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From: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.religion.jewish,net.nlang.africa,net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Apartheid on the West Bank (defining racism)
Message-ID: <366@ubvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Nov-85 16:08:54 EST
Article-I.D.: ubvax.366
Posted: Fri Nov 22 16:08:54 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 25-Nov-85 07:56:19 EST
References: <4188@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> <360@ubvax.UUCP> <614@unc.unc.UUCP>
Reply-To: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
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In article <614@unc.unc.UUCP> fsks@unc.UUCP (Frank Silbermann) writes:
>In article <360@ubvax.UUCP> tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch) maintains
>that Zioinism is racist in that the government takes special interest
>in ensuring that Jews remain a voting majority.  My question is this:
>
>	Since the Jews are not a racially defined group, then what
>	does this kind of discrimination have to do with _RACISM_?
>
>Frank Silbermann

Nothing.  Frank misunderstood me.  I don't think Zionism is racist at all.
But I also don't restrict racism to color differences.

To my sense (ignoring the corrupted rhetoric), racism is a pathological
relationship between members of a powerful ethnic (or religious) group
and members of a less powerful group, such that all the powerful ethnic group
needs to know about a member of that minority group is that he or she
is a member of that group, AND the member of the powerful ethnic group
assumes that the member of the less powerful group is an inferior.

The pathology is in letting a person's membership in one or another group
blot out one's checking out anything that might make that person an
individual, with special valuable qualities, in situations where
knowledge of the presence or absence of these qualities would normally
be checked.

Laws are racist if they make racist relationships the only legal ones.
People are racist if they belong to a more powerful group and regularly
engage in racist relationships.  A state is racist if it makes racist
laws a major basis of its legitimacy.

Anyone's invited to try to improve on this if they want to.

Given this definition (which I support), to call Zionism racist is wrong
because it was an escape for the Jews from the racism of Europe.  Jews
were never in a more powerful position, as far as states were concerned,
so they could never institute a racist relationship in the first place.
They were victims, not leaders, in politics.  Anti-semites might point
to Rothschilds as an exception, but they haven't read their history, I'd
submit.

In Israel, Jews are leaders, not victims.  There they have to face
claims and charges that they could be racist towards Arabs, with the
understanding that their leadership positions make it possible for
them to become racists.  I don't think immigration policies constitute
sufficient evidence, or even a major indication, of racism.  Expulsion
policies do.  Racist laws do.  Laws that define Jews on the West Bank
as citizens and Arabs on the West Bank as Jordanians, while Israel rules
the West Bank, are racist laws.

But these are just some laws and some practices.  I still don't think
that racist laws are the major basis for the legitimacy of the state
of Israel.  Its legitimacy is still based on an anti-racist Zionist movement
dispersed throughout the world, on the Jewish diaspora.  What worries
me is that as Israel gets its own identity and moves on its own
political track, as it's starting to do today, that track will be
based on the Likud right-wing resentment-based scapegoating racist
dynamic.

If that movement takes over, Israel will be Zionist no more.  And
it will be racist.  And what it might become is being foreshadowed by
what is happening on the West Bank today.

Tony Wuersch
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