Summary
In Sayegh’s account, racism is not an acquired or accidental trait of the Zionist settler-state but congenial, essential and permanent, inherent in Zionism’s ideology of the national oneness of Jews by common ancestry; in Palestine it is distinguished from other European racism by aiming at racial elimination rather than hierarchical racial coexistence.
Details
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Racism is inherent in the very ideology of Zionism and in the basic motivation for Zionist colonisation and statehood; neither religion nor language is the alleged national bond, for few Zionists are believing or practicing Jews and Hebrew was resuscitated only after the birth of Zionism (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.214).
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Its three corollaries are Racial Self-Segregation, racial exclusiveness and racial supremacy (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.214).
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European race-supremacist settlers elsewhere expressed supremacy within hierarchical racial coexistence, separate and unequal, tolerating the continued presence of indigenous populations as useful; Zionist settlers expressed supremacy first by isolating themselves from the Arabs and later by evicting them, and Sayegh holds that nowhere in Asia or Africa, not even South Africa or Rhodesia, had race-supremacism shown such zeal for racial exclusiveness and physical expulsion (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.10-11 / printed p.215-216).
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The motto contrast: racial discrimination for European settler-regimes, racial elimination for the Zionist settler-regime; discrimination was reserved for the remnants of the Palestinian Arab people who stayed behind (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.12 / printed p.217).
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The editors’ introduction frames the same claim: the phenomena Sayegh highlights are not passing features of Zionism but congenial, essential and permanent, and Fayez Sayegh’s presentation of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 in 1975 determined Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.1 / printed p.206).
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In Said, Chapter Two I: nineteenth-century European culture was racist with greater or lesser virulence depending on the individual — Ernest Renan an outright anti-Semite, George Eliot indifferent to races who could not be assimilated to European ideas; Mill and Marx are given as opponents of injustice who nonetheless held liberty, representative government and individual happiness inapplicable in the Orient (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.86-87 / printed p.65-66).
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In Said, Chapter Two II: on the 1975 Zionism is racism resolution, Said holds that Israel’s achievements should not be sloppily tarnished with the sweeping rhetorical denunciation associated with racism, and that for the Palestinian Arab, “Racism is too vague a term: Zionism is Zionism”, a tautology whose sense is exactly the opposite of what it says to Jews (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.132-133 / printed p.111-112).
Related pages
Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Racial Self-Segregation, Apartheid, Zionism, Fayez Sayegh