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Zionism

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aliases

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Summary

In Kanafani’s usage, Zionism is the movement and settler project allied with British Imperialism in Palestine, whose capital, immigration and armed force, backed by the Mandate, were transforming Palestine into a Jewish industrial, militarised society at the expense of the Arab population.

Details

  • The Zionist challenge gave the national contradiction predominance over social contradictions in Palestinian politics, and British imperialism found in the Zionists a more suitable ally than the local feudal-religious leadership (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.6 / printed p.10).

  • Kanafani describes the crystallisation in 1936-1939 of the militaristic and aggressive character of the colonial society Zionism had implanted in Palestine, and speaks of the ideology and practices of colonisation developing fascist characteristics in Zionist organisations (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.6 / printed p.11; PDF p.9 / printed p.16).

  • Zionist policy in the revolt ran on two parallel lines: the closest possible alliance with Britain, and continuous internal mobilisation of the settler society under David Ben-Gurion’s slogan of no alternative (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.28 / printed p.55).

  • Weizmann is quoted summarising the period’s Zionist policy in the complete similarity of interests between the Zionists and the British in Palestine (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.56).

  • In the Tribute, the primary contradiction in Kanafani’s thought is named as the one with imperialism, Zionism and racism (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.34 / printed p.66).

  • Sayegh defines Zionism by its belief in the national oneness of all Jews in terms of their supposedly common ancestry, and derives from its racial identification three corollaries, racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness and racial supremacy, which he calls the core of the Zionist ideology (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.214).

  • In Sayegh’s history, Zionism fulfilled Jewish nationalism through colonisation as the instrument of nation-building, organised itself from the First Zionist Congress of 1897 through the World Zionist Organization and its colonisation instruments, failed unilaterally to 1914, and succeeded through its 1917 alliance with British Imperialism, thereafter turning to the United States (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.2-8 / printed p.207-213).

  • Sayegh’s perennial-aim claim: statehood in all of Palestine, called Eretz Israel, completely emptied of its Arabs, with Territorial Expansion as its unfinished business (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.15-16 / printed p.220-221).

  • In Said, Zionism is the basically European and ambitious ideology (as well as practice) with which Palestinian history’s defining, traumatic national encounter has been fought since the first wave of Zionist colonialists reached Palestine in the early 1880s (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.10 / printed p.ix).

  • Said’s Zionism rationalized the denial of present reality in Palestine with an argument about a higher interest, claimed the natives nonexistent and superseded, and conducted its struggle largely in the capitals of the West by diffusion, the positive counterpart of denial and blocking (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.36, p.41-44 / printed p.15, p.20-23).

  • Said argues there is no separating Balfour’s ideology from that of Zionism: both visions cancel out the Arabs as secondary and negligible and belong to the ethos of a European Mission civilisatrice (see Balfour Declaration) (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.39-40 / printed p.18-19).

  • Pappe defines Zionism as emerging in the late 1880s in central and eastern Europe as a national revival movement which, by the beginning of the twentieth century, associated that revival with the colonisation of Palestine: it “secularised and nationalised Judaism”, claimed the biblical territory and recreated, indeed reinvented, it as the cradle of the new nationalist movement, regarding Palestine’s inhabitants as ‘strangers’ to be repossessed or as invisible, part of nature’s hardship, “to be conquered and removed” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.34-35).

  • Pappe’s central claim about it: the 1948 plan was “the inevitable product of the Zionist ideological impulse to have an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine”, the project realisable only through a purely Jewish state, “exclusively Jewish not only in its socio-political structure but also in its ethnic composition”, its geographical extent varying (Peel acceptance 1937; all of Palestine demanded 1942) while the objective remained the same (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.16, p.38-39).

  • He connects the choice of Palestine with nineteenth-century Christian millenarianism and European colonialism, and treats the Labour movement within Zionism — its universal, socialist dreams quickly substituted by nationalism — as the movement that instituted and implemented the ethnic cleansing of the local population (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.36-37).

  • In Makdisi, the movement’s internal contradiction is Baruch Kimmerling’s: “one Zionist imperative—to possess the largest possible amount of sacred land—contradicting the other Zionist imperative—to ensure a massive Jewish majority inhabiting a land that was preferably free of all Arabs” (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.52), stated openly in Vladimir Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall” (1923) (PDF p.52-53).

The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Settler Colonialism, Imperialism, Histadrut, Haganah, Jewish Labour Only

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