Azmi Bishara & the Jewish State

Maher Othman Al-Hayat - 13/04/07//

Israel now, more than at any other time, publicly announces its enmity to all Arabs in general and Palestine in particular. Because of reasons related to the chronic overall Arab irresolution accompanied with slackness, it has grown to do so in pure racism that has nothing human. The latest of the series of its racist acts was a few days ago when the Israeli intelligence agency and some leading rightist and leftist Zionist parties stirred up what they called the 'Bishara Case'. This 'serious case' in which MK Azmi Bishara, the leader of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), is involved came after former Israeli minister Shulamit Aloni had warned the Israeli intelligence might fabricate a file against him.

This racism does not only foster Israel's feelings of hatred, but it also provides a basis on which actions and stances are adopted against those Israel, while being set up in 1948, had displaced. Thus, Israel insists on refusing those refugees to return home and/or receive proper compensation according to the UN resolutions, especially Resolution 194.

Israel's racism did not only affect those who suffered forcible immigration, but it also affected those who survived the 1948 and the expansionist 1967 War. The 'Israeli Arabs', the Palestinians who stayed home despite the dangers of the 1948 war and were consequently forced to take up the Israeli nationality in order to be allowed to stay, are considered by top Israeli security and political officials as a "strategic threat" to Israel in the long run, according to Shabak chief Yuval Diskin.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians are suffering in the West Bank as they live in isolated areas separated by military barriers and the apartheid separation wall. Their homes are often devastated and they are often subjected to 'administrative' ethnic cleansing, especially in the sprawling Jerusalem, as part of the Israeli policy to judaize the city. On the backdrop of the Israeli institutions' flagrant racist discrimination against Israel's Arab nationals in fields of education, municipality budgets and other issues for about 57 years, Bishara faced the Zionist description of Israel as a "Jewish democratic" state, a description that clearly contradicts with the situation on the ground, by demanding that Israel, in light of the situation on the ground too, becomes a "state of all its citizens". This is a clear and brief demand that no one could object to except a fascist, racist regime like the former apartheid regime in South Africa or the legislations that used to have been in effect in the US before the liberation of slaves in the reign of George Washington and before the adoption of civil rights legislations under President Lyndon Johnson. Of course these cases are not identical in terms of their details, but they are identical in terms of one authority dealing with the others - the victims of persecution and occupation - from a racist perspective.

This way the racist thought stroke roots in Israel from top to bottom, with a few exceptions including Aloni, writer Uri Avnery, and a number of Israeli lawyers and journalists.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, developed the idea of setting up a country for the Jews on the basis of excluding any other ethnic or religious group from the desired state. He called the book that carried his project 'The Jewish State'. In his secret diary, he wrote that the natives must be transferred to the crossing areas after they are used to cut rocks and remove thorns.

This destructive, racist Zionist theology leads Israel to deny the rights of the Palestinian people. Furthermore, it leads to the denial of the existence of this population, like when former Israeli Prime Minister said in 1969 that: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."

Unrecognizing the Other means a desire to demolish it. In this case, the Israelis talk about the "transfer" - forced immigration - while the Arabs offer them a peace initiative; yet to no avail!