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THE CASE OF

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144

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“R. GARAUDY
THE CASE OF

ISRAEL
A STUDY OF
POLITICAL ZIONISM

SHOROUK
INTERNATIONAL
 Theology Library
CLAREMONT
SCHOOL OF }HEOLOGY
Claremont, CA

Shorouk International (UK) Limited,

316/318 Regent Street, London W1R 5AB
Tel: 01-637 2743/44, Telex: 25779 G

First published in France by SPAG-Papyrus

Editions, Paris 1983
Copyright © SPAG, 1983

This translation
first published in Great Britain by
Shorouk International, 1983
Reprinted 1984

Copyright © Shorouk International (UK) Limited, 1983

All rights reserved

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham Ltd.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Garaudy, Roger
The case of Israel
1. Zionism
I. Title II. L’ Affaire Israel. English
956.94'001 DS149

ISBN 1 85024 000 0

ISBN 1 85024 001 9 pbk
 CONTENTS

Foreword to English Edition J/

Introduction 5
A. Religious Zionism and Political Zionism 6
B. Zionism and Judaism 9
C. The Israel of the Bible and the Present
“Zionist State” of Israel 16

Part One
The Historical Myth 29
I The Myth of “Historic Rights” 29
II The ‘Biblical’ Myth 69

Part Two
From the Zionist Mythology to the
Politics of Israel 89
I Internal Policy: Racism, Israel as a Colonial Entity 89
II Israel’s Foreign Policy: Expansionism 123
Ill The Methods of Israel’s Policy: State Terrorism 148

Conclusion 157

Index 163
 FOREWORD TO
ENGLISH EDITION

' There have been many books on this subject — favourable and
hostile but never neutral even when claiming to be — and no
doubt there will be many more. But now that one of France’s
leading intellectuals has made an important contribution to its
discussion, it is wholly right that it should be made available in
English.
Roger Garaudy does not profess neutrality. In brief he
believes that Israel’s statehood — its famous right to exist which
the Palestinian Arabs are called upon to recognize — is based on
a gigantic fraud. In his words, “‘It possesses no legitimacy — his-
torical, biblical or juridical — in the place where it was estab-
lished.”’ For him political Zionism, which was born barely a
century ago with Theodor Herzl and his book Der Judenstaat,
is both a perversion and a betrayal of religious Zionism and the
true spiritual mission of Judaism which Garaudy extols. Herzl’s
followers, either cynically or sincerely but always ruthlessly,
exploited what Garaudy calls the “‘historical myth” and the
“Biblical pretext” for the seizure of Palestine and the expulsion
_ of its inhabitants.
I remember once asking an eminent Israeli diplomat and
scholar what he considered to be the basis of Israeli diplomacy.
1
2 FOREWORD TO ENGLISH EDITION

He replied: “Quite simple. The Old Testament.” The fact that,

like Herzl, he was a convinced non-believer, or that Israel’s
diplomacy might have to be conducted among Hindus or
pagans who have no particular regard for the Old Testament,
did not strike him as a difficulty. Golda Meir dismissed the
problem with her customary briskness when she said: “This
country exists as a result of a promise made by God Himself. It
would be ridiculous to ask for the recognition of its legi-
timacy.”” Roger Garaudy refuses to accept such assertions. He
argues that we are entitled to question whether this was really
His intention when His commands have been relayed to us —
often in a contradictory and unconvincing manner — by the very
people who claim to be the beneficiaries of His will.
Moreoever, even supposing God did make the promise, he
doubts whether those who rule Palestine today are the true
heirs. Thus he analyses what he calls ‘‘the myth of historic
rights”’ in addition to the “biblical myth.”
The arguments have been presented before but never, to my
mind, so cogently. The style is polemical and occasionally pas-
sionate, but always rational. Certainly it will arouse anger but
it merits a reasoned response. Not the least likely to arouse
anger is his assertion of “‘the extent to which Zionism and anti-
semitism are twins’’. Yet it would be hard to dispute that there
is an objective alliance between the two because both are
rooted in the belief that the assimilation of Jews into Gentile
societies is undesirable and ultimately impossible. Anyone who
remains doubtful of the connection should refer to the intro-
duction to the Nazi Nuremberg race laws of 1935: “‘If the Jews
had a state of their own in which the bulk of their people were
at home, the Jewish question could already be solved today,
even for the Jews themselves. The ardent Zionists of all people
have objected least of all to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg
Laws, because they know that these laws are the correct solu-
tion for the Jewish people.”
It would be absurd to deny that some of today’s antisemites
find a target for Israel in their hatred. But some of us always
 FOREWORD TO ENGLISH EDITION 3

believed that the State of Israel would ultimately increase

rather than diminish the amount of antisemitism in the world.
Since the invasion of Lebanon who can say we are wrong?
Apart from the logic and lucidity of M. Garaudy’s argument,
there is another reason why this book should have a fresh
appeal to readers in the English-speaking world. However
remote their school scripture lessons and whatever their faith,
they have been influenced by the Protestant attachment to the
Old Testament, so they are easily prone to confuse the modern
Zionist movement with the fulfilment of prophecy. This was
manifest in Arthur Balfour’s astonishing assertion in 1919 that
“Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-
long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far pro-
founder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000
Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land [i.e. Palestine]’’. But
President Jimmy Carter was saying something very similar
when 60 years later he told the Israeli Knesset that the rela-
tionship between the United States and Israel ‘‘is indestruct-
ible, because it is rooted in the consciousness and the morals
and the religion and the beliefs of the American people them-
Selves. ci.”
Roger Garaudy is the heir to a different tradition. For him
the issues raised by the Dreyfus affair are still a living reality.
He takes it for granted that,to be an anti-Dreyfusard — that is a
racist and a bigot who deplores the Jewish influence on French
society — is also to be a supporter of political Zionism. Accord-
ing to his own testimony (Le Monde 30 July 1983) he both
became a Christian and joined the French Communist Party in
1933, the year Hitler came to power. The choice for him was
not in the least contradictory. In a world of ‘“‘absurdity and hor-
ror’ he was able to rediscover a meaning in his own life and in
history through his attachment to faith, but he felt the lack of
the church’s social doctrine ‘“‘capable of overcoming the mortal
contradictions in the system.” At that time the Communist
Party seemed the most resolute adversary of capitalism and
Nazism. Today he finds it equally natural that, with his long-
4 FOREWORD TO ENGLISH EDITION

standing interest in Arabo-Islamic civilization, he should have

found peace and fulfilment in Islam, a universal faith, which
holds Moses and Jesus among its prophets and in which, in
Garaudy’s words, there is no separation between science, wis-
dom and revelation. Moreover, Islam provides the opportunity
to tackle the problem of the relation between faith and political
action — something of great importance to a man like Garaudy.
Garaudy’s life of struggle against western political and cultu-
ral imperialism, racism and nationalist extremism have led him
to this. denunciation of political Zionism in all its past and pre-
sent manifestations. It is a case which deserves to be heard.

Peter Mansfield
 INTRODUCTION

Here we are tackling a “forbidden” subject: Zionism and the

State of Israel. In France you can criticise Catholic dogma or
Marxism, attack atheism or nationalism, condemn the regimes
of the Soviet Union, the United States or South Africa, preach
anarchism or monarchism, all without running any risks
beyond the usual ones of getting involved in a polemic or being
refuted. If, however, you undertake to analyse Zionism you
enter into a different world. You pass from the realm of litera-
ture into that of the law-courts. By virtue of a law of 29 July
1881 which, very properly, forbids the defamation of any per-
son on account of his belonging to a particular ethnic group,
nation, race or religion, any criticism of the policy of the State
of Israel and of the political Zionism which is its basis renders
you liable to prosecution.
Fundamental criticism of the State of Israel — and by “‘fun-
damental” I mean criticism not of individual actions, even
criminal ones, but analysis of the inner logic of a state based
upon the principles of political Zionism — causes you to be treat-
ed forthwith as a “‘Nazi” and brings upon you threats against
your life. The author of this essay can bear witness to this fact,
having himself experienced, for this reason, prosecution, the
5
6 INTRODUCTION

charge of ‘Nazism’ and threats of death.’

By what mechanism has it been possible to put the study of
political Zionism on the plane of wars of religion? By means of
a series of amalgams, shifts of meaning and substitutions, for
which Begin gave the signal when he issued this slogan: ‘‘No
distinction can be made between anti-Israelism, anti-Zionism
and antisemitism.” This slogan was at once taken up and
orchestrated throughout the world by the leaders of the World
Zionist Organisation.”
Before beginning any examination of the ideology and prac-
tice of political Zionism it is therefore necessary to delimit
rigorously the subject of our criticism, by defining and dis-
tinguishing between religious Zionism and political Zionism,
between Zionism and Judaism, and between the Israel of the
Bible and the Zionist State of Israel.

A. Religious Zionism and Political Zionism

There can be no confusing two perfectly distinct aims, namely,
that of religious Zionism and that of political Zionism.
Religious Zionism was often professed by the Jewish mystics.
It was connected with the great Messianic hope of Judaism,
according to which, with the coming of the Messiah at the end
of time, the kingdom of God, to which would be summoned
“all families of the earth” (Genesis, xii, 3), would be accom-
plished for the whole of mankind (‘‘And in thy seed shall all the
nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my
voice”: Genesis, xxii, 18), and it would be centred in the places
where the Bible sets the stories of Abraham and Moses.
This religious Zionism gave rise to a tradition of Jewish pil-
grimage to the “holy land” and even the establishment of spir-
itual communities, notably at Safed, when the persecutions by
the “Most Catholic Kings” of Spain (after a long and happy
co-existence of Muslims and Jews in that country) led some
pious men to go to Palestine in order to live in accordance with
their faith.
 INTRODUCTION if

In a more recent period, in the 19th century, the ‘Lovers of

Zion” (Choveve Zion) pursued the aim of creating in that land
of Zion a spiritual centre from which Jewish faith and culture
would spread.
It is to be observed that this religious Zionism (which,
moreover, affected only relatively small groups) never encoun-
tered opposition from the Muslims, who regarded themselves
as belonging to the posterity of Abraham and his faith. This
spiritual Zionism, alien to any political programme for creating
a state and any domination over Palestine, never led to clashes
between the Jewish communities and the Arab population,
whether Muslim or Christian.
Political Zionism began with Theodor Herzl (1860-1904),
who composed its doctrine from 1882 onward, in Vienna, gave
it systematic form in 1896 in his book on ’’the Jewish State”
(Der Judenstaat), and began to apply it concretely at the first
World Zionist Congress, held at Basle in 1897. It is this politi-
cal Zionism, and this alone, in its principles and its conse-
quences, that constitutes the subject of the present study.
Therefore it must be precisely defined at the outset.
First of all, in contrast to religious Zionism, Herzl was radi-
cally agnostic in his views, and even opposed with vigour those
who defined Judaism as a religion. From the standpoint of poli-
tical Zionism ‘‘the Jews” are above all ‘‘a people’. (We shall
see when we look at the ‘fundamental laws” of the State of
Israel the fundamental ambiguity of the definition of “‘the Jew”
and the constant wavering between definition by ‘ethnic ori-
gin” and definition by ‘‘religion’’.*)
Herzl, whose basic concern was not religious but political,
presented the problem of “Zionism” in a radically new way.
As a result, he said, of the impression made on him by the
Dreyfus case, he drew the following conclusions:
(1) The Jews, everywhere in the world, whatever country
they live in, constitute a single ‘‘people”’.
(2) They have always and everywhere been subjected to
persecution.
8 INTRODUCTION

(3) They cannot be assimilated by the nations in which they

live (the same assumption that is made by all antisemites and
racists).
The practical consequences Herzl deduced from these ideas,
the solutions he advocated in order to put an end to this anta-
gonism, which he saw as permanent and definitive, can be sum-
marised thus:
(1) Rejection of assimilation, which, although not allowed
by the states in Eastern Europe (especially in the Russian
Empire), was taking place on an ever-larger scale in the West
(and, in particular, in France, where, after the Dreyfus Affair,
antisemitism had revealed its degrading face).
(2) Creation not of a spiritual ““Shome’’, a centre from which
Jewish faith and culture could radiate, but a ‘Jewish state”’ in
which all the Jews in the world would be brought together. We
recognise here, in that late period of the 19th century (which
was in Europe ‘‘the century of nationalities”), one of the
expressions of a typically Western nationalism. This national-
ism was most strongly manifested in Germany, and it had con-
siderable influence on Herzl, a man of Germanic education.
(3) This state to be established in a ‘“‘vacant”’ area. This idea,
characteristic of the colonialism that predominated at the time,
meant that there was no need to take account of the indigenous
population. Herzl and the leaders of political Zionism who suc-
ceeded him based themselves on this colonialist assumption,
which was to govern the whole future of the Zionist enterprise
and of the State of Israel which resulted from it.
The area to be chosen was a matter of no importance to
Herzl, who, as we shall see, contemplated as the site of opera-
tions of his ‘chartered company”, the embryo of the future
state, either Argentina (suggested by Baron Hirsch) or Uganda
(proposed by Britain). It is significant that Herzl sought advice
from Cecil Rhodes, who was then carrying on his colonising
enterprise in Southern Africa, because, said Herzl, his own
undertaking was of the “‘colonial”’ type.
Among the territories where the Jewish state might be
 INTRODUCTION 9

implanted Herzl gave preference, however, to Palestine,

because he wanted to make use of the ‘Lovers of Zion” ten-
dency and strengthen the movement he was creating by chan-
neling into support of it a religious tradition in which he him-
self did not believe.
For the implementation of his policy there was every reason
to foster this ambiguity. The most typical example of the clever
use made of the confusion between the two sorts of Zionism
appeared, long after Herzl’s death, in the Balfour Declaration
of 1917, in which the British Government declared its support
for ‘‘a national home for the Jews”’ in Palestine which would
not harm the interests of the indigenous inhabitants, whereas
the leaders of political Zionism were to exploit this Declaration
as signifying the creation of ‘‘a Jewish state” of Palestine in
which the indigenous population would be eliminated in favour
of the sovereignty of the Zionist state over the whole of Pales-
tine.
It is this colonialist character of political Zionism, with its
mythical “‘foundations” and its disastrous consequences for the
people subjected to colonisation, and for the peace of the
world, that constitutes the sole theme of our critical analysis.

B. Zionism and Judaism

The transition from the literary to the judiciary and from politi-
cal debate to religious war is effected by means of a second
confusion, a second amalgam. Not content with playing upon
the unadmitted confusion between religious Zionism and poli-
tical Zionism (which makes it possible, by utilising religion in
the service of politics, to sanctify a certain sort of politics and
turn it into a taboo, lifted above criticism), play is also made
with the identification of political Zionism with Judaism, so as
to accuse of antisemitism anyone who criticises the Zionist
policies of the Israeli leaders. A fundamental reflection upon
antisemitism is found in Bernard Lazare’s book Antisemitism,
its History and Causes, published in 1894,* amid the heated
10 INTRODUCTION

atmosphere of the Dreyfus case and of the birth of Herzl’s poli-

tical Zionism.
It is untrue to say, as has been alleged, that “‘in his subse-
quent writings Lazare was to cease to ascribe any responsibil-
ity, even partial, for antisemitism to the Jews themselves.” In his
pamphlet Contre l’antisémitisme (Against Antisemitism), pub-
lished by Stock in 1896, he wrote: ‘“‘What I said in my book I
repeated in a pamphlet entitled Antisémitisme et révolution”
(March 1895). He said again in 1896:
I wrote that we must not suppose that manifestations of antisemi-
tism were, in the past, merely due to a religious conflict. I still
uphold that view. I wrote that the reason for antisemitism in his-
tory was that everywhere, and down to our own time [the italics
are Lazare’s], “the Jew was an unsociable being”. I still say
that. . . Finally, at the end of the book I wrote: “The causes of
antisemitism are, in their nature, ethnic, religious, political and
economic. They are all causes of far-reaching importance, and they
exist not because of the Jew alone, nor because of his neighbours
alone, but principally because of prevailing social conditions.”

Bernard Lazare added, as would any serious writer

re-reading his work after a lapse of time:

If Iwere to rewrite this book today I should undoubtedly find many

things to alter and many things to add, but if I reproach myself at
all it is for not having dealt precisely with the religious causes of
antisemitism, that is, not having shown sufficiently how these sub-
serve the economic interests of certain capitalists.

And, replying once more to Drumont, he added: “‘The debate

on the Jewish question ought not to be a debate about me per-
sonally” (pp. 18 and 19 of Lazare’s pamphlet).
Bernard Lazare’s work was written in reply to the ‘‘best sel-
ler” of antisemitism, Drumont’s La France juive (1886).
Unlike Drumont’s hate-filled and ignorant pamphlet, Lazare’s
study appears, even to a reader who does not share all his
theses (which are usually, moreover, presented with honesty as
mere working hypotheses), to be based upon calm and
 INTRODUCTION 11

thought-provoking historical analyses which establish both the

share of responsibility borne by the Jewish communities for the
persecutions of which they were often victims and the dishonest
exploitation by the antisemites of the objective conditions of the
particularism of these communities.
Lazare distinguishes between anti-Judaism, mainly of Christ-
ian origin, which operated from the beginning of the 4th century
to the middle of the 19th, and the phenomenon of antisemitism,
the name of which appeared for the first time in a book by a
Hamburg journalist, Wilhelm Marr, Der Sieg des Judenthums
uber das Germanenthum (The Victory of Jewry over
Germandom) in 1873.
Specifically Christian anti-Judaism was a by-product of the
ideological and political Constantinism of the triumphalist
Church, heir both to the tradition of the High Priests of the Syna-
. gogue and to that of theRoman Empire. From having been perse-
cuted, it now became, as soon as it acquired the power, a persecu-
tor of other religions, both paganism and Judaism. In Judaism,
which had until then had great success in winning converts, the -
Church saw a rival to be struck down. (See the First Epistle of St
Peter, 11, 9: ‘Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an
holy nation, a peculiar people . . .”’) Absurdly, it accused the
Jews of being a people who, by refusing to accept Jesus as the
Messiah, had become ‘‘deicide”’, God-killers, since at Nicaea
Jesus Christ had been proclaimed to be of the same ‘‘substance”’
as God.
Bernard Lazare shows how the hair-splitting particularism of
the Jewish communities and their withdrawal into the narrowest
and most rigoristic interpretation of the Law provided, for cen-
turies, easy pretexts for making this charge. The Jew ‘‘retrenched
himself behind the fences which had been erected around the
Torah and the first scribes, later by the Pharisees and the Talmud-
ists, the successors of Ezra, deformers of primitive Mosaism and
enemies of the prophets.’ This was done in opposition to ‘‘true
~ Mosaism, purified and enlarged by Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel,
broadened and generalised by the Judaeo-Hellenists.’”°
12 INTRODUCTION

This isolation was aggravated, Lazare adds, by the circum-

stance that, for the Jew, it was something quite exceptional:
Israel ‘“‘prided itself upon the excellence of its Torah and con-
sidered itself above and beyond all other peoples.’”’
That attitude was further strengthened by the intensification,
in 19th-century Europe, of the surrounding nationalism. ‘“They
have considered themselves the elect people, one superior to
all other peoples, which is characteristic of all chauvinist
nations, the Germans as well as the French and English of
today.’
The Jews’ withdrawal into their particular world was nothing
new. The noblest attempts at opening-out had been combated,
all through the centuries, by integralist (in the sense of
ultra-strict) rabbis and ‘“‘a petrifying Talmudism’’. Lazare
recalls how, in the 12th century, the attempt made by Maimo-
nides, the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time, to demon-
strate the harmony between faith and reason was fiercely
opposed by the integralists. His major work, More Nebuchim
(the Guide for the Perplexed) was denounced by the Talmudists
to the Dominicans. In 1232 Rabbi Salomon, of Montpellier,
pronounced an anathema upon anyone who read the book,
and arranged for it to be burnt. The Talmudists strove ‘‘to con-
fine Israel to the exclusive study of the Law.’’? “At the instiga-
tion of a German doctor, Asher ben Yechiel, a synod of thirty
rabbis met in Barcelona, with Ben Adret in the chair, and
excommunicated all those who read books other than the Bible
and the Talmud, when under twenty-five years.’’!® Lazare
summarises thus the result of this tendency: “‘Their end was
attained. They had cut off Israel from the community of
nations,””!!
In the 17th century the same tendency which had sought to
stifle the voice of Maimonides was continued in the effort made
by the Talmudists to destroy Spinoza. In the 18th century they
attacked Moses Mendelssohn: by translating the Bible into
German he brought upon himself condemnation by the rabbis,
who were determined to retain their monopoly of Talmudic
 INTRODUCTION 13

interpretation of the Law, and not to allow the people to have

direct access to the Torah, and they forbade the reading of this
translation.
We shall see how, today, in the State of Israel, the rabbinate
of the extreme Right-wing religious parties tries to maintain
this ‘“‘selective’’ and sectarian reading of the Bible, for new
political ends, and succeeds in imposing its attitude upon the
State.
Lazare emphasises another prejudicial aspect of this tradi-
tion:

To make of Israel the centre of the world, the ferment of the

peuples, the agitator of the nations, is absurd: but that is how both
the friends and the enemies of the Jews proceed. Whether their
name is Bossuet or Drumont, they attribute excessive importance
to the Jews.!?

In his Discourse on Universal History Bossuet made Judaea

the centre of the world. All the events of history, the foun-
dation or the downfall of empires, had as their sole cause the
will of a God faithful to the Sons of Israel, whose duty it was to
direct mankind towards its only objective, the coming of
Christ. It is enough to turn this schema upside down and we get
the ‘‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, that forgery manutfac-
tured, on the morrow of the World Zionist Congress at Basel
in 1897, by the secret department of the Russian police, in
order to give support to the idea of a “‘Judeo-Masonic conspir-
acy’ aimed at establishing a world domination which would
mean the triumph of evil. The symmetry with Bossuet’s con-
ception is perfect.
When we mention, with Bernard Lazare, the tendencies in
Jewish thought which stress Jewish exceptionalism, in contrast
to universalism, those tendencies which stress the spirit of con-
quest, domination and massacre in Joshua, the racial discrimi-
nation in Ezra, the propensity to turn the people of Israel into
the centre of the world and of its history, we do this, following
the line of Lazare’s thinking, in order to clear away the deliber-
14 INTRODUCTION

ate confusion created by the antisemites when they try to

deduce the Zionist perversion from an alleged fundamental
defect in Judaism.
The rich tradition of Judaism contains, like Christianity and
Islam, tendencies that are mutually contradictory and, just as
there is a Christian Constantinism and integralism, and just as
there is a Muslim integralism and closing of the gate of ijtihad
(the right to individual interpretation of Islamic doctrine), so
also there are in the history of Judaism tendencies to integral-
ism and withdrawal. It is these tendencies that are exploited, in
a Judaism in which most of them do not believe, by the most
fanatical Zionists of today. What we oppose is precisely this
selective reading of the Bible and of Jewish tradition which iso-
lates the Jews from other peoples. We do not forget for one
moment that, in the great tradition of Judaism and in its contri-
bution to the elevation of mankind, there exists, in contrast to
these deadly urges, the ferment of a divine flowering of life.
With the themes of the covenant and the promise, a covenant
and a promise to which are summoned, according to Genesis,
‘all the families of the earth”, the whole of mankind, there
emerges in human form a new requirement — that man, that all
men are to strive, at every moment of their history, to discern
God’s purpose, the divine plan, and to submit to it so as to
accomplish it, like Abraham with his sacrifice, and in this way
to render relative all our wisdom and all our morality, so that
faith begins where thought ends.
With Abraham, with the Messianic promise of the kingdom
of God, with the great commandments of justice promulgated
by Moses, with the great upsurge of the Prophets, internalising
this faith in a rejection of all outward formalisation thereof,
when Hosea proclaims (vi, 6): “For I desired mercy, and not
sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offer-
ings”, with Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah, who make universal
the promise of “a just God and a Saviour” (Jsaiah, xlv, 21),
with the great Jewish Messianism — and this is perhaps the
greatest contribution of Judaism to world civilisation — there
 INTRODUCTION 15

appears the age of hope, the age of looking ahead, the leaven
of the future. In the homage rendered to Judaism in my Appel
aux vivants (Call to the Living) I wrote:
Such is the essential contribution of Judaism, the new conception
of time introduced by the great prophets: the age of promise, of
hope, of looking ahead . . . By its fidelity to the Covenant a people
becomes worthy of the fulfilment of the promise: the realisation of
the Kingdom of God. By responding to the call from God,
whose witnesses and messengers the prophets are, this people
takes part in God’s continuing work of creation in history. History
is this constant emergence of what is radically new in men’s lives
. . . Itis lit up by the Messianic promise of the end of time. !?

Further on I wrote: “‘One of the greatest misfortunes of the

present State of Israel is just this; that whereas it has need of
Prophets, it is subjected to the law of integralist rabbis.’’!4
The prophetic leaven did not cease to exist, with all its
human warmth, centuries after the great Prophets of Scripture,
among those whom Gerschom Scholem evokes in his book,
which has become a classic, on Major Trends in Jewish Mystic-.
ism.'°
He cites the gnosticism of the Jew Philo, in Alexandria at
the crossroads of the influences of the East and of Greece, and
the German ‘‘Hasidism”’ around Rabbi Yehuda, so close to his
contemporary St Francis of Assisi in his sense of the presence
of God and of Love.
In Spain, with the meeting of Judaism with the Islam of the
Andalusian Sufis, and from their experience of a personal and
immediate contact with God, which brings them close, as
Gerschom Scholem points out, to the Buddhism of Tibet and
to Hindu spirituality, the finest fruits of Judaism are born. The
great synthesis of Jewish faith written in Arabic by Maimo-
nides (1135-1204), friend and disciple of the Muslim Averroes
(Ibn Rushd): and the Zohar (the Book of Splendour) of Moses
of Leén (end of the 13th century), in which love of God takes
the place of fear of God, as with his contemporary, the Christ-
ian monk of Calabria, Joachim of Floris.
16 INTRODUCTION

Finally, the last ‘“‘Hasidism’’, born in Poland in the 16th cen-

tury — so close to the vision of the Rhineland mystics and Meis-
ter Eckhart — and flowering further in the 19th century with the
Letters to the Hasidim on ecstasy, which revives in every man
that spark of God which he bears within him.
The grand universalism of the prophets, which inspires Spi-
noza’s Ethics with so powerful a breath, despite the constraint
of Cartesian mathematical formalism. The Messianism which
impels the young Marx and makes his work a ferment of the
revolutionary spirit for a whole century.
Right up to the spiritual message of Martin Buber, which
opens a breach at last in five centuries of cannibalistic indivi-
dualism, reminding us that the centre of the self lies in the
other: ‘‘In the beginning is the relation . . . We live in the cur-
rents of universal reciprocity.”’’© For him, the spirit is not to be
found in the self but in its relation to the other. It is with civil-
isations as with individuals: they live and come to flower only
through reciprocal fertilisation. The highest revelation of God
is experienced in one’s relation to another.
In relation to this ancient universalist tradition in Judaism,
political Zionism constitutes a nationalist and colonialist dis-
tortion which owes its bent not to Judaism but to the European
nationalism and colonialism of the 19th century. It makes use of
a selective and tribal reading of the Bible, a veritable diversion
of God’s purpose, in order to provide a disguise and camou-
flage for its political objectives. !”

C. The Israel of the Bible and the Present ‘‘Zionist State” of

Israel
At the latest stage of the history of the Zionist state, which
could be called that of militarist Zionism, this use of Biblical
pretexts is assuming new dimensions.
At a moment when Israel is spending, according to the
report of the World Bank, more than 50 per cent of its budget
on its war machine, and when this militarisation has for its aim,
 INTRODUCTION 17

from now on, as Ariel Sharon himself tells us, and in accord-
ance with the plans of the Zionist movement which we repro-
duce later, not the defence of Israel but the disintegration of
the Arab states of the region, Bible passages are invoked to
‘justify’ the permanent extension of the frontiers and also the
methods of massacre and state terrorism.
The thing itself is not new.'® In 1937 already Ben-Gurion”?
was tracing the frontiers of Israel by means of references to the
Bible. According to him, the land of Israel should embrace five
regions: the southern part of Lebanon, up to the river Litani
(this he called ‘“‘the northern part of western Israel’’); southern
Syria; Transjordania (what is now called Jordan); Palestine
(which he called ‘‘the territory of the [British] Mandate’’); and
Sinai. The northern frontier should follow the latitude of
Hama, in Syria, because he identified this town with Hamath,
‘which marks in Numbers (xxxiv, 1-8) the northern frontier of
Canaan. Other Zionists, ardent ‘‘Bible scholars”’ for their own
purposes, identify Hamath with Aleppo, while yet others place
it in Turkey! Rabbi Adin Shteinsalz, close to the Shelli party, —
propounded, during a colloquy organised by Sartre in Israel,
Jewish “historical rights’? over Cyprus! In 1956 Ben-Gurion
declared, to acclamation by the Knesset, that Sinai formed part
of “the Kingdom of David and Solomon’’. After the brake
imposed by the United States and the Soviet Union at the time
of the attack on Suez, this “Bible geography” was put under
the counter, to be brought out again in 1967. Similarly, in the
defining of the limits of the promised land, “‘the river of Egypt”
(Numbers, xxxiv, 5) has been made sometimes to signify the
Nile (but which of its mouths?) and sometimes the Wadi
el-Arish.
In this elastic conception of the frontier the Bible is always
invoked, at a given point, to legitimise an aggression before-
hand or to justify an annexation after the event.
At the present stage of Zionist expansion the paranoiac
imagination of the rabbis of the “religious parties”, who are
the most fanatical for conquest, is drawn upon to justify the
18 INTRODUCTION

adventures of Israeli militarism, and thereby to satisfy the des-

potic requirements of the integralists. It was no accident when,
at the same time as he launched the invasion of Lebanon,
Begin decided that the aircraft of El Al were not to fly on
Saturdays, so as to respect the Sabbath.
Such tokens paid to the integralists are generously recom-
pensed by way of ideological justifications: not only have the
occupied territories in Lebanon become the land of “the Tribe
of Asher’’, but the massacres themselves have been ‘“‘sanc-
tified” for the needs of the cause. The destruction of Tyre and
Sidon, the pounding of Beirut and the slaughter of Sabra and
Shatila were not just a direct continuation of the ““Oradours”’
of Deir Yasin (perpetrated by Mr Begin’s Irgun in 1948), of
Qibya and of Kafr Kasem, and the bloody exploits of the kil-
lers of Ariel Sharon’s ‘Unit 101”: all this murder was given a
title of distinction. In the name of the mission of the Israel of
the Bible, the present-day state of Israel is said to be repeating
the holy deed of the Israel of the Bible when it exterminated
the Canaanites, dealing with the Arabs today just as the
Canaanites and other previous occupants of this land were
dealt with.*°

But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give
thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that
breatheth. But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hit-
tites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the
Hivites and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded
thee.”

Or again: ‘‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy

all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and
woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”’22
This “Biblical” justification of genocide, this legitimising of
the successive aggressions and annexations of the present
Zionist state of Israel, presented as the legitimate heir and con-
tinuation of the Israel of the Bible, makes it easy for the unac-
ceptable to be accepted by the Jews of the Diaspora and by
 INTRODUCTION 19

many Christians who uncritically take as true a Catholic

catechism and a Protestant Sunday-school teaching which
unconsciously promote the Zionist mythology, the fundamen-
tal insubstantiality of which has nevertheless been proved by
exegesis over a whole century, and especially in recent years.
In this case we see proof of the mobilising power of a myth.
Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, in an article in the newspaper Neku-
dah entitled “The strength to finish the work’’,”? provides the
policy of Ariel Sharon and of Begin with the “‘theological’”’
backing needed for their imperial projects: using many quota-
tions from the Bible he explains that Israel has given proof,
with the occupation of Lebanon, that it can establish a “new
order” in the Middle East and far beyond, and that this is “‘the
beginning of salvation” for the world. He is no longer content
to extol a war of defence: war itself becomes a value. In this
way of “‘salvation’’, he says, Israel has reached, in Lebanon, “‘a
more advanced stage than after the Six-Day War.” ‘““Through
this war we have shown our armed strength... We are
responsible for order both in the Middle East and in the
world.”
Faced with such megalomaniac ravings of Israeli nationalism
and militarism we realise how prophetic were the distress and
the warning of an early Zionist who recalled in 1958 how he
had entered the movement sixty years previously. Martin
Buber, one of the greatest thinkers of our century, author of
The Kingdom of God, The Knowledge of Man, On the Bible,
and Israel and the World, replied to Ben-Gurion in Jerusalem
in 1957:

And now Ben-Gurion tells us. . . that the Messianic idea is alive and
will live until the coming of the Messiah. And I answer him with the
question: ‘‘In how many hearts of this generation, in our country,
does the Messianic idea live in a form other than the narrow nation-
alistic form which is restricted to the ingathering of the exiles?” A
Messianic idea without the yearning for the redemption of mankind,
and without the desire to take part in its realisation, is no longer
identical with the Messianic visions of the prophets of Israel.**
20 INTRODUCTION

Buber never ceased, through all his life as a Zionist, until his
death in Israel, to denounce the political and nationalist per-
version of religious Zionism:

We talk of the spirit of Israel and assume that we are not like unto
all the nations. . . . But if the spirit of Israel is no more to us than
the synthetic personality of our nation, no more than a fine jus-
tification for our collective egoism, no more than our prince trans-
formed into an idol — after we had refused to accept any prince
other than the Lord of the Universe! — then we are indeed like unto
all the nations; and we are drinking together with them from the
cup that inebriates.’
National ideology, the spirit of nationalism, is fruitful just so
long as it does not make the nation an end in itself . . . Judaism is
not merely being a nation. It is being a nation, but because of its
own peculiar connection with the quality of being a community of
faith, it is more than that.”

Showing the deep root of this perversion of political Zion-

ism, sprung not from Judaism but from the European national-
ism of the 19th century, and which has now become a substi-
tute for religion, the idolatrous cult of a state, the state that
calls itself the state of Israel, he wrote:

Jewish religion was uprooted, and this is at the core of the disease
indicated by the rise of Jewish nationalism around the middle of
the 19th century . . . That original yearning is back of all the dis-
guises which modern national Judaism has borrowed from the
modern nationalism of the West . . . Here the question may arise
as to what the idea of the election of Israel has to do with all this.
This idea does not indicate a feeling of superiority, but a sense of
destiny. It does not spring from a comparison with others, but from
the concentrated devotion to a task . . . The prophets formulated
that task and never ceased uttering their warning: If you boast of
being chosen instead of living up to it, if you turn election into a
static object instead of obeying it as a command, you will forfeit
it.

Referring to this “nationalist crisis’? of political Zionism which

is a perversion of the spirituality of Judaism, he concluded:
 INTRODUCTION 21

“We hoped to save Jewish nationalism from the error of mak-

ing an idol of the people. We have not succeeded.”’?8
Martin Buber was one of those who had a passionate, sen-
sual attachment to the land of Zion. He stressed this in 1939 in
a letter to Gandhi, who had asked why the Zionists did not feel
bound (in order to fight against oppression on the spot, along
with all the rest of the people) to the country where they were
born, instead of seeking a different ‘‘national home’. Buber
replied that the Jewish faith could not live otherwise than in a
community, in accordance with its own laws and on its own ter-
ritory:
What is decisive for us is not the promise of the land but the
demand whose fulfilment is bound up with the land, with the exis-
tence of a free Jewish community in this country.”?
When Gandhi reminded him that Palestine belongs to the
Arabs and that it would be unjust and inhuman to impose Jew-
ish domination upon the Arabs, Buber replied: ““We have no
desire to dispossess them: we want to live with them.’*° ,
In a lecture given in New York in 1958 he defined with
emphasis his constant position on this problem of relations
with the Arabs. As he saw it, the “rebirth of the Jewish
people” had to proceed in step with their ‘“‘becoming a member
of the world of the Near East’’, and that ruled out the resort to
force: ‘“The most pernicious of all false teachings, that accor-
ding to which the way of history is determined by power
alone’’, which is always ‘‘the victory of the subhuman over the
human” and “‘the betrayal of faith”. The worst mistake, accor-
ding to Buber, was to consider Israel “‘an enclave of the West-
ern world”. He recalled in 1958 how in 1921 he had “‘put for-
ward the idea of a Near-Eastern Federation in which we should
participate”’.*! However, “‘in opposition to the proposals for a
bi-national state, or a Jewish share in a Near-Eastern Federa-
tion, the unhappy partition of Palestine took place, the cleft
between the two peoples was split wide asunder, and war
raged.”** Buber observed that he was not against violence on
22 INTRODUCTION

principle and that he did not challenge the existence of the State
of Israel, but he firmly maintained, after the two first Israeli-Arab
wars, which he witnessed, that ‘“‘there can be no peace between
Jews and Arabs that is only cessation of war; there can only be a
peace of genuine co-operation”’. ‘“Today it appears absurd to
many. . . to think now about Israeli participation in a Near East
federation. Tomorrow, with an alteration in certain world-
political situations independent of us, this possibility may arise in
a highly positive sense.””*°
Such statements would nowadays be enough to cause Buber to
be treated by Begin or his loyal agents in the Zionist Organisation
as an anti-Israeli, ‘‘that is’’, as an antisemite — Buber the greatest
Jewish prophet who has lived in the State of Israel since its foun-
dation.
Fortunately, this tradition, though an affair of a small minority
only, thanks to the ideological conditioning of Israeli children at
school, of soldiers by the Army’s rabbis, and of the entire popula-
tion by official propaganda, is not wholly dead. We heard, for
example, at the time of the aggression and massacres in Lebanon,
the cry of Professor Benjamin Cohen, of Tel-Aviv University, to
P. Vidal-Nacquet, on 8 June 1982:

I am writing to you as I listen to the transistor which has just an-

nounced that ‘‘we”’ are engaged in “‘attaining our objective”’ in Leba-
non, namely, to ensure ‘“‘peace”’ for the inhabitants of Galilee. These
lies, worthy of Goebbels, drive me mad. It is obvious that this savage
war, more barbarous than all the previous ones, has nothing to do
with the attempted assassination in London, or with the security of
Galilee. . . Jews, sons of Abraham. . . Jews, themselves victims of
so many cruelties, can they have become so cruel? . . . The greatest
success of Zionism is only this, then: the “‘de-judaising”’. . . of the
Jews. Dear friends, do everything in your power to prevent the
Begins and Sharons from attaining their twofold objective: the final
liquidation (a fashionable phrase at present) of the Palestinians as a
people and of the Israelis as human beings.**

This condemnation is as severe as the condemnations by the

Prophets — as that by Jeremiah cursing those ‘“‘which prophesy a
 INTRODUCTION 23

lie unto you in my name . . . They have committed villainy in

Israel . . .”” (Jeremiah, xxix, 21,23). Or that of Micah condem-
ning the leaders of Israel: “Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of
the house of Jacob and princes of the house of Israel, that
abhor judgement and pervert all equity. They build up Zion
with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity” (Micah, iii, 9-10).
Today anyone who denounces the policy of the “princes of
the house of Israel’’, the policy of the Zionist State of Israel, is
denounced as an antisemite. By that criterion Amos, Isaiah,
Micah, Jeremiah, all the great prophets would be denounced
as “‘antisemites”. Because, among the great traditions of Juda-
ism, the present leaders of Zionism have chosen to listen only
to what may justify their policy: the tale of Joshua’s massacres
of the Canaanites, prefiguring for them the massacres of the
Arabs of Palestine and Lebanon, and not the curses of Jere-
- miah or Micah — Ezra’s laws of racial discrimination, and not
the universalist Messianism of Ezekiel and Isaiah.
They have chosen “‘the doctors who slew the Prophets’.
Through this imposture, which assimilates to antisemitism
any criticism of the policy of the Zionist State of Israel, they
create a grave risk of arousing real antisemitism.
What is liable to engender antisemitism nowadays is not cri-
ticism of the policy of aggression and bloodshed, but blind,
unconditional support of that policy.
For neither Menachem Begin nor Ariel Sharon nor Itzhak
Shamir are able, by themselves, to create antisemitism by their
atrocities. No one, indeed, could confuse these long-since
notorious war-criminals*? (whose massacres in Lebanon are
the logical, unavoidable consequence of their ideology, their
mythology and their policy of colonialist expansion) with the
Israeli people as a whole, and still less with our fellow-
countrymen who follow the Jewish religion or tradition.
Those who are creating the greatest danger of fostering anti-
semitism are the leaders of certain so-called ‘“‘representative”’
| organisations who behave as unconditional agents of the Zion-
ist government of Israel, to whose most flagrant crimes and lies
24 INTRODUCTION

they give approval; who at once take up its slogans, and who
claim, furthermore, against all the evidence, to speak in the
name of the ‘Jewish community” as a whole, whereas many
members of that community, following the example of hun-
dreds of thousands of Israelis in Israel itself, have repudiated
these crimes and their perpetrators.
Without any doubt at all, dangerous confusions are created
when Begin and his crew, backed by the fanatical rabbis of the
“religious parties” who call for a “holy war’’, read the Bible in
a tribal spirit, and by a false usage of the themes of “‘the chosen
people” and ‘“‘the promised land” delude both Jews and Christ-
ians, so as to justify in the name of an alleged divine right a
bloody violation of human rights. Serving the cause of Judaism
and Christianity means rejecting the imposture constituted by
this manipulation of sacred things; refusing to confuse Judaism,
that is, the faith of Abraham and Moses, the great universalism
of the Prophets, with the racist chauvinism of Zionism; and not
calling those torturers in the service of Haddad or his like who
do the dirty work for the government in Tel-Aviv “Lebanese
Christians”. Our aim is, precisely, to combat these confusions.
To distinguish between the State of Israel and its policy, on the
one hand, and, on the other, the mass of the Israeli people, who
are beginning to become aware of the manipulations they have
suffered at the hands of their rulers. To distinguish between
Judaism and the Zionist mythology which deforms it for
political ends. To refuse today to yield to the intellectual terror-
ism of the Israeli racist agents who would like to divide the
world into Zionists and antisemites, just as yesterday’s racists
tried to divide it into Jews and non-Jews.
We fight against political Zionism precisely because we are
anti-racist. It is not anti-Zionism that gives rise to anti-
semitism, it is Zionism itself that does this.
We fight against a Zionism that seeks to utilise religion to
sanctify a policy.
In order to break out of these deadly confusions between
religious Zionism and political Zionism, between Judaism and
 INTRODUCTION 25

Zionism, and between the Israel of the Bible and the Zionist
State of Israel, we shall try to de-bunk political Zionism by
examining the mythology on which it is based — historical
myths and pseudo-Biblical ones — and the political reality
which follows with inexorable necessity from the mystical pre-
mises of political Zionism, namely: an internal policy based
upon racism; an external policy of aggression and expansion
aimed at the conquest of “‘living space” to accommodate a
hypothetical immigration; and a method of political action
typified by state terrorism.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. This is nothing new. The Reverend A. C. Forrest recalls, in his book
The Unholy Land (Toronto and Montreal, MacLelland Stewart, 1971)
how, having been entrusted by the Presbyterian churches with preparing
a report on the Palestinian refugees and having brought back photo-
graphic evidence of the Israelis’ use of napalm, he received this friendly
warning from the anti-Zionist Jewish leader Bill Gottlieb: ‘Unless I miss_
my guess there will be some kind of public outcry from Zionists, and you
may as well be prepared for all kinds of slanderous charges” (p. 39).
From Forrest’s case to the cases brought against Georges Montaron of
Témoignage Chrétien, Jacques Fauvet of Le Monde and myself, the
method has not changed.
2. In the National Council of the International League Against Racism and
Antisemitism M. André Monteil paraphrased Begin’s slogan at some
length. Anti-Zionism, he said, is ““an avatar of antisemitism.” “‘Modern
antisemitism has found a mode of expression which seems more respect-
able: One is not antisemitic, one is anti-Zionist”’ (Le Monde, 16 Novem-
ber 1982). We shall see later on the reasons for this mimesis.
3. The basic work on this subject, to which we shall have occasion to make
frequent reference, is by a fervently Zionist lawyer, Professor Claude
Klein, Director of the Institute of Comparative Law in the Hebrew Uni-
versity of Jerusalem: Le Caractere juif de I’Etat d’Israél (Paris, Editions
Cujas, 1977). He does not conceal the constant mixing-up between the
ethnic criterion and the religious criterion that occurs when answering
the questions ‘‘who is a Jew?” (Chapter II, p. 47) and “who is not a
Jew?” (Chapter III, p. 52).
4. This fundamental work has, fortunately, been reprinted by Editions de la
Différence (L’antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes, 1982). [An ear-
lier reprint appeared in Paris in 1934, and an English translation, unfor-
tunatély incomplete, was published in 1967 — Trans.]
26 INTRODUCTION

Nn _ Bernard Lazare, Antisemitism, its History and Causes, London, 1967, p.

hile
. Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid., p. 10.
. Ibid., p. 133.
Oo. Ibid., p. 63.
OND

10. Ibid., p. 64.

_ Ibid., p. 14.
12s [This passage does not appear in the English translation. It is on p. 263 of
Vol. 2 of the 1934 French edition — Trans.] Yet this is what even André
Neher has done, in his fine book on L’essence du prophétisme
(Calmann-Lévy, 1972, p. 111): “Israel is the axis of the world, its nerve,
its centre, its heart.”
. Roger Garaudy, Appel aux vivants, Editions du Seuil, Collection
“Point”, 1979, p. 154.
; bids. ps 15s.
. Jerusalem, 1941.
. Martin Buber, J and Thou, Edinburgh, 1970, pp. 69 and 67.
. Bernard Lazare said that the Talmud diverts us from the Bible: ‘““The
doctors slew the Prophets” [not in the English translation: in the 1934
French edition, Vol. 2, p. 184 — Trans.]. But we are not concerned here
to engage in a polemic over the Talmud. It would be dishonest to quibble
over this or that page of hatred or cruelty in the Talmud, linked with the
mores of a particular epoch and its conception of faith. When Rabbi
Simeon ben Yokhai said: “The best of the Gentiles should be killed” he
was no more ferocious than Saint Louis when he recommended that no
layman should argue with a Jew, but, “as soon as he hears the Christian
faith maligned, should defend it only by the sword, with a good thrust in
the belly, as far as the sword would go.” (Joinville, The Life of St Louis,
Sheed and Ward, 1955, p. 36). The drama lies in choosing today Joshua
in the Bible, or Rabbi Simeon ben Yokhai in the Talmud, in order to jus-
tify a policy, deliberately turning one’s back on the universalist and
prophetic tradition in Judaism.
. This reading of the Bible will be analysed in the first chapter of this study,
so as to show both how it is done and also its total lack of foundation.
. Report to the world congress of Poalei Zion, Zurich, 29 July 1937 (Tel-
Aviv, 1938, pp. 206, 207).
. We show in the first chapter of this book the purely mythical character of
these ‘holy exterminations”’.
. Deuteronomy, xx, 16-17.
. I Samuel, xv, 3.
. Analysed by Aharon Moged in Davar of 3 September 1982.
. Martin Buber, /srael and the World (New York, Schocken, 1948, 1963, p.
263).
. Ibid., p. 185 (Lecture at Tel-Aviv in 1939).
. Ibid., pp. 221-222 (Address to the 12th Zionist Congress, Karlsbad, 5
September 1921).
 INTRODUCTION 27

ls Ibid., pp. 223-224.

.Ibid., p. 224.
29. Ibid., p. 229 (Letter to Gandhi, 1939).
30. Ibid., p. 233.
ot. Ibid., pp. 255-256.
32: Ibid., p. 256.
33. Ibid., p. 257. (Lecture of 30 April 1958, in New York, to the American
Friends of hud.)
34. Letter published in Le Monde, 19 June 1982.
35. For a summary of their ‘“‘biographies’’, see the last chapter of this book.
Bu
(oad ea gaa

i> Gente
Sopeeae
 PART ONE
THE HISTORICAL MYTH

I
The Myth of “Historic Rights”’
_ “This land is the historic home of the Jews’’, declared the
Memorandum of the Zionist Organisation to the Peace Con-
ference in 1919.
The proclamation of the State of Israel, on 14 May 1948, .
affirmed that it was “‘by virtue of the natural and historic right
of the Jewish people” that this state was being established in
Palestine.
This idea of “‘historic rights” is constantly linked, in Zionist
propaganda, with that of the ‘‘promised land’’, which is sup-
posed to confer on the Israelis a genuine “‘divine right”’ of own-
ership and domination over Palestine.
However, we shall deal with the two problems separately.
This separation is not hard to effect, since no trace is to be
found, outside of the Biblical texts, either in the texts of the
Middle-Eastern peoples or in archaeological remains, of any of
the Old Testament accounts of events before the 10th century
B.C. Even a scholar so concerned to rescue the authenticity of
the Old Testament as the Dominican Father de Vaux acknow-
ledges that, apart from the Bible, we can find “no explicit
- reference to the Hebrew patriarchs, the period spent in Egypt,
or the conquest of Canaan. It is, moreover, doubtful whether
29
30 THE HISTORICAL MYTH
oo]
any further light will be shed on this question by new texts.
The theme of the “‘promise’’ of the land of Palestine thus
appears only in texts emanating from those who claim to be the
beneficiaries thereof. Other exegetists have, for a century past,
arrived at conclusions much more radical still, as we shall see
later, in connection with the Biblical myth of the “‘promised
land” (Von Rad, Noth, Thompson, Van Seters, Albert de
Pugy.)5: 3):
The first observation which is forced on one as soon as one
ceases to be content with accepting uncritically the “‘historical”
parts of the Old Testament is that, far from constituting the
“centre”’ of history, as 1s claimed by the “‘exceptionalist” thesis
of political Zionism, taken up by a certain Christian catechesis,
the history of the Hebrews does not appear at any time to have
been distinct from that of the great Mesopotamian, Hittite or
Egyptian empires.
Leaving aside archaeology, which testifies to the presence of
man ten thousand years ago in what was to become Palestine,
if we confine ourselves to the historical period, for which writ-
ten documents exist, we can distinguish, schematically:
(1) The early Bronze Age, down to the third millennium
B.C., for which we have evidence (and even more since the
discovery of the Ebla texts in 1976) of the existence in Canaan
of a great urban civilisation maintained by the Western
Semitic-speaking peoples, such as those who spoke Aramaic
and “the language of Canaan’’, which we call Hebrew.
(2) Then a period (2200-1900) marked by the irruption of
nomads.
(3) Then a new phase of town life (1900-1550), in the
middle Bronze Age.
(4) And, from the middle of the 16th century B.C., domina-
tion of the region by Egypt: the Pharaohs of the 18th dynasty
made Palestine an Egyptian marchland.
This region, at the heart of the ‘‘Fertile Crescent’? which
extends from the Nile to the Euphrates, is one through which
the most diverse groups of human beings have passed and
 THE MYTH OF “HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 31

where they have mingled. When nomads, or pastoral peoples

who were on their way to adopting a settled way of life, coming
from Mesopotamia or Transjordan in the course of their trans-
humances, arrived in Canaan at the beginning of the second
millennium B.C., in the early Bronze Age, they found there
inhabitants who had made it their home long before — the
Canaanites, who already possessed an urban civilisation and
were to acquire, at the end of the second millennium, the use
of iron and the practice of alphabetic writing.
The ‘“‘Hebrews’’, contrary to the traditional schema of the
Bible, did not form a distinct ethnic group before the nomads
entered Canaan. They were a confederation based on a variety
of ethnic groups, forming an element in the great nomadic mi-
grations (Amorites, according to Father de Vaux, or Ara-
maeans).
Some of these nomads settled in Canaan, while others con-
tinued on into Egypt. The former (among whom were those
who were later to be called ‘‘Hebrews’’) borrowed from the
Canaanites their language, writing and religion, until, round
about 1400, perhaps in the wake of the Hyksos invaders, they
sought pastures new in Egypt.
When the Hyksos were driven out of Egypt, those who, hav-
ing probably arrived with them and enjoyed their protection,
had benefited from a privileged status, were regarded as “‘col-
laborators’”” and subjected to increasingly oppressive living
conditions. These rebellious fringe-people, who did not form
an ethnic group but rather a category of persons hostile to
Pharaoh, under the name of apiru (from which doubtless comes
the name ‘‘Hebrew’’, as Father de Vaux suggests), fled from
Egypt. This sort of ‘‘exodus” of discontented outsiders must
have been pretty frequent and commonplace for the Egyptian
chronicles not to make any mention of the ‘incident’, even in
the form of a frontier-guard’s report — although we possess
such reports on “crossings” from the 19th century B.C.
onwards.
The only “sources” we have, apart from what is in the Old
32 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

Testament, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The

earliest mention of the name “Israel” appears on a stele of
about 1225, commemorating the victories of Pharaoh Mernep-
tah. There it is said, without giving any details, that when he
seized towns in Palestine he also destroyed “‘Israel’’: “Israel
has been destroyed, its race exists no more.” Nothing else is
said about Israel in this text.
Furthermore, four hundred clay tablets which were dis-
covered, from 1887 onward, at Tel-el-Amarna, the capital
created by Pharaoh Amenophis IV (Akhenaton, 1375-1358),
give us records which include the correspondence between
Pharaoh and the vassal princes of Palestine and Syria. They
contain no trace of Israel, but provide interesting information
about the city-states of Canaan and their rivalries.
From these very slight traces left by Israel in the history of
other peoples two conclusions at once emerge:
First, that it is not possible to ascribe to Israel, as an “‘his-
toric right’, the right of the first occupier. When the tribes
arrived in Palestine, with the Aramaean wave, they found
there the ‘“‘indigenous”’ Canaanites, the Hittites (around Heb-
ron, which they founded), the Ammonites (around Amman),
the Moabites (to the east of the Dead Sea) and the Edomites
(in the south-east). At the same time there were arriving from
the Aegean Sea another people, the Philistines, who installed
themselves between Mount Carmel and the desert. Those who
are nowadays called ‘‘Palestinians” are thus not descended
from the Arabs alone. The Arabs arrived in the 7th century
A.D., in small numbers, converted to Islam the major part of
the population (including the Israelites), merged with them by
inter-marriage and introduced their own language. The
appearance of the Arabs in Palestine in the 7th century was far
more of a cultural phenomenon than an ethnic one. The Pales-
tinians are descended from the indigenous Canaanites who
lived in Palestine five thousand years ago at least (since the
beginning of the historical epoch), from the Philistines (who
gave the country its name, Palestine — in Arabic, Falastin), and
 THE MYTH OF “‘HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 33

also from the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs
and the Turks who successively occupied the country, follow-
ing the Babylonians, the Hittites and the Egyptians. The ‘“‘first
occupiers” are these ‘“‘Palestinians’’, who have inhabited the
country since the dawn of history.
The second observation that follows from this history of
Palestine is that the Hebrews (the apiru), when they arrived
from Egypt in the 13th century B.C. and established them-
selves in Palestine, either by infiltration or by conquest (we
shall come back to this point when discussing the Bible
accounts), were simply one lot of invaders amongst others
(Babylonians, Hittites, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans,
Arabs, Turks, British).
It is only after their installation in Canaan, in approximately
the 13th century, that we can speak of an Israelite people,
formed into a confederation of tribes of various ethnic origins,
and can draw upon sources either external or internal: first,
because, as has been mentioned, there is no document other ~
than the Bible that relates to the previous period,* and
secondly because none of the Biblical texts were composed
before the reign of Solomon (10th century), and these first ver-
sions were inspired by the political preoccupations of the time
(exaltation or criticism of the monarchy, legitimation of owner-
ship of land or of its conquest, etc.), and based on oral tradi-
tions. They were like the Norse sagas, Homer’s poems, the
legends of King Arthur, the heroic genealogies of the African
griots, or the tales told by Arab storytellers, in which, as Father
de Vaux says (op. cit., p. 182):

Place-names or names of groups within the tribe as well as ances-

tors’ surnames are explained by popular etymology. The anecdotes
establish the tribal right to use a certain territory or to enjoy a cer-
tain privilege and in them the group to which the narrator belongs
plays a leading part.

From analysis of the Biblical texts (for we have no others)

we learn that in about the year 1000 B.C. the leader of a band
34 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

(what in the 16th century A.D. would be called a condottiere),

belonging to the tribe of Judah, at the head of Philistine and
Cretan mercenaries, exploiting cleverly the balance of power
between the two ‘‘superpowers”’ of the age, the Babylonians
and the Egyptians, succeeded in building a kingdom and estab-
lishing himself, with his bodyguard of Cretans and Philistines,
in Jerusalem, where the former inhabitants, the Jebusites,
went on living. This leader of a band, David, who entrusted the
command of one-third of his army to a Philistine, Ittai of Gath,
and.in Transjordan during Absalom’s revolt was fed by the
Ammonite prince Shobi, did not make any attempt to
‘“‘Judaise’> Canaan. On the contrary, he created a multi-
national state, embracing peoples of different religions and ori-
gins. His own ancestress Ruth was a Moabite, and when he was
in difficulties he put his relatives under the protection of the
Kingof Moab.
By a Hittite woman he had a son, Solomon, who succeeded
him on the throne and who maintained and even extended the
multi-national character of the state.*
After Solomon’s death the Kingdom of David was divided
into Israel, in the North, and Judah, in the South. In 721 the
Assyrians invaded Israel, and in 587 Judah was conquered by
the Babylonians. The country’s notables were carried off into
exile. When Cyrus, King of Persia, took Babylon he allowed
the exiles to return (though many of them preferred to remain
in Babylon).Thereafter the Hebrews lived successively under
the domination of the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans
until the revolt led by the Maccabees in the 2nd century B.C.,
which was directed against a Seleucid epigone of Alexander
named Antiochus Epiphanes. After a twenty-years’ struggle,
the Maccabees formed a dynasty known as the Hasmoneans.
This broke up owing to internal conflicts, and in 63 B.C. Pom-
pey conquered Palestine, which became first a_ vassal
monarchy under Herod, then a Roman province. Two revolts
against the Roman occupier failed, in 70 and 135 A.D. After
the second revolt, led by Bar Kokhba, had been crushed, the
 THE MYTH OF “HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 35

Temple was destroyed. The Jewish people were dispersed

throughout all the coastlands of the Mediterranean. The
Israelite community had ceased to exist in Palestine.
Benjamin of Toledo, a Jewish pilgrim who visited Jerusalem
in 1170, found only 1,440 Jews in the whole of Palestine.
Nahmanides, in 1267, met only two Jewish families in Jerusa-
lem.
And yet, whereas the Crusaders, when they took Jerusalem
in 1099, burned the Jews in their synagogue, Saladin, after
recovering the city in 1187, had allowed the Jews to return.
The Jews returned to Palestine only as a result of persecu-
tions elsewhere, and not from any nostalgia for “‘the homeland
of their ancestors’’. In the 15th century the first to return were
some of the Jews of Spain, who had not felt any need to emi-
grate during eight centuries of coexistence with the Arabs, but
fled from the intolerance of the Inquisition and the “‘Most
Catholic Kings.”’ Only a very small section of these Spanish
Jews came to Palestine. The great majority found refuge in
France, Holland, Italy, Egypt, Cyprus or the Balkans. In 1845
there were only 12,000 Jews in Palestine, out of a population of
350,000, and in 1880 only 25,000 out of a population of
500,000. In 1882 the persecutions in Russia brought a new
wave, which was to be followed by Jews from Poland and
Romania.
Having arrived now at the moment when political Zionism
developed, after the publication of Theodor Herzl’s book The
Jewish State, in 1896, it is necessary, if we are to understand the
new motivations of this movement, to sum up on the problem
of the alleged “historic rights’.
Far from being the first ‘‘occupiers” of Palestine, the Heb-
rews were but one component among many others in the mix-
ture of peoples in the “‘fertile crescent”. They have no grounds
for claiming an exceptional place in this long history. Political
. Zionism engages in a systematic manipulation and misrepre-
sentation of the facts when, in Israeli schoolbooks as in pro-
paganda for the outside world, it retains as significant for the
36 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

history of Palestine only those few moments when the Hebrews

played a certain role, namely:
(1) The occupation of Canaan by the tribes in Joshua’s time,
which the 10th century Biblical texts date in the 13th century
B.C. This penetration was transformed, moreover, into a
‘holy war” and an exterminating conquest by 6th-century
theologians who were re-writing history long after the event,
with precise political aims (as we shall see later when dealing
with the religious mythology of Zionism, which complements
its historical mythology).
(2) The 73 years of the reigns of David and Solomon.
(3) The exile to Babylon and the return therefrom.
(4) Finally, the revolts of 66-70 and 132-135 against Roman
rule.
All the rest of Palestine’s history is rubbed out, as though for
two thousand years, from the third millennium until the com-
ing of the Hebrews, nothing happened in that land, and then
again nothing, for nearly two more millennia, from the end of
the revolt of Bar Kokhba in 135 A.D. until the creation of the
State of Israel in 1948!
In this way a primary historical myth has been created, by
retaining arbitrarily, out of a history of five thousand years,
only a few episodes: the migration, among so many others, of
Hebrew tribes; the kingdom, among so many others, of David;
or the revolts, among so many others, of the Maccabees or of
Bar Kokhba.
The history of Palestine that is taught in the schools of the
State of Israel is the work of forgers. But the ‘“‘sacred history”
taught in the Catholic catechism or in Protestant Sunday-
schools, by sticking to the Bible and ignoring the actual history
of the Ancient East, unintentionally supports the propaganda
of political Zionism and prepares millions of Christians
throughout the world to accept as true a mythology that is
deadly to the Palestinian people and to world peace. For this
mythology serves to provide political Zionism with grounds for
territorial demands, annexations and aggressions.
 THE MYTH OF “‘HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 37

The Zionists complete this initial distortion of the truth with

two more historical myths:
(1) After transforming Palestine into an historical desert
(except for the periods when the Hebrews were there), they
transform it into a geographical desert: “‘Give a country with-
out a people to a people without a country’’, according to
Israel Zangwill’s well-known formulation.°
(2) After destroying the historical continuity of the land of
Palestine, Zionism (like the antisemites) creates a racial and
racist continuity of the “Jewish people’, by means of fictitious
genealogies and rejection of assimilation, so as to justify a
“return” to the land of this people’s ‘‘ancestors” — as though
the “Jews” of today were the descendants and natural heirs of
the Israelites of Biblical times and were accomplishing at last
the ancient and permanent desire of all the “‘Jewish” communi-
ties in the world.
Let us analyse these two historical myths.

1. The myth of the ‘‘desert”

When political Zionism became clearly formulated, with
Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896), the presence of a people in
Palestine was ignored altogether. This presence was left
unmentioned both in Herzl’s book and in the constituent
assemblies of the world Zionist movement. The non-existence
of this people is one of the fundamental postulates of Zionism,
and this is at the root of all its subsequent crimes. Mrs Golda
Meir said in the Sunday Times of 15 June 1969: **There was no
such thing as Palestinians. It was not as though there was a
Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took
their country from them. They did not exist.”
If these Palestinians do not exist, and yet resist, these
‘absent but present’”’ people must be either driven out or mas-
sacred, just as other immigrants, in America, dealt with the
Indians.
When Einstein asked Weizmann, when the latter was
one of the leaders of the World Zionist Organisation: ““What
38 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

of the Arabs if Palestine were given to the Jews?”, Weiz-

mann replied: ‘What Arabs? They are hardly of any conse-
quence.””°
Professor Ben-Zion Dinur, who was the first Minister of
Education in the State of Israel, and a close friend of the
State’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1954 in his intro-
duction to the History of the Haganah published by the World
Zionist Organisation: ‘‘In our country there is room only for
the Jews. We shall say to the Arabs: Get out! If they don’t
agree, if they resist, we shall drive them out by force.”
Joseph Weitz, former director of the settlement department
of the Jewish Agency, wrote in 1940: ‘“‘Between ourselves, it
must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together
in this country . . . The only solution is Eretz Israel, at least
the Western Israel, without Arabs, and there is no other way
but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring
countries.’””
Yet the reality was quite otherwise. After the Balfour Dec-
laration of 1917, after twenty years of political Zionism and its
propaganda for the ‘return’, after the first waves of immigra-
tion by Jews fleeing from pogroms in Russia, Poland and
Romania, there were, according to the census taken by the Bri-
tish on 31 December 1922, 757,000 inhabitants altogether in
Palestine, of whom 663,000 were Arabs (590,000 Muslims and
73,000 Christians) and 83,000 Jews — that is, 88 per cent of the
population were Arab and 11 per cent Jewish. And it should be
recalled that this so-called ‘“‘desert” exported grain and citrus
fruits.
In 1891 a Zionist of the first hour, Asher Ginzberg (who
wrote under the pseudonym Ahad Ha’am, “One of the
people”), wrote after a visit to Palestine: ‘‘We abroad are
accustomed to believe that Palestine nowadays is almost
entirely desolate: a barren desert where anyone can buy land
to his heart’s content. In fact that is not so. All over the coun-
try it is hard to find arable land that is not cultivated . . .” The
only places not under cultivation, he pointed out, were sand
 THE MYTH OF “HISTORIC RIGHTS” 39

dunes and rocky hills where nothing but fruit trees could grow,
and then only after much hard work at clearing and recovering
the soil.®
In reality, before the Zionists came, the ‘‘Beduin’”’ (actually,
arable farmers) exported 30,000 tonnes of wheat per year; the
area of Arab-owned orchards trebled between 1921 and 1942;
that of the groves where oranges and other citrus-fruits were
grown was multiplied sevenfold between 1922 and 1947; and
the production of vegetables was in 1938 ten times what it had
been in 1922.
To take only the example of citrus fruit, the Peel Report,
presented to the British Parliament by the Secretary of State
for the Colonies in July 1937, basing itself on the rapid growth
of the orange-groves in Palestine, estimated that, of the
30,000,000 cases of winter oranges by which world production
was expected to increase in the following ten years, the produc-
ers and exporters would be as follows:

Palestine: 15,000,000
U.S.A: 7,000,000
Spain: 5,000,000
Other countries (Cyprus, Egypt,
Algeria, etc): 3,000,000

This “‘projection” and the data on which it was based can be

found in the Peel Report, Chapter 8, paragraph 19, page 214.
If we take account of the progress of agriculture in all coun-
tries during the last fifty years, and especially (as we shall show
in relation to the financing of the State of Israel) of the incred-
ible amount of financial ‘“‘aid’’ received by that state from out-
side, it becomes clear that, in this field, there is not the slightest
“miracle of Israel”’.
The myth of the historical and geographical ‘“‘void’’ was to
~ serve as the basic postulate of Zionist policy in Israel, to justify
the expulsions, spoliations and repressions the extent of which
we shall show later.
40 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

2 The myth of race

The other basic historical myth of Zionism is that of the conti-
nuity of the race and the permanent yearning to return.
A fictitious genealogy aims to make believe that all the Jews
in the world today are descendants of one “race”, which
arrived en bloc, in obedience to God’s command, with Abra-
ham and the patriarchs, in the ‘‘promised” land of Canaan;
which emigrated to Egypt; and which then was delivered from
slavery, still by the agency of its God, through the miraculous
exodus led by Moses in or about the 13th century; and which at
last, under the leadership of Joshua, conquered the “promised
land’, exterminating (still in fulfilment of God’s orders) the
indigenous inhabitants, so as to build an empire, the empire of
David — only to be subsequently overcome and driven into
exile.
When in 539 Cyrus allowed the exiles to return, two men
close to the Persian Court, the high priest Nehemiah and the
scribe Ezra, concerned to preserve the purity of their race and
their religion and to avoid any assimilation of the Jews by the
nations among whom they lived, laid down strict laws forbid-
ding marriage with non-Jewish women, codified systematically
the Law which had once upon a time been revealed to Moses,
and set up an absolute priestly authority.
The laws providing for racial discrimination were particularly
strict: “Separate yourselves from the people of the land and
from the strange wives” (Ezra, x,11). These alien spouses were
to be repudiated within three months: ‘‘And they made an end
with all the men that had taken strange wives by the first day of
the first month” (Ezra, x,17). We find in Nehemiah (xiii, 3):
‘Now it came to pass, when they had heard the law, that they
separated from Israel all the mixed multitude.”” Nehemiah adds:
In those days also saw I Jews that had married wives of Ashdod, of
Ammon and of Moab. And their children spake half in the speech
of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jew’s language, but accord-
ing to the language of each people. And I contended with them,
and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their
 THE MYTH OF “HISTORIC RIGHTS” 41

hair, and made them swear by God, saying ‘‘Ye shall not give your
daughters unto their sons, nor take their daughters unto your sons
or for yourselves” (xiii, 23-25).
“Thus I cleansed them from all strangers, and appointed the
wards of the priests and the Levites, every one in his business”
(xiii, 30).
Judaism, thus preserved, in principle, from all external con-
tamination, was to be perpetuated under the guardianship of
the high priests.
In this “official” version of Jewish history we shall see, when
we analyse the selective, mythical and tribal reading of the
Bible by contemporary Zionism, that a ‘‘golden legend”’, apo-
logetics in the service of precise political aims, constitutes the
main element.
This history continues in the ‘‘Diaspora’’, meaning the Jews
dispersed into the different nations of the world, in which the
Jewish communities, whom the Zionists present as having been
persecuted always and everywhere, are said to have preserved
their Messianic hope of a “‘return”’ to the “promised land”’ that,
had temporarily been lost. Thus they constituted a ‘‘priestly
people”’ among the nations, charged with the divine mission of
testifying, by their sufferings and by their indestructible faith,
to God’s fundamental design. All humanity’s history thus
revolves around the destiny of this chosen people.
We shall see later how present-day political Zionism has
“secularised” this schema so as to justify a form of power-
politics, even for those (the majority both in the State of Israel
and in the “‘Diaspora’’) who no longer profess the Israelite reli-
gion.
Before tackling the basic theological misrepresentation
which constitutes the web of the Zionist ideology, with its
themes of the “‘promise”’ that confers a “divine right” to the
land of Palestine, and of the “election” of the Jewish people
that allows them, in the name of this “‘divine right”, to trample
on all the human rights of those who have lived and worked for
thousands of years in Palestine, we shall take up two auxiliary
42 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

myths: that of the “Jewish race” and that of the age-long yearn-
ing to return. |
The concept of ‘“‘race’’ is an invention of 19th-century
Europe, which, in order to justify the colonial hegemony of the
West, makes an arbitrary shift from the distinction between
linguistic groups to the idea of biological difference and,
above all, of a hierarchy among the major ethnic divisions of
humanity.
Before this tragic myth developed (especially through the
crazy. interpretations of Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau’s
1853 Essay on the Inequality of the Races of Mankind) the
nearest idea to that of race was the tribal conception of a com-
munity of blood, “‘justified”’, in all civilisations, by the mythical
projection of a common ancestor, the ‘eponymous’ hero of
the tribe, and by such legendary genealogies as we find among
the American Indians, or in the Aeneid, just as in the Old Tes-
tament. But this did not mean “‘race”’ in the sense which that
word acquired in Europe in the 19th century, that is, the sense
of a few large groups of human beings: it meant persons in the
same line of descent in small tribal communities or in certain
social strata. In the French language of the 16th century, for
example, a particular royal dynasty was called a “race” and in
the 18th century the hereditary nobility, “de race’’, were con-
trasted with recently-made nobles who had no such line of des-
cent.
It was only in the 18th century, with Buffon, for example,
that the idea arose of an original model of mankind, that of the
white race, which ‘‘degenerates’”’ more and more, the further
one gets from the temperate zone. Then, in the name of a
highly ethnocentric “evolutionism”, with Europe, as always,
its pivot, the non-Western peoples came to be regarded as
‘‘primitive’” — a fundamental excuse for “‘justifying’’ colonial
conquests by the white man’s mission to bring ‘“‘progress’’. The
present-day notion of ‘“‘underdevelopment” perpetuates this
hierarchical conception accordingto which the model trajec-
tory for mankind is that of the West: a people is more or less
 THE MYTH OF “HISTORIC RIGHTS” 43

“developed” depending on how close it comes to this ideal.

Lévi-Strauss, in Race et Histoire, has vigorously denounced
this ethnocentrism, showing how impoverishing it was, because
it excluded dialogue between cultures: ‘‘The unique fault which
can afflict a human group and prevent it from completely fulfill-
ing its nature is to be alone’’.?
The pseudo-theory of race has always served as a justification
for domination and violence. The culminating example of this is
Nazism. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, accuses the Jews of “bringing
Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardis-
ing the white race which they hate’, and alleges that the “Jew
poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own blood unadul-
terated.”
It is noteworthy that Hitler chose to imitate his victim. The
legislator who promulgated the bloody Nuremberg laws men-
tions in his preamble to them that he is inspired by the first, his-
toric decisions taken to preserve race-purity, those of Ezra and
Nehemiah.
This is no mere matter of ancient history or archaeology, for, —
by virtue of the rabbinical tradition, the fundamental law of the
present State of Israel defines ‘tthe Jew” in the way that Ezra
and Nehemiah required, and as the racist Nuremberg laws stipu-
lated. A Jew is one who is born of a Jewish mother (the racial
criterion), or who has been converted to the Israelite religion
(the theocratic criterion).'” The only persons who may benefit
from the Law of Return and from the privileges that follow from
this in the State of Israel are those who correspond to these cri-
teria. We thus have here not merely a racial definition but also a
racist discrimination, because, as we shall see, belonging to one
or other ethnic group entails either privileges or inferiorities.
Racism has no scientific foundation. From the biological
standpoint the old theory of the ‘cranial index’’, distinguishing
the “‘dolichocephalous”’ from the “‘brachycephalous”’, has been
. found impracticable. Modern genetics, according to which cer-
tain ‘‘genes”’ govern the serological properties of the blood, has
shown the futility of the biological concept of race.
44 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

The archaic myth of Genesis (ix, 18-27) has served, like all
the other racist myths, to “‘justify’’ hierarchies and domina-
tions. The three sons of Noah who, when they came out of the
Ark, undertook “the peopling of all the earth”, were supposed
to be the originators of the Asians (Shem), the Europeans
(Japhet) and the Africans (Ham). The last-mentioned were
doomed to slavery and violence. The feudal Middle Ages per-
ceived in Ham the ancestor of the serfs and in Japhet the ances-
tor of the lords, with Shem, as the ancestor of the clergy, at the
top of the hierarchy. Léon Poliakov, in his book The Aryan
Myth, notes that, according to Hebrew (or, more precisely,
rabbinical) tradition, even though it makes no explicit refer-
ences to “‘race’’, “the barrier between the ‘chosen people’ and
‘the nations’ was intended to preserve the former’s function as
a priestly people.’’"!
History offers no more objective basis than does biology for
the notion of race. Making out that ‘“‘the Jews” are a “‘race’’,
isolated from “‘the nations”, means creating a myth, and one
that is shared by the antisemites and the Zionists. Antisemi-
tism and Zionism rely upon the same assumption and lead to
the same results.
This common assumption is belief in a “Jewish” entity which
cannot be assimilated by the nations, whether this be a conse-
quence of “election” or of ‘‘exclusion’’.
The common result is the conclusion that the “Jews” must
be taken out of the nations and assembled in a world ghetto,
which has always been the aim of the antisemites.
In reality, no “Jewish race” has ever existed, except in the
ravings of Hitler and the Zionists. At every stage of history,
the “Jews” have been one of the components of major ethnic
groups (which, moreover, were not races).
The nomads, or pastoral peoples on their way to a settled
mode of life, who entered Canaan were Aramaeans who came
from the northern Euphrates, from Transjordan or from Ara-
bia; that is, by virtue of their language (and not of their blood),
they were “Semites’’, like the Arabs and the Israelis of today.
 THE MYTH OF “‘HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 45

The kinship of the Hebrew and Arabic languages bears witness to

this fact.
The apiru, or habiru (Hebrews), who came out of Egypt in the
Exodus were asocial category (fringe-people, dissidents) and not an
ethnic group.
The tribes which infiltrated, peacefully or by military means, into
Canaan, became mingled, by culture and by blood, with the local
populations, as the race-laws of Ezra and Nehemiah testify, several
centuries later.
The kingdom of David and Solomon was multi-national, welcom-
ing in its attitude to foreign ethnic groups and their religious cults.
When Cyrus allowed the exiles in Babylon to “return”, the great
majority of them stayed in Mesopotamia, where they had struck
root.
Finally, when the Romans drove the Israelites out, after the
revolts of A.D. 70 and of Bar Kokhba, the exiles often conver-
ted to their faith the populations that took them in. Joseph
Reinach wrote, in the Journal des Débats of 30 March 1919:

The Jews of Palestine constitute only an insignificant minority.

Like the Christians and the Muslims, the Jews engaged with great
zeal in the conversion of peoples to their faith. Before the Christ-
ian era began, the Jews had converted to the monotheistic religion
of Moses other Semites (or Arabs), Greeks, Egyptians and
Romans, in large numbers. Later on, Jewish proselytism was no
less active in Asia, throughout North Africa, in Italy, Spain and
Gaul. Undoubtedly it was Roman and Gaulish converts who pre-
dominated in the Jewish communities mentioned in the chronicles
of Gregory of Tours. There were many converts of Iberian origin
among the Jews who were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand the
Catholic, and who settled in Italy, France, in the East, and at
Smyrna. The great majority of the Russian, Polish and Galician Jews
are descendants of the Khazars, a Tartar people of South Russia who
were converted en bloc to Judaism in the time of Charlemagne. In order
to talk about a Jewish race you have to be either ignorant or dis-
honest . . . The Jews were only one of the numerous Arab or Semitic
tribes who settled down in Western Asia.

Joseph Reinach’s conclusion is clear: “As there is neither a

46 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

Jewish race nor a Jewish nation, but only a Jewish religion, Zion-
ism is indeed folly — a threefold error: historical, archaeological,
ethnic.”
With even more scientific precision Maxime Rodinson con-
firms Reinach’s view:

Itis very probable —and physical anthropology tends to show that it is

true — that the so-called Arab inhabitants of Palestine (a majority of
whom, moreover, are people who have ‘“‘become Arab’’) have much
more of the ancient Hebrews’ ‘‘blood”’ than most of the Jews of the
Diaspora, whose religious exclusiveness in no way prevented them
from absorbing converts of various origins. For centuries Jewish pro-
selytism was important even in Western Europe, and was continued
elsewhere over long periods of time. Historically, sufficient evidence
of this can be found in the Jewish state of Southern Arabia in the sixth
century, based on southern Arabs who had become Jews; the Turkish
Jewish state of the Khazars in South-eastern Russia in the eighth to
the tenth centuries, whose base was Turkish or Finno-Ugric and no
doubt partly Slavic; the Jews of China who have become thoroughly
Chinese; the Black Jews of Cochin; the Falashas of Ethiopia, etc.
And, from an anthropological point of view, a glance at any meeting
of Jews from different backgrounds will suffice to give an idea of the
importance of foreign contributions. '*

The most clear-cut conclusion from this de-bunking of history

has been formulated by Thomas Kiernan: “Anthropologists con-
cluded . . . that the eastern European Jewish inventors of Zion-
ism had little or no biological connexion to Palestine.”’!?

* * *

To make an end of these alleged “historical rights”’, let us recall

three major moments in the creation of the State of Israel:
(1) The Balfour Declaration, contained in a letter addressed
on 2 November 1917 to Baron de Rothschild:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in

Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use
their endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it
 THE MYTH OF “HISTORIC RIGHTS’”’ 47

being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may pre-
judice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish com-
munities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by
Jews in any other country.

Balfour himself very soon became aware of the danger

involved. On 19 February 1919 he wrote to Lloyd George:
“The weak point of our position is, of course, that in the case
of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the
principle of self-determination.” “If the present inhabitants
were consulted”, he added, “‘they would unquestionably give
an anti-Jewish verdict’.
This was confirmed by the report of the King-Crane Com-
mission, sent by President Wilson in 1919 to discover ‘‘the
options and wishes of the population as a whole.” In a message
_ sent by the commissioners to the President on 12 June they
noted, regarding Palestine, that:

Here the older inhabitants, both Muslim and Christian, take a uni-
ted and most hostile attitude toward any extensive Jewish immigra- —
tion or toward any effort to establish Jewish sovereignty over
them. We doubt if any British or American official here believes
that it is possible to carry out the Zionist programme except
through the support of a large army.'*

Rejecting the Zionists’ maximum programme, the Commis-

sion proposed that the unity of Syria-Palestine be maintained,
under an American mandate, with provision for a limited Jew-
ish national home.
Arthur Koestler defined to perfection what was accom-
plished by the Balfour Declaration: “One nation solemnly
promised to a second nation the country of a third nation.”’’°
With this Declaration began the series of big lies which are
so many waymarks in the history of the State of Israel and its
leaders. Not only was the clause in the Balfour Declaration
.about respect for the rights of the “non-Jewish communities”
constantly flouted, but the idea of a ‘Jewish national home”
-that is, as the British White Paper of 1922 explained, a centre
48 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

from which Jewish culture and religion would radiate — was for
the Zionists the screen to mask the creation of a Zionist state.
In 26 February 1919 Lord Curzon wrote:

While Weizmann may say one thing to you, or while you may mean
one thing by a National Home, he is out for something quite differ-
ent. He contemplates a Jewish state, a Jewish nation, a subordi-
nate population of Arabs, etc., ruled by Jews. He is trying to effect
this behind the screen and under the shelter of British trusteeship.

The double-dealing of Zionist diplomacy is patent. In March

1921 the memorandum sent to Winston Churchill by the Jewish
National Council declared that the Jewish people ‘cannot suf-
fer the suspicion that it wishes to deny to another nation its
rights.”
On 25 June 1969 Golda Meir proclaimed the contrary in the
Knesset: ‘“‘I want a Jewish state, with a decisive Jewish major-
ity which cannot change overnight . . . I always believed this
was plain Zionism.”
(2) The resolution for the partition of Palestine, adopted by
the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 November
1947. At that date Jews made up 32 per cent of the country’s
population and owned 5.6 per cent of the land. To the Zionist
state were allotted 56 per cent of the territory, with the most
fertile land.
The voting of this partition plan was the occasion of some
sordid manoeuvres. On 18 December 1947 a member of the
United States House of Representatives, Lawrence H. Smith,
reminded Congress of what had gone on:

Let’s take a look at the record, Mr Speaker, and see what hap-
pened in the United Nations’ Assembly meeting prior to the vote
on partition. A two-thirds vote was required to pass the resolution.
On two occasions the Assembly was to vote and twice it was post-
poned ... In the meantime, it is reliably reported that intense
pressure was applied to the delegates of three small nations by the
United States’ member and also by officials ‘‘at the highest levels in
Washington”... The decisive votes for partition were cast by
 THE MYTH OF “HISTORIC RIGHTS” 49
Haiti, Liberia and the Philippines. These votes were sufficient to
make the two-thirds majority. Previously, these countries opposed
the move . . . The pressure by our delegates, by our officials, and
by the private citizens of the United States constitutes reprehens-
ible conduct against them and against us. '°

Drew Pearson, in his Merry-Go-Round column of 2 Decem-

ber 1947, gave details such as this: “Harvey Firestone, who
owns rubber plantations in Liberia, got busy with the Liberian
Government...”
President Truman put unprecedented pressure on the State
Department. Sumner Welles, the Under-Secretary of State
wrote: “By direct order of the White House, every form of
pressure, direct and indirect, was brought to bear by American
officials . . . to make sure that the necessary majority would at
length be secured.’’'’
The Secretary for Defence at the time, James Forrestal, con-
firms this: ‘““The methods that had been used by people outside
of the Executive branch of the government to bring coercion
and duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered ©
closely onto scandal.’’'®
(3) Between the partition decision of 29 November 1947 and
the effective end of British mandatory rule on 15 May 1948 the
Zionist troops seized territory in the zone allotted to the
Arabs; for example, Jaffa and Acre.
Who, given these circumstances, can reproach the Palesti-
nians and the neighbouring countries for not resigning them-
selves to the monstrous injustice of the ‘“‘accomplished fact”
and for refusing to ‘‘recognise”’ the Zionist state?
But the land by itself was not enough for the Zionist state. It
had to be cleared of its inhabitants, so as to provide not a tradi-
tional colony of the sort where a native labour-force is
exploited, but a colony of settlement where immigrants take
the place of the natives.
In order to achieve this end the Zionist state engaged in what
can only be called state terrorism, that is, in veritable pogroms
against the Palestinian population. The most glaring example
50 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

of this was what was done at Deir Yasin. On 9 April 1948, fol-
lowing the example of the Nazis at Oradour, 254 of the inhabi-
tants of this village - men, women, children, old people — were
massacred by the troops of the Irgun, whose leader was
Menachem Begin.!? In his book The Revolt, Begin writes that
without what was done at Deir Yasin there would not have
been a State of Israel, and adds: ‘“‘Meanwhile the Haganah was
carrying out successful attacks on the other fronts .. . The
Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yasin!’” (p. 165).
It was not until 15 May 1948 that the Secretary-General of
the Arab League informed the Secretary-General of the Uni-
ted Nations that the Arab states were obliged to intervene in
order to protect the Palestinians.
In 1949, after this first Israeli-Arab War, the Zionists con-
trolled 80 per cent of Palestine, and 770,000 Palestinians had
been driven out of their country.
The United Nations had appointed a mediator, Count Folke
Bernadotte. In his last report, Count Bernadotte wrote:

It would be an offence against the principles of elementary justice

if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to
return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine,
and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of
the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.

He described the “large-scale looting, pillaging and plunder-

ing” and “‘instances of destruction of villages without apparent
military necessity’’.
This report (U.N. Document A.648, p. 14) was presented on
16 September 1948. On 17 September Count Bernadotte and
his French assistant, Colonel Serot, were murdered in the part
of Jerusalem occupied by the Zionists.
Faced with world-wide indignation, the Israeli Government
arrested the head of the Stern Group, Nathan Friedman-
Yellin. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, amnes-
tied, and elected to the Knesset in 1950. The honour of having
given the order for the assassination was claimed, in July 1971,
 THE MYTH OF “HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 51

by Baruch Nadel, who had been one of the leaders of the Stern
Group in 1948.”
The Zionist leaders of the State of Israel could snap their
fingers at the United Nations all the more easily because the
majority of the members of that body had connived at the
Zionist usurpation in Palestine.
In 1948, before the wave of ‘‘decolonisation’’, the United
Nations Organisation was largely dominated by the Western
powers. It violated its own Charter by refusing to the Arabs,
who at that time made up two-thirds of Palestine’s population,
the right to decide their own fate.
Even from the merely juridical standpoint a certain number
of questions arise.*! The decision in favour of partition was
taken by the General Assembly, and not by the Security Coun-
cil. It thus had the weight only of a recommendation and not
that of a decision to be put into effect. The Palestinians,
moreover, were not alone in rejecting this partition. Begin’s
Irgun declared at the time that such a partition was illegal and
would never be accepted.

Jerusalem was and will for ever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be
restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever . . . What
we have to prepare is not local defensive plans, but broad strategic
plans for repulsing attacks and for preparing the offensive of the
liberating Hebrew army.”

Ben-Gurion himself wrote: ‘“‘Until the British left, no Jewish

settlement, however remote, was entered or seized by the
Arabs, while the Haganah . . . captured many Arab positions
and liberated Tiberias and Haifa, Jaffa and Safad.”
It was in this way that the territory originally allotted to the
Zionists by U.N.O. (56 per cent) was enlarged to include
almost 80 per cent of Palestine.
In short, it is wrong to say that the State of Israel was
“created” by the United Nations. It was “‘created”’ by a series of
- “accomplished facts”, by the violence of Haganah, Irgun and
the Stern Group.
52 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

Thus ends the story of ‘“‘historic rights” — with a record of lies

and bloodshed. It could not be otherwise, if only because the
very idea of “historic rights’, if it be applied to long periods of
time, leads to absurdity and to the horrors of war.
If we were to make general this “‘Zionist” kind of ‘claim’,
based on such “historic rights’, our entire planet would be
reduced to chaos. Why should the Italians not assert “historic
rights” over France, where, after the conquest of Gaul by
Julius Caesar, the Romans reigned for much longer than the
Kings of Israel reigned over Palestine? Why should the Scandi-
navians not claim Normandy, England and Sicily, in the name
of their Norse-Norman “‘ancestors”? And what would become
of Africa if its ancient conquerors were to call for the reconsti-
tution of the Mandingo empire or the paramount chieftaincies
of the Fula?
Even if we restrict ourselves to Europe, let us first suppose
that the European states applied themselves today to invoking
“historic rights’’ over territories where they reigned or where
they formed the majority of the population at some epoch or
other. Should we go back no further than to the Treaties of
Westphalia which, in 1648, less than three-and-a-half centuries
ago, marked a ‘“‘new beginning” in Europe, with the final
break-up of ‘‘Christendom”’ and the birth of the nation-state,
Europe would be thrown into bloody turmoil by the contradic-
tory “historic” claims of every state. The fires would rage from
Sweden to Italy and Austria, and from Alsace to the Balkans.
And what would happen if one were to go back to the fall of
the Roman Empire, fifteen centuries ago? All the “‘nations’’,
with their frontiers, are so many results of the conflicts, the
relations of strength, the ‘“‘accomplished facts’’ of which history
consists. Blaise Pascal lucidly observed that, “‘having failed to
ensure that what was just was strong, we have arranged that
what was strong was just.”
An extreme example of this absurdity can be found in Amer-
ica. As the theologian Albert de Pury, of the University of
Neuchatel, has written: “The colonising of America was
 THE MYTH OF ‘‘HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 53

based on the shameful dispossession of the Indian tribes, but

it would not be possible to take that fact as a basis for chal-
lenging, today, the legitimacy of the states which have been
created on that continent.”’** Yet the “historic rights” of the
Indians are far more credible than those of the Zionists. The
Indians were not only the first but also the only occupants of
America, and had been there for thousands of years until
the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the British and then all the
other nations of Europe came and decimated them and stole
their land. While they possess today the imprescriptible right
to insist on being given the means to live, who would think it
right for them to consider themselves the sole masters of
America, so as to expel or oppress the ethnic groups of Euro-
pean origin?
Does this mean that, at any moment in history, one ought to
give up and abandon oneself, “‘like a dead dog in a gutter’, to
blows and ‘‘accomplished facts”? Not at all. The duration of an
injustice does not create a right. The disappearance of Poland
from the map of Europe for nearly a century and a quarter
(1795-1918) did not result in the historical death of that coun-
try, and its rebirth was made possible only by the indomitable
rejection of foreign oppression by its people. The same is true,
today, of the Palestinian people, who have been dispossessed
for more than a third of a century of a country where they had
lived and worked for thousands of years, only to be either
driven from it or else made to live there as foreigners in their
own land. Their resistance is not the assertion of some abstract
or remote ‘historic right’, but a vital, unchallengeable rejec-
tion of a permanent act of violence against the very roots of
their life.
There is nothing in common here with the myth manufac-
tured by political Zionism. Three thousand years ago, as a
result of one invasion among many, an ephemeral kingdom
came into being (it lasted only 73 years), a kingdom which,
moreover, never sought to make itself ethnically homogen-
eous. The vicissitudes of history brought about the downfall of
54 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

this state, which suffered the lot of all empires and domina-
tions. Those of the invaders who proved unwilling to become
absorbed into the world they had entered were driven out, as
happened to the Crusaders, who invaded Palestine in the ele-
venth century and deliberately chose to live there as a foreign
body, imposing their domination, just as the modern state of
Israel does, by means of the arms and money of the West.
After two centuries of occupation (1096-1291) which saw
nothing but a series of wars against the indigenous peoples,
they were driven out: the last of the Crusaders sailed away
from Acre in 1291.
Historically-speaking, the propagandists of political Zionism
have no more “historic rights” over Palestine than the Crusad-
ers had.

The myth of the age-old yearning to “‘return”’ conceals the col-

onialist reality of the 20th-century Zionist state. Those among
the masters of Jewish spiritual life who advocated the return to
Palestine remained isolated figures. This was the case with
Judah Halevi (1075-1141), a Jewish philosopher and poet of
the period when, in Muslim Spain, the Jews enjoyed a privi-
leged position. This great mystical poet, who saw a prophet in
every Jew, proclaimed that ‘‘the divine intuition which is their
special gift can flourish only in the land of Israel.’ His appeal
(referred to in our day by political Zionists who do not share
his beliefs) remained without echo in his own time, and his
example (for he went to Jerusalem and died at the city’s gates)
was followed by no-one. It was the same, in the 13th century,
with the philosopher and mystic Nahmanides, who went to live
in Jerusalem but had no followers on that journey.
What brought about the great waves of immigration into
Palestine was not any “‘yearning’’, to which even the Messianic
preaching of the rabbis* offered no encouragement, but
persecutions. When the Jews, who had been evicted from Jeru-
 THE MYTH OF “‘HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 55

salem by the Crusaders, were expelled from Spain by the

“Catholic Kings” in 1492 (except for those who submitted to a
conversion imposed by the terror of the Inquisition), a large
number of them took refuge in other European countries, and
a small number in Palestine, where the mystics of Safad com-
bined their lofty universalistic vision of divine love and the
unity of the world with a mythical interpretation of the history
of Israel. Political Zionism was to play upon the permanent
confusion between the prophetic grandeur of Judaism and the
historical myth underlying this same political Zionism. The fact
is that the mystics made Safad a centre of the spiritual influence
of Judaism which, again, did not entail any mass-scale immi-
gration. When in 1570 Don Joseph Nasi, Duke of Naxos, flee-
ing from the Portuguese Inquisition, obtained from his Muslim
friends Suleiman and Selim II permission to rebuild Tiberias
' for his co-religionists, this attempt at a political restoration
aroused no interest among the Jewish communities, and was
soon abandoned.
On the spiritual plane, with Baruch Spinoza the highest uni- |
versalistic traditions of Judaism were at last separated from the
historical myths, from the Zionist ethnocentrism of the “‘cho-
sen people’, with its exceptional destiny, and from its chauvin-
ist and racist consequences.
Karl Marx, whose whole work is a prolongation into the 19th
century of the echo of the universalist Messianism of the great
prophets and of Spinoza, was unable to conceive, in On The
Jewish Question (1844), any particular emancipation of the
Jews that was not incidental to a universal emancipation of
mankind from the system which had confined the Jews to a spe-
cific function within that system.
Political Zionism was born on a soil quite other than that of
Jewish mysticism. It sought to find a purely colonialist solution
to the problem of the persecution of the Jews in Europe.
The expulsion of the Jews from Spain immediately after the
fall of Granada, which meant the end of the last of the Muslim
kingdoms in that country; the massacre in Poland in 1648 of
56 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

300,000 Jews by the Cossacks of Bogdan Khmelnitsky; the

pogroms organised by the Russian Tsars from 1882 onward;
the Dreyfus case in France (1894-1906), which showed the
infamy of which were capable a corrupt big bourgeoisie, a dis-
honoured military caste and a degraded press and church, in
order to make use of nationalism as an instrument to uphold
their privileges at any cost; and, finally, Nazism, which also
made struggle against the Jews serve as a diversion to conceal
its fundamental aim to dominate the world, in opposition to its
main enemy, the revolutionary working-class movement — all
these events caused the question to arise of finding a place of
refuge where persecuted Jews could be safe.
Theodor Herzl*°, who was not at all a pious Jew, and who
had no thought of any mystical “‘return” to Zion, was moti-
vated by a proper concern to save the Jews from persecution. It
was, he claimed, the Dreyfus case that inspired him. He con-
sidered that the best solution would be to find a territory where
a sovereign “Jewish state’ could be created.
In the colonialist political context of the period, and in contrast to
the spiritual Zionism advocated, for example, by the ‘“Lovers of
Zion” who, with the Russian Jewish writer Asher Ginzberg (“Ahad
Ha’am’’), dreamt of creating a spiritual centre for the development
of Jewish culture and religion, crystallizing the aspirations of all the
Jewish communities in the world without constituting a political or
economic power, Theodor Herzl worked outa plan of a quite differ-
ent order. He created, at the Congress at Basel in 1897, a Zionism
that was no longer spiritual but political. He addressed himself to
the most typical of the British colonialists, Cecil Rhodes (who gave
his name to Rhodesia). On 11 January 1902 he wrote to Rhodes
about his plan, adding:

How then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out of the

way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial
. . And what I want you to do is .. . to put the stamp of your
authority on the Zionist plan and to make the following declaration
to a few people who swear by you: I, Rhodes, have examined this
plan and found it correct and practicable.’
 THE MYTH OF ‘‘HISTORIC RIGHTS’”’ 57

This was the point of departure of political Zionism: Herzl

was trying to obtain from a Western power a colonial charter
that would guarantee his undertaking.
Herzl had every justification for saying: ““At Basel I founded
the Jewish state’’,*® for all the subsequent features of the State
of Israel follow, with implacable logic, from the colonialist prin-
ciples which lay at its foundation.
At the outset political Zionism was not specially orientated
towards Palestine. In the colonialist language of the time, it was
merely a question of finding ‘‘a vacant space’, that is, a territory
under Western control where there would be no need to take
any account of the indigenous population. Herzl tried “‘to obtain
territorial concessions in Mozambique and in the Belgian
Congo.’
Among his colleagues in the founding of political Zionism,
Max Nordau was nicknamed “‘the African’ and Chaim Weiz-
mann “the Ugandan’. Other projects had been discussed:
Argentina in 1897, Cyprus in 1901-1902, Sinai in 1902 and,
finally, Uganda in 1903-1904, this last a proposal put to Herzl by
the British Government. The World Zionist Organisation
decided in favour of Palestine only in 1905, a year after Herzl’s
death.
For Herzl Palestine, at the crossroads of three continents, was
one possibility amongst others, and what he saw in it more than
anything else, in the approaches that he made, was a territory
that particularly lent itself to negotiations with the colonial
powers. At a time when the rival colonialists of Germany, Rus-
sia and Britain were coming into conflict in the Near East, when
Wilhelm II had launched the project for a Berlin-Byzantium-
Baghdad Railway, when Tsarist Russia was aiming at the Straits
in order to gain access to the Mediterranean, and when Britain
was keeping watch over the route to India through the Suez
Canal and over the oilfields of the Gulf, Herzl gambled on all the
colonial lusts at once. In The Jewish State he wrote: ‘“‘We should
there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an
outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.”*!
58 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

As Herzl foresaw, the State of Israel would not be able to exist in

the Near East without becoming absorbed into it unless this state
became in some way the agency of a collective colonialism of the
West.
Herzl and the founders of political Zionism did not hesitate to use
in talking with anyone, even the worst of ‘“‘antisemites”’, the lan-
guage that their interlocutor would prefer to hear. In his diary for
1895 Herzl wrote: “To the Kaiser I shall say: Let our people go! We
are strangers here; we are not permitted to assimilate with the
people, nor are we able to do so.’””**
The Zionist writer A. Chouraqui, in his biography of Herzl,
records that on 4 March 1896 Herzl wrote: “My warmest adherent
so far is the Pressburg antisemite Ivan von Simonyi.””**
Imagining the future of the “liberated” Jewish people, Herzl
hears them saying: ‘“The antisemites were right. But let us not be
jealous, for we too will be happy.”**
As regards Russia, Witte, the Tsar’s Finance Minister, said cyni-
cally to Herzl that he once said to Tsar Alexander III: “Your
Majesty, if itis possible to drown the six or seven million Jews in the
Black Sea, I have absolutely no objection to it.”
Nevertheless, Herzl went on telling him that he expected some
encouragement from the Russian Government. Witte replied:
“But we give the Jews encouragement to emigrate —a good kicking,
for example.’”°
Herzl acknowledged: ‘““They will hold it against me, with all the
reason in the world, that I am serving the antisemites’ purpose by
declaring that we are a people, one people.””*°
Where Britain was concerned, at the time of the Balfour Declara-
tion, in 1917, Weizmann sent a note to the War Cabinet saying that:
In submitting our resolution we entrusted our national and Zionist des-
tiny to the Foreign Office and the Imperial War Cabinet, in the hope that
the problem would be considered in the light of Imperial interests and
the principles for which the Entente stands.*”
It is worth recalling, so as to emphasise once more, if need
be, the extent to which Zionism and antisemitism are twins,
 THE MYTH OF “HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 59

that Balfour himself was antisemitic. He was one of those poli-

ticians who, in 1905, conducted a vigorous campaign in favour
of the Aliens Act, that is, for keeping persecuted Russian Jews
out of Britain. For him, as for the Tsar or the Kaiser, it was a
question of channelling towards Palestine, by means of his
Declaration (which was firmly opposed by the only Jew in the
Cabinet, Edwin Montagu), Jews whom he did not want to have
in his own country.
If there later developed a period of conflict between the
Zionists and Britain, this was like the conflict between South
Africa and Britain as the metropolitan country of the Empire,
and not an anti-colonial struggle. When the Palestinian Arabs
revolted in 1936-1939 against both British imperialism and
Jewish colonisation, that genuinely anti-colonial movement
was put down by the British Army, helped by the Zionist mili-
' tias.
Thus, stripped of all the trappings of the historical myth on
which it claims to be based, political Zionism is exposed as
being essentially a colonial phenomenon. Its only difference ©
from classical ‘“‘colonialism’”’ (of the British or French type, for
example) is that it is not concerned merely to exploit the native
population as cheap labour, or as a market for the products of
the “home country’’. It is out for a colony of settlement: the aim
is not just to exploit “the natives” but to take their place, by
despoiling them of their land and expelling them so as to take
over their work, by forcing them into exile or reducing them to
political impotence in their own country through racial discri-
mination. This is the meaning of the slogans of political Zion-
ism in Israel: Jewish land, Jewish labour, a Jewish state.

* * *

To make up for this total lack of basis for their claim to “‘his-
toric rights”, the Zionists use — and abuse — a different argu-
ment which does indeed rely upon an historical reality: the
massacre of the Jews by Hitler.
60 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

One understands perfectly well the legitimate concern,

among those ‘‘Zionists’’ who do not try to justify their ideology
by means of a mythology, to find a place of refuge for victims
of persecution. But this problem cannot be solved through
remedying one injustice by committing another — by driving
out another people and seizing their country, although they
had no share in the Hitlerites’ crime against the Jews.
The persecutions and massacres from which the Jews suf-
fered in the period of Nazi rule called for reparation. But that
does not imply that such reparation should have been made at
the expense of those who did not commit the crime.
Some people think, the political Zionists among them, that
the only solution to the problem of safety for the Jews is the
creation of a Jewish state. But that is not at ail obvious. What
state, throughout history, has been safe from destruction? Still
less the colonial “‘empires’’, founded, like the Zionist state,
against the will of the indigenous people: not one of them,
however great the military strength of the occupying power,
has managed to survive. The experience of the colonialist
enterprise of the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine — and
one which, moreover, by its very essence is condemned to pur-
sue a policy of expansion to win “‘living space’’, so as to make
room for unlimited immigration — has shown that this implies a
permanent state of war, and even greater anxiety for the
future. To such an extent, indeed, that today, the part of the
world where Jews are least safe is the Jewish State of Israel.
The great majority of the world’s Jews (80 per cent) are fully
aware of this, since they have preferred to remain in their
countries of origin: and, after more than thirty years of experi-
ence of the State of Israel, the number of Jews leaving it
exceeds the number coming to settle there.
But even if it were to be agreed that the creation of a Zionist
state was the only solution possible, nobody could have objec-
ted, for example, to the granting to the survivors of the Nazi
genocide, as reparation, the territory of one of the German
Lander, as a totally independent state, to be subsidised by the
 THE MYTH OF ‘“‘HISTORIC RIGHTS’”’ 61

Europeans who were guilty of the crime or who had connived

at it. The genocide committed against the Jews forms part of
European history and of the shameful Nazi episode.
Effecting reparation for this crime at the expense of the
Arabs, who had nothing to do with it, is a purely colonialist
measure which it is sought to justify by an alleged historical
continuity between the Israel of the Bible and the present State
of Israei, a continuity which we have shown to be wholly
mythical. Such is the fundamental fallacy of the strange argu-
ment of “the holocaust”, by which it is attempted to legitimise
the establishment of the State of Israel in a country stolen from
the Arabs. ‘“The holocaust and the establishment of the State
of Israel’’, writes Gerschom Scholem, “‘are two sides of a single
vast historical event’’.*® The State of Israel, says another wri-
ter, “enables us to bear the agony of Auschwitz without radical
despair’’.*?
Such use has been made of this ‘“‘holocaust’’, in the name of
which it is sought to legitimise not just the existence of the
State of Israel but absolutely any political demand made by its
leaders, that one ought to think deeply about it.
In the first place, the very word “holocaust” has a religious
flavour: it means a religious sacrifice consisting in the immola-
tion of one or more victims to some god. This is not just a ques-
tion of vocabulary. The Hitlerite crime against the Jews was
not religious in character: it constitutes a political problem,
and one that forms part of a larger whole.
To speak of a “‘holocaust”’ means once again singling out the
Jews from that larger mass of victims of Hitler in a war which
cost the lives of more than sixty million men and women. In
particular, among the civil populations, three million
non-Jewish Poles were exterminated, and over six million
other non-combatant Slavs. Is it to the interest of the Jews
themselves to be separated from the totality of those who suf-
fered from Hitlerite Fascism and fought against it? Why should
death possess a “‘sacred”’ character for only one of the sections
of mankind?
62 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

Furthermore, this particularism conceals the true nature of

the Hitlerite undertaking, as though Nazism could be defined
by only one of its aspects: anti-Jewish racism. Having lived in
the same concentration camp with my friend Bernard Lecache,
founder of the “International League Against Racism And
Antisemitism”, I recall that, in the ordeal and the struggle that
united us fraternally, our motivation in our resistance for free-
dom was exactly the same. I cannot remember anything said
between Bernard and me in which the fact came up that he was
a Jew and I was not. All our comrades in the camp were glad
when the Mayor of New York, La Guardia, helped him to
recover his freedom, and we all shared the same fraternal sor-
row when, years later, we learnt of his death.
Calling the massacre of the Jews “‘the holocaust’? means not
only detaching the Jews from the totality of Hitlerism’s sixty
million victims and concealing the true nature of the Hitlerite
project. It also means making out that this massacre, by its
quasi-‘“‘mystical’’ nature, forms part of Jewish history alone, as
one moment in an eternal persecution that results from an eter-
nal divine election, and separating it from the history of
Europe — that is, forgetting that the crimes of Nazi imperial-
ism, against the Jews and against so many others, were a con-
tinuation of the crimes of Western imperialism as a whole,
from the genocide of tens of millions of American Indians or of
more than a hundred million Negroes in Africa, to the deporta-
tion of ten million slaves to the Americas. The genocide under-
taken by Hitler was neither the first crime of imperialism nor
the one that involved the most victims, and singling out the
Jews into a “holocaust” which constitutes an ‘‘exception”’
means hiding the profound causes of these genocides and fail-
ing to help the Jews, along with all the other victims of these
crimes, to fight against their root causes.
It signifies cutting Israel off from world history, and in par-
ticular detaching it from the Third World. Ariel Sharon proc-
laimed, in a speech to foreign Jewish delegates at a meeting at
Gush Etzion: ‘We have the right to demand anything we like
 THE MYTH OF “‘HISTORIC RIGHTS” 63

from the world. As Jews we do not owe anything to anybody,

while the rest of the world owes us a great deal.”
Boaz Evron replied*’, rejecting this barrier erected once
again between the Jews and the “‘others’’, meaning everybody
else, that ‘“‘the rest of the world” would retort to Israel that
“this is between you and the Europeans, not the whole world”.

In China, Japan and India, in Africa and parts of Latin America,

where three quarters of the world’s population are living, few
people have even heard of you. You were neither persecuted nor
annihilated there, and you are owed nothing. Moreover, to be
frank, in those places you always sided with the whites, with the
colonialists, and you partook in the exploitation of the blacks, the
Asians and the Indians. If there are any accounts to settle in those
parts, you might be the ones in debt . . . It is the Europeans with
whom you have accounts to settle . . . Go ahead and argue with
those whose culture you share. Leave us barbarians alone. Only,
by the way, if we are talking about rights and obligations, what are
your Uzis and Galil rifles doing in the hands of repressive forces in
E] Salvador?

And, as for the Europeans, Boaz Evron went on, they might
reply: “You must also remember that millions of Russians,
Britons and French were killed in that war. They defeated
Germany and thereby saved you . . . If it was not for them
there would be no trace of you left today.””*!
If, however, instead of separating Jews from non-Jews — as
Hitler did — we see the slaughter of the Jews of Europe by the
Nazis as one part of a whole, that is, one aspect of the
Hitlerites’ intentions towards all those who defended against
Nazism the dignity of man, and of every man, the Jews have
their place in a world-historical perspective, in accordance with
their highest Messianic traditions.
But political Zionism insists essentially upon ‘‘exceptional-
ism’’ and separatism, so as to support the idea that the Jews
cannot find security in the Diaspora, but only in a separate
state — as though states, and even empires, no matter how power-
ful, had not all, without exception, found themselves one day
64 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

invaded and destroyed, and their inhabitants put at the mercy

of the conquerors. It is not true that it was political Zionism,
either as a plan or as the realisation of this plan in a state, that
saved the Jews. The Jews were indeed saved from Nazism, but
saved by Stalingrad and El Alamein. And without those checks
to the Hitlerites’ drive towards the East, Palestine, with or
without a Zionist state, would have been subjected to the Nazi
terror.
The underlying reason for this falsification of history by the
Zionists is political. What they aim at is, by means of this
‘““exceptionalism”’ to separate the State of Israel from the inter-
national community, and to establish with the other countries
not normal relations based on mutual understanding, common
interests, and peaceful, creative purposes to be accomplished
together, but exceptional relations of guilt, so that it will be
enough to mention “‘the holocaust”’, taking this out of its entire
historical context, for everything to be permitted to the excep-
tional victim — including the turning to profit of that massacre
of earlier times, so that today the “external aid” received from
the United States amounts. to more than $750 per head of the
population of Israel*? — that is, twice the national income per
head in the African countries. And what if the American
Indians were to make “‘the rest of the world”’ pay in this way
for the genocide of which they were the object? Or if the blacks
of Africa were to claim repayment of the “debt” for the hun-
dred million victims of the slave trade?
The result of this devotion of political Zionism to spreading
the myth of exceptionalism is total isolation. Israel’s isolation
in the United Nations is merely a reflection of this, and it can
be borne only thanks to the unconditional and unlimited sup-
port given, so far, by the United States. If, though, this exter-
nal support should one day cease (as happened to the Crusad-
ers, with their arms and money), the financial and military
dependence of the Zionist State is such that political Zionism
would then reveal that it has prepared the worst of catas-
trophes for the Jews themselves. So as to disguise this terrible
 THE MYTH OF “‘HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 65

truth, the Israeli leaders use all means to make believe that
they are every day on the brink of extermination (“the new
holocaust”). For this they have need of antisemitism abroad
and of the bogey of the ‘““Arab menace” in the Middle East —
whereas it is they who, from Deir Yasin to Sabra and Shatila,
have massacred tens of thousands of Arabs, that is, have com-
mitted crimes out of all proportion to the attacks provoked by
their colonial occupation of Palestine.
In short, this will to exceptionalism and this pseudo-sancti-
fication of their policy have prevented the Zionist leaders from
achieving what they alleged to be their aim, namely, to enable
the Jews to live in a state like other people.
This is shown even better by the attempt that is made to legi-
timise the Zionist enterprise in Palestine by the pseudo-
Biblical myth of ‘“‘the promised land”’.

NOTES
1. R. de Vaux, O.P., The Early History of Israel, London, 1978, Vol. I, p.
156.
2. “It could not have meant the whole of Israel, that is, the twelve tribes,
because ‘all Israel’ had not been constituted at that time. It must there-
fore have meant Israel in a much narrower sense.” (Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 390).
3. To take only the most significant example: the very name of David and
his story do not figure in any source other than the Bible — neither among
the texts nor among the archaeological remains.
4. It is piquant to observe that, by virtue of the fundamental laws of the pre-
sent State of Israel, wherein one is a Jew only if one has a Jewish mother
or has been converted to the Jewish religion, King Solomon would not
have been considered a Jew and could not have benefited by the ‘‘Law of
Return” — first, because his mother was not Jewish but Hittite, and
secondly, because no Orthodox rabbi authorised to certify his conversion
would have agreed to do that for a man who set up in Jerusalem altars for
the gods of his concubines from Egypt, Edom, Moab, Sidon, etc. The
same would apply to Saul, born of a Canaanite mother, and also (as we
shall see later) to King David, whose great-grandmother, Ruth, was a
Moabite!
5. Israel Zangwill, ‘“The return to Palestine”, New Liberal Review, Decem-
ber 1901, p. 627. (‘‘Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a
people without a country’’).
66 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

. Quoted by Alfred Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, New York, 1978, p.

341.
~ . Davar, 29 September 1967. Quoted by Noam Chomsky, “Israeli Jews
and
Palestinian Arabs”, Holy Cross Quarterly, Summer 1972. (Reprinted in
Chomsky’s Peace in the Middle East, London 1975, p. 94).
. Ahad Ha’am, Complete Works (in Hebrew), Tel Aviv, Devir Publishing
House, and Jerusalem, The Hebrew Publishing House, 8th edition.
_C. Lévi-Strauss, “Race and History”, in Structural Anthropology, Vol.
II, London, 1977, p. 356.
10. See Joseph Badi, Fundamental Laws of the State of Israel, New York,
1960, p. 156.
1. Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, London, 1974, p. 327.
ie, Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial Settler State?, New York, 1973, pp.
79, 80. See also Ilan Halévi, La question juive, Paris, Editions de Minuit,
1981, pp. 116-125, and his discussion of Arthur Koestler’s book about the
Khazars, The Thirteenth Tribe, London, 1976.
. Thomas Kiernan, The Arabs, Abacus Edition, 1975, p. 296.
. Harry N. Howard, The King-Crane Commission, Beirut, 1963, p. 92.
. Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfilment, London, 1949, p. 4.
. U.S. Congressional Record, 18 December 1947, p. 1176.
. Sumner Welles, We Need Not Fail, Boston, 1948, p. 63.
. The Forrestal Diaries, New York, 1951, p. 363.
. On the massacre at Deir Yasin it is interesting to compare the version
given in Begin’s book The Revolt, in the English edition of 1951, with the
testimony of Jacques de Reynier, head of the International Red Cross mis-
sion in Jerusalem, in his book 1948 a Jérusalem (Neuchatel, Editions de
la Baconniére, 1950, reprinted 1969, pp. 69-78).
20. On the murder of Count Bernadotte, see the report by General A.
Lundstr6m (who was in Bernadotte’s car at the time), sent to the U.N. on
the very day it happened. There is also the book by General Lundstr6m
published in Rome in 1970: Un Tributo alla memoria del Conte Folke Ber-
nadotte, and Ralph Hewin’s book: Count Bernadotte, His Life And Work
(London, 1950). Baruch Nadel’s confession appeared in the Milan weekly
Europa, and was quoted in Le Monde of 4 and 5 July, 1971.
Zi On this aspect of the problem, see Henry Cattan, Palestine, the Arabs and
Israel, London, 1969.
22. Begin, The Revolt, pp. 335-337.
. David Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny ofIsrael, New York, 1954, p. 530.
24. At the Euro-Arab Colloquium held in Paris in September 1977; published
in France/Pays Arabes, 1978, pp. 136-140.
aD. From the end of the 13th century the basic text of the literature called
‘Kabbalistic’, that is ‘‘of tradition’, namely, the Zohar, conceived man-
kind as being a concise summary of the universe, and amid mankind it was
the mission of the Jewish people to restore the world’s unity and establish
the universal Kingdom of God.
26. His book The Jewish State was published in Vienna in 1896.
21: Theodor Herzl, Complete Diaries, London, 1960, Vol. 3, p. 1194.
 THE MYTH OF “‘HISTORIC RIGHTS”’ 67
28. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 581.
. J.-P. Alem, Juifs et Arabes; 3,000 ans d’histoire, Paris, 1968, p. 67.
30. On 19 December 1903, in Paris, the student Zelig Louban fired a revol-
ver at Nordau, shouting: “Death to Nordau the African!”
Sitle Herzl, The Jewish State, New York, 1946, p. 96. In the same work he
wrote: ‘The Society of Jews will treat with the present masters of the
land, putting itself under the protectorate of the European powers”
(ibid., p. 95).
Se. Herzl, Complete Diaries, Vol. 1, p. 23.
. A. Chouraqui, A Man Alone, Jerusalem, 1970, p. 106.
34. Ibid., p. 167. This convergence of Zionism and antisemitism was confirmed
even under Hitler. The records of the German Foreign Ministry reveal the
stages of the agreement made between Hitler’s Reich and the Jewish
Agency in order to facilitate the transfer and emigration of the German Jews
to Palestine. A document of 22 June 1937 testifies to the Nazis’ hesitations:
“This German attitude, dictated by requirements of domestic policy,
virtually promotes the consolidation of Jewry in Palestine and thereby
accelerates the development of a Jewish state in Palestine.”
Nevertheless, Hitler himself resolved to continue along that path. The
Deputy Director of the Foreign Ministry’s Economic Policy Department,
Clodius, notes on 27 January 1938: *‘The Fuhrer has recently decided
again .. . that Jewish emigration from Germany shall continue to be
promoted by all available means. Any question which might have existed
up to now as to whether in the Fuhrer’s opinion such emigration is to be
directed primarily to Palestine has thereby been answered in the affirma-
tive.”’ (Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, Series D, Vol.
5, London, 1953, pp. 752 and 784).
A former leader of the Stern Group, Nathan Yalin-Mor (formerly
Friedman-Yellin) tells us the arguments that were used by an emissary of
that group sent to negotiate with the Nazis in 1942, in the midst of the
war: “Our plans for large-scale immigration offered Germany an addi-
tional advantage in that they would fulfil one of her avowed aims,
namely, to rid Europe of the Jews” (Nathan Yalin-Mor, /sraél-Israél
. . .: Histoire du Groupe Stern, 1940-1948, Paris, 1978, p. 98).
This collaboration between the Zionist leaders and the Nazis is con-
firmed in Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Dr Kastner,
acting for the Zionist movement, made an agreement with Eichmann.
The latter would permit the “‘illegal’ departure” of several thousand
prominent Jews and members of the Zionist youth organisations for
Palestine. In exchange for this, “quiet and order’? would reign in the
camps from which hundreds and thousands of Jews were being sent to
Auschwitz. (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, London, 1963, pp.
37-38).
On ic problem ofthis co-operation ofthe Zionist leaders with the Nazis,
a document to consult is The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and
Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, by Reb Moshe Shanfiel, published by
Neturei Karta of the U.S.A., G.P.O.B. 2143 Brooklyn, New York 11202.
68 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

35. Chouraqui, op. cit., p. 236.

. Ibid., p. 199.
37. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, London, 1949, p. 258: ‘“‘What we
wanted”, Weizmann added, ‘“‘was a British protectorate.”’ He explained,
for the benefit of Lord Robert Cecil: ‘‘A Jewish Palestine would be a
safeguard to England in particular in respect of the Suez Canal” (ibid.,
pp. 242, 243).
38. Gerschom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, London, 1971, p.
Sie
ue Abraham Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, New York, 1969, p. 115.
. Yediot Aharonot, 27 November 1981.
41. Ibid. Let us add that, throughout history, persecution has not been the
lot of the Jews alone. There were the persecutions of Christians under
Nero and Diocletian, and then the persecutions of “heretics” — the
bloody orgies of the extermination of the Cathars in Languedoc, the rep-
ression of the Hussites in Bohemia, the slaughter of the Vaudois, the
Inquisition in Spain, the St Bartholomew’s Eve massacre and the dragon-
nades against the Huguenots, are only a few examples of the intolerance
of which the Jews were victims amongst others.
42. For 1983 the American Senate, increasing the amount of aid to Israel
proposed by the White House, has increased the subsidies to $850 million
for the economy and $910 million for arms purchases. These figures do
not include the contributions made by the Jews of the ‘‘Diaspora”’.
 II
The “Biblical” Myth
“This country exists as a result of a promise made by God
Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask for the recognition of its
legitimacy.” This is the fundamental axiom of political
Zionism, as formulated by Mrs Golda Meir.! :
‘This country was promised to us, and we have a right to it,”
says Begin.”
“Tf you have the Book of the Bible, and the People of the
Bible, then you also have the land of the Bible — of the Judges
and of the Patriarchs in Jerusalem, Hebron, Jericho and
thereabouts”’.*
In this way the Israeli Zionist leaders, whether they call
themselves right-wing or left-wing, members of the Labour
Party or of Likud, spokesmen of the Army or of the
rabbinate, continually invoke a biblical ‘‘argument”’ as their
grounds for asserting a territorial claim, a “divine right” of
ownership over Palestine. The matter is presented as though
they could produce an act of gift signed by God which would
consequently endow them with right to expropriate any other
occupier of the land in question.
This conception of the ‘‘promise’’, together with the means
for its realisation (as the leaders of political Zionism derive
69
70 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

these from the Book wherein Joshua recounts his feats of

extermination of the previous inhabitants, which he carried out
at God’s command and with his support), plus the themes of
‘the chosen people”’ and of ‘‘Greater Israel’’, from the Nile to
the Euphrates, constitute the ideological foundation of
political Zionism.
Colonialists of all epochs and all nations have always sought
a “‘justification” for their annexations, robberies and
dominations. The pretext was usually found in an alleged
“superiority” of culture which endowed the invader with a
“civilising mission” for his “‘race” in relation to others. A
religious pretext offered a precious additional aid to such
colonial conquests — or, more generally, to any domination of
one social group over another.
Everything is permitted if one is God’s ‘‘chosen people’,
“the functionary of the Absolute’. Gesta Dei per Francos
meant that the “Franks”? were the arm by which God acted,
and so we had the Crusades. The Spain of the ‘“‘Most Catholic
Kings” was the Spain of the Inquisition and of the genocide of
the American Indians. ‘“‘Holy Russia’ was the Russia of the
pogroms. Gott mit uns meant the Germany of Bismarck,
before it became the Germany of Hitler and Auschwitz. ‘““You
are Christ’s soldiers”, Cardinal Spellman told the American
expeditionary force in Vietnam.
In 1972 Vorster, the Prime Minister of South Africa,
notorious for the harsh racism of apartheid, likewise pro-
claimed: “Let us not forget that we are the people of God,
entrusted with a mission.’
In the Judaic religious tradition, ‘election’ means
essentially “election through suffering”, and it is a lofty
spiritual theme of responsibility and sacrifice on the part of the
one who has received the divine message. But let us recall,
once again, that our criticism is directed exclusively at political
Zionism, which exploits this theme of election — including
“election through suffering”, as we have shown in connection
with the political exploitation of ‘the holocaust” — in a
 THE ‘“‘BIBLICAL”” MYTH 71

colonialist sense implying superiority, which, still in the pure

colonialist tradition of the ideology of justification, is
presented as involving responsibility and painful sacrifice: the
sense in which, for example, Rudyard Kipling spoke of “‘the
white man’s burden”’.
The idea of a chosen people is historically infantile, for all
peoples have expressed in their writings this privileged
conception of themselves, which comes across in terms of
election. Why should the writings of one people alone be taken
at their word?
The idea of a chosen people is politically criminal, for it has
always sanctified aggression, expansion and domination.
The idea of a chosen people is theologically intolerable, for
if some are “chosen” that means that others are “‘rejected’’.
Any policy that claims to be based on this myth must
therefore lead to negation and rejection of “‘the other’. There
is no theology of solitude, for a solitary man, sufficient unto
himself, has no God.
Zionist colonialism is no exception to this rule. We have
already seen how it implies denial of the very existence of a
Palestinian people (Golda Meir), or their expulsion, from Deir
Yasin to Beirut (Begin), with perhaps more such exploits to
come.
The ideological phenomenon of the importance accorded in
Israel to certain passages in the Bible is all the more
remarkable in that political Zionism took shape in opposition
to the Judaic religious protest voiced by the rabbis in 1897,
when they said that to reconquer Palestine by money and arms
amounted to a betrayal of the highest and noblest traditions of
Judaism.
In the 1890s, when Herzl was beginning his campaign, a
proposal to hold a conference at Munich was abandoned owing
to opposition from the German rabbis, who declared that
“attempts to found a Jewish national state in Palestine were
contrary to the Messianic promises of Judaism.’ In the 1930s
Albert Einstein wrote:
72 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on

the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish
state. Apart from practical considerations, my awareness of the
essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state, with
borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter
how modest — I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain
— especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within
our own ranks ... We are no longer the Jews of the Maccabee
period. A return to a nation, in the political sense of the word,
would be equivalent to turning away from the spiritualisation of
our community which we owe to the genius of our prophets.°

The vast majority of Israelis of today are neither practising

nor believing Jews, and the different ‘religious parties’,
although they play a decisive role in the State of Israel, include
in their membership only a very small minority of the country’s
citizens. This apparent paradox is well explained by Nathan
Weinstock: “If rabbinical obscurantism rules the roost in
Israel, it is because the Zionist mystique lacks coherence
except by reference to the religion of Moses. Do away with the
concepts of ‘chosen people’ and ‘promised land’, and the
foundation of Zionism collapses. That is why, paradoxically,
the religious parties draw their strength from the complicity of
the Zionist agnostics. The needs of the internal coherence of
the Zionist structure of Israel have obliged its leaders to
strengthen the authority of the clergy. It was the social-
democratic party Mapai which, on the initiative of Ben-
Gurion, made the teaching of religion an obligatory item in the
school curriculum — not the religious parties.””’
For the same reasons there is no civil marriage in Israel: a
Jew cannot marry, separate or divorce in Israel except in
accordance with the rules of the Torah, that is, the religious
laws set forth in the Pentateuch.
The principal consequence of this impossibility of separating
the synagogue from the state is that the State of Israel,
thirty-five years after its birth, still has no Constitution: “It is in
order not to clash with the clerical parties, which insist that the
Torah be made the fundamental law of the state, that it has
 THE ‘“‘BIBLICAL”’ MYTH 18

been necessary to refrain from providing the country with a

constitution.’
That which is the very principle of the Zionist state, namely,
the definition of ‘‘the Jew” — the one who alone may enjoy the
benefits of the fundamental, constitutive Law of Return
—possesses the same clerical and discriminatory character.
The Law of Return (5710-1950) provides that:

1. Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an

immigrant...
4b. For the purposes of this law anyone is considered a Jew who
was born of a Jewish mother or who has been converted to
Judaism, and who does not adhere to a different religion.”

No other criterion is laid down other than the racial one

(succession through the blood of one’s mother) or the religious
one (conversion) — which latter, by the way, is valid only if
certified by an ““Orthodox” (and not a “‘Reform’’) rabbi.
The ideology of justification which is characteristic of
Zionism invokes the promise made to Abraham in Genesis, xv,
18: ‘‘In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham,
saying, ‘Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of
Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.’”’
We have already noted that no trace of this ancient history of
Israel exists in any form apart from the Old Testament. The
question that arises at once therefore is: can any group of
human beings impose on other peoples a rule governing their
existence which has no authority behind it but the belief held
by this group in its own tradition?
This question is all the more to the point in that all the
peoples of the Middle East — the Mesopotamians, the Hittites,
the Egyptians — were given by their gods the same promises as
Abraham: a land and a posterity. Why should the Syrians not
invoke, as an historic and divine right, the promise made to
their Hittite ‘‘ancestors”’ (whose empire, unlike the Kingdom of
David and Solomon, lasted nearly a thousand years, from the
18th to the 8th century BC) by the goddess Arinna, who
74 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

“established the borders of the land.’’?'° We should rightly

regard such a claim as absurd. But why, then, take a different
attitude towards similar texts emanating from a neighbouring
civilisation — unless because, rightly or wrongly, we believe
ourselves to be the heirs of that civilisation? (See the First
Epistle of St Peter, already quoted.)
From the outset, then, we must regard this reading of the
Bible as a tribal reading, that is, one that considers a priori, the
tradition of “‘our’” tribe as the only valid one, while the
traditions of other tribes, even neighbouring ones, are null and
void.
This reading of the Bible, even if we accept the tribal
assumption of that book’s exclusive value, detached from the
whole context of the religions of the Middle East which are so
close to it, is a selective reading which picks out particular
episodes because they serve to justify certain behaviour now,
and excludes other episodes because they tend to condemn
that behaviour.
It is true that there are in the Old Testament passages which,
if they be taken as guides to conduct, would justify Oradour or
Deir Yasin, violent occupation of territory, or genocide. The
Book of Joshua, so often invoked today by the army rabbinate
in Israel in order to preach holy war, and also made much of in
schoolteaching,'’ dwells upon the sanctified extermination of
conquered populations, putting everyone to “the edge of the
sword” — “both man and woman, young and old” (Joshua, vi,
21) — as we read in the story of Jericho and of so many other
cities.
In Numbers (xxxi, 7-18) we learn of the exploits of those
“children of Israel’ who, having overcome the Midianites,
“slew all the males’, ‘‘took all the women of Midian captives”’
and “‘burnt all their cities’. When they returned into the
presence of Moses, he
was wroth . . . And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all these
women alive? . . . Now therefore kill every male among the little
ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with
 THE “BIBLICAL”? MYTH 75

him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by
lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

These accounts were the work of theologians who wished to

proclaim their faith in an unconquered God, despite the defeat
suffered by his people. The Assyrians considered their victory
as being that of their god Assur over Yahweh, who had been
defeated. The theologians of the Exile period were therefore
concerned to show that if their people had been beaten, that
was not because their god, Yahweh, was weak, but because his
people had been faithless, and had been punished by Yahweh
for their faithlessness.
The multiplication of accounts of god-commanded
massacres and exterminations is a critique of the way in which
the kings waged their wars, so as to gain materially by them. In
the tradition of the ‘“‘holy war’ it was out of the question to
profit from victory. That was a belief and a practice that were
current in that time and in that part of the world. The
‘“‘anathema”’ which implied the extermination of the con-’
quered, and even of their livestock, was an oath to renounce all
booty, if only God would grant victory. The conquered would
not be sold as slaves and the victors would not take their cattle.
Everyone and everything would be destroyed. This was
extermination by God’s decree.
To give just one example of this fabrication of historical
legends, the ‘‘taking of Jericho”’ is so completely an invention
that archaeologists have established that ‘Jericho ... had
been destroyed in the 14th century and was deserted during
what is generally assumed to be the period of Joshua.””'”
Yet these historical reconstructions are utilised in the
schools of Israel in order to cultivate fanaticism among the
young. The psychologist G. Tamarin, of Tel-Aviv University,
carried out the following test. He distributed to more than
1,000 pupils of the 4th to 8th forms (children between 8 and
14), who read the Book of Joshua in school, the account of the
genocide at Jericho given in that book (vi, 20,21), and put this
76 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

question to them: “Suppose the Israeli Army occupies an Arab

village in battle. Do you think it would be proper, or not, to act
against the inhabitants as did Joshua with the people of Jericho?”
The number who answered “Yes” varied between 66 percent and
95 per cent, according to the school attended or the kibbutz or
town where the children lived.'* The publication of the results of
this inquiry, revealing the real visage of a society, caused
Professor Tamarin to be expelled from the University.
This brainwashing at school is continued by the rabbinate
and by the Army. During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon the
rabbis attached to the Army continually preached the doctrine
of holy war. The central theme was given by a rabbi with the
rank of captain:
We must not overlook the Biblical sources which justify this war
and our presence here. We are fulfilling our religious duty as Jews
(Mitzvah) by being here. So it is written: the religious duty
(Mitzvah) to conquer the Land from the enemy.”’'*

We have here indeed a selective reading of the Bible, one

that is uncritical and non-historical, keeping to those passages
only which can serve to legitimise conquest and the use of
barbarous methods, for there are other passages in the Old
Testament which are inspired by a quite different spirit.
First of all, as regards the ‘‘promise’’, Abraham considered
himself so little the owner of the land of Canaan that at Hebron
he went to great lengths in the courtesy of his request to
Ephron the Hittite to sell him a field in Machpelah, before
Mamre, in order that he might bury his wife Sarah there
(Genesis, xxiii, 3-20).
Another example of this dual tradition: it is said in the Book
of Judges (i, 8) that the children of Judah, after Joshua’s death,
took Jerusalem and exterminated its inhabitants. Yet, in the
same book (i, 21) we are told the contrary: ‘‘And the children
of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that inhabited
Jerusalem; but the Jebusites dwell with the children of
Benjamin in Jerusalem unto this day.”’
 THE “BIBLICAL”? MYTH 77

In the Second Book of Samuel we see David looking upon

the land so little as having been “‘promised”’ that he buys from
Araunah, King of the Jebusites, a field whereon he can build
the Temple, paying for it fifty shekels of silver (xxiv, 24). In the
First Book of Chronicles we are told again of how David bought
this piece of land (xxi, 18-25), and although in this version the
Jebusite king is called Ornan and the price is six hundred
shekels of gold, these contradictions are of minor interest.
What remains the same is that David has not behaved as the
owner of the land, has not sought to drive out the indigenous
inhabitants, but, on the contrary, has negotiated politely with
them, just as Abraham had done in his time.
Where the methods used are concerned it is the same. The
Book of Judges gives us an account of the entry into Canaan
quite contrary to that given in the Book of Joshua. Instead of
the invasion described by Joshua, in which the tribes, united in
a single state and under a single command, massacre the
populations as they advance, the picture presented is one of a
gradual infiltration, usually peaceful though sometimes violent,
without, however, any major conflict with the Canaanite cities,
whose war-chariots were hard to combat for nomadic tribes
each of which was operating on its own. The victory-song of
Deborah, in Chapter V of Judges, one of the oldest parts of the
Old Testament, and similar to the war-songs of the Egyptians
in the days of Tethmosis III or Rameses III, is one of the rare
triumphalist episodes in this version, for the ideology of holy
war and of extermination in God’s name does not predominate
here as it does in Joshua.
Far from seeking a foundation in exclusivism and the
rejection of assimilation, in the denial and crushing of “the
other”, the Old Testament constantly reminds its readers:
“Love ye therefore the stranger; for ye were strangers in the
land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy, x, 19: cf. Exodus, xxii, 21, and
Leviticus, xix, 33-34). It is even laid down specifically, against
any discrimination, that: ‘““One law shall be to him that is
homeborn and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you”’
78 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

(Exodus, xii, 49). Liberation never means taking the place of

the former oppressor.
The tribal, nationalist and racist reading of the Bible by
political Zionism refuses to listen to the imprecations of Micah
(iii, 9-12):

Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob and princes of
the house of Israel that abhor judgment and pervert all equity.
They build up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity . . .
Therefore shall Zion for your sake be ploughed as a field, and
Jerusalem shall become heaps. . .

This selective reading has singled out three essential myths:

the chosen people, the gift of Canaan to this people, and the
exclusively Jewish “Greater Israel’.
A critical reading of the Bible, situating these themes in the
period in which they were created, and seeking to discover
what political and theological aims inspired them, is the only
way to integrate them in a history of man’s destiny and God’s
design.
If, for a believer, the Bible is the revelation of God’s interventions
in men’s lives in order to give them a meaning, what matters above
all in one’s reading of it is to discern the “poetic” (that is, creative)
manifestations of the divine. It is therefore not possible to read the
Bible like a history book, in the way one would read the history of
Rome. In the first place, because, from this standpoint, it would be
very inferior in “objective” value to that sort of history. Nothing is
“objectively” verifiable in the Bible stories, about the deeds of the
Patriarchs, the sojourn in Egypt, the Exodus, Moses and the
installation in Canaan, for no cross-checking is possible, either with
written documents emanating from sources external to the Bible
itself or with archaeological remains. Solomon’s “death is the
earliest event in the history of Israel which it is possible to date
precisely,”’° because we can in this case establish a comparative
historical relation with the chronology of the neo-Assyrian empire,
which is reliable, being determined with certainty by astronomical
calculations.
 THE “BIBLICAL” MYTH 79

Today there is no serious exegetist who does not accept that

the oldest parts of the Bible, those which form what is called
the “Yahvist’? source, were composed, at the earliest, in
Solomon’s reign (middle of the 10th century BC) and are
compilations of oral traditions. If, then, we keep to the criteria
of historical “objectivity” alone, these Bible stories which
describe events of several centuries earlier are no more
‘historical’, in the positivist sense of the word, than are the
Iliad or the Ramayana.
From the standpoint of a short-sighted and de-humanised
historical positivism which concerns itself only with ‘‘facts’’ and
not with meanings, the ‘promise’ made to Abraham, the
“covenant’’, the ‘“‘election’’, the sacrifice of Abraham’s son
Isaac, the Exodus, and the very person of Moses, possess no
“historical”’ reality.
From the “‘scientific’’ standpoint (in the narrow sense of the
word, that is, the positivist, scientist sense) nothing therefore
remains of the promise, the election, the covenant, or of the
entire history of Israel before the reign of David.
But if, on the contrary, we look at history not like moles but
in a truly human way - that is, if we try to find in the past how
man became human, then the ‘poetic’ inventions by which,
unlike any of the other animal species, he sought to give a
meaning to his life and to his death, the images of the hero and
of the saint that he conceived or experienced, as ways of going
to the ultimate limit in the truly human way of living: why,
then, the historical problem shiftsitsground.
The problem is no longer one of knowing whether
Abraham was really born at ‘Ur of the Chaldees” (which is,
moreover, an anachronism)'°; whether his journey did indeed
follow the route described; whether God came to him (in what
form?) to make him a promise and a gift of a country or of a
posterity; of knowing on what mountain we should place the
‘burning bush” of Moses, or whether Joshua was in fact the
commander-in-chief of the tribes and the slayer of Canaanites
(as others, many centuries later, were to be slayers of Indians),
80 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

andsoon...
The problem is quite different, and it does not rule out
research of the strictest scientific rigour, but, on the contrary,
implies and presupposes this. The problem is as follows: at
what moment, in what historical circumstances, in which
human communities and for what purposes were these basic
stories of heroes, real or mythical, created — these stories which
were decisive in the formation of man, of man’s life? The
important thing is that men were able to conceive and create
such images of themselves. They tried to live in accordance
with these examples, which inaugurated a new reality in human
form,'’ opening new horizons, horizons without limit,
revealing this new criterion so as to reduce to merely relative
significance all human projects and their realisation, when
compared with this boundless horizon stretching before the
caravan of mankind. This boundless horizon is called ‘“‘God”’
by the Abrahamic tradition: it enables man to accomplish, in
the most worldly actions, ‘‘the movements of infinity’, as
Kierkegaard wrote in his incomparable meditation upon
Abraham, “‘the knight of faith’’.'*
Let us now take up again, from this “‘theological’’!” angle,
the themes of election, the covenant, the promise of the land
and of a posterity, not in order to grasp them as “‘facts”’ (like a
title-deed, or a political programme, which is the claim, at once
absurd and deadly, of political Zionism), but in order to
welcome in them their “meaning”, as a great heritage of
Judaism at the start of the Abrahamic succession to which
Jews, Christians and Muslims all belong.
If we accept the dating which is now established by scientific
exegesis, according to which the most ancient of the
chroniclers, the ‘‘Yahvist’’, wrote his works no earlier than
Solomon’s reign, what ‘‘message”’ do we find him trying to
convey to his contemporaries?*” Some, like Von Rad, in his
Theology of the Old Testament, see in the work of the Yahvist a
legitimation of the Kingdom of David (as against those who
were nostalgic for the old tribal confederation). Others, like
 THE “‘BIBLICAL”’ MYTH 81

Albert de Pury, emphasise the non-triumphalist, critical aspect

of the Yahvist’s work, which reminds readers that God’s
purpose and his ‘“‘promise’’ are being realised despite the
unworthiness of those he has chosen. He stresses the failures
even of Abraham, where the essentials of the “promise” were
concerned. By including in his history Abraham’s sojourn in
Egypt he can draw attention to his infidelity with regard to the
two objects of the ‘“‘promise’’: the land (which he abandoned)
and the posterity (which he compromised in cowardly fashion
by passing off his wife Sarah as his sister and letting her be
taken into Pharaoh’s harem).7!
The Yahvist’s preoccupation is evidently with impressing the
reader both with the greatness of God and with the gratuitous-
ness of his gifts. God stands by his blessing despite the failures
of the men who received the “promise” and do not show
. themselves worthy of it. In several episodes it is made clear
that every time the Patriarch or the members of his family use
trickery or violence in their dealings with others, a disaster
follows. When Abraham lets himself be swayed by his wife -
Sarah and sends away the servant who has borne him a son
(Genesis, xvi); when Joseph is betrayed by his brothers
(Genesis, xxv—xxvii); or when the sons of Jacob massacre the
inhabitants of Shechem during ritual ceremonies (Genesis,
XXXIV).
Every time that Abraham tries to “appropriate” the
Promise, to accomplish it by his own means, by force or
trickery, his undertaking fails. He finds that he cannot live
except by agreement with his neighbours.
Furthermore, in a spirit of generous universalism, the
Yahvist reduces to merely relative significance, in the cosmic
design of God, the realisation of the Kingdom of David and
Solomon, by recalling that God’s Promise will not be fulfilled
until ‘“‘in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
It would be pointless, for our purpose, to examine the other
' less ancient sources (the Elohist, who doubtless belongs to the
beginning of the 8th century; the 7th-century Deuteronomy;
82 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

and the priestly code and historiography in Deuteronomy,

both conceived during the Exile period, in the 6th century).
That the Patriarchs and, foremost among them, Abraham,
were not historical personages, and that the Covenant, the
Promise and the Election belong to legend and poetry and not
to history, does not prevent us from asking ourselves about the
significance of these myths, it even invites us to do this. For the
Covenant is the problem of the relations between man and
God, the Promise is the problem of the relation between a
divine purpose and a human plan, and the Election is the
problem of man’s responsibility when he assumes _ his
transcendent dimension.
As the Koran says, more than once: “‘Each apostle we have
sent spoke in the language of his own people, so that he might
make plain to them his message.’’*? When exegesis separates
out the various strata of which the Bible is composed, it shows
us several successive versions of the promise of the land and of
posterity. There is, first of all, the promise made to nomads
engaged in transhumance, a promise of a land where they will
be able to settle down (Genesis, xxviii, 10-22). This promise
carries no implication of a military and political conquest of the
territories concerned, only of settlement in them. A second
stage (and a second version of the Promise, expanded to
national dimensions) is a post facto justification of David’s
conquests: it provides backing for the sovereignty of the
‘chosen people”’ over all the regions situated ‘“‘from the river
of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates” (Genesis,
xv, 18). A third version (still keeping to the Old Testament)
extends the Promise to “‘all families of the earth” (Genesis xii,
3).
The thread running all through this history of the Promise is
God’s constant care for the welfare of mankind:?4 whether he
is promising to a nomad the security and well-being of a happy
posterity in a rich land where he can settle down; or a stable
and prosperous state, as could be hoped for in David’s reign;
or whether he is opening up the prospect of convoking the
 THE “‘BIBLICAL”? MYTH 83

entire world to the realisation of the highest aim of man and

God’s own purpose, as these are envisaged, for example, by
the prophet Isaiah (ii, 4).
Man’s salvation is never transferred to another world, for
the ancient Israelitish faith seems to exclude such a dualism:
but at the same time land and political power are never ends in
themselves. They are always treated as relative to the
transcendence of God.
The land belongs to God alone. ‘“‘The land shall not be sold
forever: for the land is mine: for ye are strangers and
sojourners with me.”’° So as to break the tie between man and
the land, God prescribes that in every year of jubilee (every
forty-nine years), all land, however it may have changed hands
in the meantime, shall be redistributed and restored to its
original possessor: ‘‘in the jubilee it shall go out, and he shall
return unto his possession.’’”° [i.e., all mortgages were to be
written off — Trans.]
Power, like the land, belongs to God alone. In the first book
of Samuel (viii, 10-18), Samuel warns the people of all the
alienations that will be entailed by the institution of the
monarchy in Israel.
This veritable “liberation” with regard to property and
power is already the great lesson of the Exodus and Moses:
“After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall
ye not do”.”’ This “‘liberation” is no mere matter of property
and power changing hands, with the oppressed of yesterday
becoming the oppressed of today.
This is the wonderful message of Judaism to the world,
which political Zionism has betrayed by a fundamental
misrepresentation of the meaning of the Promise.
Political Zionism has betrayed Judaism and perverted
Christianity. For is it not a basic perversion of Christianity to
let oneself be swayed from what was the most prodigious
heritage of Judaism, namely, the faith of Abraham, that faith
which does not seek to enjoy the promises of God but to
submit to his demands?
84 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

Kierkegaard has, more profoundly than any other

theologian, Jewish, Christian or Muslim, shown the common
centre of faith for all the posterity of Abraham, those to whom
the Promise is made, that Promise which is, for all three
communities (which are really one), a promise not of privilege
but of responsibility: the responsibility of subjecting man’s
projects to God’s purpose, with all the risks entailed in this
exalting adventure for man, who can never be certain as to
what God’s purpose is. As Karl Barth wrote: whatever I may
say about God, it is but a man who says it. A fallible man, with
words that are always provisional, liable to revision, and never
to reach completion: “It is now my intention” wrote
Kierkegaard,

to draw out of the story of Abraham the dialectic which lies

concealed within it, and to do this in the form of problemata, in
order to discover what a tremendous paradox is faith, a paradox
which can transform a murder into a holy act pleasing to God, a
paradox which no thought can encompass, because faith begins
where thought leaves off.”°

The Christians who have allowed themselves to be drawn

into passing on the slogans of political Zionism about ‘“‘the
Promised Land” and the ‘‘Chosen People’”’ have been cured,
have they not, of the age-old aberration of a Church that
fostered a specifically Christian antisemitism based on the
ignoble accusation directed against the Jews, that they were a
““deicide” people, the murderers of Jesus Christ? Today, that
same church tries to correct its aim by committing a misinter-
pretation in exactly the opposite direction. After having
anathematised the ‘“‘rejected” people, the ‘“‘chosen” people are
now given support. Limping on both legs is not the same as
walking straight. There are saints and there are guilty men. But
there are no holy peoples any more than there are accursed
peoples.
After a miserable rivals’ quarrel in which the Christian
Church claimed to be the object of “‘election’”’, the heir to the
 THE “BIBLICAL”? MYTH 85

‘priestly people”’,”’ we see it now ready for compromise and

sharing, as though there were sects in the posterity of
Abraham, as though the faith of Abraham were an “‘inherit-
ance” that could be claimed by a people, a race, an institution
or a church, and not the obligation imposed on all those who
seek to respond to God’s appeal.
And what, indeed, is this “catholicism” or this ‘‘ecu-
menism’’, provincial and Western, which pretends to be
unaware of the other members of the Abrahamic community —
the Jews before them and the Muslims after them?
It is monstrous, let it be said straight out, that Christians
should separate the “‘Promise” of the Land from the promise
of the ““Kingdom’’, as if their Bible did not constitute a whole,
just like those Jews who isolate the nationalist and racist
tendencies of the Torah from the lofty universalism of the
' Prophets, from Amos to Isaiah.
What conception of the faith of Abraham and of the message
of Jesus concerning the ‘““Kingdom”’ can have inspired Jacques
Maritain when he wrote: ‘Palestine is the only territory to -
which it is absolutely, divinely certain that one people has an
incontestable right”’,*” as if one belonged to the community of
Abraham by birth and not by faith, and as if one shared in the
Promise as in a privilege and a property-right, and not as a
responsibility and a grace?
And what can be said of the document entitled: Pastoral
Guide on the Attitude of Christians towards Judaism, published
by the Committee of the Bishops of France on 16 April 1975,
when it affirms (point 5): ‘‘We cannot forget, as Christians, the
gift made by God in former times to the people of Israel, of a
land whereon it was summoned to reunite ... ”’? Only that
this is a tragic muddle, identifying Judaism with the State of
Israel and Zionism, and a strange Christian theology which no
longer sees in Jesus Christ and the annunciation of the
_ Kingdom to the whole world the complete fulfilment of the
Promise.”
The Koran has defined better what is meant by the posterity
86 THE HISTORICAL MYTH

of Abraham, adding to Abraham’s reply to God’s call: “Behold,

here I am”, the equally unconditional concurrence of his son:
“Father, do as you are bidden. Allah willing, you shall find me
faithful.”22 With this unconditional submission of every human
ambition to God’s purpose the posterity of Abraham begins.

NOTES
1. See the context of this statement in Le Monde of 15 October 1971.
. Statement made by Begin in Oslo, reported in Davar, 12 December
1978.
. Moshe Dayan, in the Jerusalem Post, 10 August 1967.
. Vivant-Univers No. 290, Jan-Feb. 1974.
. Forrest, The Unholy Land, op. cit., p.53.
N
W
Nn. Quoted by Moshe Menuhin, The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time,
1969, p. 324.
— . Nathan Weinstock, Le Sionisme contre Israél, Paris, Maspero, 1969,
Pa dls.
8. Ibid., p. 316.
9. The text of the law is given by Claude Klein, Director of the Institute of
Comparative Law in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Le
Caractere juif de l’Etat d’Israél (Paris, Editions Cujas, 1977), pp.
155-156. This work by an eminent Zionist laywer, published in French, is
of fundamental importance for its remarkable analyses of the decisions of
Israel’s Supreme Court.
10. Les Religions du Proche-Orient asiatique, Paris, Editions Fayard, 1970,
paso
11. The Minister of Education is, significantly, one of the leaders of a
religious party.
12. De Vaux, The Early History of Israel, Vol. 2, p. 480.
13. Liban-Palestine, published by the Centre Protestant de l'Ouest, Paris,
Editions L’Harmattan, 1977, pp. 84-86. [A report of this survey
appeared in The Zionist State and Jewish Identity, published as Israca No.
5, January 1973 - Trans].
14. Haaretz, 5 July 1982.
15. Martin Noth, History of Israel, London, 1958, p. 224.
16. The name ‘“‘Chaldea”’ does not appear until the 9th century, centuries
after the period in which tradition places the Patriarch.
17. What is wonderful is that men, “‘poets’’, were able to conceive and create such
figures as Hector or Rama, who are still living ferments in our lives, even if
Hector’s fight with Achilles at Troy is a myth, like Rama’s victory over Ravana
in Sri Lanka. If we mean by “reality” that which sets its mark on us and inspires
our actions, these myths are more real than many an everyday “‘fact”’.
 THE “BIBLICAL”? MYTH 87

18. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, London, 1939, p. 48. This
meditation upon the act which founded the faith of the ‘“‘lineage of
Abraham” — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — seems to us relevant today for
the solution of the major problems of our time, especially those of the
relations between faith, on the one hand, and morality, politics and
science, on the other.
19. By “theological” I mean a study of man and his history which does not
rule out a priori the transcendental dimension of man, that is, his
constant ability to break ‘‘poetically” with the (real, but partial and local)
determinisms of his past, and his unending ‘‘quest”’ for the meaning of his
life and of his death.
. See on this subject the incisive synthesis by Albert de Pury: Les Sources
du Pentateuque: une bréve introduction, in Les Cahiers protestants,
September 1977, pp. 37-48.
. Genesis, xii, 10-20.
. Genesis, xii, 3.
. The Koran, Surah xiv, 4: Penguin edition, 1964, p. 98.
. On the significance of the Promise, see the thesis of Albert de Pury:
Promesse divine et légende culturelle dans le cycle de Jacob, 2 vols, Paris,
Editions Gabalda, 1975.
. Leviticus, xxv, 23.
. Leviticus, xxv, 28.
. Leviticus, xviii, 3.
. Kierkegaard, op. cit., p. 74.
. First Epistle of Peter, ii, 9.
. Jacques Maritain, Le Mystere d’Israél, Paris, 1965, p. 243.
. See on this subject the study by the Lazarist Father Jean Landousies, Le
Don de la terre de Palestine: Etude biblique, Master’s degree thesis
presented to the Institut Catholique, Paris, June 1974.
. The Koran, Surah xxxvii, 102, Penguin edition, p. 167.
 PART TWO
FROM THE ZIONIST
MYTHOLOGY TO THE
POLITICS OF ISRAEL
“Goyim kill goyim, and they come to hang the Jews!”
(Statement by Menachem Begin, 22 September 1982, after the
massacres at Sabra and Shatila).

I
Internal Policy: Racism,
Israel as a Colonial Entity
Everything is being done as though the aim is to get it into the heads of
the Jews of Israel that there is a qualitative and normative difference
between Jews and non-Jews . . . This is the principle that inspires all
the laws and regulations of the State in matters concerning domestic
policy, the status of individuals and of families, the criteria of citizen-
ship . . . It is the principle that governs our behaviour towards the
Israeli Arabs, the Beduin and the inhabitants of the West Bank and
Gaza, and our way of responding to their aspirations. . .
No unwarranted or distorted use of the Jewish law will succeed in
reducing to silence those who can see the differences between the law
of the priests and the vision of the prophets. We will not allow anyone
to turn Israel into a religious ghetto with Messianicclaims which flouts
the universal laws of mankind and international law.

In these words Mrs Shulamit Aloni, deputy to the Knesset and

leader in Israel of the Movement for Civil Rights, voiced her
indignation in an article entitled “In the name of Judaism’”’ in the
Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot of 25 June 1978.
89
90 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

In this cry we hear a denunciation of the way that the funda-

mental spirit of Judaism has been ideologically twisted by the
deadly mythology of political Zionism.
The entire policy, internal and external, of the State of Israel
follows, in fact, with inexorable logic, from the two basic fea-
tures of political Zionism: it is an essentially colonial phenome-
non, but it wears the specific disguise of a pseudo-theological
myth, one which was denounced by almost all the rabbis and
those who were devoted to the Jewish religion, before its birth
at the Congress of Basle in 1897,' as a betrayal of Judaism,
which was emptied of all spiritual significance and utilised to
justify a nationalist and racist policy.
The racism of political Zionism is a perfectly coherent sys-
tem which inspires all the laws and all the practices of the State
of Israel.
This racism was already the organising principle of Theodor
Herzl’s plan, as is revealed in his book The Jewish State and
still more clearly in his Diaries. After the French Revolution,
in France to begin with and then in the other countries of
Europe in the course of the 19th century, as democracy pro-
gressed, the archaic and inhuman system of discrimination
against the Jews retreated. Integrated in their nations with full
rights, most of them became “‘assimilated’’, identifying them-
selves with the destiny of each respective nation and bringing a
distinguished contribution to their political and economic life
and their culture. The achievements of the greatest of them
were marked by the universalism which had made the thought
of Spinoza so noble. From Karl Marx to Martin Buber, from
Heine to Kafka, from a musician like Mendelssohn to a physi-
cist like Einstein, their message was addressed to all mankind.
Herzl’s plan ran contrary to this lofty tradition. Deeply dis-
turbed, he said, by the Dreyfus case*, he strove to combat
“assimilation” and, taking up the basic thesis of the antisemi-
tes, upheld the idea that the Jews cannot be assimilated by
other nations, but must be severed from them so as to form no
longer a religion and a cultural element, but a separate state.
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 91

In order to gain his ends, Herzl did not hesitate to employ,

with each of his interlocutors, the language that was most likely
to convince him of the danger represented by the Jews, and
therefore the need to facilitate their departure.°
In London, for example, Herzl declared that the Zionists
would, by their solution of the Jewish problem, “eliminate the
danger of a revolution which would begin with the Jews and
end who knows where . . .”” This was the way, too, in which
Herzl spoke to the German Foreign Minister Von Biilow and
Kaiser Wilhelm II, to Russia’s Minister of the Interior, Plehve,
and to Tsar Nicholas II, to the most notorious antisemites.
Plehve was responsible for the pogroms at Kishinev in April
1903, which were among the worst of such atrocities. Herzl
wrote to Plehve in May, recommending Zionism to him 4s an
antidote to “‘revolution’’, the idea of which would, after Kishi-
nev, certainly prove attractive to young Jews. When Plehve
received him, in August, Herzl asked for a letter expressing
support for Zionism. He was given such a letter: in this letter
Plehve made it clear that he would support a Zionism that’
caused Jews to emigrate, but not any cultivation of an alien
nationalism inside Russia. Herzl found the letter “‘satisfying’’,
and in another appeal to Plehve asked him for an introduction
to the Turkish Sultan, so that he might ask permission for Jews
to enter Palestine. Despite the misgivings of his friends, Herzl
made this correspondence public at the Zionist Congress of
1903.
Even before he published his book, one of his critics wanted,
early in 1896, to kill Herzl, “‘for you will do the Jews a frightful
injury.”’ Herzl did not hesitate to reply: “‘So I am beginning to
have the right to become the world’s worst antisemite.’’ Per-
fectly aware of the convergence between his Zionist project
and antisemitism, he said: ‘“The antisemites will become our
surest friends and the antisemitic countries our allies.”
Another of his remarks in this context was: “‘It’s just too bad if
this provides more material for Monsieur Drumont.”’
In fact, Herzl developed all the ideas used by the antisemi-
92 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

tes. Before he won over the British Rothschild to Zionism, in

1902, he advocated a campaign of blackmail directed at the great
Jewish financiers, outlining in his Diaries a scheme of operations
on the theme: ‘‘‘The House of Rothschild’ — objective presen-
tation of the world menace that this octopus constitutes.’
Or, again, in order to get across the idea that the Jews were
aliens in their respective countries, replying to a protest by rabbis
who were worried by the suspicion he was causing to fall upon the
national loyalty of the Jews, he wrote: ‘“The chief defender of the
patriotic idea for England is the chief rabbi, Herr Adler, a
German. As to Prussian patriotism, we have as our leading light
the Rabbi, Dr Maybaum, of Berlin, a Hungarian; while lately a
voice has joined the chorus of protest in Belgium-—the Rabbi, M.
Bloch, who, to judge from his name, is neither a Fleming nor a
Walloon.” The worst of the antisemites could not have spoken
differently.
But, then, Herzl knew very well that antisemitism was needed
by political Zionism, so as to persuade the Jews to flee and emi-
grate to Palestine. We shall see later how this idea of his has
remained aconstant feature of political Zionism right downto the
present time. As soon as one ceases to define Judaism as a faith
and defines it as a nation, it becomes no longer possible to count
on religious motivation for a “‘return to Zion’. (We have seen
that, historically, this motivation has not had much effect.) What
is needed now is to cry up an “‘extra-national nationalism”’, pre-
senting the Jews as alien to the peoples among whom they live
(which provides the best nourishment for antisemitism) and to
rely on persecution to stimulate emigration. This was why Herzl
was not afraid to unleash antisemitism and even to encourage it.
There was no lack of warnings. Baron Chlomecki, the Presi-
dent of the Austrian Parliament, wrote to Herzl: “If your inten-
tion and the objective of your propaganda is to foster antisemi-
tism, you may reach this objective. I am absolutely convinced
that by such propaganda antisemitism will grow and that you will
bring a bloodbath upon Jewry.’”°
When Herzl died, his executors preferred not to publish his
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 93

Diaries in full, and when the baneful volumes were at last pub-
lished, in 1922 and 1923, in Germany, Joseph Samuel Bloch,
an Austrian writer (editor of the Oesterreichische Wochen-
schrift), who had known Herzl well, wrote in the same pro-
phetic vein:

The letters to Rothschild and to Baron Hirsch, and the assertion

that the Jews are potential rebels and revolutionaries in the coun-
tries where they reside, are enough to bring destruction upon the
Jewish people. Herzl has provided the enemies of the Jews with the
basis for a “solution of the Jewish problem”. He has shown them
the path to follow in their future work. The Diaries are terrible.

Herzl died in July 1904. In October of that year the Jewish

Quarterly Review published the results of a thoroughgoing
investigation of antisemitism and Zionism by the Anglo-Jewish
scholar Lucien Wolf. He concluded that: “‘Already the signs of
decay in organised antisemitism are very pronounced, . . . and
this notwithstanding that the assimilation problem still presents
difficulties.”” But he added that Zionist propaganda “‘will cer-
tainly give a new lease of life to the antisemitic agitation, which
otherwise must pursue a downward course.”’ ‘“To sum up then:
the characteristic peril of Zionism is that it is the natural and
abiding ally of antisemitism and its most powerful justifica-
tion.”
After the creation of the State of Israel, in 1948, this racism
of political Zionism was to have its effects not only to the detri-
ment of the Jews of the whole world but also, and above all, at
the expense of the Palestinian people, whose existence political
Zionism denied.
The new cycle of problems posed by political Zionism arose
from this question: how to create a Jewish majority in a coun-
try inhabited by an indigenous Palestinian Arab community?
Political Zionism answered the question with the only solu-
tion that could follow from its colonialist programme, namely,
to establish a colony of settlement by driving out the Palesti-
nians ahd promoting Jewish immigration.
94 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

The expulsion of the Palestinians and the seizure of their

land was a deliberate and systematic undertaking. The head of
the Jewish National Fund, responsible for acquiring land in
Palestine, Joseph Weitz, wrote in 1940:

Between ourselves, it must be clear that there is no room for both

peoples together in this country . .. The only solution is Eretz
Israel, at least the Western Israel, witout Arabs, and there is no
other way but to transfer the Arabs from her to the neighbouring
countries; to transfer them all — not one village, not one tribe
should be left... And the transfer should be directed to Iraq,
Syria and even Transjordan ... Only after this transfer will the
country be able to absorb millions of our brethren.’

That was the programme, formulated even before the State

of Israel came into being. As for its realisation on the political
and economic plane, it has corresponded perfectly to the
definition given in November 1980 by Professor Israel Shahak,
of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and formerly President
of the Israeli League for the Rights of Man: ‘Basically, the
State of Israel was founded by people who were not conscious
of the rights of non-Western people . . . They had absolutely
no sense of justice for people outside their group.” The domi-
nant attitude, he said, was “fundamentally racist’, with a
‘combined racism. First, Jewish racism and then Western rac-
ism: the feeling of Western superiority, not habitual now, but
customary forty or fifty years ago.”’ This racism had undergone
a “very quick acceleration between 1974 and 1980’, a period
marked by the rise of a ‘mystical ideology” and by “great
financial support from the U.S.A., whose dimensions have
completely changed’’.®
It is amazing that Zionist propaganda can claim that the
State of Israel is “‘the only democracy in the Middle East” and
can invoke the argument that freedom in Israel is such that
Opposition can express itself in the press and even in the street.
While it is true that intrepid adversaries of the racism of the
State of Israel such as Professor Israel Shahak, the barrister
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 95

Felicia Langer, the Knesset deputy Shulamit Aloni, Uri Avneri,

General Peled, Professor Leibowitz and some others — very few,
alas, are they who challenge the principles of political Zionism and
the practice that follows from it — do manage, with real heroism, to
make their testimony public, despite threats and pressure. But it
must never be forgotten that this freedom is tolerated only within
the Jewish “establishment’’. Israeli “democracy” involves a funda-
mental discrimination, as in all the colonialist countries where the
“white man” reigned alone. This strange ‘Israeli democracy” can
be compared to that American democracy which proclaimed in its
Declaration of Independence the equality of all men, while retain-
ing for a century the slavery of the blacks (delicately referred to as
“the peculiar institution’) and the hunting down of the Indians, who
were massacred or driven away so that their lands might be taken
over. Israel is indeed a democracy, except for its “‘blacks”’ and its
“Indians”, whom the Fundamental Laws of Israel delicately refer to
as “‘the non-Jewish population”, meaning the Palestinians, both
Muslim and Christian.
We shall confine ourselves to listing the most obvious aspects ©
of this policy of apartheid, as they affect personal status and
land tenure.
(a) Personal status. A book written with great accuracy by a
fervent Zionist, Professor Claude Klein, of the Hebrew Uni-
versity of Jerusalem, where he heads the Institute of Compara-
tive Law, is particularly revealing — first of all, by its title: Le
Caractere juif de ’ Etat d’Israél.?
In this book we see emerging, despite the author’s denials,
but thanks to the very rigour of his documentation and his
arguments, the racist nature of the State of Israel.
(1) ‘The Zionist doctrine is officially professed by the
State.”!° Professor Klein shows this by establishing that three
laws give the Zionist organisations a “‘special status” in the
State. The first of these laws (5713-1952) concerns the World
Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency. The author
emphasises that this law does not create ‘a legal bond
between . . . the Jews who do not live in Israel and the State.
96 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

Such a legal bond can be created only by an act of will, such as,
for example, settlement in Israel.’’'! It is indeed clear that, for-
tunately, every Jew in the world is not, as an individual, subject
to the jurisdiction of the State of Israel. But the eminent jurist
is more discreet about the fact that the World Zionist Organ-
isation and the Jewish Agency are, as institutions, linked orga-
nically and juridically with the State of Israel, even though they
operate in all countries of the world.
Were a Catholic Church or a Communist Party to proclaim such
juridical, state bonds with the Vatican or with the Soviet govern-
ment, they would certainly, and rightly, be made illegal as “agents
of a foreign power”, and would certainly not be authorised to col-
lect funds for the benefit of their state, even when the policy of that
state was leading it to commit actions contrary to the policy of the
French state or that of any other of the states in which these organ-
isations function. In short, the “special status” which establishes a
juridical and state bond between these institutions and the State of
Israel sets a problem which is of fundamental political and juridical
significance. That the legality of the World Zionist Organisation
and the Jewish Agency should not be called in question constitutes
already a singular privilege and an exception.
The two other laws singled out by Klein relate to the Keren
Kayemet (Jewish National Fund: law adopted on 23 November
1953) and to the Keren Hayesod (Reconstruction Fund: law
adopted on 10 January 1956). ‘““These two laws’, writes Profes-
sor Klein,'? ‘have made possible the transformation of these
societies, which have been given a certain number of privi-
leges.”’ Without enumerating these privileges, he mentions, in
the form of a mere “‘observation’’, that “‘the lands possessed by
the Jewish National Fund are declared ‘Lands of Israel’,!? and
a fundamental law has proclaimed the inalienability of these
lands.’ This is one of the four ‘“‘fundamental laws” — the ele-
ments of a future constitution, which Israel still does not pos-
sess, 35 years after the state was formed — which were given
that status in 1960. It is a pity that the learned jurist, does not,
with his usual concern for accuracy, provide any commentary
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 97

on this “inalienability”. He does not even define what it means: a

piece of land ‘‘saved”’ (redemption of the land) by the Jewish
National Fund is a piece of land that has become “‘J ewish’’, andit
will never be sold or leased to a ‘‘non-Jew” or cultivated by one. '4
Can anybody deny the racist discrimination inherent in this
fundamental law?
Let us continue our instructive reading of Professor Klein’s
work,'> where he writes about the Law of Return, that law
which “crowns the Zionist achievement”’. At the beginning of the
debate when this law was approved unanimously by the Knes-
set, Ben-Gurion declared, on 5 July 1950, that the State of Israel
“is not a Jewish state merely by virtue of the fact that Jews con-
stitute the majority of its population. It is a state for Jews
wherever they may be, and for every Jew who desires it.’’!°
Analysing the consequences of a law like this, Klein puts the
question: ‘‘While the Jewish people greatly exceed in numbers
the population of the State of Israel, conversely one can say
that the population of the State of Israel is not entirely Jewish,
since the country includes an important non-Jewish minority,
mainly Arab and Druze. The question that arises is: to what
extent can the existence of a law like the Law of Return, which
favours immigration by one part of the population (defined by
its membership of a certain religious and ethnic community),
be regarded as being discriminatory?’’!’
The author asks himself, in particular, whether the inter-
national convention for eliminating all forms of racial discrimi-
nation (adopted on 21 December 1965 by the General Assem-
bly of the United Nations) applied to the Law of Return. Using
a dialectic which we leave the reader to judge, the eminent jur-
ist concludes with this subtle distinction. Where non-
discrimination is concerned, ‘‘a measure must not be directed
against any particular group. The Law of Return was adopted
in favour of Jews who want to settle in Israel: it is not directed
. against any group or nationality. One cannot see how such a
law can be considered discriminatory.’’!®
For the benefit of the reader who is in danger of being dis-
98 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

concerted, or amazed, by this logic, which can only be called

audacious, and amounts to saying, as a famous witticism has it,
that all citizens are equal but some are more equal than others,
let us give a concrete illustration of the situation created by the
Law of Return. For those who do not benefit under that law, a
Law on Nationality (5712-1952) is laid down. It concerns
(Article 3) “every individual who, immediately before the
foundation of the state, was a Palestinian subject and who has
not become an Israeli by virtue of Article 2” (the one that con-
cerns the Jews). The persons referred to by this periphrasis
(and who are regarded as “never having possessed a national-
ity previously’, that is, as being stateless by heredity) must
prove that they inhabited the country at such and such a period
— documentary proof being very often impossible because the
relevant papers disappeared during the war and the terror
which accompanied the establishment of the Zionist state. If
this is not possible, then, in order to become a citizen of Israel,
they must take the path of “‘naturalisation”’, which requires,
for example, “‘a certain knowledge of the Hebrew language’.
After that, ‘‘if he considers it useful’’, the Minister of the Inter-
ior will either grant or refuse Israeli nationality to the appli-
cants. In short, under Israeli law, a Jew from Patagonia
becomes an Israeli citizen at the very moment he sets foot on
Tel-Aviv airport, whereas a Palestinian, born in Palestine of
Palestinian parents, may be treated as stateless. What we have
here is not racial discrimination against the Palestinians but
merely a measure in favour of the Jews!
This same apartheid that applies to citizenship is in force
where rights of residence and marriage are concerned.
Entire towns, such as Upper Nazareth, or Carmiel
(north-east of Haifa), having been built on land belonging to
the Jewish National Fund, are ‘‘outside the limits of the sector
reserved for non-Jews”. The newspaper Ha'aretz of 18 Febru-
ary 1972 published an interview with the secretary of the work-
ers’ council at Carmiel, Moshe Prishmore: ‘‘We want only Jews
to live and work here.” It was pointed out to him that there
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 99

were Arabs working there. He replied: “‘Yes, but only in Jew-

ish enterprises and only doing manual work.” His deputy, Rahl
Tirosch, added: “If we allow them to live here, they will pre-
vent the creation of Carmiel from achieving its purpose,
namely, the Judaising of Galilee.” Does this not mean that
“non-Jews”’ are forbidden to live in certain places? That would
not signify, according to Professor Klein, any racial discrimina-
tion against the Palestinians — merely a measure in favour of
the Jews.
We could multiply such examples of apartheid of the State of
Israel which would fully justify Resolution 2279 (xxx), voted
on 10 November 1975 by the General Assembly of the United
Nations: “‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimina-
tion’.
To this basic racism, which is characteristic of political Zion-
ism as of all colonialism, is added the pseudo-theological dis-
guise which is specific to political Zionism.
For example, in all matters concerning personal status in the
State of Israel, clerical control reinforces racism by providing it
with religious “‘grounds’’. The marriage laws are particularly
revealing.
A law of 5713-1953 on the jurisdiction of the rabbinical
courts stipulates: “Article 1: Matters of marriage and divorce
of Jews in Israel, being nationals or residents of the state, shall
be under the exclusive jurisdiction of rabbinical courts. Arti-
cle 2: Marriages and divorces of Jews shall be performed in
Israel in accordance with Jewish religious law.”
There is thus no civil marriage for Jews in Israel. To give just
one example of the consequences entailed by the omnipotence
of the rabbis in this sphere: a Jew whose name is Cohen has not
the right to marry a divorced woman (because the Cohens,
being descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron, performed
priestly functions in the Temple). This rabbinical prohibition
. can be got round only by a complicated procedure and a deci-
sion of the Supreme Court.’”
Another example: a childless widow cannot marry again
100 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

unless her brother-in-law agrees to marry her or is granted cha-

litza by the rabbinical court, which releases him from the duty
to do this.
A second consequence is underlined by Klein: “In practice,
the significance of this law is clear: it is legally impossible for a
Jewish person to marry a non-Jewish person in Israel.” (The
italics are Klein’s own.)
Here, racism and theocracy are inextricably bound up
together on a fundamental point, namely, the very definition of
‘“a Jew’. Who is ‘‘a Jew’? The law on this, in the State of
Israel, is as follows (instructions of 10 January 1960): “A per-
son will be entered as Jewish in the sections ‘religion’ and ‘eth-
nic group’ of his identity documents if he was born of a Jewish
mother and does not adhere to any other religion, or if he has
been converted in accordance with the Halakhah.”
This definition involves a number of difficulties, which Pro-
fessor Klein brings out quite frankly. In the first place, “‘Juda-
ism is not a religion which favours proselytism”’.*' Indeed,
nowadays at any rate, conversions are extremely rare.
There remains the ethnic criterion. ‘“‘For the Jew’’, says
Klein, “the ideas of religion and ethnic origin are identical.”?*
But the problem is not solved for all that: ‘‘Defining the Jew by
his Jewish mother is not very satisfactory. To realise this one
has only to point out that it means shifting the problem back to
the mother, and so on further back . . .”’*? Let us take a con-
crete illustration. We have mentioned that under the present
law of the State of Israel King Solomon would not have been
Jewish, because his mother was Hittite, nor would King Saul,
whose mother was Canaanite. But Professor Klein’s unques-
tionably logical observation shows us that King David, too,
might not have been Jewish, since his great-grandmother,
Ruth, was Moabite. If he descends from her by the female line
he is not Jewish, and if by the male line, well, those men’s mar-
riages would not have been legal in the Israel of today! This is
not, alas, just a joke. Professor Klein concludes: ‘‘There is, in
fact, no solution to this problem. It is quite possible that, one
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 101

day, this sort of definition will give rise to some problem and
may even be referred to the Court, but up to now it has not
given any trouble to Israeli lawyers.’’** It does give trouble,
though, in everyday life. If it is discovered that the grand-
mother of an Israeli was not Jewish, the administration has the
right to alter his registration from ‘‘Jewish”’ to ‘‘non-Jewish”’,
and this will prevent him from marrying a Jewess in Israel —
unless he undergoes conversion. At the time of the case of Sha-
lit, an Israeli naval officer who married a non-Jewish Scots-
woman in 1970, Mrs Golda Meir, when the case went up to the
Supreme Court, publicly called on Mrs Shalit and other women
similarly situated to submit themselves to the ceremony of con-
version.
The colonialist and racist nature of Zionism is manifested
not only in the status of persons but also in the grabbing of
land.
Just as Zionism has long denied, and still denies, that the
Palestinians exist, it has also created the legend of “‘land with-
out people, for a people without land’’, and of the deserts that
it is supposed to have caused to blossom.
There has been no Israeli ‘‘miracle”’ in this sphere.*°
At most, one can be astonished at the lightning speed with which
one population has been driven out and replaced by another, and at
the rapidity of the process of robbery whereby ownership of the land
has changed hands. But here, too, there is no “miracle”’: it was the
implementing of a plan for systematic expropriation which was
worked out well before the creation of Israel, as a fundamental
instrument of the colonialist policy of political Zionism.
Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary on 12 June 1895:

We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates

assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across
the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries,
while denying it any employment in our own country. The
property-owners will come over to our side. Both the process of
expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out dis-
creetly and circumspectly.°
102 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

This programme of expropriation was applied systematically

(except for the point about “‘discretion’’) from the moment when
the Zionists gained possession of the means to carry out by viol-
ence their plan of land-robbery.
From this standpoint it is appropriate to distinguish between
two stages in Zionist colonialism.
The first stage bore the marks of classical colonialism. It was a
matter of exploiting the local labour-force. This was the method
of Baron Edouard de Rothschild. Just as, in Algeria, he exploited
the cheap labour of the peasants in his vineyards, so, merely wide-
ning his field of operations, he exploited in his Palestine vine-
yards the labour of Arabs other than those Algerians.
A turning-point came with the arrival from Russia of a new
wave of immigrants, following the defeat of the 1905 revolutionin
that country. Instead of continuing the fight on the spot, along-
side the other Russian revolutionaries, these deserters from the
defeated revolution imported into Palestine a curious ‘“‘Zionist
socialism’’. They set up craftsmen’s co-operatives and farming
kibbutzim, ousting Palestinian peasants in order to establish an
economy based ona Jewish working class. From the classical type
of colonialism, as practised by the British and French, they thus
made the transition to a colonialism of settlement, according to
the logic of political Zionism, which implied an influx of immi-
grants, ‘‘in favour of” whom and “‘against”’ no one (as Professor
Klein puts it) land and jobs were to be reserved. From now on, the
task was to replace the Palestinian people by another people and,
naturally, to take over their land.
Let us recall that when the Balfour Declaration was issued the
Zionists possessed only 2.5 per cent of the land, and at the time of
the partition decision they still possessed only 6.5 per cent. In
1982 they possess 93 per cent.
In 1930 Dr A. Ruppin, the Jewish Agency’s expert on agricul-
ture and economies, set forth this principle:

Land is the most necessary thing for settling in Palestine. As in

Palestine there is almost no more arable and unoccupied land, we
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 103

must, in every case when we purchase land and settle it, remove the
peasants who until now have cultivated it, whether they be the
proprietors of the land or tenants.

The procedures employed for dispossessing the native of his

land were those of the most implacable colonialism, with a
racist flavour that was even more marked in the case of Zionism.
The point of departure of the grand operation was the set-
ting up in 1901 of the Jewish National Fund, which had this ori-
ginal feature as compared with other colonialisms that the land
which it acquired could not be re-sold, or even leased, to non-
Jews.
The agrarian policy of the Israeli leaders was one of system-
atic robbery of the Arab peasants. The Land Ordinance of 1943,
on expropriation in the public interest, was inherited from the
period of the British mandate. This law, legitimate in itself, is
abused when applied in a discriminatory way — as, for example,
when, in 1962, 500 hectares were expropriated at Deir
El-Arad, Nabel and Be’neh, the “public interest’’ in this case
consisting in the creation of the town of Carmiel, reserved
exclusively for Jews.
Another procedure was to use the Emergency Laws decreed
in 1945 by the British for application against both Jews and
Arabs. Law No. 124 gives the military governor — on the pre-
text, this time, of “‘security’’ — power to suspend all the rights
of citizens, including their freedom of movement. It is enough
for the Army to declare a certain area a prohibited area, “‘for
reasons of state security’, for an Arab to find himself unable to
go to his own fields without the military governor’s permission.
If this permission is refused, the fields in question are declared
to be uncultivated, and the Ministry of Agriculture can ‘‘take
possession of uncultivated land in order to ensure its cultiva-
tion.”
When, in 1945, the British promulgated this harshly col-
onialist legislation, as part of their struggle against Jewish ter-
rorism, the jurist Bernard (Dov) Joseph, protesting against this
104 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

system of lettres de cachet, said: ‘‘Are we all to become the vic-

tims of officially inspired terrorism? . . . There is nothing to
prevent a citizen from being imprisoned all his life without
trial . . . The powers of the administration to exile anybody at
any time are unlimited... There is no need for anyone to
commit any offence, a decision taken in some office is
enough...’ This same Bernard (Dov) Joseph, having
become Minister of Justice in Israel, was to enforce these same
laws against the Arabs.
J. Shapiro spoke out more firmly still against these laws, at
the same protest meeting in Tel-Aviv on 7 February 1946
(reported in Hapraklit, February 1946, pp. 58-64): ‘The sys-
tem established in Palestine since the issue of the Defence
Laws is unparalleled in any civilised country; there were no
such laws even in Nazi Germany.” This same J. Shapiro, hav-
ing become Israel’s Public Prosecutor, and later Minister of
Justice, was to enforce these same laws against the Arabs. For,
to justify the retention of these terror laws, the state of
emergency has never been terminated in Israel since 1948.
Shimon Peres wrote, in Davar on 25 January 1972: ‘“‘The use
of Law 125, on which the military government is based, is in
direct continuation of the struggle for Jewish settlement and
Jewish immigration.”’
The ordinance concerning fallow land, issued in 1948 and
amended in 1949, goes in the same direction, but by a less
roundabout route. Without even looking for the pretext of
‘public interest” or “military security”, the Minister of Agri-
culture can requisition any land which has been abandoned.
The large-scale exodus of Arab inhabitants as a result of terror
in the style of Deir Yasin in 1948, of Kafr Kasem on 29 Octo-
ber 1956, or of the pogroms by ‘Unit 101”, created by Moshe
Dayan and commanded for a long time by Ariel Sharon,
“liberated” extensive territories which, having been emptied
of their Arab owners or workers, were given to Jewish settlers.
The mechanism for the dispossession of the peasantry was
completed by the ordinance of 30 June 1948, the emergency
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 105

regulation of 15 November 1948 on the property of ‘‘absen-

tees”, the law concerning the land of ‘‘absentees” (14 March
1950), the law on the acquisition of land 13 March 1953, and a
whole arsenal of measures tending to legalise robbery by forc-
ing the Arabs to leave their land so that Jewish settlements
can be installed there, as is shown by Nathan Weinstock in his
book Le Sionisme contre Israél.*’
So as to wipe out even the memory of the existence of the
Palestinian farming population, and give credibility to the
myth of “the desert’, the Arab villages were destroyed, with
their houses, their enclosures and even their cemeteries and
graves. Professor Israel Shahak gave in 1975 a district-by-
district list of 385 Arab villages which had been bulldozed, out
of the total of 475 existing in 1948.
Israeli settlements continue to be established on the West
Bank, having received a boost since 1979, and, respecting the
most classical colonialist tradition, the settlers are armed.
The result of all this is that, after the expulsion of a million
and a half Palestinians, ‘“‘Jewish land’’, as the officials of the
Jewish National Fund call it, which made up only 6.5 per cent
of the total in 1947, covers today more than 93 per cent of
Palestine (75 per cent belonging to the state and 14 per cent to
the Jewish National Fund).
Since this is the colonialist and racist policy of political Zion-
ism where personal status and land ownership are concerned, it
is easy to appreciate what the Israeli leaders mean by the
“autonomy” of which Begin speaks. What is meant, in fact, is
continued pursuit of the annexationist policy of Zionist col-
onialism.
In the first place, nobody knows what partner the Israeli
leaders would be able to negotiate with. The P.L.O.? Not at
any price. The elected representatives of the population?
These have all been removed from office by the Israeli Govern-
ment.
Here are the principal arrangements included in this carica-
ture of autonomy. On 3 May 1979 Begin put his plan for
106 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

administrative autonomy before the committee of eleven

ministers: on 17 May the committee approved it, and on 21
May the Government finally confirmed the plan. This plan con-
sists of a list of principles which consecrate the annexationist
and expansionist policy of the Zionist entity. It states that,
after the transition period of five years provided for the intro-
duction of administrative autonomy, Israel will assert its
alleged ‘right of sovereignty’? over the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip. This principle lights up all the rest. ““The Jewish
settlements and the Jewish inhabitants will be subject to Israeli
law and Israeli administration.” The “‘right”’ to continue settle-
ment in “‘‘the districts placed under the autonomous regime will
be safeguarded: the government-owned lands and the unculti-
vated lands’’”® will be held by the occupying power. The Zion-
ist state ‘‘will be responsible for planning the use of water
resources and will merely consult the administrative council’”’.
Its armed forces “‘will be stationed at certain points in the
districts placed under the autonomous regime’’, and its security
forces “‘will take responsibility for internal security” in the
occupied territory. As for the administrative council, the
Government’s plan provides that “‘the military government will
delegate its powers to the autonomous authority. There will be
negotiations as to the number of members of the administra-
tive council to be elected and the number of departments to be
attached to it.”” An appendix to the plan notes that the Zionist
leaders will never allow a Palestinian state to be created on the
West Bank and in Gaza.”?
The Government decided unanimously that this plan, en-
titled “Principles for complete administrative autonomy of the
Arab inhabitants of Judaea and Samaria and of Gaza and for
the presence of Jewish settlers in these areas”, would be the
platform of the Israeli delegation in the negotiations on auton-
omy. For tactical reasons it would not be presented to Egypt
during negotiations.”
The recommendations made by the committee for the appli-
cation of this plan were revealed by the newspaper Haaretz.
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 107

Complementary to the ones put forward on 9 February, they

showed that additional restrictions were to be imposed on the
autonomous authority.
These restrictions begin at the level of the procedure to be
followed when the administrative council is elected. No one
who has been sentenced for opposing the occupation will be
eligible. The candidates will offer themselves on a list of
individuals and without indicating the constituency for which
they wish to sit. On the economic plane, “the autonomous
administration will not be authorised to issue currency, to set
up a central bank or to levy indirect taxes. It will have no
power to control imports or exports or the circulation of
money.” As regards internal security, “‘political detainees will
be held in prisons subject to Israeli law, and the Government
of Israel will be empowered to veto any amnesty.”
The seizure of land is to be intensified. “727,000 dunams’’*!
will be “enclosed”’ for the establishment of military training
areas and camps. Then there is the land needed for the build-
ing of roads. ‘‘More than ten motorways’”’ will be built on the
West Bank and another one in the Gaza Strip, in addition to a
motorway destined to by-pass the chief towns. ‘““‘The communi-
cations network in the territories will be under the supervision
of the Israeli Ministry of Transport.” Also, the occupying
power “‘will supply water to the Gaza Strip and will reserve the
right to plan the exploitation of the water resources of the West
Bank.”
One more recommendation by the committee: “‘The settlers
will constitute a local police force and carry arms whenever on
the move.’’*?
The significance of this operation was excellently summed up
in advance by the South African newspaper Die Transvaler, an
expert in the matter of racial discrimination (apartheid): ‘‘Is
there any real difference between the way that the people of
Israel are trying to maintain themselves amid non-Jewish
peoples and the way the Afrikaner is trying to remain what he
ig?
108 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

The Israelis base themselves on the Bible when they explain

why they are unwilling to become intermingled with other
peoples. The Afrikaners do the same. And the South African
Prime Minister Verwoerd himself observed that the Jews
“took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for
a thousand years. In that I agree with them. Israel, like South
Africa is an apartheid state.’”**
After thus having seen the methods used by political Zion-
ism to expel the Arabs, let us now look at the methods by
which it has tried to bring the Jews into Israel. We say “‘tried’’,
because this attempt has failed. Only 18 per cent of the world’s
Jews live in Israel, where the Zionists promised them “‘safety”’.
After a succession of wars, and given the total inability of the
Israeli leaders, because of their Zionist doctrine, to integrate
the country peacefully among the peoples of the Middle East,
there is today no country in the world where Jews enjoy less
safety than in Israel. This situation results from a policy which
strives to perpetuate in the age of decolonisation — in company
with South Africa alone — the most irremediably doomed type
of colonialism.
Contrary to the legend put about by political Zionism, the
religious motive (let alone the “national” one) has operated
only very feebly to bring about a “return” to Palestine. This is
not through indifference, but precisely on account of religious
reasons which form part of the very foundations of Judaism in
its highest principles. In the Bible and in rabbinical tradition
there coexist a great universalist spirit, that of the Messianism
of the Prophets (in particular in the latter part of the Book of
Isaiah), and a narrow nationalist spirit, manifested especially
in the Book of Joshua, full of massacres and God-commanded
exterminations, and also in Ezra and Nehemiah, books
devoted to racial discrimination and theocracy in the service of
chauvinist exclusivism. Political Zionism relies upon a
one-sided, selective reading of the Bible which exalts the
nationalist tendency at the expense of the spirituality of Juda-
ism.
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 109

Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, was himself a

non-believer, and was interested in the Bible only in so far as it
might provide justification for his power-politics. Most rabbis
condemned political Zionism at its birth. The Philadelphia
Conference of 3-6 November 1869 denounced the very princi-
ple of political Zionism even before Herzl had given expression
to its theses. This rabbinical conference adopted a resolution®
which stressed the radical opposition between the universalist
principles of Judaism and those of Zionist nationalism.
This does not mean that Jerusalem did not matter to them.
Isaiah’s “‘next year in Jerusalem” and the pledge: “If I forget
thee, O Jerusalem .. .”’ in Psalm 137 are at the heart of the
Jewish religion. But they refused to put this religion at the ser-
vice of a political enterprise, to go over from universalism to
nationalism. They placed Jerusalem, as do Jeremiah and
Isaiah, at the centre of the Messianic promise, which did not
wait for Christianity in order to address itself to all the nations
of the earth and announce the true “return” — not that of a
community to a country, but that of the whole world, of all
men, to the Eternal, to the Kingdom of God, as we see in the
sublime verses of Isaiah.
With Jerusalem are connected the loftiest moments of the
three great revealed religions. That of the sacrifice of Abra-
ham, the basic symbol of the faith, transcending all reason and
morality and reducing these to relativity: the common posses-
sion of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. That of the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. That of the ascension of the
Prophet Muhammad, from the very spot where both Koran
and Bible locate Abraham’s sacrifice, and which Muslims ven-
erate just as the Jews and Christians do: it was towards Jerusa-
lem that Muslims turned when they prayed, before Mecca, also
connected with the tradition of Abraham, took its place.
Jerusalem thus bears, for Jews as for Christians and Mus-
lims, the significance of a “‘high place”’ of their religion, towards
which everyone’s prayers are directed. For the three revealed
religions it symbolises the gathering together of all mankind in
110 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

a common faith of which Abraham’s sacrifice was the founding

act. This is why the Muslims, during the eleven centuries when
the city was in their charge, respected its ruins and permitted
access to all pilgrims. The first measure taken by Saladin when
he liberated Jerusalem was to open it once more to the Jews
and to all Christians, whereas the Crusaders had massacred or
expelled the Jews, the Orthodox Christians and the Muslims.
The Crusades were a “‘Christian Zionism” just as the politi-
cal Zionism of today is a “Jewish Crusade’”’: in both cases we
see a perversion of spirituality and faith.*°
It is significant that, in the schools of the State of Israel and
in the programmes of political Zionism, the passages from the
Bible that are most often quoted are those relating to the con-
quest of Canaan by Joshua and to the Kingdom of David, that
is, to the military and political aspects of the history of Pales-
tine, and not the sacrifice of Abraham or the words of the
Prophets.
Jerusalem, a spiritual centre for all mankind, summons men
to pilgrimage, not to conquest.
Even after the deportation of part of the population to Baby-
lon, and when Cyrus the Persian overcame Nabonidus, the last
King of Babylon in 538 B.C. and allowed the exiles to return to
Jerusalem, a great many of them stayed in Mesopotamia, culti-
vating that land with love, as Jeremiah (xxxix, 5—7) called on
them to do, and they won over part of the population to their
faith, so that they came to constitute a sort of state within the
state, ruled by one of their “heads of the exiles”’ (Resh Galuta)
and safeguarding the practice of their particular way of life and
their religion. It was in this centre of spiritual influence that the
Talmud was composed, that interpretation of the teachings of
Moses which for centuries to come was destined to play a
major role in the Jewish communities of the world.
Many other spiritual centres of Judaism sprang up in the
same way, even without any persecution as their cause. When
Ptolemy, King of Egypt, returned home in 320 B.C., after con-
quering Judaea, he was followed by some Palestinian Jews,
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 111

who thus rejoined those of their compatriots who had fled to

the banks of the Nile two or three centuries earlier, to
escape from the Assyrian invaders. They did not go back to
Palestine, and in 250 B.C. the Jewish community of Alexan-
dria was the most numerous in the world. These Jews, who
absorbed the Greek culture of a strongly Hellenised Alexan-
dria, spread awareness of their religion in that Hellenistic
setting. Their sacred books, the Torah and the Prophets, were
translated into Greek, and from this dialogue between the
two cultures sprang the great work of synthesis accom-
plished by Philo the Jew.
Before the coming of Christianity the Jews made efforts
throughout the world to win converts to their religion. From
India to China, from Yemen to the Crimea, from Rome to
Gaul, peoples of all races accepted Yahveh as their one
god.?’
With the spread of Christianity and, above all, from the
time when, having been accepted by the Roman Empire, the
Christians became persecutors, and brandished against the’
Jews for centuries thereafter the stupid and criminal accusa-
tion that they were a “nation of deicides”, the killers of
Christ, thus creating a specifically Christian form of anti-
semitism (as though the ecclesiastical crime of a few high
priests could be imputed to an entire religious community,
its descendants and its converts) — from that time Jewish
proselytism ceased.
The spiritual influence of Judaism was never associated with
the idea of a return to Palestine. When, in 1492, the ‘‘Most
Catholic Kings’’, ending the golden age of coexistence between
Muslim and Jew in Spain, expelled the Jews, forced them to be-
come converts to Christianity (the ‘‘Marranos’’) or persecuted
them, most of those who had to flee found exile in France,
Italy, Egypt, the Balkans and Turkey. Only a very small num-
_ ber, a mere few hundred pious Jews, joined in Jerusalem, Heb-
ron, Safad and Tiberias, the little community which had been
founded in the 13th century by Rabbi Moshe Ben-Nahman,
112 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

from Barcelona. So, late as 1835, according to Neville

Mandel,*® the Jewish community in Palestine numbered no
more than ten thousand.
It was only after the creation of political Zionism by Theodor
Herzl that immigration intensified, and then not for religious
but for political reasons: the persecutions in Europe (Russia,
Romania, Poland, then Germany) and the doctrine of political
Zionism, based on a series of myths: that of the ‘‘unassimilable”’
Jews (an idea shared with the antisemites); that of antisemitism
regarded as eternal and ineradicable (whereas, after the French
Revolution, its decline throughout Western Europe and Amer-
ica was obvious); that of refusal to fight on the spot, along with
the rest of the oppressed, against the persecutors; and that of
giving up the struggle to preserve Jewish religion and culture
and universalist Messianism in favour of a demand for a Jewish
state (Herzl’s Judenstaat), inspired by the European (especially
the German) nationalism of the 19th century — a state with a
country of its own, to be conquered with the complicity of the
colonial powers and by means of their methods, with the ulti-
mate aim, in the dream of Herzl and Ben-Gurion, of concentrat-
ing all the world’s Jews in Palestine.
The universalist religious Messianism of the great Jewish tra-
dition was thenceforth replaced (though its dynamism was
exploited) by a political nationalism that was exclusivist and
chauvinist.
This inversion and perversion of Judaism was denounced at
the outset by the highest spiritual authorities of Judaism. In
1885, when, even before the publication of his book on the
Jewish state, Herzl was already carrying on propaganda for
political Zionism, the Pittsburg Conference set forth the “‘eight
principles of Reform Judaism”. The great majority of the
American rabbis proclaimed: ‘‘We consider ourselves no
longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore
expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship
under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws
concerning the Jewish state.”
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 113

This protest against political Zionism has been made not

only by rabbis but by some of the most distinguished Jews in
the world: Einstein, the philosopher, Martin Buber, the first
President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Professor
Judah L. Magnes.
Besides the religious considerations which influenced those
who saw in political Zionism a political use of religion and a
betrayal of Judaism, the chief reasons for this opposition were
these: (1) The establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine
would inevitably result in conflict with the population which
had been living and working in that country for centuries past:

‘What I missed most’’, said Judah Magnes prophetically in 1931,

‘‘was the absence of any constructive suggestion as to how this con-
flict might be resolved short of war between the two peoples. . .
The Jews have more than a claim upon the world for justice. . .
But, as far as I am concerned, I am not ready to try to achieve jus-
tice to the Jew through injustice to the Arab. I would regard it as
an injustice to the Arabs to put them under Jewish rule without
their consent. If I am not for a Jewish state, it is solely for the:
reason I have stated: I do not want war with the Arab world.*?

Although Magnes was among the earliest Zionists, he had

already demanded in 1923: ‘Will the Jews here [in Palestine],
in their efforts to create a political organism, become devotees
of brute force and militarism, as were some of the late Hasmo-
neans?’”*?
(2) Political Zionism endangers Jews throughout the world
by arousing suspicion of a dual allegiance, a dual citizenship.
The American Council for Judaism, launched on 31 August
1943 as a result of the initiative of 92 rabbis who met at Atlan-
tic City in June 1942 to protest against the plan to create a Jew-
ish state, declared in its manifesto:

The day had to come when we must cry “halt”. The conditioning
of American Jewry by a Jewish flag and a Jewish army and a state
in Palestine and a dual citizenship in America, is more than we can
114 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

accept. . . . In the light of our universalistic interpretation of Jew-

ish history and destiny, and also because of our concern for the
welfare and status of the Jewish people living in other parts of the
world, we are unable to subscribe to or support the political
emphasis now paramount in the Zionistic programme. We cannot
but believe that Jewish nationalism tends to confuse our
fellow-men about our place and function in society and also diverts
our attention from our historic role to live as a religious community
wherever we may dwell.*!

The American Council for Judaism proposed a concrete

solution for the problem of “‘displaced persons” (as they were
later to be called):

We ask that the United Nations secure the earliest feasible repat-
riation or resettlement ... of all peoples uprooted from their
homes by the Axis powers, and . . . persevere in their efforts to
provide immediate sanctuary for refugees of all faiths, political
beliefs and national origins . . . For our fellow Jews we ask only
this: Equality of rights and obligations with their fellow
nationals . . . We oppose the effort to establish a national Jewish
state in Palestine or anywhere else, as a philosophy of defeatism,
and one which does not offer a practical solution of the Jewish
problem...
Palestine is a part of Israel’s religious heritage, as it is a part of
the heritage of two other great religions of the world. We look for-
ward to the ultimate establishment of a democratic, autonomous
government in Palestine, wherein Jews, Muslims and Christians
shall be justly represented . . .
We invite all Jews to support our interpretation of Jewish life
and destiny in keeping with the highest traditions of our faith. We
believe these truths provide the basis for every programme of a
more hopeful future put forward by free men.”

At that time, as the American Jewish Yearbook for 1943

shows, the Zionist movement in the U.S.A. had 207,000 mem-
bers. The total Jewish population of the U.S.A. was then
about 5,000,000.
It is noteworthy that, despite the propaganda of political
Zionism, immigration into Palestine remains very slight. At
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 115

the end of the 19th century there were fewer than 50,000 Jews
in Palestine. Two years after the Balfour Declaration of 1917
there were still only 65,000 — 7 per cent of the population. In
the twelve years between 1920 and 1932 only 118,378 Jews
came to Palestine — less than | per cent of the world’s Jews.
Even after the dreadful Hitlerite bloodbath the proportion
of Jews who chose to live in Israel stayed very small.
Ben-Gurion recognised this failure when he received a group
of Americans in Israel on 31 August 1949: ‘Although we real-
ised our dream of establishing a Jewish state, we are still at the
beginning. Today there are only 900,000 Jews in Israel, while
the greater part of the Jewish people are still abroad. [Our
task] consists of bringing all Jews to Israel.”
In December 1951 Ben-Gurion blamed the American Zion-
ist leaders for not having set an example (‘‘There were not five
leaders who got up to go to Israel after the State was estab-
lished”’).8
The Israeli leaders and their supporters abroad desperately
brandish the threat of antisemitism, which they need so badly
in order to attain their aim. Dr Israel Goldstein wrote: ‘‘What
are American Jews waiting for? Are they waiting for a Hitler to
force them out? Do they imagine that they will be spared the
tragedies which have forced Jews of other lands to emi-
grate?’”**
A third of a century later, other dedicated supporters of the
State of Israel do not shrink from making themselves equally
ridiculous. Even after the massacres of Sabra and Shatila,
supervised by the Israeli Army, the Swiss Revue juive of 11
June 1982 justified its solidarity with the state terrorism of
Jerusalem by writing: ‘‘Since Israel has existed we have been
able to go through life with our heads held high — we ought
never to forget that fact.’’ To read this one might suppose that
the Jews were in a desperate situation in Switzerland before
1948!
Antisemitism is needed by Zionism in order that it may
achieve its aims. Herzl himself wrote: ‘““The Jews constitute a
116 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

single people, and cannot be integrated into other peoples. But

they do become assimilated by any society if they find them-
selves secure in it for a long period. And that will never be to
our interest.”
For the purpose of artificially stimulating immigration it is
not ruled out, but, on the contrary, recommended, that a sce-
nario of antisemitism be concocted. And, in fact, from the
beginning, immigration into Palestine has been stimulated by
artificial means.
Here are three examples of the procedures employed.
First, the case of the Yemenis, who formed the principal
community of Oriental immigrants before 1948. The problem
was to replace Arab workers, at the same low wages, in the
performance of the least attractive tasks — as farm-workers,
factory hands, charwomen. A report by Dr Thon, of the Jewish
Agency, in 1908, indicated the solution. Only Oriental Jews
could work like Arabs, for Arab wages, while at the same time
helping to achieve the Zionist aim of ‘Jewish labour” and the
elimination of Palestinian workers. He concluded: “If we could
manage to get Yemeni families to instal themselves perma-
nently in the settlements, we should accomplish something
else: the Yemeni women and girls would work as domestics in
place of the Arab women and girls who are at present
employed as servants by nearly every settler family, at the
exorbitant wages of 20 to 25 French francs a month.” And in
1911 a pseudo-preacher was sent to Yemen — the ‘‘Zionist-
Socialist” Warshavsky. re-named for the purpose *‘*Rabbi
Yavne’eli” — in order to announce to the Yemeni Jews the
coming of the Messiah and the third Kingdom of Israel. Much
later, in 1948, the Yemeni immigrants brought to Israel in the
operation called ‘Magic Carpet” chanted in the aircraft that
conveyed them: “David! David! [i.e. Ben-Gurion] King of
Israel!’ This operation was carried out in two phases, between
December 1948 and March 1949 and between July 1949 and
September 1950, and cost five-and-a-half million dollars.
Another example is that of the “displaced” persons, also in
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 117

1948. At that time there were only between 100,000 and

114,000 “‘displaced”’ Jews in the American zone of occupation
in Europe. Despite intense propaganda by the Jewish Agency,
the author of the Klausner report, after he had stressed, before
the American Jewish Conference on 2 May 1948, that ‘‘the
Jews as a group are not overwhelmingly desirous of going to
Palestine’, declared, without beating about the bush;

I am convinced that these people must be forced to go to Palestine

... To effect this programme it becomes necessary for the Jewish
community at large to reverse its policy and, instead of creating
comforts for the displaced persons, to make them as uncomfort-
able as possible . . . A further procedure would call for an organ-
isation such as the Haganah [the Zionist militia] to harass the
Jews...

The essential preoccupation of the Zionist leaders was not to

come to the aid of the Jewish refugees, but to get them to go to
Palestine. On 17 December 1938 Ben-Gurion was already
expressing, in a letter to the Zionist Executive his fear lest the
persecuted Jews succeed in finding shelter in the Western
countries:

If the Jews [of the West] will have to choose between helping the
refugees, saving Jews from concentration camps, and assisting a
national museum in Palestine. mercy will have the upper hand and
the whole energy of the people will be channelled into saving Jews
from various countries ... and Zionism will be struck off the
agenda.*°

As for the Western governments, so prompt to shed hypocri-

tical tears over the “refugees from the holocaust”, they did not
hesitate, when it was a matter of giving shelter to these refu-
gees, to impose quotas on their entry. Out of 2,500,000 Jewish
victims of Nazism who fled abroad between 1935 and 1943,
hardly 8.5 per cent went to Palestine. The United States limi-
ted their welcome to 182.000 (less than 7 per cent) and Britain
to 67,000 (less than 2 per cent). The great majority (over 75 per
118 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

cent) found refuge in the U.S.S.R., to the number of

1,930,000.*”
“It must be borne in mind’’, Rabbi Klausner goes on, “that
we are dealing with a sick people. They are not to be asked,
but to be told what to do. They will be thankful in years to
come.’”4®
A third example is that of the Jews of Iraq, the nucleus of
which community was formed, two-and-a-half thousand years
ago, by the exiles carried off to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar,
after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah. This Jewish
community — 110,000 persons in 1948 — was well rooted in the
country. The Chief Rabbi of Iraq, Khedouri Sassoon, said:
“Jews and Arabs have enjoyed the same rights and privileges
for a thousand years and do not regard themselves as a distinc-
tive separate part of this nation’”’.
Then came the Israelis’ acts of terrorism, in Baghdad in 1950
and 1951. In the face of the reticence of the Jews of Iraq to
emigrate to Israel, the Israeli secret services did not hesitate to
throw bombs at them, so as to convince the Jews that they were
in danger. The attack on the Masauda Shem-Tov synagogue
resulted in the death of three persons and the wounding of two
dozen more.” Thus began the exodus entitled ‘Operation Ali
Baba”’.
We could give many more examples, in particular those
relating to a regular racket organised by political Zionism in
Latin America. The Jewish community in Mexico was reduced
to the status of an Israeli colony. In the spring of 1948 the *‘Uni-
ted Fund of Mexico” announced that persons who refused to
contribute to this Zionist fund, or made inadequate contribu-
tions to it, would be subject to harsh judgment, and their
names revealed to hundreds of persons. The first such “trial”
was described in the Mexico City newspaper Die Stimme of 9
June 1948. The same system was extended to other countries of
Latin America. In Montevideo recalcitrant Uruguayan Jews
who in 1949 refused to pay the 2 per cent tax on their wealth
demanded by the Zionist leaders found themselves excluded
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 119

from the Synagogue and unable to find a rabbi for a marriage,

a funeral or a circumcision.*’ The same procedure was exten-
ded to Argentina, Brazil and Peru.*!
Zionism has failed in its attempt to get all the Jews in the
world to go to Palestine — happily for the countries which would
otherwise have been deprived of the contribution made by
their Jewish citizens, and also for the Middle East, where such
an influx would have strengthened still further the tendency of
the Zionist state towards permanent aggression against its
Arab neighbours, for the sake of acquiring “‘living space’’. But
the claim to govern from the State of Israel all the Jews of the
“Diaspora” has not ceased to be insisted on. When
Ben-Gurion was Prime Minister he asserted ‘‘the collective
duty of the Zionist Organisation and of the Zionist Movement
to assist the State of Israel in all conditions and under any
circumstances. . . This signifies assisting the State whether the
governments to which the Jews in question owe allegiance
desire it or not.”°? At the World Zionist Congress this was
accepted as meaning ‘unconditional co-operation with the
State and the Government of Israel’’. Opponents pointed out
that the conferment of such a status on the world Zionist move-
ment put Jews living outside Israel in a delicate position in
which they might “‘with some justification fear the charge of
double loyalty.’’>?
In the midst of the invasion of Lebanon, in a circular of 10
June 1982 appealing for money to be collected for the State of
Israel, the President of the Swiss section of “Action Israel’,
Mr Nessim D. Gaon wrote: ““The army of Israel is looking after
the military front: the second front, that of Israel’s economy, is
in your hands. Support it to the utmost of your ability, proving
once more that the Jewish people is one and indivisible.”
The same attitude of unconditional and a priori support,
even for crime, was shown by Alain de Rothschild, when he
said, in an interview given to France-Soir on 27 September
1982, on behalf of the Representative Council of the Jewish
Institutions of France, immediately after the massacres at
120 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

Sabra and Shatila: ‘“‘The significance of these events has been

distorted in an attempt to attack and smear the Jewish com-
munity and the Jewish people in general, by making them bear
once more the original sin of being Jews. Sight is completely
lost of the actual executants, who were Lebanese.” This is
exactly the same as what Begin says: “Goyim kill goyim”
— forgetting to mention that these criminals were ‘“‘executants”’
armed by the State of Israel and able to operate thanks to
Sharon, who opened the camps to them, surrounded those
camps with his troops, and lit up with his flares the atrocities
that were being committed under the eyes of his troops.** For
Rothschild as for Begin, denouncing this crime is equivalent to
“antisemitism” against ‘‘the Jewish community”’!

NOTES
1. The Rabbinical Conference held at Philadelphia in 1869 adopted the fol-
lowing resolution: ““The Messianic purpose of Israel is not to restore the
ancient state of Israel . . . which would imply a second break with the
other nations, but the union of all the children of God who believe in
One God, so that the unity of all rational creatures may be accomplished
together with their aspirations to moral sanctity.”
2. Yet the Dreyfus case served as a revelation of how antisemitism was used
as a pretext to cover up the corruption, lies and sordid aims of the ruling
class, its politicians and its army. It was a warning to the French people of
the shamefulness of antisemitism and of its reactionary role.
3. What follows is based on Mrs L. M. C. Van der Hoeven Leonhard’s lec-
ture Sionisme herzlien et antisémitisme, Paris, September 1977.
4. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, New
York and London, 1960, Vol. 2, p. 592.
5. Herzl, “The Zionist Congress”, Contemporary Review, Oct. 1892, p.
591;
6. Herzl Year Book, edited by Raphael Patai, New York, 1958, Vol. I, pp.
216-217.
7. Davar, 29 September 1967.
8. Interview given by Professor Israel Shahak to the American magazine
Village Voice, 19 November 1980.
9. Paris, Editions Cujas, 1977.
10. Op. cit, |B. 22:
Th bid. sp. 27:
12. Ibid., p. 21.
 INTERNAL POLICY: RACISM 121

. The first version said: ‘‘Inalienable property of the Jewish race.”

. Let it be remembered that 75 per cent of the land belongs to the State
and 14 per cent to the Jewish National Fund.
. Klein, op. cit., p. 29.
. Ibid., p. 29.
MTbid..; p. 33:
Habid:, p. 35:
. Ibid., p. 124. A bill for establishing a civil marriage procedure, so to
avoid these archaic prohibitions, was rejected in 1972.
» Ibid... p. 123.
. Ibid., p. 49.
. Ibid., p. 48.
. Ibid., p. 49.
. Ibid., p. 49.
. “The Arab population of Israel’’ (in Hebrew) in Arakhim, 1971, no. 3, p.
10. On Palestine’s agriculture before the creation of the Zionist state, see
supra.
. Herzl, Complete Diaries, Vol. 1, p. 88.
. Published in Paris by Maspero, 1969: pp. 373 et seq.
. “The plan’s proposals regarding West Bank land are as follows:
Government-owned lands which are uncultivated will be used, as
required, for security needs, for Jewish settlement, and for refugee reha-
bilitation. Land which is not legally registered in private ownership but is
nevertheless privately cultivated will be used, as required, for security
needs only. Similarly, land which is legally registered in private owner-
ship but is not cultivated will be used for security, if required. In this case
it will be requisitioned, not confiscated. (The difference is that, in
requisition, possession is taken by the government but ownership
remains vested in the individual.) Privately owned and cultivated land
will not be used unless unavoidably required for security or road-building
purposes.” (Jerusalem Post, 18 May 1979).
. Haaretz, 22 May 1979.
. Maariv, 22 May 1979.
. A dunam is 1,000 square metres.
. Ha’aretz, 21 May 1979.
. Quoted by H. Katzew, “South Africa: A Country Without Friends’,
Midstream, Spring 1962, p. 73, and reproduced in Richard P. Stevens and
Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri, Israel and South Africa: The Progression of a
Relationship, New Jersey, revised edition, 1977, p. 66.
. Rand Daily Mail, 23 November 1961.
. See supra.
. See on this subject Rabbi Emmanuel Lévyne’s Judaisme contre
Sionisme, Paris, Editions Cujas, 1969.
. Philo wrote ‘‘Our customs win over and convert the barbarians and the
Hellenes, the continent and the isles, the Orient and the Occident,
Europe and Asia, the whole world, from end to end.” (Quoted by Ber-
nard Lazare, Antisemitism . . .: see p. 36 of the 1967 English edition).
122 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

38. Quoted by Ilan Halévi, La Question juive, Paris, Editions de Minuit,

1981, p. 17.
3g: Norman Bentwich, For Zion’s Sake: a Biography of Judah Magnes, Phi-
ladelphia, 1954, p. 188.
40. Ibid., p. 131.
41. Samuel Halperin, The Political World of American Zionism, Detroit,
1961, pp. 84-85.
42. New York Times, 31 August 1943.
. New York Times, 13 December 1951.
. The Day, New York, 15 March 1950.
45. The essentials of this report are given in the History of the Zionist Settle-
ments published, in Hebrew, in 1970 by Masada Publications, Tel-Aviv:
quoted by Ilan Halévi, op. cit., p. 24.
46. Quoted in The Other Israel, published by Matzpen, Tel-Aviv, 1968, p.
91: reproduced in Nathan Weinstock, Zionism: False Messiah, London,
1979, pp. 136-137.
47. Figures from the New York Institute for Jewish Affairs and from Christ-
opher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel, London, 1965, quoted in Weinstock,
op. cit., p. 138.
48. Quoted in Alfred L. Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, New York, 1953
(reprinted in 1969 by Institute for Palestine Studies), p. 195.
49, An account of these provocative acts appeared in the Israeli weekly
Ha’olam Hazeh, 20 April and | June 1966. It was confirmed in August
1972 by Kokhavi Shemesh, in the newspaper of the ‘‘Black Panthers’’,
and by the journalist Baruch Nadel, in a questionnaire addressed to Mor-
dekai Ben-Porat through the High Court at Tel-Aviv, on 7 November
1977: see the report in Yediot Aharonot, 8 November 1977, quoted in
Ilan Halévi, op. cit., p. 29.
. Jewish Post, 22 April 1949.
. Imprensa Israelita (Rio de Janeiro), 23 July 1948: Nossa Voz (Sao
Paulo), 28 July 1948; Jewish Telegraphic Agency (Buenos Aires), 2
August 1948.
. Jerusalem Post, 17 August 1951.
. Official minutes, 23rd World Zionist Congress, 1951.
. See Amnon Kapeliuk’s book on Sabra and Shatila, Enquéte sur un mas-
sacre, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1982.
 II
Israel’s Foreign
Policy: Expansionism
I would suggest to you to come round in time to the ‘‘Greater
Palestine’ programme before it is too late ... The Basle Pro-
gramme must contain the words Great Palestine or Palestine and its.
neighbouring lands — otherwise it’s nonsense. You do not get the
ten million Jews into a land of 25,000 square kilometres. !

This letter, sent to Theodor Herzl by one of his close friends

and advisers. David Trietsch, on 29 October 1899, expresses
with perfect clarity the inner logic of Zionist foreign policy.
The very principle of Zionism — to make Jewry no longer a
religion but a nation and a state; to consider all the Jews in the
world as belonging to that nation; and to struggle to bring them
into that state — inevitably committed the Zionist state to a
series of wars of expansion in order to conquer “‘living space”
(Hitler’s Lebensraum). The entire history of the aggressions
and annexations by the State of Israel has followed from this
inexorable logic of political Zionism.
The only difference between this militarist and expansionist
thrust of Israel and that of the Nazis is that, where Israel is con-
cerned, in the ideology and mythology of justification that
accompanies it, the emphasis is laid not only on the myth of
race but also and more particularly on the pseudo-Biblical
123
124 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

myth of a “promise”, interpreted in a purely tribal sense —

not the spiritual sense of the Messianic Kingdom of God but
the materialist, territorial sense of “the Land’’. The verse in
Genesis (xv, 18): ‘““Unto thy seed have I given this land, as
the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Puphiaioed
seen as constituting a political and military programme, 2-asct it
were an historical reality and a deed of ownership — as if the
“seed” of Abraham were to be defined by continuity of blood
and not by community of faith. As if, too, from this “seed”,
even understood in the fleshly sense, were to be excluded the
Arabs, who are the descendents, according to Genesis, of
Abraham’s eldest son, Ishmael, as well as all that part of man-
kind who see in the sacrifices of Abraham the archetypal image
of their faith. As if, furthermore, we are to take as genuine the
mythical genealogy of the Jews of today as descendants of the
ancient inhabitants of Canaan, whereas, even on the absurd
basis of biology, and according to the evidence of history, the
Jews of today — issued, like everybody else from the mixing of
many different peoples, from the Crimea to Yemen, and from
Ethiopia to Spain — have no right to claim the heritage of
‘“‘ancestors” who are not theirs and to exclude the indigenous
population of Muslim and Christian Arabs, who are much
more certainly bearers of the ethnic and territorial heritage of
the inhabitants of David’s kingdom than are the Polish, Rus-
sian, Romanian, Hungarian, Yemeni or North African immi-
grants whom only the most hideous Nazi propaganda could
make out to be a single unit, recognisable, according to the
Nazi racists, by features either physical (shape of skull or nose)
or psychological.
Yet it is with this myth of the “‘Greater Israel’’ promised to
their alleged ancestors, and by means of this selective reading
of the Bible that the Israeli leaders continually “‘justify” their
expansionist policy, the aggressions and annexations they oe)
out in the name of these fairy tales.
“If you have the Book of the Bible’’, said Moshe Dayan in
August 1967, “‘and the People of the Book, then you also have
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 125

the Land of the Bible — of the Judges and of the Patriarchs in

Jerusalem, Hebron, Jericho and thereabouts.’”* But on the
basis of such “‘principles’’, frontiers become elastic: ‘“Take the
American Declaration of Independence, for instance. It con-
tains no mention of the territorial limits. We are not obliged to
state the limits of our state.”* Ben-Gurion’s citing of the
American “precedent” is highly significant, for over there,
indeed, the frontier kept moving westward for a whole cen-
tury, until it reached the Pacific, in a process of harassment of
the Indians in order to drive them away from lands the new-
comers wanted.
Ben-Gurion said, very plainly: ‘To maintain the status quo
will not do. We have set up a dynamic state, bent upon crea-
tion and reform, building and expansion.”
Political practice corresponds to this remarkable theory:
land is seized and its inhabitants expelled. This is the jungle
law laid down by the Zionist state, through its very essence,
from the outset. The U.N. resolution on the partition of Pales-
tine was never respected by the Israeli leaders. As we have
seen, between the partition resolution of 29 November 1947
and the end of the British mandate, Zionist commandos seized
areas assigned to the Arabs, such as Jaffa and Acre. When, to
protect the Palestinians from massacres like that at Deir Yasin
(9 April 1948), the Arab states tried to intervene, this was a
pretext for the leaders of the Zionist state to annex more terri-
tory. Although they had been assigned 56 per cent of the area
of Palestine by the U.N., at the end of the first Israel-Arab war
they held 80 per cent of it.
In that connection there is another legend to be dissipated,
the legend of the little Israeli David confronting the Arab
Goliath, which is used both to arouse pity for this “little
nation’”’ whose security is threatened, and to exalt its military
prowess. Without even considering the present situation, when
the Israeli Army possesses war material which is infinitely
superior, in both quantity and quality, to that of all the Arab
states put together, it should be noted that in 1948 the com-
126 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

bined forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq

amounted to less than 22,000 men, as against the 65,000 sol-
diers of Israel.
But that first thrust seemed insufficient to the Israeli leaders.
The New York Times published on 9 March 1964 an interview
with Ben-Gurion, who was by then in retirement. “‘He said
Israeli territory might have been greater if General Moshe
Dayan had been chief of staff during the war of 1948.” General
Allon, who held important commands during that war, said:

When the Prime Minister and Defence Minister [Ben-Gurion, on

whom President Truman had brought strong pressure to bear]
ordered a halt in our army’s advance, we had been on the crest of
victory on all vital fronts, from the Litani in the north to the Sinai
desert in the south-west. A few more days of fighting would have
enabled us . . . to liberate the entire country.

That task was merely postponed. When President Nasser

nationalised the Suez Canal the Zionist leaders of Israel saw this
as the opportunity for fresh territorial expansion, by allying
themselves with the British, who were concerned about the
Canal, and the French, who, being engaged in war in Algeria,
hoped to be able to hit at the leaders of the Algerian struggle
and their allies in Egypt. The operation was fixed up in France
by Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, with General Challe (later
one of the leaders of the ‘generals’ plot” in Algiers) and the
French Government.°®
The firm check imposed by the Americans and the Soviets
put a stop to that expedition. But the “grand design”
remained. Menachem Begin had written: ‘‘Eretz Israe! will be
restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”’’
In 1967 the Israeli leaders decided to make another leap for-
ward. War was their way of solving their problems: in 1967
there were 96,000 unemployed, out of an active population of
950,000. Emigration was exceeding immigration, with about
10,000 citizens leaving Israel in that year. The influx of funds
from collections in the Diaspora (especially in the U.S.A.) was
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 127

at its lowest level ever. A victorious war would enable all these
problems to be solved at one blow — mobilisation and occupa-
tion of new territory would liquidate unemployment, clamour
about the threat to Israel’s ‘‘security”’ would stimulate the col-
lection of money abroad, and military triumph would restore
confidence to potential immigrants.
The idea of a “preventive war’’ was inherent in the logic of
the Zionist system. On 12 October 1955 Begin declared in the
Knesset: “I deeply believe in launching preventive war against
the Arab States without further hesitation. By doing so, we will
achieve two targets: firstly, the annihilation of Arab power;
and secondly, the expansion of our territory.”
The “‘preventive war” of 1967, the “‘Six-Day’s War’’, began
with an operation similar to that of the Japanese Fascists when,
on 7 December 1941, at Pearl Harbour, without any declara-
tion of war, they surprised and destroyed America’s Pacific
fleet. On 5 June 1967, without any declaration of war, the
Israeli squadrons destroyed the Egyptian air force on the
ground.
On 12 June 1967 Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said in the
Knesset that ‘“‘the very existence of the State of Israel hung
upon a thread, but the Arab leaders’ hopes of annihilating
Israel have been confounded.”’
No Israeli leader could really believe in this lie intended for
the naive, both inside and outside the country. A former minis-
ter, Mordechai Ben-Tov denounced it publicly: ‘““The entire
story of the danger of extermination was invented in every
detail and exaggerated a posteriori, to justify the annexation of
new Arab territory.”® This was confirmed, from among the
military men, by General Ezer Weizmann: “There was never a
danger of extermination’”’,’ and by General Mattityahu Peled:
“The thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung
over us in June 1967 and according to which Israel was fighting
for her very physical survival was nothing but a bluff, which
was born and bred after the war.’'? Even General Rabin
wrote: “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divi-
128 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

sions which he sent into Sinai on 14 May would not have been
enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and
we knew it.””!!
Aggression and mendacity combined had enabled Israel to
occupy Sinai. Mendacity, because the official representation of
the Zionist state had continually asserted that they sought no
annexations.
“Israel covets no territory of any of its neighbours’’, said
Israel’s representative at the U.N., Michael Comay, on 8 Novem-
ber 1966 (U.N. Document A/SPC, PV 505). ‘‘We have no inva-
sion aims’’, said Moshe Dayan ina broadcast on 5 June 1967. We
need only compare these statements with those of General Hod,
commander ofthe Israeli Air Force: ‘Sixteen years’ planning had
gone into those initial eighty minutes” (he meant the attack on 5
June 1967). ‘We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate
the plan. Constantly we perfected it.”"!*
The crime paid off. After 1967 the Zionists occupied a terri-
tory three times as big as that which had been assigned to them
by the partition of 1947. But the appetite for further conquests
was already reappearing.
In July 1968 Moshe Dayan declared:

During the last hundred years our people have been in a process of
building up the country and the nation, of expansion, of getting
additional Jews and additional settlements in order to expand the
borders here. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no
Jew say that we are near the end of the road.'*

In 1972 Golda Meir was asked in an interview: ‘‘What terri-

tory do you consider necessary for Israel’s security?” She
replied:

If you mean that we should draw a line, that we haven’t done. We

will do that when we get to it. But one of the basic articles in
Israel’s policy is that the borders of 4 June 1967 cannot be
re-established in the peace agreement. There must be changes in
the border. We want changes in borders, on all our borders, for
security’s sake.
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 129

After the check suffered in 1973, Israel’s colonial policy

pressed on unwaveringly, especially following the Camp David
agreements of September 1978 (the Egyptian ‘‘Munich’’),
which made possible the multiplying of settlements in the occu-
pied territories, the annexation of Jerusalem and the Golan
Heights, and, in 1982, the invasion of Lebanon.
What makes the aggression against Lebanon in the summer
of 1982 so important is neither exceptionality nor unexpected-
ness. This operation had been in preparation for many years. It
was in the logic of the struggle of Israeli colonialism and fasc-
ism for Lebensraum. What is new is that, for the first time, a
large number of Jews in the world, and some in Israel itself,
together with millions of other people in the West, have begun
to be aware of the deception of which they have been victims
for more than a third of a century: it is sad that it had to take
the massacre of tens of thousands of men, women, children
and old people, the destruction of Beirut, the infamy of Sabra
and Shatila for them to perceive, through the myths by which
they had been blinded, the true visage — colonialist, racist and.
increasingly fascist — of the doctrine of political Zionism and
the actual political practice of the State of Israel.
The lying became so flagrant that it was difficult, despite all
the camouflage and toning-down attempted by the media, not
to glimpse the horrible reality.
The first pretext invoked for the aggression against Lebanon
was the attack on the Israeli ambassador in London, which was
at once put down to the P.L.O. Mrs Margaret Thatcher then
publicly revealed, after the criminals had been arrested and the
police inquiry carried out, that a “hit list” including the name
of the P.L.O. representative in London had been found on the
men arrested after the shooting of the Israeli ambassador to
Britain. If the head of the P.L.O. office was among the targets,
then the attackers would presumably not have enjoyed broad
Palestinian support, as Israel had asserted. “I do not believe it
’ was in retaliation”, she said in a BBC interview. “They may
have made the attack on Ambassador Argov the occasion of
130 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

the new hostilities in the Middle East, but I do not believe it

was the cause.’””*
This rejection of Israeli propaganda passed almost unobser-
ved in France, although it demolished the legend of “legitimate
defence’? which had served as the pretext for this renewed
aggression.
Then came the other lie about the objectives of the war,
which was baptised ‘“‘Operation Peace in Galilee’. According
to this, the aim was to create a security zone forty kilometres
deep along the frontier. The U.N. forces let the Israeli Army
pass through their lines and it set upon Beirut. When Beirut
had been destroyed, Begin installed upon the city’s ruins a
President of Lebanon whom Israel had over a long period
equipped and shaped as its instrument. When, however, he
showed himself, even so, to be not docile enough, Bashir
Gemayel was murdered at his headquarters — which was sur-
rounded by Israeli forces and impenetrable without their per-
mission. The murder served as pretext for a more complete
occupation by the Israeli Army, in order, as the Government
of Israel put it, to establish order and prevent settlements of
accounts. And so it was that, two hundred metres away from
the Israeli headquarters, under their eyes, and at night under
the light of their flares, collaborators with the Israeli occupiers
slaughtered, in a pogrom lasting two days, those whose exter-
mination had been the objective of the Israeli leaders from the
start. And Begin concluded: ““Goyim kill goyim’’.
This is only the external aspect of the story. What is impor-
tant is to grasp its inner meaning, as one moment among others
in the realisation of the plan of political Zionism — ‘“‘Greater
Israel”’.
In order to appreciate that the invasion of Lebanon had
nothing to do with the attempt on the life of the Israeli Ambas-
sador in London, or with any threat to Galilee, it is enough to
place “Objective Lebanon” in the setting of the Zionist plan
for ‘Greater Israel’.
At a time when no Israeli diplomat had been attacked, when
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 131

the P.L.O. did not exist, and when no terrorism threatened

Galilee, the invasion of Lebanon had been planned as an item
on the calendar of Zionist annexations. In his diary for 21 May
1948 Ben-Gurion wrote:

The Achilles’ heel of the Arab coalition is the Lebanon. Muslim

supremacy in this country is artificial and can easily be overthrown.
A Christian state ought to be set up there, with its southern fron-
tier on the river Litani. We would sign a treaty of alliance with this
state. Then, when we have broken the strength of the Arab Legion
and bombed Amman, we would wipe out Transjordan; after that,
Syria would fall. And if Egypt still dared to make war on us, we
would bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. We should thus end
the war, and would have put paid to Egypt, Assyria and Chaldea
on behalf of our ancestors. !°

Here we see clearly, in the light of recent events, how the

mythological fantasies of megalomaniac Zionism can cost the
blood and tears of thousands of living people.
Long before the pretexts that were thought up for its actual
realisation, Ben-Gurion’s scenario was given more precise
form by Moshe Dayan. At a time, in 1954, when Major Had-
dad, Begin’s bloody stooge, was still a child, this was Dayan’s
plan, as revealed to us in the diary of Moshe Sharett, formerly
Israel’s Prime Minister:

According to him [Dayan] the only thing that’s necessary is to find

an officer, even just a major. We should either win his heart or buy
him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the Saviour
of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli Army will enter Leba-
non, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian
regime which will ally itself with Israel. The een from the
Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel.

A few days later Sharett wrote: “The Chief of Staff supports

a plan to hire a [Lebanese] officer who will agree to serve as a
puppet so that the Israeli Army may appear as responding to
his appeal to liberate Lebanon from its Muslim oppres-
sors.”
132 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

And so we see clearly, through the myths about “security”’

and ‘‘peace in Galilee”, the meaning of the war in Lebanon.
This is further clarified by Begin’s new minister, Professor
Ne’eman (from the extreme-right religious party Tehiya) in
1982:

Thus Israel now has an excellent opportunity to establish a new

order in Lebanon. . . The Israel Defence Force must be prepared
for a long stay in Lebanon . . . In the interim Israel will have an
opportunity of reaching a stage of socio-economic or technological
development in the nearby region which, geographically and his-
torically, is an integral part of Eretz Israel . . . It is perhaps also
possible that Israel could integrate the strip south of the
Litani ;'02"2

Naturally, as after each escalation, the Israeli leaders remin-

ded everyone that it would be necessary to press on further in
order to realise the long-term plan of political Zionism. On this
occasion it was Ariel Sharon who said that Israel had, as yet,
“done just a little part of the job.”!”
With this war as with all the other wars of Israel, in the
words courageously spoken by Professor Leibowitz at his press
conference on 14 June 1982 in Jerusalem, ‘‘the aim of this war
is to prepare for the next war’. It was as though the Zionist
leaders were applying to the letter the verse of the Book of
Joshua which says: ‘‘Every place that the sole of your foot shall
tread upon, that have I given unto you” (Joshua, i, 3).
This is the conception of ‘“‘Greater Israel’’, the permanent
objective of political Zionism, as emphasised by General
(Reserve) Shlomo Gazit, now President of Ben-Gurion Uni-
versity at Beersheba, when speaking of the essential objectives
of the Israeli-Arab conflict:

The first objective is to ensure that historic Eretz Israel is not parti-
tioned again . . . The second objective is to ensure that historic
Eretz Israel will remain entirely under Jewish control and,
moreover, that it will remain a basically Jewish state. The third
objective is a full solution to the problem of the Arabs of historic
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 133
Eretz Israel . . . The solution for them must be found outside historic
Eretz Israel.7°

Driving the Arabs out of Palestine and destabilising and disinte-

grating the other Arab countries — those are the two tablets of the
Zionist programme.
An article by Oded Yinon in the review Kivunim (Directions),
published by the World Zionist Organisation in Jerusalem (No. 14,
February 1982), sets forth a ‘strategy for Israel in the 1980s”. This
article reveals the mechanism whereby the State of Israel, going well
beyond all previous aggressions, intends to engage in a systematic
and generalised intervention against the structures of all the neigh-
bouring Arab states, with a view to breaking them up.
An enterprise on this scale, backed by the unconditional and
unlimited support which the United States gives to Israel, would
inevitably raise a tidal wave, not only in all the Arab and other
Muslim countries but throughout the Third World. The Soviet
Union would not be able to refrain from intervening in this process.
The plan thus constitutes the most dangerous detonator for a third
world war, with the prospect of nuclear tit-for-tats which could end
in suicide for the planet as a whole. ;
When carried in this way to its extreme consequences (and the
article in question shows that the Zionist leaders in the logic of their
doctrine and their madness, are quite conscious of this), the Zionist
plan no longer affects only a restricted part of the world—itis a threat
to all nations. These megalomaniac aims are all the more dangerous
in that, up to now, even in its craziest mythological speculations, the
Zionist state has performed every task that it publicly set itself.
We therefore reproduce the most significant passages from
this article, which emanates from the World Zionist Organisa-
tion and reveals the aims which correspond in today’s circum-
stances to the century-old dream of “‘Greater Israel” cherished
by political Zionism:

Regaining the Sinai Peninsula, with its resources present and

potential, is a first-rate political aim which is obstructed by Camp
David and the peace agreements . . . Without oil and the income
134 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

from it, and given our gigantic current expenditure . . ., we shall

have to act so as to restore the situation to the status quo which exis-
ted in Sinai prior to Sadat’s visit and the mistaken peace agreement
signed with him in March 1979...
The economic situation in Egypt, the nature of the regime and its
pan-Arab policy will bring about a situation such that. . . Israel will
be forced to act, directly or indirectly, in order to regain control over
Sinai. . . Owing to its internal conflicts, Egypt does not constitute a
military-strategic problem, and it could be driven back in a day or
two to the position it was in after the war of June 1967. The myth of
Egypt as the strong leader of the Arab world . . . definitely did not
survive 1967. . . Egypt’s power, in proportion both to Israel alone
and to the rest of the Arab world, has declined by about 50 per cent
since 1967. . . Inthe short run, owing to its recovery of Sinai, Egypt
will gain several points at our expense, but. . . that will not change
the relation of forces to its advantage. In its existing domestic politi-
cal image, Egypt is already a corpse, all the more so if we take into
account the growing rift between Muslims and Christians. Breaking
Egypt down territorially into distinct geographical regions is the
political aim of Israel in the 1980s, on its western front. . .
If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya and Sudan, or even the
more distant states, will not continue to exist in their present form,
but will share the downfall and dissolution of Egypt. The vision of a
Christian Coptic state in Upper Egypt, alongside a number of weak
states with very localised power, and no centralised government
such as has existed up to now, is the key to a historical development
which, though set back by the peace agreement, seems inevitable in
the long run.
Although the western front appears, on the face of things, to pre-
sent more problems, it is actually less complicated than the eastern
front. . . The total dissolution of Lebanon into five provinces serves
as a precedent for the entire Arab world. . . The break-up of Syria,
and Iraq later on, into ethnically or religiously homogeneous areas
. .ls Israel’s primary long run aim, with the destruction of the milit-
ary power of those states as the primary aim for the short run. Syria
will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure,
into several states, . . . so that its coast will be a Shivite Alawi state,
there will be a Sunni state in the Aleppo area and another Sunni
state round Damascus, hostile to its northern neighbour, and the
Druzes will set up a state of their own — perhaps in our Golan, but
certainly in the Hauran and northern Jordan. This state will be the
guarantee of peace and security in the area in the long run, and this
aim is already within our reach today.
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 135

Iraq, on the one hand rich in oil but, on the other, torn by
internal conflicts, is firmly in Israel’s sights. This country’s disso-
lution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is
stronger than Syria and, in the short term, it is Iragi power that
constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. A war between Iraq and
Syria ... will tear Iraq apart and bring about its internal col-
lapse even before it becomes able to organise a struggle on a
wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation
will assist us in the short run, and will bring nearer realisation of
the higher aim of breaking Iraq up ... So, three (or more)
states will come into being around the three major cities — Basra,
Baghdad and Mosul — while Shiite areas in the south will sepa-
rate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It may be that the pre-
sent Iran-Iraq confrontation will deepen this polarisation.
The entire Arabian peninsula is a natural candidate for disso-
lution, through pressure from within and from without. This is
bound to happen, especially in Saudi Arabia, no matter whether
that country’s economic might, based on oil, remains intact or
whether it ultimately decreases. Internal conflict and break-
down are a natural process clearly due to result from its pre-
sent political structure.
Jordan constitutes a strategic target for the immediate future,
but not for the long term, for it will not be a real threat to us
after the ending of the long reign of King Hussein and the trans-
fer of power to the Palestinians, ... Israel’s policy both in
peace and war ought to be directed toward the liquidation of
Jordan under the present regime and the transfer of power there
to the Palestinian majority. Changing the regime east of the
river Jordan will also bring an end to the problem of the terri-
tories, densely populated with Arabs, to the west of the river.
Whether through war or under conditions of peace, emigration
from these territories, and an economic and demographic
“freeze” inside them, are the necessary guarantees of the com-
ing change on both banks of the Jordan, and we ought to be
actively engaged in accelerating this process in the very near
future. The autonomy plan should be rejected, along with any
scheme for compromise over these territories or their parti-
tion ... It is not possible to go on living in this country as at
present, without separating the two nations — the Arabs to Jor-
dan and the Jews to the West Bank. Genuine co-existence and
peace will reign over the land only when the Arabs understand
that without Jewish rule between the Jordan and the sea they
will have neither existence nor security. . .
136 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

In the nuclear epoch we shall soon enter it is no longer possible

to live with three-quarters of the Jewish population on the
densely-populated coastline. Dispersal of the population is there-
fore a domestic-strategic aim of the highest order .. . Judea,
Samaria and Galilee are our sole guarantees of national existence,
and if we do not become the majority in the mountainous areas
we shall not rule in this country, but shall be like the Crusaders,
who lost it . . . Re-balancing the country, demographically, stra-
tegically and economically, is our supreme and most central aim
today. Control of the watershed that runs from Beersheba to
Upper Galilee is necessitated by our major strategic aim of set-
tling the mountainous part of the country, which is at present
empty of Jews.

The colonialist and racist plan of political Zionism, after

entailing the expulsion, robbing and repression of the Palesti-
nians, then a series of aggressive wars in the Middle East, and
now the threat of destruction for all the Arab states, consti-
tutes henceforth a threat to world peace.
It may seem paradoxical that a country so small in territo-
rial extent and number of inhabitants can play such a role in
world affairs. To understand why this is the case it is not
enough to refer to the country’s strategic situation, even
though this is very important, at the junction of three conti-
nents. Chaim Weizmann was right when he argued with his
British contacts that “‘a Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard
to England, in particular in respect to the Suez Canal.’’!
Israel does, indeed, hold the ‘‘keys” of the most important
trade and military route, between East and West — and if
today, owing to the passing of hegemony from one power to
the other, it no longer does this for Britain’s benefit, it does it
in the service of the United States ... Israel’s role as gen-
darme of the Middle East has become still more indispensable
for the United States as they can no longer, since the over-
throw of the Shah, count on their bases in Iran. Israel
alone can watch over not only Suez but also the oil-producing
region, and in addition, can provide safe bases in the East-
ern Mediterranean. These tasks cannot be performed by the
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 137

Americans themselves: the Vietnam experience has warned

them off from direct intervention in the Third World. They
operate, therefore, through the agency of Israel, rendering it
unconditional and unlimited aid. This position is much more
comfortable for them. It is possible, now and again, to indulge
in a verbal condemnation of Israel while at the same time pro-
tecting it, by use of the veto, from any real sanction that might
hinder its freedom of action, and, above all, supplying it with
all the money and weapons needed for the accomplishment of
these vital tasks and maintaining the position of the United
States in the world balance of power. It is noteworthy, for in-
stance, that the United States equip the Israeli Army with the
most sophisticated weaponry. The International Herald Tri-
bune of 22 July 1982 informs us that “‘the Israeli Government
will spend five and a half [US] billion [milliard] dollars this
year on its military forces. One out of every three dollars will
come from the U.S. Treasury.”
Almost all of the Israeli Army’s equipment has been
acquired through the United States foreign military aid pro-
gramme, from which Israel received $15 billion of the $28 bil-
lion distributed throughout the world since 1951.
Out of the 567 aircraft which Israel possessed on the eve of
the invasion of Lebanon, 457 had been bought from the
U.S.A., thanks to Washington’s gifts and loans.
If we except the postponement of the delivery of fragmenta-
tion bombs (which the Israelis can now manufacture them-
selves), there has been no interruption in the supply of
American armaments to Israel. According to the officials of
the Pentagon and the Israelis themselves, the planned sale of
eleven F-15 aircraft is to go ahead “normally”, together with
the delivery, already provided for, of other aircraft, self-guided
missiles, trucks and other armoured vehicles.
The close co-operation between the armed forces and war
industries of the two countries makes any proposal for Amer-
ica to take measures against Israel highly unpopular in those
quarters. The Pentagon receives detailed information from
138 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

Israel about the performance of the types of weapon it

receives, some of which have not yet been tried out by the
U.S. Army. This was the case, apparently, with the Hawk-
eye E-2C reconnaissance plane, which was used against dis-
tant objectives in Syria during the first phase of the war in
Lebanon.
The American army can thus carry out really extensive
experiments with its most up-to-date weapons, using for the
purpose an Israeli Army which is much more efficient than
any American expeditionary corps would be.
From the ‘geopolitical’ standpoint, as the Nazis used to
say, only South Africa, which stands guard over the other
route leading to Asia (round the Cape of Good Hope) and
exerts pressure on neighbouring African countries, is in a
position to render America comparable services, though on a
very much lower plane of importance.
This complementarity, along with an obvious similarity of
regime (apartheid) and situation (permanent conflict, in the
one case with the Black world and in the other with the Arab
world), is very well understood as between Israel and South
Africa, and finds expression in a close solidarity between
them.
Jewish Affairs (Johannesburg) defined to perfection, in
November 1970, this strategic “‘complementarity”’:

For South Africa the Middle East — with Israel standing guard as
the small but irreplaceable sentinel for the free world — is sta-
tioned in the very first line of her security. Or, to put it in another
form, Israel safeguards the corridor which must be defended as
long as possible if it is not to become the highway of potential
aggression by a common enemy. The future of the passage
between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, which is cru-
cial for Israel, is no less essential to South Africa than the protec-
tion of the Cape sea route. Should it fall into hostile hands, hos-
tile both to Israel and to South Africa, the Cape sea route would
be practically outflanked and the problems of South African
security would become vastly more formidable. For Israel a
friendly, well-armed and economically strong nation at the south-
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 139

ern end of Africa . . . can only be a valuable strategic asset at her

back door.

This relationship finds expression not only in such spectacu-

lar moves as Vorster’s visit to Israel in 1976 — which was all the
more revealing in that Vorster, Prime Minister of the country
where the most clear-cut form of racism (apartheid) prevails,
held during the Second World War the rank of general in the
pro-Nazi organisation Ossewabrandwag** — but also in close
co-operation in the military, commercial and cultural spheres.
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz of 26 April 1976 wrote at the
time of Vorster’s visit, when he paid a visit to Yad va-Shem,
the memorial to Jews killed by the Nazis:

We tend to examine closely the past of much less important perso-

nalities during the Second World War. Was Yad va-Shem not
aware of Vorster’s past? . . . Or perhaps the “national interest” of
the State of Israel is more important than the sacredness of the
memory of the six million victims of the Nazi holocaust?

After the first talks held in 1970 by Shimon Peres with South
Africa’s defence minister, Botha,”° relations have grown closer
and closer. South African concerns use Israel as a means of
getting round the sanctions imposed by the rest of the world,
and the agreement between Israel and the E.E.C. enables
them to introduce their products into the countries of the Com-
mon Market.
“But there is, in addition to everything else, considerable
military understanding” between these two countries.** The
London Times of 3 April 1976 adds confirmation of this, in a
message from its Cape Town correspondent:

Because of the ban on the sale of arms by many countries, South

Africa has difficulty in obtaining modern weapons . . . Israel, with
which South Africa enjoys increasingly cordial relations, is one of
the few countries which could provide the Republic with modern
weapons and also share the expertise gained during its wars against
the Arabs . . . During the last few years, South Africa has come
140 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

increasingly to identify itself with Israel. Newspapers here fre-

quently draw similarities between the development of Zionism and
Afrikanerdom.

The President of the American Jewish Congress states in

1976, in a letter to the Secretary-General of the United
Nations, that he ‘‘noted with regret that Israel figures among
the nations that supply arms to South Africa.”
South Africa’s most valuable article of commerce is its ura-
nium. This is especially sought after by Israel, which by
November 1976 already had an arsenal of between 13 and 20
bombs of the type dropped on Hiroshima.*°
On 29 June 1975 the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published
an article by Shlomo Aharonson on “‘the need to re-examine
Israel’s strategico-political position’. He wrote:

The nuclear weapon is one of the means that can overthrow the Arabs’
hopes of an eventual victory over Israel . . . An adequate number of
atomic bombs could cause enormous damage in all the Arab capitals and
effect the collapse of the Aswan dam. With an additional supply of these
bombs we could deal with the medium- sized towns and the oil installa-
tions. . . Inthe Arab world there are about a hundred targets the des-
tructionofwhich. . . would deprive the Arabs ofall the advantages they
gained from the Yom Kippur war. . .

How did it happen that the Zionist State of Israel could

assume such importance in the global strategy of the Powers
that it is today in a position to imperil world peace?
In The Jewish State Herzl said plainly: ‘We should there [in
Palestine] form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia,
an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.”’ Since then,
however, the State of Israel has become not only the agent of a
collective Western colonialism in the Middle East but also — for
the U.S.A. in particular — a major piece in the relation of
forces on the planetary chessboard.
The Zionist leaders use this argument to the full. In the arti-
cle already quoted from Kivunim of February 1982 they make
play with the great themes of the ‘Cold War’’:
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 141

One of the major objectives of the U.S.S.R. is to defeat the West

by gaining control of the gigantic resources in the Persian Gulf and
in the southern part of Africa, where most of the world’s minerals
are located. We can imagine the dimensions of the global confron-
tation which will face us in the future. The Gorshkov doctrine calls
for Soviet control of the oceans and the mineral-rich areas of the
Third World. This, together with the present Soviet doctrine on
nuclear war, which holds that it will be possible to wage, win and
survive such a war, in which the military might of the West will be
destroyed and its inhabitants reduced to slavery in the service of
Marxism-Leninism, constitutes the principal danger to world peace
and to our own existence.

This exploitation of anti-communism, at the level of a man of

Begin’s type, is typical of the methods of political Zionism,
which can also, without altering its essential nature, express
itself more elegantly through Shimon Peres, so as to present
“barbarism with a human face’’. It is Reagan’s aim to replace
Begin by Peres, so as to pursue the same policy in less repulsive
outward forms.
The ranting of Menachem Begin changes nothing, for
Israel’s dependence on the United States for money and
weapons is total.
After the annexation of the Golan Heights Begin replied to
the (purely verbal) remonstrances of the Reagan administra-
tion by handing the U.S. Ambassador a note saying: ‘“‘What
kind of talk is this of punishing Israel? ... Are we a vassal
state of yours? Are we a banana republic? .. . You will not
frighten us with punishment. He who threatens us will find our
ears deaf.’’ He added that the people of Israel had survived for
3,700 years without an agreement on strategic co-operation
with America, and they would continue to survive intact with-
out it for another 3,700 years.
This impudent boasting on Begin’s part is not dangerous to
Israel, because the policy of Israeli Zionism corresponds so
closely: to the aims of the world policy of the United States, and
plays in it such an irreplaceable role, that the Government of
Israel, sure of impunity, can say whatever it likes.
142 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

The financing of the State of Israel provides, moreover, the

key to the very nature of this state.
Mr Pinhas Sapir, who was Israel’s Finance Minister at the
time, revealed at the ‘“‘conference of Jewish millionaires”’
(sic)?’? held in Jerusalem on 9 and 10 August 1967, that
between 1949 and 1966 Israel received $7 billion. To appreci-
ate the significance of this figure it is enough to recall that the
aid given to Western Europe under the Marshall Plan between
1948 and 1954 amounted to $13 billion — that is to say, the
State of Israel received (spread out over a longer period, to be
sure), for less than two million inhabitants, more than half of
what was given to two hundred million Europeans. In other
words, a hundred times as much, per head of population.
Here is another means of comparison: the average amount
of aid annually received by all the ‘‘underdeveloped countries”
between 1951 and 1959 did not exceed $3,164 million,**
whereas Israel, with, at that time, only 1,700,000 inhabitants,
received $400 million: in other words, with less than
one-thousandth the population of the ‘‘underdeveloped”’ parts
of the world, Israel received one-tenth of the total. Less than
two million Israelis received, per head, a hundred times as
much as two billion inhabitants of the Third World.
Some more figures, to provide clear comparisons. The $7 bil-
lions received as a gift by Israel in a period of eighteen years
represent more than the total annual income from the labour
of ail the adjacent Arab countries (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jor-
dan), which in 1965 came to $6 billion.
If we take account of the American contribution alone, we
see that, between 1945 and 1967, the United States gave $435
to each Israeli and $36 to each Arab — or, in other words, that
to 2.5 per cent of the population was given 30 per cent of the
aid given to the remaining 97.5 per cent.
An Israeli economist of world reputation, Don Patinkin, has
shown the extent to which, between 1950 and 1958, Israel’s
gross national product fell short of financing consumption,
both public and private, and the depreciation of existing capi-
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 143

tal.?? In simple terms, the product of the nation’s labour does

not, in Israel, cover the nation’s needs. According to the
U.N.’s annual publication giving statistics of national accounts
(1965), the proportion of the total needs of the State of Israel
covered by its gross national product varied between 80 and 83
per cent, whereas even countries like Vietnam which had in
this same period to sustain continual war managed more than
87 per cent, and Jordan, without natural resources and largely
desert, exceeded 80 per cent. Countries as well-known to be
“under-developed”’ as Bolivia, Ceylon, the Sudan and Malta,
showed percentages higher than 90.
The Zionist State of Israel is thus the country whose depend-
ence on aid from outside is greatest.
In order to try and fill this gap, the Zionist leaders convened
in Israel, after the war of 1967, as mentioned above, an annual
conference of Jewish millionaires from the Diaspora. In an
interview, Dr Yaakov Herzog, Director-General of the Israeli
Prime Minister’s office, defined the aim of these meetings as
follows: ‘“To consider how to attract larger investments into
Israel and get Jewish investors from abroad to become inter-
twined with the Israeli economy with a sense of direct responsi-
bility and participation ... We are now planning something
else too — a sort of great dialogue on the identification of the
Diaspora with Israel, on the struggle against assimilation
abroad.”
The operation paid off, since the American Jewish organisa-
tions now send each year, on the average, one billion dollars
to Israel. These contributions, which are classified as ‘‘charit-
able’, are tax-deductible, which means that they are a charge
upon the American tax-payer, even though they serve to sus-
tain Israel’s “‘war effort’ and finance its aggressions. But the
main contribution is made, nevertheless, directly by the
American state, whose ‘‘aid” amounted, at the beginning of
the 1980s, to more than $3 billion per year.
It has been arranged that this annual subsidy of $3 billion is
to be increased during 1982: which may seem rather odd in
144 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

view of the reductions which have been imposed on America’s

expenditure on internal services. . .
Nearly half of this official aid consists of gifts and of “loans”’
which are very quickly ‘“‘forgotten’”’. The rest goes to increase
Israel’s external debt, which is growing rapidly and now
approached the figure of $20 billion, which means an unprece-
dented average of $5,000 per head of population.
The bulk of this annual aid is accounted for by arms deliver-
ies, for which Congress, anxious to play down the spectacular
aspect and avoid public criticism, has arranged a special fund-
ing procedure under its Arms Export Control Act of 1976.

Thus, for example, in fiscal 1980 $1 billion [milliard] worth of for-

eign military sales were authorised for Israel’s account. Immedi-
ately following the sale, however, $500 million of the loan was can-
celled, and the residual $500 million was added to the $7 million-
plus the State Department estimates that Israel now owes the U.S.
Government. This debt involves grace periods of up to ten years
prior to any repayment. [Moreover], as a consequence of Israel’s
worsening economic malaise since 1973, it can service this debt
only in the formal sense that instalments are paid when due but are
in fact funded through new aid each year.°°

During the build-up for the attack on Egypt in 1956,

in May, France sent two consignments of a dozen “‘Mystére IV”

fighters and a number of tanks to Israel. These deliveries had the
secret blessing of the United States, who preferred to see a Euro-
pean country arming Israel and drawing Arab barbs upon herself.
But in June and following months huge quantities of armaments
flowed towards Israel, under a top-secret agreement, all unknown
to Washington and to the French Foreign Ministry, which was
opposed to favouring Israel because of fear of offending the Arabs
and harming what remained of French connections and interests in
the Middle East.*!

Such aid is increased by means of sub-contracting, especially

for aircraft — for example, Israel Aircraft Industries receives
contracts for the manufacture of parts for F—4s and F-15s.
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 145

Finally, economic aid includes facilities for Israeli exports to

the U.S.A., which enjoy the preferential tariffs accorded to
“developing countries’’, so that 96 per cent of these exports ($1
billion) enter the country duty-free.
In short, one figure will suffice to define the nature of the
Zionist State of Israel: the total amount of American official
aid alone that it receives comes to more than $750 per head of
population.»
That means that the “tip” added to Israel’s
national income in this way is more than twice the gross
national income per head of population of Egypt and of most
of the other countries in Africa.
By these figures many legends are dispersed; in the first
place, the most dangerous of them all, the legend of little
Israel, weak and perpetually under threat from an Arab tidal
wave, and doomed to fight for its survival. In fact, Israel pos-
sesses, thanks to the United States, the means of striking
within 48 hours at Damascus, Baghdad, Amman and Cairo,
just as it has already struck at Beirut. The danger lies in the -
legend about Israel being constantly threatened with annihila-
tion, whereas it is Israel that constitutes a standing threat of
aggression against all of its neighbours. This is the legend
(thanks to which Western opinion puts up with everything and
anything from Israel, even the most unacceptable of crimes) of
the permanent “miracle” of the so- called “little David” face to
face with the all-devouring Arab Goliath — whereas “‘little
David” can load his sling with all the armaments and all the
money of the United States. The Zionist State of Israel weighs
upon the Middle East, at the point where Europe, Asia and
Africa meet, with all the weight of mighty America.

NOTES
1. Oscar K. Rabinowicz, A Jewish Cyprus Project. New York, 1962, p. 17.
2. Herzl records in his Diaries a conversation with his friend, the Gentile
Zionist Rev. William Hechler, chaplain to the British Embassy in Vienna,
while they were travelling on the Orient Express. ‘‘In the compartment
146 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

he unfolded his maps of Palestine and instructed me for hours on end.

The northern frontier ought to be the mountains facing Cappadocia [i.e.
the Taurus Mountains, in Turkey — Trans.]; the southern, the Suez Canal.
The slogan to be circulated: ‘The Palestine of David and Solomon’”
(Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, London, 1960, Vol. I, p. 342).
W . Jerusalem Post, 10 August 1967.

. Ben-Gurion’s diary, 14 May 1948, quoted by Michael Bar-Zohar, The

Armed Prophet, London, 1967, p. 133.
. Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, New York, 1954, p. 419.
_N. Lau Lavie, Moshe Dayan: a Biography. London, 1968, p. 156.
NYDN . Menachem Begin, The Revolt: The Story of the Irgun, London, 1951
p. 335. The New York Times of 29 November 1967 quoted a remark made
by General De Gaulle: “During the Suez affair in 1956 the Israelis
emerged as a warlike state, determined to expand”.
. Al Hamishmar, 14 April 1972.
. Maariv, 19 April 1972.
. Ha’aretz, 19 March 1972.
. ibid. (quoted in Le Monde, 3 June 1972).
. Sunday Times, 16 July 1967.
. Maariv, 7 July 1968.
. International Herald Tribune, 8 June 1982.
. Quoted by Michael Bar-Zohar in The Armed Prophet, op. cit.
pp. 139-140.
. Quoted in Livia Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, Belmont, Mass.,
1980, p. 28 (Sharett’s diary of 16 May 1954).
. Ibid. p. 29 (Sharett’s diary of 28 May 1954).
. Jerusalem Post, 24 June 1982. Let it be recalled that, in his letter to the
Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Chaim Weizmann claimed that Israel’s
northern frontier should include “the northern and southern banks of the
Litani river, as far north as latitude 33 degrees 45 minutes”’ — that is, a
line between Sidon and Beirut.
. Interview given by Sharon to Oriana Fallaci, in the Milan periodical
Europa, 28 August 1982 [London Times, 30 August 1982].
. Yediot Aharonot, 15 January 1982.
. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 243.
. Vorster wrote in 1942: ‘We stand for Christian Nationalism which is an
ally of National Socialism. . . In Italy it is called Fascism, in Germany
National Socialism and in South Africa Christian Nationalism” (quoted
by A. Hepple: South Africa: Workers under Apartheid, 1969 p. 3).
. See Sechaba, (organ of the African National Congress), April 1970,
p. 19.
. C. L. Sulzberger in the New York Times, 30 April 1971.
. Ha’aretz, 14 November 1976.
. Brian Beckett, “Israel’s Nuclear Options”, in the Middle East Inter-
national, November 1976.
. Sapir’s speech will be found in The Israel Economist of September 1967
(Volume XXIII, no. 9) pp. 181-182.
 ISRAEL’S FOREIGN POLICY: EXPANSIONISM 147

28. According to U.N. statistics given in Le courant international des capi-

taux a long terme et les donations publiques, 1951-1959 (The inter-
national flow of long-term capital and public grants, 1951-1959), quoted
by Georges Corm in Les Finances d’Israel, Institute of Palestine Studies,
1968.
29 Ibid.
30. T. Stauffer, Christian Science Monitor, 29 December 1981.
ai. M. Bar-Zohar, The Armed Prophet, p. 210.
32 . Let it be remembered, once again, that this figure does not include either
the payments received from the Diaspora or the American “‘loans” which
are so quickly “‘cancelled’’. The actual total external contribution must
amount to about twice the figure quoted, if we take account of the sum
exceeding $1 billion that comes in from the Diaspora every year, and also
the “‘camouflaged”’ American loans.
 Ill
The Methods of Israel’s Policy:
State Terrorism
Our exposure, disregarding taboos, of the harsh reality of poli-
tical Zionism, its colonialism, its apartheid-type racism, and
the relentless logic of its policy of aggression aimed at the con-
quest of “‘living space”’ on the pretext of legitimate defence and
a fight for survival, should indicate the road to a solution of the
problem.
First, that we must avoid the crazy and criminal diversion of
antisemitism, which is symmetrical with political Zionism, in
that it tries to render responsible for the crimes of that move-
ment the people of Israel as a whole and all the Jews of the
world, whereas these are, for the most part, victims of the
mental manipulation practised by the Zionist leaders. Despite
the pressure to which they are subjected, some of these people,
in Israel and elsewhere, are beginning to show awareness of
the suicidal dead-end into which Zionism has led both the Jews
and everyone else.
From the beginning to the end of this book we have com-
bated a certain doctrine, political Zionism, and a certain
policy, that of the State of Israel, which results from that doc-
trine. This approach enables us to combat antisemitism effec-
tively, by not confusing the promoters and peddlers of that evil
148
 THE METHODS OF ISRAEL’S POLICY: STATE TERRORISM 149

doctrine and the colonialist policy it inspires with the mass of the
Israeli people, even if they are misled by their rulers — and, still
less, with the Jews of the “Diaspora” as a whole.
We never confused the German people with Hitlerism, even
when the propaganda of the Nazi myths about race and “‘prole-
tarian nations” had manipulated them and caused them, follow-
ing in the wake of their criminal leaders, to make Hitler a
“democratically elected Chancellor’, and to obey his criminal
orders.
Every system “‘secretes”’ the leaders it deserves but we cannot
confuse these deceitful ‘‘guides” with the people they mislead.
What is under indictment, after the attempt at de-bunking we
have made in this work, is not so much a particular group of men
as the system which, by its very logic, has carried these men to
power.
It is true, for example, that the triumvirate that directs the
Zionist policy of Israel today is a triumvirate of war criminals.
Begin first and foremost, eee Ben-Gurion himself defined as
‘‘a thoroughly Hitlerite type’.
When Begin made his first visit to the United States, a group
of prominent Jews, which included Albert Einstein, wrote on 4
December 1948 to the editor of the New York Times: “It is
inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the
world, if currently informed as to Mr Begin’s record and pers-
pectives, could add their names and support to the movement he
represents. . .” Begin was the leader of ‘‘a political party closely
akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social
appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the
membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a
terrorist right-wing chauvinist organisation in Palestine.” They
recalled, as ‘“‘a shocking example” of what the Begin’s movement
stood for, ‘‘their behaviour in the Arab village of Deir Yasin.
This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands,
had taken no part in the war ... On April 9 terrorist bands
attacked this peaceful village, . . . [and] killed most of its inha-
bitants.
150 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

“It is imperative that the truth about Mr Begin and his

movement be made known in this country ... The under-
signed therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few
salient facts concerning Begin, and of urging all concerned not
to support this latest manifestation of fascism”’.’
Begin was the man of blood who, on the morrow of the mas-
sacres at Sabra and Shatila — perpetrated, thanks to his
Defence Minister and himself, by their puppets, such as the one
he calls ‘‘my friend Haddad” — complained that “goyim kill
goyim, and they come to hang the Jews!”
Begin’s Defence Minister, General Ariel Sharon, at that
time Number Two in the Government and the executioner of
Lebanon, also has a record which illuminates his present activ-
ity. He it was who was given by Moshe Dayan in August 1953
the task of creating and commanding “Unit 101”’, with respon-
sibility for carrying out reprisals on Arab frontier villages, so as
to spread terror and promote the departure of the non-Jewish
population, in fulfilment of the first requirement of the doc-
trine of political Zionism.* Sharon and his commandos
launched their first raid at Qibya, a small Palestinian village in
Jordan, during the night of 14-15 October 1953: 66 of the inha-
bitants were massacred, three-quarters of them women and
children. In their report to the Security Council the U.N. milit-
ary observers who reached Qibya two hours later testified:

Bullet-riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet-hits on

the doors of the demolished houses indicate that the inhabitants
had been forced to remain inside until their houses were blown up
over them . . . Witnesses were uniform in describing their experi-
ence as a night of horror, during which the Israeli soldiers moved
about in their village blowing up buildings, firing into doorways
and windows with automatic weapons and throwing hand-
grenades.

Among the provocative acts which preceded the first war in

Sinai, the massacres at Khan Yunis and Bani Suheila, in Egyp-
tian territory, during the night of 31 August 1955, were
 THE METHODS OF ISRAEL’S POLICY: STATE TERRORISM 151

directed by Sharon in person, and he also led the “‘punitive’’

raids into Syrian territory on the eastern shore of Lake Tiber-
las, an action condemned on 19 January 1956 by the Security
Council of the United Nations.

During the 1967 war Sharon commanded that part of the Army
which attacked in Sinai. He is personally responsible for the deaths
of hundreds of Egyptian soldiers whom he refused to take prisoner
in the last days of the campaign, Dayan’s order being: “Take no
prisoners, but destroy the Egyptian forces in Sinai’’.4

On 26 July 1973 Ariel Sharon wrote in Yediot Aharonot:

‘Israel is now a military super-power . . . All the forces of the
European countries are weaker than ours. Israel could conquer
in one week the whole area from Khartoum to Baghdad and
Algeria.”” As Defence Minister he had nuclear missiles at his
disposal which would have enabled him to put into effect that
boast.
The third man in the sinister trio which headed Israel is
Itzhak Shamir, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Even if we con-
fine our attention to those features of his biography which
relate to dealings with other countries and international organ-
isations, he, too, has plenty of “‘form’’.
Shamir’s career has been entirely dominated by racism. His
view of the world and of international relations was summed
up in an article in Yediot Aharonot of 14 November 1975, after
the voting of the U.N. resolution which denounced Zionism as
a form of racism. He wrote:

It is unacceptable that nations made up of people who have only

just come down from the trees should take themselves for world
leaders . . . How can such primitive beings have an opinion of their
own? . . . The blow we have just received from U.N.O.. . . should
convince us, once more, that we are not like unto other nations.

That is Zionism’s guiding thread in foreign policy. And Sha-

mir’s career had been a logical fulfilment of that idea. He was
152 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

one of the three top leaders of Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel,

‘Fighters for the Freedom of Israel’’), the organisation more
commonly known as the Stern Group, or Stern Gang. The
German historian Klaus Polkehn discovered, while researching
in the secret archives of the Third Reich, the plan for an alli-
ance which was put to Hitler’s Foreign Minister by the Stern
Group in January 1941. These proposals were conveyed via the
Naval Attaché of the German Embassy in Turkey, who was
responsible for special missions in the Middle East. In a mes-
sage dated 11 January 1941 he passed on Lehi’s ideas:

Evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is the first condition

for the solution of the Jewish problem, but this is not possible
unless these masses are settled in a Jewish state within its historic
frontiers. . . . This is the objective of the political activity and long
years of struggle by Lehi and its national military organisation.
1. There could be a common interest as between the establish-
ment of a new order in Europe, in accordance with Germany’s con-
ceptions and the true aspirations of the Jewish people, as these are
incarnated in Lehi.
2. Co-operation would be possible between the new Germany
and a reborn Hebrew nation.
3. The establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national
and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty to the German Reich,
could help to maintain and strengthen in the future the position of
Germany in the Near East. . . . Co-operation with Lehi would be
in accordance with the line of the recent speech by the Chancellor
of the Third Reich in which Herr Hitler emphasised that any com-
bination, any alliance should be accepted in order to isolate and
defeat Britain.”

This same hatred of Britain led Shamir, at the head of the

Stern Group, to cause Lord Moyne, the British Minister of
State in charge of Middle East affairs, to be murdered in Cairo
in November 1944 - and then, using the same terrorist
methods, to have struck down, in Jerusalem on 17 September
1948, Count Bernadotte, the mediator between Israel and the
Arabs appointed by the United Nations.
The sole concern of Shamir and his associates was that of
 THE METHODS OF ISRAEL’S POLICY: STATE TERRORISM 153

political Zionism — to create in Palestine the “living space”

needed if all the Jews of the world were to be brought there.
On 23 September 1948 Harold Reinhart, of London’s West
End Synagogue, wrote in the Times: ““Only madness can
explain the murder of Count Bernadotte. But, as is well known
and as was incontrovertibly demonstrated by the Nazis on a
gigantic scale, the borderline between madness and unbridled
nationalism is uncertain. Naked nationalism knows no law
except necessity. Its passion for Lebensraum is beyond the
sphere of reason and compassion. Bred on despair and disillu-
sion, a naked nationalism — contrary to the whole Jewish tradi-
tion — finds some expression among Jews today.”
This, then, was the triumvirate of war criminals who held
power in Israel at the time of the invasion of Lebanon. But it
would be naive to suppose that the problems would be solved
merely by replacing these men with personages presenting a
different aspect.
What is at issue is not men but a doctrine, the doctrine of
political Zionism, which these individuals have merely taken to
its extreme limits. Barbarism with a human face is still barbar-
ism. Reagan would certainly like to have vassals less arrogant
than Begin, but only so as to pursue the same policy. There can
be no doubt that he prefers Shimon Peres and his team. But
what real changes would be brought in by this ‘‘opposition”’
which opposes nothing where the basic points of Zionist doc-
trine are concerned?
Besides, this “‘reserve’’ team consists of men who were in
power from the foundation of the State of Israel until recently.
Shimon Peres was the favourite disciple of Ben-Gurion, who,
as we have seen, marked out the guidelines of the programme
of political Zionism, including its worst consequences.
Was Peres more humane towards the Palestinians? When he
waxed indignant in the Knesset over former Defence Minister
Sharon’s responsibility for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila,
Sharon replied: ‘‘Where were the Israeli officers when the
Palestinians were massacred at Tel-el-Zaatar? You were
154 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

Defence Minister at that time.’’ And, indeed, when, after a

fifty-days’ siege, from 22 June to 12 August 1976, the so-called
“Christian” Phalangists, well-equipped and armed by the
Israeli Government, caused 2,000 persons to ‘‘disappear”’
(according to the figure given by the International Red Cross),
Defence Minister Shimon Peres did not lift a finger to check
the atrocities being committed by Israel’s puppets.
To be sure, it was Ariel Sharon who, in an interview, boas-
ted of his crimes:

We must hit, hit and hit them incessantly. We must hit them every-
where: in the country, in the Arab states and overseas. It can be
done. In this matter I have already seen hopeless situations that
have found a solution. We must not act against them after they hit
us, but every day and everywhere. If I know they are in a certain
country in Europe, we must do it despite all the difficulties and
limitations. Not by means of a large- scale war. Suddenly someone
disappears there, someone is found dead here and somewhere else
someone is found stabbed to death in a European night club.°

What Sharon talks about, the Labour Party does. For state
terrorism, too, is the logic of political Zionism. Summing up the
results of the investigation into the murder in Rome, on 16
October 1972, of Wa’el Zu’ayter, the P.L.O. representative in
Italy, the Rome Assize Court explained in the preamble to its
verdict given in November 1981 that it was unable to find any
individual guilty, as this was a political affair that lay outside its
competence. ‘“This crime was the outcome of a premeditated
policy . . . carried out methodically and with quite military effi-
ciency by an organisation belonging to the State of Israel.”’
Recalling the fact that the physical elimination of six Palesti-
nians between October 1972 and July 1973 had been ‘“‘preceded
by statements, official and unofficial, by Israeli leaders declar-
ing ruthless war against the Palestinian Resistance and its rep-
resentatives everywhere, to be waged all the time by every
possible means”’, the Court considered that these crimes ‘‘must
be put down to the Israeli secret service, and in particular to a
 THE METHODS OF ISRAEL’S POLICY: STATE TERRORISM 155

section thereof which is active and maintains contacts on the

world scale.”
At the time of the murder of Wa’el Zw ayter, the “‘socialist”’
Prime Minister in office at the time, Mrs Golda Meir, made
remarks similar to those of Ariel Sharon. When she was ques-
tioned in the Knesset on 18 October 1972, 48 hours after the
murder, she replied: ‘All I know is that the bullets did indeed
reach their target.”
Who introduced the racist Law of Return? Who organised
the systematic grabbing of land? Who drove from that land
those who cultivated it? Who committed the Suez aggression?
(It was prepared in Paris by Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres).
And the aggression of 1967? Each time we come upon the
Same names: Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Shimon
Peres — all persons who belonged to the party which is now in
“opposition’’. The attack on Lebanon by Begin and his gang is
only one more chapter in the same story, subject to the same
logic. So true is this that, when Begin wanted to explain to the
Americans what he had done, the man he immediately thought
of as the one to perform that mission was — Shimon Peres.
For there is no major disagreement between Likud and
Labour on the fundamentals of this policy. Two days after the
invasion of Lebanon began, when nobody could be in any
doubt as to the operation’s scale, methods and objectives, a
vote of confidence in the Government was passed by the Knes-
set with only Rakah (the Communist Party) voting against and
only nine deputies abstaining — of whom just one, Y. Sarid,
was a member of the Labour Party.
Where the future is concerned, and the prospect of a real
solution of the problems through negotiation, we find the
Labour Party engaging in the same rejection of the Fez prop-
osals and alignment on the Reagan theses, which rule out any
dialogue with the P.L.O., even though nobody doubts that the
P.L.O. is the only possible interlocutor if peace is sought.
We can therefore understand the position taken by the for-
mer Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, a socialist and a Jew
156 ZIONIST MYTHOLOGY TO THE POLITICS OF ISRAEL

whose family were massacred in the Nazi camps. After describ-

ing his struggles inside the Socialist International, he wrote: “I
want to have nothing to do with that Israe
l 997

NOTES
. Ben-Gurion, letter to Chaim Guri in 1963, quoted in Jsraeleft No. 108, 15
June 1977.
. It was Begin’s Irgun that blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem kil-
ling 91 people, so as to destroy the headquarters of the British Army,
which had stopped Rommel from reaching Palestine and so prevented
the Nazis from exterminating its Jewish inhabitants.
. Moshe Sharett wrote in his diary on 31 March 1955: “In the thirties .. .
we educated the public to consider revenge as an absolutely negative
impulse. Now, on the contrary, we justify the system of reprisal . . . We
have ... made it possible to uphold revenge as a moral value. This
notion is held by large parts of the public in general, the masses of youth
in particular, but it has crystallised and reached the value of a sacred
principle in [Sharon’s] battalion, which becomes the revenge instrument
of the State.” (Livia Rokach, IJsrael’s Sacred Terrorism, Belmont,
Mass., 1980, p. 36).
On the responsibility of Ariel Sharon for the atrocities committed in
Lebanon, see the remarkable testimony of an ardently Zionist Israeli
journalist, Jacobo Timerman; The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon, New
York, 1982.
. Uri Avneri in Ha’olam Hazeh, 24 August 1973.
. Quoted by Professor Israel Shahak in Zo Haderekh, 2 September 1981.
. Yediot Aharonot, 26 May 1974.
. Bruno Kreisky in Der Stern, August 1982.
NDANS
 CONCLUSION

1. The Zionist state of Israel possesses no legitimacy —historical,

Biblical or juridical — in the place where it has been established.
Nor does it possess any moral legitimacy: its conduct, both inter-
nal and external (racism, expansionism, state terrorism) makes it
a State like any other, and even sets it among the worst of states,
resembling those with which it is in fact most closely connected,
namely:
(i) the United States, from which it takes over, for use against
the Arabs, the worst of that country’s traditions, namely, its
treatment of the Indians and the Blacks; whose worst actions,
such as the Vietnam war, it emulates; and whose ‘“‘democratic”’
fictions combined with support, in Latin America, of the dicta-
torships it apes:
(ii) South Africa, whose apartheid and archaic colonialism it
practises:
(iii) El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay (the chief place of
refuge of the old Nazis), to whom Israel supplies arms and
instructors to help them terrorise their peoples.

2. The constituent doctrine of the State of Israel, political

Zionism — born not of Judaic tradition, which merely provides
157
158 CONCLUSION

it with camouflage and pretexts, but of Western nationalism

and colonialism of the 19th century — is a form of racism,
nationalism and colonialism.

3. This state, sprung from this false ideology and from a series
of acts of violence and terrorism, was created in the name of an
illegal decision by the United Nations’ Organisation (domin-
ated at the time by the Western powers) and by means of pres-
sure and corruption. It has survived not through its own work
and its own strength but, just like the Crusader states in their
day, through an influx of money and weapons from the West,
and above all through the unconditional and unlimited backing
of the United States, which has used it as a major element in its
world strategy, as a wedge driven into the Middle East.

4. The Zionist State of Israel, stripped of the myths that were

used to justify its foundation, and of the intellectual (and
sometimes physical) terrorism that is used to protect it, is thus
simply one state among the rest, without any halo or privilege
or sacred character. Because all states owe their origin, just
like Israel’s, not to any “right” but to a certain relation of
forces, and to accomplished facts.

5. History cannot, therefore, be made over again, and the fron-

tiers of states changed, by acts of violence. What, then, can
provide a realistic solution to the problem?

6. It is senseless to call on the P.L.O. to ‘recognise’ Israel,

unconditionally, for at least three main reasons:
(a) This would require of the Palestinians that they accept
the legitimacy of the land-robbery and eviction of which they
have been victims. The State of Israel, in Palestine itself more
than elsewhere, can, if absolutely necessary, be accepted de
facto, but not recognised de jure.
(b) By its essence (political Zionism) and its existence (the
series of usurpations and wars it has undertaken) the State of
 CONCLUSION 159

Israel is in constant expansion: after each aggression and each

annexation it covets a fresh area of “‘living space’’. It is there-
fore impossible to “‘recognise”’ the validity of its ‘‘elastic’’ fron-
tiers. What Israel is it that the P.L.O. is expected to ‘‘recog-
nise”’? The one projected by the U.N.’s partition plan in 1947?
The one created by the encroachments of 1948, through terror,
through Deir Yasin? The one of 1967, with its territory
acquired by preventive war and invasion? The one of 1982,
with the proliferation of its settlements in that territory? The
one conceived in the megalomaniac dreams of Herzl (from the
Euphrates to “the river of Egypt’’) or of Ben-Gurion (from the
Litani to Sinai)? The one contemplated by Ariel Sharon, with
his dream of dominating the Near East from the Straits to the
Suez Canal? Or the one with a plan to disintegrate all the Arab
states, along their ethnic or religious lines of cleavage?
(c) Finally, how can the P.L.O. be asked to give a valid ‘‘rec-
ognition”’ to something when its own right to exist is denied?
How can an act of recognition be demanded from an institution
whose own existence is denied? .
With what more representative interlocutor do the Israeli
leaders want to deal, since the mayors elected by the Palesti-
nians, the overwhelming majority of whom have shown their
loyalty to the P.L.O., have all been removed from office by the
Israelis?
Are these fresh encroachments to be “negotiated” with a
handful of ‘“‘Gauleiters” imposed on the people, with collabor-
ators and ‘“‘kapos’’, with puppets who would be to the Palesti-
nian Arabs what Haddad is to the Lebanese Christians? The
truth of the matter is that Israel’s rulers, from Begin to Peres,
do not want to negotiate with anybody.

7. Consequently, the solution to the problem can come only

from the international community.
(a) It is not a question of “throwing the Israelis into the sea”’,
as lying propaganda alleges. What is being fought against, by
the Palestinians as by all partisans of freedom in the world,
160 CONCLUSION

is not persons, and still less an entire people, but a racist doc-
trine — political Zionism and the aggressive, colonialist beha-
viour of a state and its ruler.
(b) To employ the formulation of one of the P.L.O.’s lead-
ers, when a child has been born illegitimately, even as a result
of a rape, there can be no question of killing the child.
(c) Any solution must be guaranteed by the international
community, regardless of the shortcomings of this community
in the past, when it was dominated by the West and illegally
‘made reparation’’ for the injustice done to ‘‘the Jews” by
Hitler by inflicting an injustice on the Palestinians, who had
had no share in the Nazi’s crimes.

8. Therefore, whereas the Israeli leaders have systematically

flouted the decisions of the United Nations, the only solution that
is honourable for everyone and ensures the security of everyone,
Israelis and Arabs alike, is, as Yassir Arafat has proposed, for
both sides to accept all the U.N.’s resolutions on Palestine.
Let us recall that the first resolution was the one on parti-
tion, which defined precise frontiers for two states, Israeli and
Palestinian.
The second resolution conferred formal existence on the
State of Israel.
Even if this partition and this ‘‘creation of a state” exceeded
the juridical competence of the General Assembly and were
fundamentally unjust, they are acceptable to the Palestinians,
out of respect for international law, on condition that they are
accepted by the other side, with international guarantees of
this acceptance.

9. The only obstacle to the application of this solution comes

from the Israeli leaders, for whom political Zionism, the myth
that constitutes the basis of their state, would thereby be pre-
vented from developing its will to power and expansion.
It is not at all utopian to contemplate this solution, for politi-
cal Zionism, is becoming more and more “mythical’’. In the
 CONCLUSION 161

first place because only 18 per cent of the world’s Jews have
responded to the call to “return”, and secondly, because the
current has now gone into reverse, with more Jews leaving
Israel than wish to “‘return’’ to it.
We can thus take note today of the defeat suffered by politi-
cal Zionism and its plan to bring all the world’s Jews to Pales-
tine, into a world ghetto, as desired by all the world’s antisemi-
tes.

10. The realisation of this peaceful compromise, which would

douse the fires that could lead to a third world war, depends
entirely on the international community.
Any violent intervention is, of course, out of the question:
but the dependence of the Zionist State of Israel on the outside
world is such, from the financial, economic and military stand-
points, that a gradual reduction in this external “‘aid’’ could
oblige the rulers of Israel, whether named Begin or Peres, to
come to the negotiation table.

11. The publication of this book, in French and English, is

intended as a contribution to the de-mystification of public
opinion, especially in America, France and Israel, by replacing
a mythical picture of the problems involved with the objective
reality, revealed by irrefutable facts, so as to set the problem
on the plane of calm political discussion.

12. To begin with, it is necessary

(a) That each community, receive a guarantee of security, of
freedom from discrimination and of self-determination, with
the backing of an international force.
(b) That all supplying of arms, ammunition and military
equipment to the Middle East be stopped at once, together
with the collection of money, in any country, by those official
organs of the Israeli state, given status under its ‘fundamental
laws’’, the World Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency.
(c) That this progressive ‘“‘de-Zionising” of the State of
162 CONCLUSION

Israel, which is indispensable for its own security no less than

for that of its neighbours, and which alone will make negotia-
tions possible, be accelerated by intensifying economic sanc-
tions, until the Israeli rulers agree, under pressure from their
own public opinion, to begin genuine negotiations with the
P.L.O. and with all those whom its policy has continually
attacked or threatened for nearly half a century.
Only then will the way be opened, in the long run, for a real
integration of this state into Asia (so that it no longer functions
as a. Western racist and colonialist enclave), in what Martin
Buber dreamt of from 1921 onward and advocated in 1947 —a
Near-East Federation wherein there can be brotherly
co-existence, without any ethnic discrimination between Arabs
and Jews, in the land where the hopes of three great religions
were born, for Jews, Christians and Muslims, all who claim the
great heritage of Abraham, together with all those who,
though they have lost religious belief in that heritage,
nevertheless continue to cherish its culture and its lofty human
values.
INDEX
Abraham, 73, 76ff, 79ff, 82ff, 109ff, Arms Export Control Act, 144
124, 162 Aryan myth, 44
Action Israel, 119 Assimilation, 9, 90
Adler, Herr, 92 Aswan dam, 140
Agrarian policy, 103 Autonomy, 105ff, 135
Agriculture, 39 Averroes, 15
Ahad Ha’am (Ginzberg), 38, 56, 66 Avneri, Uri, 95
Aharonson, Shlomo, 140
Aid, dependence of Israel on, 143,
161 Baghdad, 118
USS., 94, 142ff Balfour, Arthur 3, 59
Diaspora, 143, 147 Declaration, 9, 38, 46ff, 58, 102,
Alexandria, 111 Lets
Ali Baba, Operation, 118 Bani Suheila, 150
Aliens Act, 59 Bar Kokhba, 34, 36, 45
Allon, General, 126 Barth, Karl, 84
Aloni, Shulamit, 89, 95 Beduin, 39
American Council for Judaism, 113ff Begin, Menachem, 6, 18ff, 22ff, 50,
American Declaration of Indepen- 66, 69, 71, 89, 105, 120, 126ff,
dence, 125 130ff, 149, 153, 155ff, 159, 161
American Indians, 62, 64 Beirut, 130
American Jewish Conference, 117 Ben-Gurion, David, 17, 19, 38, 51,
American Jewish Congress, 140 DO 2.9 Pelle lott, Wotteisile
American Jewish Yearbook, 114 149, 153, 155, 159
Antisemitism, 9ff, 23, 90ff, 111ff, Ben-Nahman, Rabbi Moshe, 111
115ff, 148 Ben-Tov, Mordechai, 127
Apartheid, 95, 98ff, 107ff, 138ff, 157 Bernadotte, Count Folke, 50, 66,
Apiru, 31, 33, 45 152ff
Arab League, 50 Bible, selected reading of, 13, 74, 76,
Arabian Peninsula, 135 78, 108
Arafat, Yassir, 160 not historical, 78
Arendt, Hannah, 67 Bloch, J. S., 93
Argentina, 119 Bloch, M., 92
Argov, Ambassador, 129 Bossuet, 13
165
166 INDEX

Botha, 139 de Pury, Albert, 52, 81

Brazil, 119 Desert myth, 101, 105
Bronze Age, 30ff De Vaux, Father, 29, 31, 33, 65
Buber, Martin, 16, 19ff, 22, 26, 90, Diaspora, 41, 63, 119, 143, 147
113, 162 Dinur, Ben-Zion, 38
Buffon, 42 Displaced persons, 116ff
Dreyfus case, 3, 7, 56, 90, 120
Drumont, 10, 91
Camp David, 129, 133
Canaanites, 31ff, 45, 110, 124
Carmiel, 103 Eckhart, Meister, 16
Carter, Jimmy, 3 Ecumenism, 85
Catholicism, 85 Egypt, 134
Cecil; Lord Robert, 68 Eichmann, 67
Challe, General, 126 Einstein, Albert, 37, 71ff, 90, 113,
Chlomecki, Baron, 92 149
Chosen People, 70ff, 72, 78, 82, 84 Eliezer, Waldman, 19
Chouraqui, A., 58, 67 Emergency Laws, 103
Christians, 7, 84, 109ff, 114, 124, Emigration, 126
ISi, 1345162 Eshkol, Levi, 127
Christian anti-Judaism, 11 Evron, Boaz, 63
Christian Phalangists, 154 Expropriation, 101 ff
Cohen, Benjamin, 22
Cold War, 140
Colonialism, 8, 59, 61, 89ff, 101,
108, 129, 136, 158, 160 Fauvet, Jacques, 25
Comay, Michael, 128 Fighters for the Freedom of Israel,
Committee of the Bishops of France, 152
85 Forrest, A. C., 25
Common Market, 139 Forrestal, James, 49
Congress of Basle, 90 Friedman- Yellin, Nathan, 50, 67
Constitution, lack of, 72 Frontiers, 17, 125, 131, 146, 159
Covenant, 14, 73, 76ff, 78, 80, 82 Fundamental Laws of Israel, 95ff
Crusaders, 110, 158
Curzon, Lord, 48
Cyrus, 110 Gandhi, 21
Gaon, Nessim D., 119
Gaza Strip, 106ff
David, 34, 36, 45, 65, 77, 80, 82, 110, Gazit, Shlomo, 132
124 Gemayel, Bashir, 130
and Goliath, 145 Genocide, 18, 60, 62ff, 74ff, 127
Dayan, Moshe, 104, 124, 126, 128, Ginzberg, Asher, 38, 56
1ISTAS Of 155 GNPs compared, 143
Defence Laws, 104 Golan Heights, 141
De Gobineau, Comte J. A., 42 Goldstein, Dr. Israel, 115
Deir Yasin, 18, 50, 65ff, 71, 74, 104, Gorshkov doctrine, 141
149, 159 Greater Israel, 124, 130, 132ff
 INDEX 167

Haddad, Major, 131, 150 Jews of Iraq, 118

Haganah, 50, 117 Jordan, 135
Halevi, Judah, 54 Joseph, Bernard (Dov), 103ff
Hasidism, 15ff Joshua, Book of, 74ff, 77, 108, 110,
Hebrew, history of, 30ff 182:
Heine, 90
Herzl, Theodor, 1, 2, 7, 35, 37, 56ff,
666f, 71-908 101. 109.4415" 123% Kafka, 90
140, 145, 159 Kafr Kasem, 104
Herzog, Yaakov, 143 Kastner, Dr., 67
Hirsch, Baron, 93 Khan Yunis, 150
Historic rights, absurdity of, Khmelnitsky, Bogdan, 56
American Indians, 53 Kibbutzim, 102
Crusaders, 54 Kierkegaard, 80, 82
Italians, 52 King-Crane Commission, 47
Scandinavians, 52 Klausner Report, 117ff
Poland, 53 Klein, Claude, 25, 95, 99ff
Hitler, 43ff, 59, 61ff, 67, 149 Koestler, Arthur, 47
Hittites, 73 Koran, 82, 85, 109
Hod, General, 128 Kreisky, Bruno, 155
Holocaust, 61ff, 64ff, 70
Holy War, 75ff, 77
Hussein, King, 135 Land Laws, 103ff
Hyksos, 31 Land Ordinance, 103ff
Land of Israel, 96
Langer, Felicia, 95
Immigration, 114, 116, 126 Law of Return, 65, 73, 97ff, 155
Institute of Comparative Law, 25
Law on Nationality, 98
Integralism, 12, 14, 18 Lazare, Bernard, 9ff, 26
Iraq, 135 Lebanon, 22, 76, 119, 129, 131ff,
Irgun, 18, 50ff, 149 15071535155
Isaiah, Book of, 108 Lecache, Bernard, 62
Israel Aircraft Industries, 144 Leibowitz, Professor, 95, 132
Israeli democracy, 95
Lévi-Strauss, 43
Israeli League for the Rights of Man, Liberation, Biblical, 83
94 Litani, River, 131ff, 159
Lovers of Zion, 7, 9, 56
Jerusalem, 109ff, 129 Lundstrom, General, 66
Jew, definition of, 43, 73, 100
Jewish race, 44, 46
Jewish Agency, 95ff, 116ff, 161 Magic Carpet, Operation, 116
Jewish Institutions of France, 119 Magnes, Judah, L., 113
Jewish millionaires’ conference, Maimonides, 12, 15
142ff Mandel, Neville, 112
’ Jewish National Council, 48 Mapai, 72
Jewish National Fund, 94, 96ff, 98, Maritain, Jacques, 85
103, 105 Marr, Wilhelm, 11
168 INDEX

Marranos, 111 Pascal, Blaise, 52

Marriage Laws, 72, 99 Patinkin, Don, 142
Marx, Karl, 16, 55, 90 Peace Conference, 29
Marxism, 141 Peace in Galilee, Operation, 130
Masauda Shem-Tov Synagogue, 118 Pearson, Drew, 49
Maybaum, Dr., 92 Peasants, 102, 104
Meir, Golda, 2, 37, 48, 69, 71, 101, Peel Report, 39
128; 135 Peled, Mattityahu, 95, 127
Mendelssohn, 90 Peres, Shimon, 104, 126, 139, 141,
Messianism, 6, 14, 16, 19, 23, 41, 55, 153ff, 159, 161
63, 108ff, 112, 116, 120, 124 Peru, 119
Mexico, 118 Persecution, 7, 54ff, 60, 68, 92,
Montagu, Edwin, 59 TD nia17)
Montaron, Georges, 25 Pharaohs, 30ff
Monteil, André, 25 Philadelphia Conference, 109, 120
Montevideo, 118 Philo the Jew, 111
Moses of Leon, 15 Pilgrimage, 110
Movement for Civil Rights, 89 Pittsburg Conference, 112
Moyne, Lord, 152 Plehve, 91
Muslims, 7, 109ff, 114, 124, 131, 134, P.L.O., 105; 129; 154 ff; 158
162 Pogroms, 49, 56, 70, 91, 104, 130
Poland, 55
Poliakov, 44, 66
Nabonidus, King of Babylon, 110 Polkehn, Klaus, 152
Nadel, Baruch, 51, 65
Promised Land, 14, 29ff, 40ff, 63,
Nasser, President, 126ff
72, 80, 82, 84ff, 124
Nationalist spirit, 108
Prophets, 108, 110ff
Naxos, Duke of, 55
Proselytism, Jewish, 45, 100
Nazism, 5, 43, 56, 60ff, 67, 104, 117,
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 13
123ff, 149, 153, 157
Ptolemy, King of Egypt, 110
Near Eastern Federation, 21
Nebuchadnezzar, 118
Ne’eman, Professor, 132
Qibya. 150
Neher, André, 26
Nicholas IJ, Tsar, 91
Noah, sons of, 44
Rabbinical courts, 99
Nordau, Max, 57, 67
Rabin, General, 127
Nuclear weapons, 140ff
Racism, 24ff, 40, 42ff, 90ff, 136, 151,
Nuremberg Laws, 2, 43
158, 160
Racism, League against, 25, 62, 89ff
Oriental Jews, 116 Reagan, 141, 153, 155
Reconstruction Fund, 96
Reform Judaism, 112
Palestinians, 32ff, 94 Refugees, 117
Particularism, Jewish, 11, 62 Reinach, Joseph, 45ff
Partition of Palestine, 48ff, 51, 125, Reinhart, Harold, 153
128, 159ff Resh Galuta, 110
 INDEX 169
Revolt, The, 50 Underdevelopment, concept of, 42
Rhodes, Cecil, 8, 56 United Fund of Mexico, 118
Rodinson, Maxime, 46, 66 United Nations, 48, 51, 97, 99, 114,
Rothschild, 92ff, 102, 119ff 140, 158, 160
Ruppin, A., 102 Universalism, 16, 23, 55, 108ff, 112
Uranium, 140
Uruguayan Jews, 118
Sabra, 115, 120, 150, 153 ORSAY lh 13S 186i torte
Safed, 6, 55 WES SaRe 133141
Safety, lack of, 108
Saladin, 110 Verwoerd, 108
Sapir, Pinhas, 142 Von Bilow, 91
Sassoon, Khedouri, 118 Von Rad, 80
Saudi Arabia, 135 Von Simonyi, Ivan, 58
Saul, 65, 100 Vorster, 139
Scholem, Gerschom, 15, 61, 68
Schools, teaching in, 36, 72ff
Shahak, Israel, 94, 105 Warshavsky, 116
Shalit, Mrs, 101 Welles, Sumner, 49
Shamir, Itzhak, 23, 151 ff West Bank, 105ff, 121, 135
Shapiro, J., 104 Weinstock, Nathan, 72, 105
Sharett, Moshe, 131, 156 Weitz, Joseph, 38, 94
Sharon, Ariel, 17ff, 23, 62, 104, 120, Weizmann, Chaim, 37ff, 57ff, 68, .
132, 150ff, 153ff, 159 136, 146
Shatila, 115, 120, 150, 153 Weizmann, Ezer, 127
Sinai, 128, 133ff, 151, 159 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 57, 91
Six-Days’ War, 127 Witte, 58
Smith, Lawrence H., 48 Wolf, Lucien, 93
Solomon, 34, 36, 45, 65, 78, 80, 100 World war, threat of, 133
South Africa, 138ff, 157 World Zionist Congress, 7, 13, 56,
Spain, 6.15.55, 111 119
Spinoza, Baruch, 12, 16, 55, 90 World Zionist Organisation, 6, 29,
Stern Group, SOff, 67, 152 6757) Sstt a9 33-16)
Suez Canal, 136, 155, 159
Syria, 134, 151
Yad va-Shem, 139
Yavne’eli, Rabbi, 116
Yemenis, 116
Talmudism, 12, 110 Yinon, Oded, 133
Tamarin, G., 75ff
Thatcher, Margaret, 129
Thon, Dr., 116 Zangwill, Israel, 37, 65
Torah, 111 Zionist Congress, 91
. Treaties of Westphalia, 52 Zionist Organisation (see World)
Triesch, David, 123 Zohar (Book of Splendour), 15, 66
Truman, Harry S., 49, 126 Zu’ayter, Wa’el, 154ff

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