Will the Real Racists please stand up?

Zionists, and other supporters of the State of Israel, are quick to demand that opposition to the policies of the Zionist State that oppress the Palestinian people, has nothing to do with a desire for justice and equality, but are based simply in racism and hatred towards Jewish people. In other words, those who claim to oppose Zionism, are not motivated by a desire for freedom and equality, but are just using the issue as an excuse to vent their hatred of Jews and or western society.

In my previous years as a card carrying member of the religious right, I believed that all people on the left were basic hypocrites in that while they would stand all day in rain, hail or shine protesting against abuses of human rights, they themselves had an agenda that showed their true intent. These hopeless dupes of the left (be it secular or religious) were inwardly haters of humanity and all Godly concepts of human freedom! They would have us enslaved to an authoritarian state in a beehive like social order. In the final analysis, their so called desire for justice and equality was nothing but a sham! Or so I thought.

Palestinians are continually portrayed as Islamic extremists and anti-Semites. This despite the fact that Judaism and Islam have existed side by side in the Middle East for hundreds of years in peace and mutual respect. In all those centuries, neither the Koran nor the Torah changed. What changed was the creation of the Zionist state, facilitated by Europeans whose racist views laid the basis for their colonialism and imperialism.

I believe that European chauvinism is what lies at the heart of this conflict in the Middle East. The idea that there are inferior people groups, or races, in our world and that there are those of superior stock who have an entitlement to take from those of lesser races that which did not originally belong to the higher grades of humanity, was not an idea held to exclusively by the Nazis of Germany in the 1930’s.

Speaking at the Peel Commission in 1937, Winston Churchill said;

“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

(Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p.156)

Twenty years before this the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, wrote in a memo to Lord Curzon that;

“For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…the Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. Zionism, be it good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

(Victor Kattan, ‘The Failure to Establish Democracy in Palestine: From the British Mandate to the Present times’, Jadaliyya, 2 April 2011)

This type of thinking explains how Europeans can come to Australia or Zionist Jews to Palestine and apparently see “a land with no people”, or, “Terra Nullius”, in the case of my home country. It is not that they didn’t see any people in the land, it is that in their eyes they did not see a people who were of a high grade or quality or who were worthy of being in charge of their own destiny in the land of their birth.

The Red Indians of America, the Aborigines of Australia and the Arabs of Palestine have all been invisible to the eyes of Europeans (be they Zionist or otherwise) when it comes to a consideration of their rights and needs. They simply are not the equals of us Europeans and hence do not have the rights that we do.Hence allowing democracy for Arabs in Palestine was never a priority for the British Mandate or any other western nation. Democracy is not for savages!

In 1935, it was proposed, by the High Commissioner for the British Mandate, that a Legislative Council be established. The Zionists;

“attacked the project because the Jews were to be allotted seats in proportion to their actual population”

(Ronald Storrs, The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, Pittstown, NJ: Arno Press, p. 396)

Obviously the Zionists considered that right from the outset an Arab vote should never be equal to a Jewish vote in Palestine.

While in Israel today an Arab has a vote of equal numerical value to the vote of a Jewish person, the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the state of Israel in 1948 and subsequent immigration laws that ensure that Jews always have an 80% majority in Israel adds up to the same situation of impotency at the ballot box for Arabs in Palestine as it would if the idea of one Jewish vote equals one Arab vote had never been thought of.

Arabs inside the state of Israel are a people under constant suspicion and control. Their loyalty to a nation that only really tolerates their presence is always considered to be dubious. They are a people with conditional rights WHILE IN the land rather than unconditional rights TO the land as Jews have under Zionist rule. Israel is a Jewish state according to Zionist ideology, not Biblical scripture.

CRAIG NIELSEN