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href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-zionists-use-racial-claims-deny-palestinians-right-their-homeland?fbclid=IwAR0hVROpNHXihtkiaPSGWU4yzRqJ2pn9IOqRJ23ca49uKKHgoplqVnN9qGM">https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-zionists-use-racial-claims-deny-palestinians-right-their-homeland?fbclid=IwAR0hVROpNHXihtkiaPSGWU4yzRqJ2pn9IOqRJ23ca49uKKHgoplqVnN9qGM</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">How Zionists use racial myths to deny
Palestinians the right to go home</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Joseph Massad - 5 August
2019 </div>
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<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<h3>European racialism</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Given the force of European racialism and its deeply
racist culture then and now, the belief in the
foreignness of Jews persisted</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>What is remarkable, however, is that no one suggested
then - or now - that European Christians were also the
descendants of the ancient Palestinian Christians! </p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/wilhelm-marr"
target="_blank">Marr</a>, who popularised the term
“antisemitism”, insisted that the hostility of
antisemites to Jews was not based on their religion, but
on their “race”.</p>
<p><a
href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/468-the-invention-of-the-jewish-people"
target="_blank">Historical</a> 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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Racial purity</h3>
<p>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. </p>
<p>To further Zionism’s racial claims, Zionist Jewish
scholars <a
href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=364"
target="_blank">established</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9780803283671/"
target="_blank"><i>Degeneration</i></a> popularised
the term. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>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</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>To Zionists, the decline in Jewish births signalled
“degeneration”.</p>
<p>Some of their <a
href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=364"
target="_blank">scholars</a> 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. </p>
<h3>Newcomers to Palestine</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>The irony, however, was that even the founders of
modern Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi,
insisted in a <a
href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Eretz-Israel-David-Gurion-Yitzak/dp/B00OY6YZD4"
target="_blank">1918 book</a> that Palestinian
peasants - then the majority of the Palestinian
population - were the descendants of ancient Hebrews.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<h3>Dangerous precedent</h3>
<p>That the leaders of the Zionist movement would
recognise Palestinians as the ancient inhabitants of the
land, whose majority <a
href="https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-should-palestinians-return-to-judaism-1.6159270"
target="_blank">converted</a> 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. </p>
<p>This background terrifies Zionist ideologues and
imperils their racialist claims. Here, the advances in
genetic science in the last few decades and the <a
href="https://books.google.jo/books/about/It_Ain_t_Necessarily_So.html?id=apSD85sQKbUC&redir_esc=y"
target="_blank">baseless</a> claims of many of its
commercial practitioners have been a gift for Zionist
racialism. </p>
<p>While the ongoing charlatan search for the “<a
href="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo12456289.html"
target="_blank">Jewish gene</a>” 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. </p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4968443,00.html"
target="_blank">Jewish religious law</a>”, eliminating
the need for the arduous process of conversion to
Judaism by those whose Jewishness could not be
ascertained by rabbis. </p>
<p>In line with this bogus race science, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently <a
href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahus-downplaying-of-palestinian-ties-to-the-land-highlights-larger-debate/"
target="_blank">jumped on</a> 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. </p>
<h3>Right of return</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are still steeped in race science and colonial
justifications, as we were back in the late nineteenth
century</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p><i>The views expressed in this article belong to the
author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial
policy of Middle East Eye.</i></p>
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