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November 20, 2006
As is well known in Australia there is little split between the identity and heritage of Jewish people in the diasporia and Zionism. They are still one and the same.
Zionism holds that Jewish people are a wandering "tribe" who must have a "homeland", in the form of a nation-state, because of the historical injustices they have suffered. What was established was a state that elevates Jewish rights over those of non-Jews. This is the logic of ethnic nationalism (constructing a "nation"-state with the idea of elevating the rights of a particular ethnic community).The birth of the Israeli state in 1948 was a violent one: it was based on the mass expulsion and exodus of around 1 million non-Jewish Palestinians following numerous massacres and demolitions of over 400 Palestinian communities in order to form the Zionist state of Israel.
The reasoning was this: in order to create a Jewish demographic majority, around one million non-Jewish Palestinians in 1948 had to be "transfered", i.e. forcefully expelled or coerced to leave. While any Jew regardless of their birthplace is granted automatic citizenship and allowed to settle in Israel under the "Law of Return", Palestinians are denied their right to return to their homes, which is a basic right enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Geneva Conventions and other international law treaties.
What we have here is the workings of an exclusivist-colonial modernity of Zionism nationalism of an ethnic Jewish state) that was imported under British rule, and which works in terms of the triumph of Jewish culture (ethnic purity) over Palestinian nature. The (Zionist) Israeli Lobby endeavours to portray Zionism as both 'modern' and something other than colonialism.
Zionists (Jewish nationalists) justify the way that Israel practices institutionalized discrimination against its non-Jewish citizens whereby Israel pursues various means of getting rid of its non-Jewish population altogether. All Israeli politicians are committed to preserving Israel's Jewishness. They have to be. It's the law. Israel expressly claims not to be the state of its actual citizens (who include a million non-Jews), let alone that of the people whom it actually governs (half of whom are Palestinian Arabs). Non-Jews are, an impediment to Israel's Jewishness. Though non-Jews are second or third class citizens, Avigdor Lieberman, the deputy Prime Minister, wants them out altogether.
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