"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Zonism: implications
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June 6, 2006
The material below is part of an interview between Christopher Brown, a grassroots radical journalist, and Prof. Norman Finkelstein. Christopher Brown asks:
Finally, Prof. Finkelstein, could you speak about the formation of the Zionist ideology and how it has been interpreted on the ground as Palestine continues to get chopped up to suit the ethnocentric colonialist system in Israel?
It's a good question, particularly the ethnocentric bit, as it implies that Israeli is more of a Jewish state than a liberal democracy respecting the universal rights of citizenship. Israel is the Jewish national home. This implies that in Israel there is room only for the Jews. So what then happens to the Arabs?
I recall that Zionism once held that Israel was founded on a myth of "land with no people, for a people with no land". That myth leads to a questioning of Zionism as a nationalism associated with the violent beginnings of sovereignty. Since historic Palestine was inhabited prior to Israel being created so the Jews came to Palestine and took the country from the Palestinians. Why should the Palestinians accept that?
Norman Finkelstein responds to Brown's questions as follows:
Israel is a self-declared Jewish State and its ideology is to create a Jewish State. A State for the Jews. And it doesn't want a non-Jewish presence in that State, it's gratuitous, it's superfluous, it's a nuisance, and so, Israel has been trying, since the beginning, to carve out a State, which is overwhelmingly, if not homogeneously Jewish, in an area which was and parts of it still are, overwhelmingly non-Jewish. And that's been Israel's struggle. That's been the struggle of Zionism from the beginning, and the struggle of Israel's since the past fifty or sixty years. How do you create a Jewish State in an area that is overwhelmingly non-Jewish? And in the early years the assumption was sooner or later we can either buy them out and send them off somewhere else, or if we can't buy them out, we can push them out. Since the late 1960s the buy out option is plainly untenable. The Palestinians won't be bought out. And the push out option is less and less tenable because international law and pressures of international public opinion won't allow for a mass expulsion. So given that you can't buy them out, you can't push them out, the only other option is to confine them in smaller and smaller parcels of land, and keep as much of the land as you can for the Jewish State which is what Israel is currently doing.
That's about right. The wall was a part of that process of establishing a Jewsh state. That has meant that the Palestinians, those that were forcefully expelled from their homes in 1948, 1967, and more recently in 2001, have been living in squalid refugee camps throughout the region.
Finkelstein adds:
And I think they're hoping that Palestinians will reach such a state of despair that, quietly, they'll leave. That's pretty much what happened in Lebanon. The Lebanese government banned Palestinian men from a large number of professions, I think it went up to something like 80 if my memory serves, and slowly but surely without any fanfare, Palestinian men left. And the official Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon, I believe it is, supposedly half a million, the actual numbers are close to 200,000. Because, one way or another, by hook or by crook, Palestinian refugees found a way to get to Europe and elsewhere. And I suspect that Israel is hoping that that will happen with the Palestinians who they have confined in these, I hate the word "cantons", conjures up some notion of Switzerland and William Tell. They're not cantons, they're Indian reservations, with the difference being that Indians have US citizenship
My understanding is that the Palestinians who did not flee Israel-proper in 1948 are Israeli citizens, albeit fourth class Israeli citizenship. What happens to them if the Zionist policy of Israel with a Jewish-only population is continued with?
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Sir,
Norman Finkelstein is a Jewish self -hater who's in need of a psychiatrist more than a podium. Only neo Nazis and Arab apologists take comfort in his views.
For those who'd like to get a more objective view of his work, I'd recommend
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=8&x_nameinnews=169&x_article=985