My wife left our car with its pro-Israel bumper stickers outside a big local bookstore today, and she found the following note on the windshield when she returned:
“ZIONISM”
IS
Seperatism
&
Rasic Racism
The good news is that the person who left this note was apparently capable of recognizing that he/she had spelled “racism” incorrectly the first time, although “seperatism” seems to have slipped by.
Our correspondent doesn’t seem to know what ‘separatism’ is (here’s an example). Even Jimmy Carter didn’t accuse us of that. Probably he or she meant ‘apartheid’, but got tired just thinking about spelling it.
One of the things which characterizes grass-roots anti-Israel people is their complete ignorance of the actual issues and of history (our friend is even ignorant of the actual slogans).
The conflict between Palestinians and Israelis has nothing to do with race — how can it when it is impossible to tell an Israeli from a Palestinian by their appearance? But antisemites of the Right and Left (for example, Shlomo Zand) will go on and on about the Khazars, about how Ashkenazis are not actually Jews, etc. Their obsession with race is indeed racist, but is not shared by average Israeli, who is concerned about Palestinian terrorism, not Arab or Jewish genetics.
It’s true that anti-Israel Arabs have adopted a lot of the trappings of European racist antisemitism in order to stir up hatred. But Israeli Jews have always had more concrete reasons to dislike Arabs, such as the history of murderous attacks, from pogroms in the 1800’s, through the ‘riots’ of the 1920’s and -30’s and the terror attacks of the Arafat period, to the Qassam rockets of today. Who needs racial antagonism when friends and relatives are murdered?
Despite all this, Israel has not exterminated the Palestinians or ethnically cleansed territories captured in wars started by the Arab nations — Israel has not behaved like Jordan, for example, which one way or another eliminated every last Jew in the areas it occupied in 1948.
One might well ask who in the Middle East is actually racist. Egypt, where Mein Kampf is a runaway best seller and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was a hit TV series; Hamas, whose charter calls for the killing of Jews and repeats silly antisemitic cliches — it would be funny if they didn’t actually murder people — or Saudi Arabia, whose official website until very recently carried a statement that “Jewish persons” would not be allowed into the Kingdom? What about Sudan, where an Arab government is committing genocide against three non-Arab ethnic groups, because of their color or religion or both?
If you search for ‘Zionism’ on YouTube, you will find numerous videos in which neo-Nazis, ordinary antisemites, and Iranian TV personalities explain how Zionism is a racist doctrine that holds that Jews are superior to non-Jews and that Jews must strive for world domination (or even the extermination of non-Jews). All of this is false.
Zionism simply states that the Jewish people has a right to self-determination, like any other people. Zionists believe that the State of Israel was legitimately established and has a right to exist as a Jewish State (see: “Zionism — What it is and isn’t“).
Our note writer needs to study history as well as spelling.