Marking 60 years of the Zionist State

The sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the Jewish state of Israel occurs next month. Its inauguration on May 11, 1948 officially dates to the end of the civil war in the British mandated area of Palestine. The members of the United Nations Security Council voted to partition Palestine on November 19, 1947. The partition gave 55 percent of the territory to the Jewish population and 45 percent to the indigenous Arab population. The UN resolution gave the largest portion of the land to the Jews even though they formed only 37 percent of the population of Palestine at the time and owned only 7 percent of the land in what was to become the Jewish section of the partition of Palestine.

The partition decision in the UN was followed immediately by a “civil war” between the Palestinian Arabs and the Palestinian Jews over control of the land. The Arabs goal was to prevent the creation of the Jewish state. The aim of the Jews was to establish that state and control as much of the pre-partition territory of Palestine as possible. A second and equally important goal of the Jewish leadership was to exclude as much as possible of the Arab population from the new Jewish state.

The entire Zionist project from its very beginnings in 1880 was to create an exclusionary Jewish state in all of what came to be the mandated territory of Palestine which the Zionists considered to be the biblical land of Israel. The state of Israel was to become the homeland of all the world’s Jews. The Arabs who had lived in Palestine for thousands of years were to be dispossessed of their lands and encouraged or forced to relocate to neighbouring Arab lands or elsewhere.

The fighting between the Zionist forces and the Palestinian Arabs and the subsequent war involving Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq ended in 1949 with the Zionists in control of more than 70 percent of partitioned territory and a Arab population that made up approximately 20 percent of the population of the state of Israel. Another 700,000 Palestinian Arabs about 80 percent of the total Arab population of pre-partition Palestine who had lived in what became Israel were displaced as refugees into camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as to adjoining Arab countries, mainly Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

Subsequent wars were provoked by Israel in 1956, 1967 and 1973. In all of these conflicts Israel received massive material and logistical support for the governments of Western Europe and the United States. These wars left Israel in military control of the entire area of the old British mandated Palestine partly as Israel proper and the rest in occupied territory. The Arab Palestinian state that had been mandated by the UN resolution of 1947, was of course never created.

Since it conquered the Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 Israel has moved more than 400,000 Jewish colonists into settlements in the occupied territories and East Jerusalem. It maintains these settlements by force of arms and maintains a network of Jewish-only roads to link the settlements to each other and to Israel proper.

As the state of Israel approaches it 60^th anniversary however it faces the cold reality that the Zionist plans for an exclusionist Jewish state in Palestine will never come to fruition. There are several reasons for this. First and foremost is that contrary to Zionist theory, Israel is not the solution to anti-Semitism. Zionism maintains that Jews will never be free of anti-Semitism while they continue to live in non-Jewish countries. The only escape from the anti-Semitism of non-Jews according to this logic is to move to the Jewish state of Israel.

By and large Jews living outside of Israel are living quite peacefully and free of oppression in their home countries in the Americas and Europe. They are not subjected to pogroms and are well integrated into their societies and free from discrimination official or otherwise. Ironically, Israel as an officially Jewish state, routinely practices discrimination against its non-Jewish citizens. The vast majority of the world’s Jews have chosen not to move to Israel because they have not the felt the need or desire to do so. Consequently, the Jewish population of Palestine is not being swelled by an influx of Jewish immigrants.

Second, the population of Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories is growing rapidly. Although non-Jews still make up only 20 percent of the population of Israel, when the entire territory occupied and militarily controlled by Israel is considered, Jews make only 50.3 percent of the population and will soon be in the minority. Within the Zionist community this is known colloquially as Israel’s “demographic time bomb”.

In spite of Israel’s open discrimination in favour of Jews in Israel proper, it constantly claims itself to be a democratic state. As time goes on and the Zionists continue build and populate more and larger Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem the sham of the democratic Jewish state becomes harder and harder to maintain. There are now at least five different classes of people living in the territory of the Palestine. There are Jews in Israel proper and Jews in Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These people are all considered residents of Israel wherever they reside and have full rights as citizens in the state of Israel. In addition there are Israeli Arab citizens of Israel proper. These people are citizens of Israel but that citizenship is attenuated by official discrimination in favour of Jews. There are also the Palestinian Arab residents in East Jerusalem who are considered residents of Israel but not citizens. Finally there are the Palestinian Arabs residing in the West Bank, the Golan and Gaza who are neither citizens nor residents and have no rights in respect of the governing power that controls them.

Sixty years after the advent of Israel and nearly one hundred and eighty years after the birth of the Zionist project in Palestine, the Zionists have succeeded in creating a profoundly undemocratic, racist, multi-ethnic entity whose only future is greater and greater oppression of an increasing majority of its citizen/residents.

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