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Semitic Action

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Summary

A small political organization of Jewish Israeli intellectuals — including Uri Avnery, Yaakov Yeredor and Nathan Yellin-Mor, per the translator’s footnote in Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace — which called for Israel’s integration into the Middle East through the rejection of Zionism and a “Hebrew” identity; the book uses its Hebrew Manifesto in Chapter 9 to show that even the proposers of a compromise solution shared the official premise that the conflict is a legacy of hatred rather than a political dispute (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.437-438).

Details

  • The translator’s footnote describes Semitic Action as established in the 1950s by a group of Jewish Israeli intellectuals, calling for “the integration of Israel into the Middle East through the rejection of Zionism and the adoption of a “Hebrew” identity based more on the (Semitic) Hebrew language than on the Jewish religion, and the self-identification of the “Hebrew” society as an indigenous part of the Semitic zone of the Middle East” (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.437).

  • Shmuel Shnitzer’s long programmatic Maariv article “Peace with Nasserism?” (25/7/58) was written against Semitic Action’s members, arguing that preaching rapprochement with Nasserism rests on “one big illusion: that the Arabs’ hatred of Israel is a rational phenomenon and it is possible to remove it from the world if we remove its causes” (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.437-438).

  • Semitic Action’s own platform stated: “The chasm that today separates Israel from the Arab states was not created by a specific concrete problem but rather it is the legacy of mutual hatred and mutual distrust and fear” (The Hebrew Manifesto, September 1958, p.22). The book comments: “It is surprising that both those who propose a solution to solve the conflict and those who reject that solution share the same basic assumption about the nature of the conflict” (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.438).

  • Chapter 9 gives the Manifesto’s refugee programme in full (second edition, 1/7/59, p.10): Israel will recognize in principle every refugee’s right to return, give free choice between return and compensation, let the refugees elect an independent representation, absorb returnees in ten yearly quotas on Jewish-immigrant procedures, compensate non-returnees, let border farmers work lands across the border, and finance it internationally — “immediately and unilaterally and independent of a comprehensive settlement” (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.488-489).

  • On borders the Manifesto contradicts itself: “It is a fateful necessity to maintain the State of Israel within its present borders as a sovereign unit” (first edition, p.25), while recognizing the Palestinian nation — “the natural ally of Israel, as the only nation that lost the Semitic civil war in 1948” — and its right to self-determination in its own independent state (first edition, p.24): it demands the “foreign regimes in Jordan and Gaza” concede their shares of the spoils of Palestine, but not Israel (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.490).

  • The book’s critique: the Manifesto states the root geopolitically — “The dismemberment of Palestine into three parts … runs counter to the needs of the country” (second edition, p.10) — whereas “The problem is not that the country was dismembered, but that the Arab state that was supposed to be created was dismembered. It is, therefore, not a geopolitical problem but a political problem”; its reunification slogan is “a slippery slope” toward Herut, instanced by Uri Avnery’s own Gaza articles of November-December 1956; its equation of the two superpowers (“the intrigues of Western and Soviet imperialism”) is false — “there is no symmetry, but rather complete anti-symmetry between the roles of the “superpowers” in the Middle East”; and its “Semitic mythos” confuses racial essence with the region’s actual common basis, the struggle against colonialism. It is nonetheless welcomed as “a breath of fresh air” (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.491-495).

  • With the Communists, Semitic Action is one of the two compromise bodies that “overtly declare themselves to be non- and even anti-Zionists” (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.502).

Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, Shmuel Shnitzer, Zionism, Uri Avnery, Ihud, Maki, Self-determination, Right of Return

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