The success of Zionists in muzzling the left over the past few years, combined with Israeli progress in ‘normalising’ its ties with Arab neighbours, shows we are losing the battle for Palestine. We need a new tack. This is not to be defeatist: it is to adopt a new strategy that strikes at the very heart of ‘Jewish nationalism’.
The Zionists say the land is theirs and has always been theirs, because they are the only true inheritors. They even see the Palestinians as invaders. Our campaigning needs to be different from previous anti-apartheid struggles. With South Africa, it was easy to establish who needed to cede power, as the whites there were clearly from elsewhere. For the past 70 years we have largely accepted that Zionists are descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel and therefore that they have a right to emigrate there. We have therefore lost the argument – allowing them to use the holocaust as a pretext for drawing more and more Zionists into Palestine. Until we convince the world that Israel is not the Jewish state, we will continue to lose. It is only by clarifying the genetic element that we can prove – without argument – that this is a colonial project.
The definition of ‘Jew’ – from the Oxford English Dictionary – is “a member of the people and cultural community whose traditional religion is Judaism and who come from the ancient Hebrew people of Israel; a person who believes in and practises Judaism”. Zionists fail to meet these criteria on both counts. The Torah declares Jews cannot migrate en masse to Palestine until the Messiah comes and so Zionists do not follow the Torah – whatever they practice, it’s not Judaism. So, when a Zionist moves to Israel – or believes they have rights to that land – we need to observe they ignore the Torah and by denying their faith, should no longer be calling themselves Jewish. They are, at best, ex-Jews.
It’s for this reason that up until 1940 most Jews refused to move to Israel on religious grounds. These were the people that Hitler gassed. With Zionist support. Proof? Over the period 1942-44, Rabbi Weissmandl of Hungary made a deal with Holocaust organiser Adolf Eichmann, whereby the Germans would ‘sell’ the Jews to him (Germany was short of money) – with the upshot that the Nazis would not have killed any Jews in Hungary, along with a third of the Jews in Slovakia that were still alive. Those with the necessary funds to ‘buy’ the Jews were the Zionists – and so Rabbi Weissmandl approached them and sought their help.
Help was refused: the Zionists declared that “only through the bloodshed of Jews will we get the land, because when the victors will divide the land after the war, then they will give us [the Zionists] the land in return for Jewish bloodshed, and that is what we want.” At the 2006 Holocaust Review conference in Tehran, US rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss noted: “They were sacrificing human beings on the altar of Zionism. Because they were the antithesis to Judaism, against God, human lives were sacrificed to reach their goal.”
The Zionists survived the war, safe in Palestine – and through relentless Holocaust promotion raised their colony through the deaths of those who had denied their right to be there in the first place.
And what of the Zionist claim to be descendants of the ancient Hebrew people of Israel? Genetically? Dr Ariella Oppenheim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem conducted the first comprehensive DNA study of Israelis and Palestinians in 2001. She concluded that the European emigrants on ships to Palestine before it became Israel were of Mongolian genome (40%) and Turkish (40%) – ie, from Kazakhstan. So not from the ancient Hebrew people of Israel either …
There should be a lot more to being a Jew than being circumcised and celebrating Hanukkah. I mean, I celebrate Christmas, but that does not make me a Christian. I think it is essential in our campaigning to recognise that the linkage between the majority of Israeli ‘Jews’ – who do not adhere to the Torah – and the Jews who lived in Israel 2,000 years ago is close to nil.
This is not like the South Africa struggle … These people argue they have every right to be there, by dint of their ancestry and religious beliefs. And most of us in the west accept this claim, which is entirely bogus.
The Zionists lay claim to being of the Jewish race and ‘of the land’. As a result, to date, we have tried to critique their actions on a humanitarian basis, which, of course, has largely failed, because they use the Holocaust and ‘self-defence’ to justify all the violence that they do.
We need to use the genetic angle, as well as the religious one, to prove that the Zionists are not of the original Jewish race. Because in modern times there is no Jewish race. Those Ashkenazis running Israel are Europeans, pretty much like me. When we let them claim a Jewish connection to the land they take, we lose our case. The British census does not recognise Jewishness as an ethnicity, but as a religion. National Health Service hospital records do not identify patients as Jewish, but they do have markers for Africans, Pakistanis and … Arabs – who really are an ethnic minority, as their DNA shows. The Nazis claimed the Jews were a race – an attribute that the Zionists claim for themselves as well, but the truth is the opposite. Unlike the Palestinians, that is, who were Jews and Christians prior to their conversion to Islam in the 9th century, and whose DNA is 100% tied to the area they are being ethnically cleansed from.
The Palestinians are the only ones with a true claim to the land, like the blacks in South Africa had, whose battle against apartheid and their removal to Bantustans was one the whole world could get behind. The Zionists must learn to live with the fact that they are guests in Palestine – and should behave as such. For further proof of how badly two-state solutions work out, we need only look to Ireland, which should never have been partitioned in the first place.
Most Palestinians want a single-state solution. We at One Democratic Palestine share Rabbi Weiss’s view that Israel has no ‘right to exist’. We believe that the Zionists must give up their claims and learn to live as citizens of Palestine – in one state – a single state for all.
To promote the single-state solution and further the aim of getting our UK politicians (and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign) to drop the futile two-state approach, I am bringing Rabbi Weiss over from New York to tour Britain with his message.
He, along with Palestinian broadcaster and author Dr Azzam Tamimi, who has written extensively on Middle Eastern/Islamic politics, including Power-sharing Islam and Hamas: unwritten chapters, will feature in our UK tour running in April-May next year.
Over the course of three weeks, rabbi Weiss and Dr Tamimi will be speaking in every single one of Britain’s 15 major cities in our ‘Muslim and Jew Tour: Beyond Israel’. Learn more about these wise men and book your free advance tickets for a town near you, at www.onepalestine.land
Pete Gregson
One Democratic Palestine
As published in Weekly Worker on 4/11/12- Third letter in “Genetic Politics” at https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1417/letters/
and in Redress Online on 6th Nov 2022 at Against Zionist invaders: Why race matters in Palestine – Redress Information & Analysis (redressonline.com)
The Weekly Worker letter drew some furious responses https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1418/letters/
Pete Gregson responded to these; see https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1419/letters/