Now that the UN General Assembly, under pressure from the United States, has revoked its 16 year old resolution equating zionism with racism, one would believe that the time has come when the South African Government could persuade Washington in getting repealed the 1967 resolution of the General Assembly which described apartheid as a “crime against humanity”.
But what did the Nov. 101975 General Assembly resolution on zionism say? It simply said: Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. This would lead one to briefly discuss the meaning of the terms racism and racial discrimination.
UN Resolution: Racism has been variously described as “hatred or intolerance of another race or other races”, “a doctrine that human abilities are determined by race” and “belief in the superiority of a particular race”.
Racial discrimination is defined by the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, duly endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 1965, in the following words:
….. the term racial discrimination shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent or national and ethnic origin, which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, employment or exercise on an equal footing of human rights and fundamental freedoms ….
In this regard zionist history and origin carry many seeds of racism and racial discrimination. One can quote dozens of zionist leaders who employ racist language. An early zionist, Moses Hess, in his book, Rome and Jerusalem, observes:
Every Jew has the making of a Messiah, every Jewess that of a Mater Dolorosa … only the Jews could rise to the height on which life and death seem equal … the great teachers of the knowledge of God were always Jews.
Another early Zionist, Norden arrogantly claimed that Jews were “more industrious and abler than the average European, not to mention the moribund Asiatic and African”. Another chauvinist Jew wrote: “Jews are the aristocracy of history.”
The founder of the World Zionist Organisation, Theodor Hezel, asserts: Our race is more efficient in everything than most other peoples of the earth. If all this is not racism, what is it?
Gandhi’s letter: The oft-quoted correspondence between Mahatma Gandhi and the zionist philosopher, Martin Buber, is quite revealing on the “superior race” theory of the Jews. When Gandhi observed that the zionists were looking for a sanction in the Bible for the demand for a Jewish state in Palestine, Buber shot back : ….
the Bible tells us, and our innermost knowledge testifies to it, that once more than three thousand years ago our entry into this land (i.e ., Palestine) took place with the consciousness of a mission from above to set up a just way of life through the generations of our people ….. No other nation has ever been faced at the beginning of its career with such mission. Here is something from which there is no forgetting and from which there is no release. (Martin Buber, Israel and the World, New York, 1963 p.229).
Chosen people: The present-day zionist leaders are even more arrogantly racists. Here is what Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, had to say:
I believe in our moral and intellectual superiority, in our capacity to serve as a model for the redemption of the human race.
Israeli atrocities in occupied West Bank and Gaza smack of nothing but racism and racial discrimination. There is so much of evidence that the Jewish rulers in occupied Arab territories consider Arabs as an inferior lot of humanity.
One must not also forgot how in 1948 the Israelis hounded the Palestinians out of their homes. A cruel example of this was massacre of Deir Yassin on April 9 1948 in which 250 old men, women and children were savagely murdered and their mutilated corpses put on public display. The most terrifying incidents in Hulah, Ramleh and Lydda forced lakhs of Palestinians to flee from their homes. This is all racially discriminatory.
Palestinian stand: The Jewish settlements on Arab territories have so much of racist content. So is the eviction of the Palestinians from the homelands during and after the June 1967 war. The UN Relief and Works agency reported that the Israeli army forced a large number of Palestinians out of the West Bank by bombing the refugee camps.
Most cruel regime: A testimony of the Israeli racist policies is provided by Dr. Israel Shehak and his League for Human and Civil Rights. He calls the Israeli regime as the most cruel and repressive. Its racist expulsion, collective punishments, dispossession through promise and deceit and the enslavement of the Palestinian population.
The case of Rabi Meir Kahanae, an American Jew who came to Israel in 1971 and has ever since been
propagating the cult of racist hatred against the Palestinians, needs to be noted. His solution to the “Arab problem” is: “Throw them out.” No wonder he was elected to the Israeli Parliament in 1984 on a racist plant.
Pact with Apartheid: The growing cooperation between Israel and South Africa is a clear case of zionism and racism being one and the same thing. After the 1967 war there appeared a telling editorial in DieBerger, the mouthpiece of the Nationalist Party, which said:
It is in South Africa’s interest that Israel is successful in containing her enemies, who are among our own most vicious enemies; and Israel would have all the world against it if the navigation route around the Cape of Good Hope should be out of operation because South Africa’s control is undermined.
It was not surprising when Die Vaterland, another South African ruling party newspaper, wrote: Israel’s survival in the Middle East is a fundamental part of our security. (Mainstream Jan. 4 1992).
