Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on February 6, 2017

The racism implicit in the recent letters and op-eds by pro-Israeli writers really needs to be answered.

One way to define racism is as a philosophy that either makes the case for the superiority of one group, which justifies its right to rule, or the inferiority of another group, which makes its subjugation richly deserved.

Zionism is, very basically, a racist ideology that maintains that Jews are more entitled than Palestinians to rule the land of Palestine. So, its not surprising that the pro-Zionists use racist tropes to justify the Israeli Jews domination of the Palestinians.

For instance, a pro-Zionist writer recently implied that Jews are superior to Palestinians because Jews have many Nobel Prize winners while the Palestinians have none. To him, this demonstrates the superiority of Jewish culture over that of the Palestinians while completely ignoring that this difference is solely an accident of geography. Jews happened to be living in Europe when the great advances in science were made there during the past 500 years. If the Palestinians had also been living there, they would probably have as many Nobel Prize winners as the Jews, as anyone who has knowledge of the role that Palestinians (and Arabs, in general) have played in U.S. academia during the past 50 years can attest. This effort to portray the Palestinians as intellectually and culturally inferior to Jews is blatantly racist.

Palestinians are also portrayed by the pro-Zionists as both unreasonable and psychotically vicious. The pro-Zionists say that the Palestinians have been offered deals by the Israelis for the establishment of a Palestinian state but the Palestinians refused to accept any of them. If you accept that contention at face value, it would make the Palestinians seem unreasonable. Unfortunately, the truth is that it is the Israelis who have never made an offer that any Palestinian politician could accept and it should be obvious, by this point, that the Israelis are not negotiating in good faith but, rather, that the Israelis goal is to immiserate the Palestinians to the point that they will leave voluntarily. The Israelis want all of the land of Palestine for themselves. They will suffer the Palestinians only if they agree to live in completely servile subjugation.

About the Palestinians supposed viciousness and hatred of Jews and the state of Israel, suppose that foreigners came here and occupied California from Monterey to Los Angeles and from the coast to the eastern side of the Salinas Valley (thats about the size of Israel and the occupied West Bank) and immediately dispossessed millions of us, forcing us to live in refugee camps or outside those boundaries. Further, they continued to slowly dispossess those of us still living here and humiliated us daily as we traveled from one little enclave in which we were allowed to live to another. Id be pretty angry about that and Ill bet you would be, too, and no one could blame us for wanting to kill them all.

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So, considering the ongoing dispossession and daily humiliation of the Palestinians and their slaughter in ratios of 100 to 1,000 Palestinians killed for every Israeli they kill, I think the Palestinians have been models of restraint, not vicious beasts. I dont know how many Israelis the Palestinians have killed since Israel was established almost 70 years ago but it is probably only a few hundred as opposed to thousands of Palestinians slaughtered by the Israelis. After all, weve killed thousands of Afghans over the past 15 years and the Afghans never even did anything to us.

Dan Turner is a resident of Monterey and is a past president of local Congregation Beth Israel.

Continue reading here:
Dan Turner: Zionism is a racist ideology - Monterey County Herald

Category: Zionism
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