WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Perhaps you’ve wondered, as I have, why American Blacks and others fighting what they see as “systemic racism” should single out Israel, which we see as our Jewish people’s justly-entitled homeland, for “dismantling.” Perhaps remarks by Prof. Hill, embodying a view of Israel that “turns history on its head,” as one responder put it, furnish an explanation. This distorted view of our Jewish homeland, expressly attacking its very existence, has to be answered expressly.
This Week: Answering Calls for “Dismantling the Zionist Project,” that “Settler-Colonial Movement in Palestine”
Israel Hayom headlined last week, 2/11/21, “BLM ‘Seeks To Dismantle the Zionist Project,’ Marc Lamont Hill Admits.” The article cited Temple University professor Hill as saying at a recent Democratic Socialists of America panel discussion, according to Algemeiner, that “the Black Lives Matter [“BLM”] movement supports the ‘dismantling of the Zionist project,’ and of referring to Israel at that session as “a settler-colonial movement in Palestine.”
Unlike UNSC 2334, which “merely” accuses Israel of “a flagrant violation of international law” through “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” thereby perpetrating “a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace,” Hill’s attacks strike expressly at the Jewish homeland’s sovereign existence. That’s what “dismantling” means. These express attacks have to be answered expressly.
And Prof. Hill, the attacker, must not be summarily dismissed as a no-nothing of Israel ignorantly spouting ignorant slogans. As he himself has put it, Jerusalem Post, 5/22/19, Marc Lamont Hill Slams Mizrahi Jews as ‘Identity Category’ of Palestinians, “I literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living.” But why do Hill and those who think like him attack us? His view of Israel, and hence presumably BLM’s, as quoted in the Israel Hayom article, is that the Jewish state is an inseparable part of “white supremacy” and “imperialism.” Hill: “W can’t dismantle white supremacy or imperialism section by section,” and this applies to Israel as “a settler-colonial movement in Palestine.” We have to address his distorted “identity category,” to use his own phrase quoted in the 2919 Jerusalem Post article, of Mizrahi [indigenously Middle Eastern] Jews, which lets him see Israel as “colonial white.”
So let’s have a go at directly addressing Hill’s attacks on Israel as “a settler-colonial movement in Palestine” and as “the Zionist project.”
Israel as “A settler-colonial movement in Palestine”
Granted that the state of Israel could do a better job in not itself calling its citizens residing over the 1949 ceasefire lines in Judea-Samaria and Jerusalem “settlers,” and in presenting a more Mizrahi diplomatic and broader face to the world, Israel’s Jewish population is decisively not “settler-colonial” – indisputably (except for Prof, Hill) not its today major Mizrahi segment, nor its from Western world Sephardic and Ashkenazi segments. Centuries of persecution-as-strangers treatment in Europe, climaxed in the Inquisition and Holocaust, had Jews fleeing that cursed continent, not exploiting elsewhere’s natives from there as “colonialists.” And (though the world isn’t aware) the long Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine displaced more indigenously Middle Eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Middle Eastern lands, mostly to Israel, where they were absorbed, than Arabs left tiny Israel.
How then does Prof. Hill, who studies inter alia Mizrahi Jews for a living, make Israel “settler-colonial”? Per that 2019 Jerusalem Post article, by a misportrayal of Mizrahi Jews that “turns history on its head.” JPost article:
“Now the narrative has sought to portray Israel as ‘white,’ when Israel is in fact primarily a country made up of Middle East-origin citizens. Hill’s comment takes this one step further, and notes that even when discussing Mizrahi Jews, who came from all over the Middle East, they are an ‘identity category’ that was created as ‘a means of detaching them from Palestinian identity.’ This turns history on its head, redefining the Jewish people from the Middle East as ‘Palestinian Jews.’ Once again, Jews are being redefined by Westerners as part of a Western attempt to colonize Jewish identity, either as ‘white’ or now ‘Palestinian.’ It is part of an agenda to prevent Jews from being Jews, and affix different labels to them: ‘white Jews’ or ‘Palestinian Jews.’”
I agree with that quotation just above that Mizrahi Israelis are not exclusively “Palestinian Jews,” but “Palestinian” is not a dirty word applying exclusively to Palestinian Arabs. All Israeli Jews are “Palestinian Jews,” which is precisely what they are recognized as and called during the Mandate.
The upshot of all this is that Prof. Hill is wrong in misportraying “white” Israeli Jews as “settler-colonialists” exploiting “Mizrahi Jews” who he says are a subset of Palestinian Arabs. The heroic efforts in the face of great danger by Jews from all streams to bring home to Israel Arab and Black Jews from North Africa and the Mideast, victims for centuries of Muslim persecution no less vicious than the centuries of persecution of Jews in Europe by Europeans, belies that these heroic efforts were “settler-colonial.”
Israel as “The Zionist Project”
Nor is Israel “the Zionist project.” It’s, as the Palestine Mandate put it, “the Jewish national home.” Zionism didn’t start something new. The Jewish connection to Palestine had gone on, including through continuous tenacious physical presence in spite of every discouragement, as Parkes put it in Whose Land (p. 266), all through the long dark foreign empire rule centuries between Hadrian and Herzl. All that Zionism – a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine – did was to modernize and speed up the never-ended process. As Katz put it correctly in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine (p. 97, quoted in Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, p. 140):
“Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organization were new. The living movement to the land had never ceased.”
Nor are the Palestinian Arabs, misdescribed by all as “The Palestinians,” who’ve never ruled any part of Palestine (except de facto today Gaza) ever, being screwed out of Palestine by “the Zionist project.” Palestinian Arabs are the majority population of Eastern Palestine, Jordan, 78% of the Palestine Mandate. All that has to happen to make them as much the rulers there as British are the rulers of Britain is to make Jordan’s king a constitutional monarch, not to divide once again between Arabs and Jews the 22% of Palestine that its first division between Arabs and Jews left for us Jews.
What We Must Do
This week I read that our American Jewish Conservative Movement has joined the Reform in objecting to the Jewish National Fund sticking its toe over the 1949 ceasefire lines to develop housing for Jews in Judea-Samaria, just as both these movements have opposed application of Israeli sovereignty in Judea-Samaria as what they call “annexation” by Israel over “the 1967 borders” in “the West Bank.” I bitterly dissent from these American Jewish movements’ position and how they express it on all that, of course, but Prof. Hill’s not-just-his-own calls for “dismantling the Zionist project” which engages in “a settler-colonial movement in Palestine” strike deeper at our Jewish homeland than does “the two-State solution along the 1967 lines with agreed territorial swaps.” It’s expressly existential, and demands express answer – Israel’s not “the Zionist project” and is our people’s homeland, not “settler-colonialism” – by all of us.