Apartheid

271
This prevalent hypocrisy inherent in treating Jews as ‘westerners’ and Muslims as
‘non-westerners’ is all the more annoying to Palestinians, since Zionism usually lays claim to
Palestine without invoking the fact that Jewish people and cultures have always mixed with
European (and other) people and cultures, but rather by claiming the opposite of that idea,
namely, the idea of Jewish ethnic and cultural purity and Jewish uniqueness.
The situation of Sephardic or Oriental Jews in Israel further illustrates the European
lop-sidedness of Israeli elite culture. Sephardic Jews today make up around one third of all
Jews in Israel. They are very poorly represented in the elites, who proudly nurture their
European roots, while tacitly or loudly accusing Sephardic Jews of having avoided the
Holocaust. Thus, the descendants of Holocaust survivors somehow manage to consider
themselves superior, by invoking their origins in the historically worst judeophobic area in the
world, as if the European experience were better for Jews than the much less devastating
experience among Muslims and Arabs. There is also a color-coded racism involved here since
the European Jews generally have lighter skin. 668
In 1896, the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote in his ‘Judenstaat’ that the
Jewish state would constitute a ‘fortification’, or a ‘wall’ of ‘civilization against barbarity’,
meaning Muslim or Arab culture. This idea has been plausibly linked to one of Ariel Sharon’s
many illegal legacies: the infamous apartheid wall (see Chapter II.6.3, above). It could also be
considered a legacy in the so-called ‘Iron Wall’, the militaristic, hard-line Israeli, yet
mainstream Zionist policy of never negotiating with Arabs except from a position of military
strength. 669
There is nothing at all idealistic, in a humanist sense, about Zionism. The eminent
Israeli historian who brought the central importance of the Iron Wall doctrine for Zionist and
Israeli politics to the attention of the world, Avi Shlaim, has also identified Zionism’s
fundamental if not fundamentalist opportunism. Zionists never chiefly negotiated with
Palestinians about anything in Palestine. Their main negotiating partners about everything in
Palestine have been, in chronological order, the Ottomans, the British, and the Americans, i.e.
whoever was most powerful in the region at the time. 670
In this regard, Jewish nationalism has also been compared to Darwinian nationalism
and ethnicism: ‘the fittest (nation or people) survives’. 671 And to ensure that, apparently, all
and any tricks are basically allowed. Zionism and Social Darwinism both belong to the ‘web
of ideas’ that Said describes. They are both products of late 19 th -century European elitist
thought. The following quote from the then Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, brings
home the eminent applicability of the term ‘ethnicism’ for Zionism: ‘There were Palestinians
who lived on that land but were never a people, and there were Jews who were a people but
who never had a land.’ 672 Groups of human beings (or super-human beings) who are ‘people’
apparently deserve land and statehood, whereas groups of humans (or sub-human beings) who
are not ‘people’ do not even deserve the most basic of human rights. This use of the
term,’people’, is indeed very similar to the dominant use of the German concept of ‘Volk’
668
Plathe: Viele Israeli mögen nicht zum Nahen Osten gehören: Die arabische Welt ist ganz nah und wird
geschmäht, 2004
669
Bunzl: Der Wall, der Zaun, die Mauer, 2004. The German original quote from Herzl in Bunzl’s rendition is:
‘Wall der Zivilisation gegen die Barbarei’. See also Schoenman: The Hidden History of Zionism, 1988; and
Shlaim 2001 (2000): 4: Herzl ‘viewed the natives [of Palestine] as primitive and backward, and his attitude
towards them was rather patronizing’. See, further, the thoughtful review of Shlaim’s book: Halper: Eight
Decades of the ‘Iron Wall’ Concept, 2001: 97-102.
670
Shlaim 2001 (2000): 17f.
671 2
Ezrah: Rubber Bullets, 1998: 89; Chomsky 1999: 153ff
672
Quoted in Pumpyansky July 2002; see footnote 19 and Ashrawi: Peace in the Middle East: A Global
Challenge and a Human Imperative, 2003, where Ashrawi speaks of the “myth of a ‘land without a people for a
people without a land’ that has long framed the rationalization for the most extreme forms of Zionism that sought
to deny the very existence and humanity of the Palestinians.” On the genocidal/pro-ethnic cleansing aspects of
Zionist ideology, see further Said 1992 (1979): 83ff, and Chapters II.1.3 and II.2.3, above.