[News] How Zionists use racial myths to deny Palestinians the right to go home

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-zionists-use-racial-claims-deny-palestinians-right-their-homeland?fbclid=IwAR0hVROpNHXihtkiaPSGWU4yzRqJ2pn9IOqRJ23ca49uKKHgoplqVnN9qGM 



  How Zionists use racial myths to deny Palestinians the right to go home

Joseph Massad - 5 August 2019
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Like all settler-colonial ideologies, Zionism has always been obsessed 
with race. Having emerged at the height of European colonialism and race 
science, it sought to learn from both.

Zionists understood that making racial claims was foundational and 
essential for their colonial project, a realisation that still informs 
Israeli colonial and racial policy today.


      European racialism

In the late 18th century European philologists invented the category 
“Semitic” to describe the languages of the Eastern Mediterranean and the 
Horn of Africa - Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Amharic, among others -  to 
distinguish them from Indo-European “Aryan” languages.

    Given the force of European racialism and its deeply racist culture
    then and now, the belief in the foreignness of Jews persisted

Since then European Christians began to consider European Jews, who did 
not speak Hebrew, as “Semites”, based on the religious Jewish and 
Christian claims that European Jews were the descendants of the ancient 
Palestinian Hebrews.

What is remarkable, however, is that no one suggested then - or now - 
that European Christians were also the descendants of the ancient 
Palestinian Christians!

When antisemitism emerged as a political ideology, it latched onto the 
Semitic linguistic category that encompassed Jews, and antisemites 
converted this into a racial category. In 1879, German Wilhelm Marr 
<https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/wilhelm-marr>, who popularised the 
term “antisemitism”, insisted that the hostility of antisemites to Jews 
was not based on their religion, but on their “race”.

Historical 
<https://www.versobooks.com/books/468-the-invention-of-the-jewish-people> 
research has established for many decades that European Christians and 
Jews were native European converts to the two Palestinian religions of 
Christianity and Judaism, and not descendants of their ancient 
adherents, anymore than today’s Indonesian or Chinese or Bosnian Muslims 
are descendants of the ancient Arab Muslims of the Arabian peninsula.

But given the force of European racialism and its deeply racist culture 
then and now, the belief in the foreignness of Jews persisted. It is a 
belief that the Zionist movement espoused.


      Racial purity

Zionism accepted the claim of a Jewish “race” separate from the race of 
gentiles, and proceeded to justify its colonial project based on this. 
Just as Europeans understood their “superior” race as the justification 
for their colonialism, Zionism, as a new member of the colonial club, 
used similar arguments to colonise the land of the Palestinians.

To further Zionism’s racial claims, Zionist Jewish scholars established 
<https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=364> in Berlin in 1902 the 
Association of Jewish Statistics to study, among other matters, the 
causes of the racial “degeneration” of European Jews. The very notion of 
racial “degeneration” had been invented a decade earlier by the 
second-most important Zionist leader at the time after Theodor Herzl: 
Max Nordau, whose 1892 book /Degeneration/ 
<https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9780803283671/> 
popularised the term.

    Now that they had affirmed Jews were a race, Zionists needed to
    prove they were direct descendants of ancient Hebrews, as there
    seemed to be other contenders for this claim - namely, the Palestinians

Zionist scholars focused on the concept of the Jewish race, the 
centrality of Jewish demography to the survival of the race, the 
physical health of European Jews, the rate of intermarriage with 
non-Jews, the Jewish birth rate, and rates of Jewish conversions to 
Christianity.

They diagnosed the situation of European Jews as one of “degeneration”, 
allegedly caused by their residence in the “diaspora.” The task for 
Zionism was to “regenerate” them by creating a settler-colonial state 
for European Jews in Palestine.

To Zionists, the decline in Jewish births signalled “degeneration”.

Some of their scholars <https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=364> were 
most concerned with the racial purity of Jews, arguing that the 
Enlightenment threatened this through mixed marriages, which introduced 
impure blood into the race - although they acknowledged that children of 
these marriages often remained outside Jewish communities, helping to 
preserve the racial purity of Jewish communities.


      Newcomers to Palestine

In contrast, diasporic social conditions and antisemitism were viewed as 
the social causes of Jewish mental and physical “degeneration” - which, 
unlike racial degeneration, could be reversed through Jewish 
colonisation of Palestine, which Zionism was undertaking on their behalf.

Now that they had affirmed Jews were a race, Zionists needed to prove 
they were direct descendants of ancient Hebrews, as there seemed to be 
other contenders for this claim - namely, the Palestinians who had 
inhabited the land since time immemorial. Like neighbouring Egyptians, 
Syrians and Iraqis, Palestinians are said to have mixed with peninsular 
Arabs after the peninsular Arab conquest of the region in the seventh 
century.

Zionists do not claim that today’s Egyptians, Syrians and Iraqis are 
pure descendants of the invading Arabs, rather than indigenous peoples 
who mixed with them. Yet, Zionists, like Netanyahu, insist fantastically 
that all Palestinians are newcomers to Palestine from the Arabian 
peninsula.

While modern Egyptians non-controversially claim ancient Egyptians as 
their ancestors, and modern Iraqis claim the Babylonians and the 
Sumerians, the threat came from Palestinians, who would claim that 
ancient Hebrews alongside Canaanaites, Philistines and all other ancient 
inhabitants of Palestine as their ancestors.

The irony, however, was that even the founders of modern Israel, David 
Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, insisted in a 1918 book 
<https://www.amazon.co.uk/Eretz-Israel-David-Gurion-Yitzak/dp/B00OY6YZD4> 
that Palestinian peasants - then the majority of the Palestinian 
population - were the descendants of ancient Hebrews.

The Palestinian peasants, the authors argued, had held on to their 
Hebrew ancestors’ traditions, most obviously through maintaining the 
same names for their villages, and that "in their veins, without a 
doubt, flows much Jewish blood – from the Jewish peasants who in the 
days of the persecutions and terrible oppression had renounced their 
tradition and their people in order to maintain their attachment and 
loyalty to the land of the Jews.”


      Dangerous precedent

That the leaders of the Zionist movement would recognise Palestinians as 
the ancient inhabitants of the land, whose majority converted 
<https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-should-palestinians-return-to-judaism-1.6159270> 
from Judaism and other local faiths to Christianity and later to Islam, 
was a dangerous precedent that had to be erased from the memory of 
official Zionism and Israel. And so it was.

This background terrifies Zionist ideologues and imperils their 
racialist claims. Here, the advances in genetic science in the last few 
decades and the baseless 
<https://books.google.jo/books/about/It_Ain_t_Necessarily_So.html?id=apSD85sQKbUC&redir_esc=y> 
claims of many of its commercial practitioners have been a gift for 
Zionist racialism.

While the ongoing charlatan search for the “Jewish gene 
<https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo12456289.html>” 
has become the Holy Grail of race and racist scientists, especially 
Zionist ones, some in Israel have found immediate, practical uses to 
increase the number of Jews worldwide, and therefore increase the number 
of those that Zionism claims have a colonial claim to Palestinian land.

Two years ago, a group of Israeli Jewish experts on genetics and Jewish 
religious law claimed that the so-called “Jewish gene” could help to 
prove “Jewishness” in line with Jewish religious law 
<http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4968443,00.html>”, 
eliminating the need for the arduous process of conversion to Judaism by 
those whose Jewishness could not be ascertained by rabbis.

In line with this bogus race science, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin 
Netanyahu recently jumped on 
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahus-downplaying-of-palestinian-ties-to-the-land-highlights-larger-debate/> 
the findings of geneticists and archaeologists who uncovered the 
skeletons of ancient Philistines, whose genetic markers they attributed 
to southern Europe. This was taken as proof by Zionist racialists that 
modern Palestinians are not linked to the ancient inhabitants of 
Palestine, and therefore have no claim to their own homeland.


      Right of return

Zionism’s arguments are two-pronged: that European converts to Judaism 
and their descendants who were away for 2,000 years have the “right” to 
return to their ancient homeland and drive out the inhabitants of the 
land; and that the Palestinian natives of Palestine are foreigners to 
their own lands.

    We are still steeped in race science and colonial justifications, as
    we were back in the late nineteenth century

Unlike Jews, who can maintain a “right of return” after two millennia of 
domicile in Europe to an Asian land from which they did not originate, 
Palestinians, whom Israel expelled in 1948 and after, are denied the 
right to return to their actual lands after a mere seven decades of 
expulsion.

What makes this Israeli racist argument acceptable to most white 
Americans and Europeans is the very racism that has anchored it since 
the 19th century. We are still steeped in race science and colonial 
justifications, as we were back in the late 19th century.

The irony is that liberal and conservative supporters of Zionism and 
Israel among Europeans and Americans, Jews and gentiles alike - who 
claim to oppose racism and colonialism - find nothing unpalatable in 
Zionism’s insistent and continuing commitment to both.

/The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not 
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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