Judea Pearl’s letter (“Professor misquoted in Israel article,” March 9) is a classic example of what happens when one allows an opponent of a position to offer up a definition of that same position.
In addition to identifying the main motivation behind anti-Zionism (at least for “many anti-Zionists”) as anti-Semitism (i.e., hatred of Jews simply for being Jewish), Pearl describes anti-Zionism as follows: “Anti-Zionism earns its distinct discriminatory character from denying the Jewish people what it grants to other historically bonded collectives (e.g., French, Spanish, Palestinians), namely, the right to nationhood and self-determination.”
As someone who has been in the anti-Zionist camp for almost 30 years, I can only say that Pearl’s letter in no way, shape or form describes my own position as an anti-Zionist.
I am not anti-Semitic, and I have no desire to deny the Jewish people nationhood and self-determination. I do, however, reject the attempt of any people, Jewish or otherwise, to take over the land of Palestine, ethnically cleanse the indigenous population, destroy more than 500 Palestinian villages and impose an apartheid state self-defined as “Jewish,” a state ready and willing to use any force or employ any act of terror necessary to maintain the racial status quo.
Pearl’s attempt to equate the right of Zionists to steal and occupy Palestine with the existence of nation-states in France and Spain is specious at best, duplicitous at worst. Those nations were formed more than a thousand years ago. The Zionist entity (or “Israel,” as Pearl terms it) has existed for only 60 years, and only by means of expulsion, terror and the imposition of a racially based apartheid state. Because of the Nakba of 1948-1949, and continuing ethnic cleansing thereafter, there are now more than 4 million Palestinians denied the right to return to their homeland to rebuild their villages.
Does this mean that Pearl is correct in charging that I, as an anti-Zionist, reject “Israel as an equal member in the family of nations”? Absolutely. Without question, I reject the Zionist entity as an equal member of the family of nations, and I do so because it is not a legitimate state, but rather a racist terrorist settler state that refuses to admit its crimes against the Palestinians and allow them to return to the homeland from which they were driven out by the Zionists. It has no more legitimacy now than South Africa had in the apartheid era.
Note the juxtaposition of Pearl’s claims: “Whereas anti-Semitism rejects Jews as equal members of the human race, anti-Zionism rejects Israel as an equal member in the family of nations.”
His protestations to the contrary notwithstanding (“I refrain from using allegations of anti-Semitism when it comes to the Middle East conflict”), this is indeed nothing less than an attempt to equate anti-Zionism with that specific subset of racism known as anti-Semitism. In fact, just the opposite is true: It is support for Zionism and the Zionist entity that is racist.
It is support for the six-decade long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Zionists and their supporters that is racist. It is support for the apartheid status within occupied Palestine that is racist.
The facts in this case are simple: For more than a millennium and a half Palestine was primarily Arab. It was only with the advent of modern-day Zionism in the 1900s that Jewish settlers moved into Palestine in large numbers, and that was done primarily only with the help of colonialist measures taken by Great Britain, and later by the United Nations in recognizing a Jewish state in Palestine.
The Palestinians argue, and I agree, that neither Great Britain nor the U.N. ever had the right to give away what was not theirs to give, namely Palestine. The only people that had a right to determine the fate of that land were the Palestinians themselves.
The Zionist idea of a two-state solution (“here, Palestinians, we’ll give you back one-third of the land that we seized, and then that can be your country”) is a pipe dream, a last desperate attempt to maintain the racist apartheid state created by the Zionist movement in Palestine. Fortunately, the flawed logic employed by Pearl and other Zionist apologists in equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is finally growing stale; it is being exposed ever more often as the self-serving propaganda that it is.
Even more fortunate is the fact that more and more of our Jewish brothers and sisters are now joining in the fight against Zionism, this in spite of the charges of “traitor” and “self-hating Jew” that are regularly thrown at them by the Zionists.
There can be only one solution to the conflict in the Middle East, and that is a single state in which the rights of all its residents, Palestinian and Jewish alike, are respected, and when no one group is granted special privilege based on its race, religion or ethnicity.
Richards graduated from UCLA in 1993 and 2001.