The loyalty oath and Israel's Zionist "left"

Jesse Benjamin, David Comedi, Toby Kramer, The Electronic Intifada, 8 November 2010

Activists in Israel rally against the proposed loyalty oath in Tel Aviv, October 2010. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)

On 10 October 2010, the Israeli government proposed a bill obligating non-Jewish naturalized citizens to swear loyalty to a "Jewish and democratic state." The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) deplores this attempt to demand recognition of Israel as a Jewish state -- a state whose existence is premised on the removal of the indigenous people of Palestine.
In response to this bill, members of the Zionist "Left" in Israel issued a "declaration of independence from fascism." Announced at a rally in Tel Aviv, the Middle East's most ethnically cleansed city (indigenous population: four percent), the declaration asserts that the proposed law "violates [Israel's] basic commitment to the principles of equality, civil liberty and sincere aspiration for peace -- principles upon which the State of Israel was founded."

The Zionist "Left" is distancing itself from this policy, but the proposed oath is entirely consistent with Israel's racist foundations and continued ethnic cleansing -- all of which the Zionist "Left" has played a central role in perpetrating and whitewashing.
In the 1930s, as the Zionist state was forming, the Histadrut and other Labor Zionist institutions campaigned to dispossess Arab peasants and workers, while helping crush the resulting 1936 Arab rebellion.

In 1947-48, under the leadership of David Ben Gurion, Labor Zionism -- the dominant force in the Zionist "Left" -- also directed the Nakba (catastrophe), which established the "Jewish state" by terrorizing and expelling at least eighty percent of the indigenous Palestinian population.

In the following decades, "Left" Zionism imposed domestic apartheid, made apartheid South Africa Israel's closest ally and led or supported every Israeli war of domination -- most recently in Lebanon and Gaza. Under Labor governments, Israeli settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank exploded in number (see "Briefing: Labor Zionism and the Histadrut," International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network-Labor and Labor for Palestine (US), 13 April 2010).

Today, "Left" Zionists, no less than their right-wing counterparts, view Palestinians as a "demographic threat" to Jewish supremacy. Like the "Right," they insist that Palestinians ratify their own unequal status by recognizing 1948 Palestine ("Israel") as a "Jewish state." Ironically, this Zionist racism, violence and apartheid serve to deliver a segregation of Jews that parallels traditional European anti-Semitism.

The problem, then, is not alleged betrayal of Israeli "principles" at the hands of right-wing "extremists," but Zionism itself -- both "Left" and "Right." For Israeli Jews who reject Israel's racist foundations, we stand with you.

We ask others not only to join us in opposing the loyalty oath, but to reject the Zionist principles upon which it rests. Concretely, that means supporting Palestinian demands for an end to military occupation, implementation of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their land and equal rights for all throughout Palestine.

Jesse Benjamin, an associate professor of sociology at Kennesaw State University, is a US and an Israeli citizen. He is a member of IJAN.

David Comedi is an activist, physicist and coordinator of IJAN in Argentina.

Toby Kramer is a member of IJAN in the San Francisco Bay Area.