous and
precarious because it meant becoming the rulers of an apartheid
settler regime to crush Palestinian resistance and hold back
the tide of the Arab revolutions. And the Zionist state was
"birthed" out of massacres, state terror and military
occupation.
Those who profit from the well-armed colonial outpost today
also don't give a damn about Palestinian lives or Jewish lives.
They see Israel as a giant, unsinkable aircraft carrier in the
middle of the Middle East, as officials like Casper Weinberger
have characterized it.
It's about oil and who controls the profits--from the moment
it's pumped out of the ground until it arrives in the form of
cash in bank vaults.
The creation of the Zionist settler state, bristling with
machine guns and missiles, tanks and fighter jets provided by a
munificent U.S. military-industrial complex, has fanned the
flames of anti-Semitism by carrying out its bloody repression
of the Palestinian and other Arab peoples in the name of a
"Jewish state."
And Israel's complicity with openly anti-Semitic
regimes--from Chile to Argentina to apartheid South
Africa--only illuminates more clearly that the esta blish ment
of the settler state was never about fighting persecution of
Jewish people.
But new ranks of Jews, young and old, are demonstrating an
effective approach to battling anti-Semitism: They are fighting
on behalf of Palestinian rights.
Scores of young Jews are going to jail rather than be
inducted into the Israeli Defense Forces. Courageous Israeli
Jews have tried to bring urgently needed supplies past the
military cordons into Jenin and other besieged Palestinian
towns and refugee camps.
Many Jews from around the world, particularly from the
United States, rushed to Palestine in recent weeks when Israel
carried out its brutal re-occupation. These "internationals"
have put their own lives on the line to support their
Palestinian sisters and brothers and to get news out about the
bloody siege.
Jewish people of all ages in this country have swelled the
ranks of pro-Palestinian protests in cities, towns and campuses
from coast to coast. And at these rallies, even those that are
predominately Arab or Muslim, Jewish speakers in support of
Palestinian rights are thunderously cheered.
That is because the Palestinian liberation movement is not
motivated by anti-Semitism, but by anti-colonialism.
Want to defeat anti-Semitism? Stand up against Zionism.
Stand up for Palestinian freedom.
Reprinted from the April 25, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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Email: ww@workers.org
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