Zionism is racism, and Zionism is theft of land and property based on racism. The Zionist ‘Jewish State’ continues to thieve off other peoples’ lands and properties and Haaretz.com has just published material showing how the Israeli government in its own documents was hiding the extent of the theft for Jews of Arab properties from the general world public. See Secret Israeli database reveals full extent of illegal settlement
To learn more about this systematic theft by the Israeli Jewish community, one can go to the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem, too, and do some studying.
“Zionism is raciism” is a recurring slander here. A misguided notion devoid of any intellectual grounding. In point of fact, the population of Israel represents more than 100 countries, including dark-skinned Jews from Ethiopia, Yemen and India, who are Israeli citizens. Approximately 1,000,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze, Baha’is, Circassians and other ethnic groups also are represented in Israel’s population. The presence of thousands of black Jews in Israel is the best refutation of the calumny against Zionism, when Israel rescued almost 42,000 persecuted members of the ancient Ethiopian Jewish community.
Compared to their brethren in surrounding countries, Israel’s Arabs literally swim in human and political rights. The freest Arab press in the Middle East exists in Israel. Israeli Arabs have equal voting rights with Israelis and it is one of the few places in the Arab world where women have the right to vote. Arabs hold seats in the Knesset. Israeli Arabs have also held various government posts, including one who served as Israel’s Consul-General in Atlanta. Ariel Sharon’s cabinet included the first Arab minister, Salah Tarif, a Druze who served as a minister without portfolio. Arabic, like Hebrew, is an official language in Israel. More than 300,000 Arab children attend Israeli schools. Today, there are also hundreds of Arab schools whereas at the time of Israel’s founding, there was only one Arab high school in the entire country.
Israel has no formal written constitution, but it does have a series of Basic Laws that include provisions for the protection of minorities. Much work still needs to be done in this area, but in Israel more legal provisions are made for safeguarding minorities than in many other democracies that boast written constitutions — and certainly more than in any Arab nation.
In terms of religious sites, the Arabs have full rights of worship and control their own holy sites. Compare this to the pre-1967 period when Jerusalem was divided and during which there was no access to Jewish holy sites for Jews. Sacred places such as the Western Wall were badly desecrated on a regular basis.
In point of fact, anti-Zionism is racist as its gets its character from denying the Jewish people what it grants to other collectives (e.g. Spanish, Palestinians), namely, the right to nationhood and self-determination.
Are Jews a nation? A collective is entitled to nationhood when its members identify with a common history and wish to share a common destiny. Palestinians have earned nationhood status by virtue of thinking like a nation, not by residing where their ancestors did (many of them are only three or four generations in Palestine). Jews, likewise, are bonded by nationhood (i.e., common history and destiny) more than they are bonded by religion.
As a form of racism, anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism. It targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of their state for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity. To put it more bluntly, anti-Zionism condemns 5 million human beings, mostly refugees or children of refugees, to eternal statelessness, traumatized by historical images of persecution and genocide.
Zionism is not racism
Yawn… The US is made up of many peoples, too, but is still a quite racist society against ‘the others’. Your assertion that Israel cannot be racist against Palestinians is ludicrous on the face of it, ‘Grace’. You can do better than that, I would think?
“Yawn… The US is made up of many peoples, too, but is still a quite racist society against ‘the others’.
Yawn. Far less racist given the election of Barack Obama. Israel doesn’t have a perfect system, either, but no nation does. Point is, Israel is light years ahead of the Arab world in terms of human rights. Arab states are run by tyrannical dictatorships where women can’t vote in Saudi Arabia and are even forbidden from driving cars, and, you’re talking about Israel??? Give me a break.