Faces dripping with sweat move together as one in a crowd. Shouts echo through a darkened sky as hands wave national flags in a rapid pulse. The mob pounces on a solo taxi in the middle of the street, spraying broken glass over the ground. Egged on by politicians, the mob continues its vengeance by attacking any black bodies in their midst. This harrowing scene is neither from Apartheid South Africa nor the segregationist riots of South Boston in the 1970s. This is May 2012 in Tel-Aviv, Israel, in the southern neighborhood of Hatikva where most residents are Mizrahim — Jews from the Arab and Muslim world. We might react to this as just isolated bigotry, a poor neighborhood inflamed by xenophobia targeting asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan. But that would miss the bigger picture. Arab Jews, too, are victims of racial violence and subjugation wrought by a variant of European colonialism. This system has violently labelled, dehumanized, exploited and excluded bodies of color. Like Palestinians living under apartheid, Ethiopian Jews and African Migrants, Arab Jews are also victims of Zionist white supremacy. Israel was founded upon Zionism, an ideology that has sought to establish and maintain a white, European-Jewish (or Ashkenazi) colony in non-European lands. It’s not hard to see that this is a racist project — after all, establishing a state in land already inhabited by indigenous people is a clear sign of a belief in their inferiority. Zionism’s roots are in white supremacy and colonization. It contains the same vein of logic that perpetrated the violent, genocidal European colonization of the non-Western world. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, first lobbied the British government for the creation of a Jewish colony in Uganda in 1903. When his proposal was rejected, Herzl turned his gaze towards the Middle East, joining forces with the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. Herzl explicitly envisioned Israel to be “a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism” — or, as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak once put it, a “villa in the jungle.” This logic portrays those in Israel and Europe as “civilized,” as opposed to the “barbaric” and dangerous peoples of Asia and the Middle East who must be tamed. Zionism claims to be a movement for the Jewish people to a homeland, but being a movement created by white European Jews for white European Jews, Zionism has always concentrated power in the hands of a European elite. When colonialism stopped being fashionable, Zionists dropped the “c” word from their lexicon, but their practices of racial exclusion and white supremacy continued. tuftsdaily/op-ed/op-ed-hand-in-hand-israel-and-white-supremacy-1.2859123
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 19:48:25 +0000
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