by Habib Siddiqui:

IS ZIONISM anything but crass racism? Do the indigenous people have any right to exist in their homeland? Apparently not. If they are Palestinians they are evicted and killed by the Apartheid Zionist state of Israel.

Are not the Palestinian Arabs Semites? Apparently not — in the dictionary of the Zionists.

On November 28, 2023, all but two members of the US House of Representatives voted in favour of a resolution (H Res 888), which reaffirmed Israel’s right to exist and recognised that ‘denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of anti-Semitism.’

Coming as it did in the midst of the latest genocidal campaign of Israel that witnessed the sheer barbarity of its settler-colonial occupation forces, the so-called Semites, against the unarmed Palestinian civilians once again showed the moral bankruptcy of the Capitol Hill. It has become a mouthpiece for the Knesset, justifying and funding colonisation, violence, and its genocidal agenda against the ‘other’ people who happen to be non-Jewish.

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the only Palestinian in the US Congress, voted ‘present,’ effectively an abstention. One may recall that earlier last month, Tlaib was censured by her colleagues in the House for her defence of Palestine. To the ‘Amen Corner’, humans are unequal, Palestinians lives do not matter, and the life of a single Israeli Jew is more important than the lives of hundreds of Palestinians.

Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) wrote on X that he voted against the resolution because ‘it equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is deplorable, but expanding it to include criticism of Israel is not helpful.’

Such resolutions passed in the ‘Amen Corner’ that is long mortgaged to the interests of the pro-Israel Zionist power lobby should not surprise anyone.

The 2024 election is only 11 months away. With Israel’s latest brutality in Gaza — and the strong backlash from the American public that has come with it — we are told that AIPAC is expected to spend at least $100 million in the Democratic primaries to oust people like Tlaib and the rest of the ‘Squad’ who support Palestinian human rights.

This corruption of US politics with AIPAC’s dirty money explains the reason why even the so-called most progressive representatives like Cori Bush, who introduced a ceasefire resolution, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Ilhan Omar voted in favour of this House resolution.

The House resolution is criminally silent about the Palestinian people, as if they do not exist. It also omitted the mere fact that, prior to the influx of European Zionists, 95 per cent of the population of Palestine comprised of Muslim and Christian Palestinians. More problematically, despite the fact that only 5 per cent of Jews were native and indigenous to Palestine, Tuesday’s resolution declared that Jewish people are ‘native to the land of Israel.’

What a mockery! Truly, this resolution once again shows what is wrong with Zionism and its corrupting influence on the ‘Amen Corner’ that is complicit in crimes against humanity.

Historical facts cannot be whitewashed by such irresponsible resolutions that try to sanctify Zionism and its horrendous crimes against humanity.

As I have long maintained, political Zionism remains a curse for humanity. It betrayed Judaism and perverted Christianity. The entire policy of the state of Israel, internal or external, has been a colonial enterprise, but it wears the cloak of pseudo-theological myth. Israel remains a racist, settler-colonial enterprise that denies the equality of humankind.

To the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, universal brotherhood ‘is not even a beautiful dream, antagonism is essential to man’s greatest efforts.’ (Jewish State, 1897) In his diary, Herzl writes about the establishment of a Jewish state: ‘We should form there a portion of rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.’ Here, it clearly shows his colonial, racist mentality. He first disregards the rights of the indigenous inhabitants of the Arab Palestinians and then calls them barbarians. All the Israeli leaders since the establishment of the Zionist state in 1948 have ensured that Israel remains a ‘rampart’ of the West. In so doing, Zionism has transformed Israel into an apartheid state.

As expected, the western leaders have seen the emergence and protection thereof the Zionist state as a necessary, small investment. Its unholy establishment in the Holy Land allowed them to get rid of the Untermensch from Christian Europe and plant them in the heart of an oil-rich region that had no prior history of anti-Semitism (in contrast to the false allegation in House Resolution 888). Zionism sanctioned the eviction, dispossession and slaughter of the native Palestinians, who are denied the right to return to their ancestral home, while allowing non-native Jews to settle in as bona fide citizens.

Thus, it was no surprise that on November 10, 1975, the General Assembly of the UN equated Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. Resolution 3379 was approved by a vote of 72 to 35 (the opposition coming mostly from former colonial and racist regimes like the USA, UK, FRG, Australia, New Zealand, France, Canada, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden and some client states, and of course, Israel).

It took another 16 years before the UN General Assembly revoked Resolution 3379. Why? Israel had made the revocation of Resolution 3379 a condition of its participation in the Madrid Peace Conference, which was aimed at reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process through negotiations in the last quarter of 1991.

George HW Bush personally introduced the motion to revoke 3379. He said, ‘To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations. This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israel’s right to exist. By repealing this resolution unconditionally, the United Nations will enhance its credibility and serve the cause of peace.’

As the subsequent events proved, Bush Sr was grossly wrong and so was the UN, which lost its credibility. Peace has been a mirage in the holy land. The UN revocation simply emboldened Israel to disregard Palestinian rights altogether and commit its genocidal crimes with more vigour, thanks to its powerful backers within the UN Security Council.

Israel has remained an apartheid state that epitomises racism and bigotry. It is a slap on our collective intelligence and wisdom to say otherwise.

The charge that Israel is committing apartheid has long been made and supported by United Nations investigators, the African National Congress, several human rights groups, and many prominent Israeli and Jewish political and cultural figures.

‘I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land,’ wrote Nobel peace prize-winning bishop Desmond Tutu in 2002. ‘It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.’

The testimonies of prominent South Africans who defeated apartheid have been harsher. ‘The current situation’ is ‘worse than conditions were for blacks under the apartheid regime,’ said the former South African president Kgalema Motlanthe; it is ‘far worse than apartheid,’ said the speaker of the South African parliament Baleka Mbete; ‘the Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic,’ said the former South African intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils, who served in the armed wing of African National Congress from its inception in 1961.

After witnessing the genocide of July–August 2014 in Gaza, Kasrils said, ‘We have known apartheid. The freedom fighters among us visiting the occupied Palestinian territories have unanimously declared, “We are reminded of apartheid but what we see is far worse”… no African (black) townships or Bantustan settlements were ever bombed from the sky or attacked by tanks and artillery.’

To Nelson Mandela, justice for the Palestinians is ‘the greatest moral issue of our time’. ‘After we toppled the Apartheid regime in 1994,’ he went further, saying, ‘We, South Africans, cannot consider ourselves free until the Palestinian people are free’.

Sadly, the Palestinian people remain colonised by the Zionists, thirty years after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

The 2017 UN Report argued that Israel is ‘guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid’, a ‘crime against humanity under customary international law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’. It urged governments to ‘support boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] activities and respond positively to calls for such initiatives’. It recommended that the UN and its member states should ‘revive the Special Committee against Apartheid, and the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid (1976–1991)’.

As we know too well, thanks to Israel’s supporters, the UN recommendation was never put into practice.

In a 2021 report, Human Rights Watch said, ‘Applying the facts to the laws, Human Rights Watch concluded that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. We found that the elements of the crimes come together in the occupied territory as part of a single Israeli government policy. That policy is to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territory. It is coupled in the occupied territory with systematic oppression and inhumane acts against Palestinians living there.’

It further said, ‘Today, apartheid is not a hypothetical or future scenario. A 54-year occupation is not temporary. The threshold has been crossed. Apartheid, and parallel persecution, is the reality for millions of Palestinians.’

It recommended that ‘recognizing and correctly diagnosing a problem is the first step to solving it and ending apartheid is vital to the future of both Palestinians and Israelis and the cause of peace.’

The latest mass slaughter and wanton destruction in Gaza once again showed the evil of Zionism. Israel lives in an alternative world in which genocide and apartheid have been normalized. It is high time that the UN General Assembly reinstates Resolution 3379 and the mass murdering of Israeli leaders and their western backers is tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity.

Zionism is hideous. Anti-Zionism is noble, humane and just. Zionism is oppression and colonisation. Anti-Zionism is freedom. Humanity demands resistance against oppression and apartheid.

Desmond Tutu reminded us: ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.’

The choice is ours. Let us choose what is morally and humanely right.

Dr Habib Siddiqui is a peace and rights activist.