Don't fall into the Israeli Trap

Dear TUPOCC Sisters & Brothers,

 

NLG member Elias Davidsson is a Palestinian Jewish composer born in Palestine in 1941.  In his e-mail below Davidsson urges us to condemn Zionism stressing:

 

As long as Zionism remains the basis for the State of Israel and is combatted as such, all denunciations of specific Israeli policies remain an attack on symptoms, rather than on the roots of the disease. It is as if a opposition to Nazism could be limited to oppose the use of gas chambers, without attacking the racist roots of such crimes.

For this reason, I urge all those who have read until now, to denounce Zionism as a form of racism and apartheid, demand that Zionist organisations be banned as racist organisations and demand that the UN General Assembly suspend Israel's membership in the United Nations as long as it has not abolished Zionist and racialist legislation, including its laws prohibiting non-Jewish refugees from areas located under Israeli jurisdiction to return to their homes.

His full e-mail is below.

 

Until Return,

Michael

Date: Jul 11, 2006 12:11 PM

Subject: [NLGInternational] Don't fall into the Israeli Trap

Don't fall into the Israeli Trap

The current Israeli attacks on Gaza constitute without question
international crimes.  As such they do not constitute any form of
deception.  Real people are killed by deliberate Israeli attacks on an
urban area.  The Gaza strip is correctly designated as a new form of a
ghetto or concentration camp, whichever designation you prefer.  It is
surrounded by Israeli barbed wire, Israeli watch towers and Israeli
armed forces who decide who may enter or exit from that small area.

By conducting its massive operation Israel intends to shift the debate
into that of demanding Israel to "stop the attacks".   When Israel will
stop the attacks, the world will applaud the Israeli government for its
reasonable response.  The method is an old Jewish one derived from a
story about a Rabbi and a goat.   You first create extreme hardship,
and then release the pressure.  The victim will then feel elated and
thankful for the release of the pressure and will stop making more
demands.

Those who are concerned with human dignity and justice should not fall
into the trap laid by the Israeli government.  While it is necessary to
denounce the Israeli atrocities, collective punishment, extra-judicial
assassinations and other assorted war crimes, and while it is
necesssary for the international community to come to the defense of
the Palestinian people, this should not be considered an adequate
response.

Israeli policies are part and parcel of an ideology - Zionism - which
must be combatted.  The current policies are a logical outcome of
Zionism, not something extraneous to it.  Zionism is predicated on the
eradication of Palestinian national consciousness and the Palestinian
relation to its homeland.  Zionism is predicated on Jewish control over
the entire area of historical Palestine. In Hebrew that area is
designated as "Eretz Yisrael" (in contradistinction to the State of
Israel, the area of which is geographically and deliberately
undefined).  This is reflected, for example, by denying Palestinians
who found themselves outside the Palestinian occupied areas in 1967 the
right of residence, by the Hebraization of localities' names, including
in the 1967-occupied areas, the destruction of about 400 Palestinian
villages within Israel proper, and by rewriting the history of the
land, including historical falsifications.  Zionism has made tremendous
efforts to eradicate all signs of Palestinian history in the hope that
the Palestinian people would disappear from the earth.  The assault on
Gaza is part of the policy to make life so unbearable to Palestinians
as to make them wish to leave for other countries.   It is a subtle (or
not so subtle) form of ethnical cleansing, which is defined under
international law as a crime against humanity.

But this is only one part of Zionism's danger.   For even if no

Palestinians would have lived in Palestine, Zionism would continue to
remain a danger for its neighbours, because the only way to maintain a
predominantly or pure Jewish State in the Middle East and prevent its
Arabization, is by erecting and maintaining physical and mental walls
between the Jewish population and the surrounding Arab populations.
Any form of true peace will inevitably lead to the slow Arabization of
Israel, because of simple demographics.  The only way to prevent this
from occurring is to prevent true peace, that is by maintaining
animosity and state of permanent war or animosity.   This can be
demonstrated both in theory and empirically by a careful study of
Israel rejectionist and provocatory policies since its establishment in
1948.

As long as Zionism remains the basis for the State of Israel and is
combatted as such, all denunciations of specific Israeli policies
remain an attack on symptoms, rather than on the roots of the disease.
It is as if a opposition to Nazism could be limited to oppose the use
of gas chambers, without attacking the racist roots of such crimes.

For this reason, I urge all those who have read until now, to denounce
Zionism as a form of racism and apartheid, demand that Zionist
organisations be banned as racist organisations and demand that the UN
General Assembly suspend Israel's membership in the United Nations as
long as it has not abolished Zionist and racialist legislation,
including its laws prohibiting non-Jewish refugees from areas located
under Israeli jurisdiction to return to their homes.

Elias Davidsson
11 July 2006

edavid@simnet.is