Today's Stories

December 26-28, 2008

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

December 22, 2008

Pam Martens
Madoff's Money Trail Leads to Washington

Gary Leupp
Base Alienation: Obama's Team of Rivals

Mike Whitney
Bail Out the Economy? More Pay is the Only Way

Karl Grossman
Lost in Space: NASA at 50

Niall Meehan
Conor Cruise O'Brien: Historian, Politician, Censor

Steve Conn
Where Would Larry Summers Dump the Guantanamo Mess?

Uri Avnery
Israeli Elections: Spot the Difference

Corey D. B. Walker
The Politics of Freedom

David Swanson
The Purloined Constitution

Worthy Group of the Day
Socialist Worker

December 19 - 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
An Ethnic Cleansing in America

Jeffrey St. Clair
Salazar and the Tragedy of the Common Ground

Paul Craig Roberts
Country Without Mercy

Patrick Cockburn
The Baathist "Coup Plot"

Felice Pace
Green Myopia: Obama's Appointments Reveal What's Wrong with the Environmental Movement

Diane Farsetta
The Pentagon's PR Slush Fund

George Ciccariello-Maher
By the Time I Get to Arizona: ICE Raids and Resistance in Flagstaff

Eric Bergoust
Extinct Lifestyles: Redefining Prosperity

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Without Regrets: Cheney's Unrepentent Confession

Stan Cox
Clothes and Commentaries That Don't Fit

Michael Donnelly
Clinton III: Continuity We Can Believe In

Robert Weissman
The Auto Bailout

Ralph Nader
Excluded Democracy: Scholastic and the Two Party System

Alan Farago
Shock and Awe Economics

Sam Smith
Not All Public Work is the Same

Timothy G. Hermach
What Happened on the Way to the Inauguration?

Seth Sandronsky
Who's Not Getting By and Why

Rannie Amiri
All Quiet on the Gazan Shore

David Yearsley
Bach as Jihadi

Martha Rosenberg
Wyeth's Pay-to-Play

Dave Lindorff
White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy (But That's Not the Biggest Scandal)

Christopher Brauchli
Weekend at Bernie's: the Confinement of Mr. Madoff

Missy Beattie
President Meathead

Richard Rhames
Corporatizing the Kids

Stephen Martin
Full-Spectrum Dominance of the Big Lie

Paul Krassner
Milk and Twinkies

Lorenzo Wolff
Does Coldplay Give a Shit Anymore?

Poets' Basement
Kathwari, Halling and Payne

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Heartwood

December 18, 2008

Phillip Doe
The Man in the Hat: Salazar and the Status Quo

Ronnie Cummins
Vilsack: Another Shill for Monsanto

Jesse Sharkey
No School Left Unsold: Arne Duncan's Privatization Agenda

Saul Landau
Postcard from Venezuela

Peter Morici
What's Next for the Fed?

Dave Lindorff
Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture

Panos Petrou
Days of Rage in Greece

Jeff Cohen /
Norman Solomon
The 2008 P.U.-litzer Prizes: the Stinkiest Media Performances of the Year

Worthy Group of the Day
Organic Consumer Alliance

December 17, 2008

Peter Lee
Pushing Pakistan Over the Edge

Conn Hallinan
Angels and Demons in Mumbai

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Fatal Flaw

Jeff Halper
Obama and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Alan Farago
The Audacity of Parkland

Peter Morici
The Big Hole

Norm Kent
Obama Lights Up

Col. Douglas MacGregor
The Price of Expediency

Margaret Kimberley
Blacks and Gay Rights

Ron Jacobs
The Myth of the Good Guy: Waiting on a President to Do the Right Thing

Worthy Group of the Day
Campaign to End the Death Penalty

December 16, 2008

Vicente Navarro
A Forgotten Genocide: the Case of Spain

Patrick Cockburn
Each Shoe was Worth a Thousand Words

Thomas Michael Power
Back to the Pump: an Economic and Environmental Dead End

Jason Hribal
Orangutans, Resistance and the Zoo: the Story of Ken Allen and Kumang

Farzana Versey
Straw Warriors and the Pantomime of Patriotism

Wajahat Ali /
Ahmed Rashid
Indian Muslims: Defining Their Loyalty

Mats Svensson
The Order to Destroy has been Given

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Mumbai Terror's Afghan Roots

David Macaray
Workplace Violence and Termination Etiquette

Howard Lisnoff
Left Control of Academia? The Case of William Felkner

Worthy Group of the Day
AWR: the Last, Best Hope for Saving the Big Wild

December 15, 2008

Andy Worthington
Hit Me Baby One More Time: a History of Music Torture in War on Terror

Franklin Lamb
Why Hezbollah Stiffed Carter

Karl Grossman
Dr. Chu's Nuclear Prescription

Brian Cloughley
Land of the Free (To Torture and Imprison Without Trial)

Mary Lynn Cramer
Stiglitz's Foolishly Flawed Morality

Steve Early
From Nicky Pockets to Blago: Why Pay-to-Play is Bad for Labor

Thomas Christie
Pentagon Train Wreck Awaits Obama

Ken Paff
Remembering Ron Carey: a Great Labor Leader

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What is India to Do?

Dave Lindorff
A Hero of Our Time: Muntadar al-Zaidi

Alan Farago
The Artless Dodger

Worthy Group of the Day
Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund

December 12 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to Chicago, Beacon of American Values

Michael Hudson /
Jeffrey Sommers
The End of the Washington Consensus

David Price
The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nukes Up the Hudson

Frank Barat
An Israeli in Gaza: an Interview with Jeff Halper

John Ross
Writing a Thesis in Blood

Binoy Kampmark
Humanitarian Imperialism: Obama and the Genocide Task Force

David Macaray
Killing the Auto Bailout: a Dagger to the Heart of Organized Labor

Ralph Nader
Antidotes to Plunder: a Holiday Reading List

Eamonn Fingleton
Whatever Happened to Iris Chang?

Lawrence Velvel
Why Blagojevich Might Be Acquitted

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Housing Crisis: a Timebomb China Can't Defuse

Sam Husseini
Putting the Pro in Protest

Tom Barry
Incentives to Detain: How Immigrants Drive Prison Profits

Howard Lisnoff
Why I Went to Jail

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Immigration Problem

Raj Patel
The WTO and Other Fairy Tales

Ron Jacobs
The Manufacturing of History

Paul Watson
Risky Business Down Under

David Yearsley
They Also Serve Who Only Pull or Tread

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Want Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star...

Kim Nicolini
Finally, a Vampire Movie You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Susie Day
Proposition 1984: the Problem with Heterosexuals

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Lerch and Crete

Worthy Group of the Weekend
Energy Justice

December 11, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq

P. Sainath
After Mumbai

Vicken Cheterian
The Zarqawi Generation

Ray McGovern
Will Obama Buy Torture-Lite?

Dedrick Muhammad
Post-Racial Racism at the Post: the Undying Obsession with Black Family Values

Lee Sustar
Victory at Republic

Peter Morici
The Big Drag

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Must They Hate Us So?

George Wuerthner
Another Subsidy to Big Timber?

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Berg's Strange Obsession

Worthy Group of the Day
Animal Balance

December 10, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Whose Interests Will Shape Obama's Change?

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Multi-Trillion Dollar Question

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Weapons Obsolescence

Joshua Frank
Breaking the Stranglehold on Middle East News Coverage

Jack Ely
Stop Sobbing About Free Music Downloads: a Message to the Music Industry from the Lead Singer of the Kingsmen

Steve Conn
An Obama Public Works Program?

Lee Sustar
Republic Workers Target Bank of America

Glen Ford
The Die is Cast

Stephen Lendman
The Persecution of Syed Fahad Hashmi

Nadia Hijab
The Face of America

Dave Lindorff
We All Need a Union

Website of the Day
This One's For You, Senator Dodd

December 9, 2008

Mike Whitney
Card Check

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Us vs. Them

Ghada Karmi
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot

Dave Lindorff
A Car Dealer Explains Why the Bailout is a Raw Deal

Steve Breyman
Notes on a Green Economy: Managing Stuff in the 21st Century

Lee Sustar /
Nicole Colson
Raising the Stakes at Republic

Rev. William E. Alberts
God of Our Fathers

Martha Rosenberg
Bill Richardson: Secretary of Bloodsports

Sam Husseini
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War

David Macaray
The UAW in Peril

Website of the Day
This Toxic Life

December 8, 2008

Steve Early
Is Obama Backing Off a Crucial Pledge to Labor?

Michael Hudson
Obama's Favoritism: Wall Street, Not the Auto Industry

Patrick Cockburn
Talking to a Lashkar Militant

Diane Farsetta
An Officer and a Conflicted Man: McCaffery, the Pentagon and Fleishman-Hillard

Paul Craig Roberts
Chapters in Imperial Hypocrisy

Daniel Gross
The Chicago Sit-Down Strike

Saul Landau
To Bail or Not to Bail?

Harvey Wasserman
Why John Bryson is Unfit for Energy Secretary

Mike Ferner
The New Generation of "Non-Lethal" Weapons

Norman Solomon
The Silent Winter of Escalation

David Michael Green
The Other Foot

Website of the Day
The Remains of Detroit

December 5 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Honeymoans From the Left

Brian Cloughley
Shambles in Afghanistan

Paul Craig Roberts
Muslim Revolution: How Washington Arrogance Helped Drive the Mumbai Attacks

Liaquat Ali Khan
Mumbai and the Kashmir Tinderbox

Farzana Versey
Mumbai's Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

Peter Lee
Pakistan Nears the Breaking Point

Peter Morici
Slouching Toward a Depression?

Ralph Nader /
Toby Heaps
Junk Cap-and-Trade

Yinon Cohen /
Neve Gordon
Obama Could End the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Will He Meet the Challenge?

Wajahat Ali
Perverse Justice: the Holy Land Foundation Convictions

Johnny Barber
Aswad's Story: Illegal Detention and the Declaration of Human Rights

Alan Farago
Fallout from the Pass-Through Economy

Jeremy Scahill
Obama Doesn't Plan to End Occupation of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Powergrab in Ottawa

Ranjit Hoskote
Jahiliyya Versus Jihad

Carl Finamore
Thank God I'm an Atheist! (Or Boy is Bill O'Reilly in for a Big Surprise)

Marjorie Cohn
Obama and Women's Rights

Norm Kent
Tommy Chong, the Unanticipated Warrior

Missy Beattie
What Lies Ahead

Binoy Kampmark
Committing Suicide On-Line: the Briggs Case

David Macaray
The Best and the Brightest Redux: Too Many Brains, Not Enough Humility

Nancy Stohlman
Relational Activism

Ron Jacobs
Irreverent Politics Then and Now

David Yearsley
Thematics From the Golden Past

Lorenzo Wolff
Troubled Songs of Home and War

Poets' Basement
Orloski: The Door Opener

Website of the Weekend
In Prison My Whole Life

December 4, 2008

Ece Temelkuran
Inside the Ergenekon Case

Ralph Nader
Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Who Will Seize the Moment?

Harry Browne
The Bush-Obama National Security Strategy

Eamonn Fingleton
The American Car Industry: a Riposte to the Knockers

Conn Hallinan
The Syria Attack

Mike Whitney
Fiasco in Somalia: Another CIA Cock-Up

Stewart J. Lawrence
Obama and Latinos: Richardson, Alone, is Not Enough

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Message to Obama: Stop Killing Afghanis

Karyn Strickler
Show Us the Green, Before We Show You the Money

Jennifer Matsui
Obama-Cola: the Great National Temperance Beverage

Website of the Day
"He Ain't Got Laid in a Month of Sundays..."

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

Sheldon Rampton
Mormon Homophobia: Up Close and Personal

Robert Weissman
Nationalize GM

Yifat Susskind
From Mumbai to Washington

William Blum
The Obama Bummer: Vote First, Ask Questions Later

Alan Singer
The Ghost of the Defunct Economist

David Macaray
Trampled Under Foot at Wal-Mart

Martha Rosenberg
Born With a Statin Deficiency? Line Forms to the Left!

Mats Svensson
The Crimes Have No Period of Limitations

Website of the Day
Why Bill Richardson's Nomination Should be Opposed

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

Weekend Edtion
December 26-28, 2008

How the Zionists Created "Races" in Palestine

Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

By LARRY PORTIS

Between the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the creation of the United Jewish Agency in 1929, the evolution of political vocabulary in relation to ethnic groups in Palestine accompanied the emergence of an increasingly difficult geopolitical problem.

At the time, notions of nationhood were at the center of all questions of foreign affairs. Although touted as a solution to collective conflicts in general, national self-determination was at best a tenuous idea that tended to obscure the re-composition of empires or, at least, the transfer of their control from one powerful entity to another.

Spokespersons for the Zionist movement intervened actively in the US popular press during this period of transition between the defeat of the Turkish Empire (end of 1917) and the eventual implementation of the British Mandate in Palestine (April 1920). This journalistic activity was particularly important in the United States because financial donations from the large and relatively wealthy Jewish population in the US were vital to the Zionist project in Palestine.

Contrary to predictions of stability under the British Mandate, British control was inaugurated by riots caused by increased Jewish immigration. In July 1921, after one year of the new British administration, the Literary Digest noted that fears concerning the Zionist project were articulated in Palestine and also in neighboring countries and in the United States. Reviewing reactions to the events in Palestine in Arab-American publications, the Digest found, as did Arab newspapers in the Middle East, that there was a careful distinction drawn between attitudes concerning Jewish people and those concerning Zionism. In Al-Bayan, a Syrian newspaper published in New York, it was feared that there was much misrepresentation “as to the real ground of opposition in Palestine to Zionism”. This concern was echoed by the Meraat-ul-Gharb (New York) asserting that “the people of Palestine do not hate the Jews, but hate Zionism.” The Syrian Eagle (New York) found it ironic that it was the Palestinians who were being accused of religious fanaticism when it was the Zionists who were immigrating to Palestine out of “religious sentimental” motivations. The editorialist then asked: “Has it come to this, that we must plead with England for possession of our own country, and prove to a credulous world that Palestine really does not belong to the Zionists?”

Although it was never explicitly stated, confusion existed over how to refer to the members of different ethnic groups in Palestine. In an article in the Literary Digest of November 5, 1921, for example, reference is editorially made to “Arab Mohammedans”, “native Christians” and “Jewish colonists”. But this circumspection is in contrast to the ethnic characterizations of Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Congress, who in the same article referred simply to “Jew and Arab”, or to those the British High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, quoted as approving “the legitimate aspirations of the Jewish race (my italics)”. Samuel (who was Jewish) tended to reduce the population of Palestine to “the Jew”, on the one hand and “the Arab”, on the other.

Even as he attempted to allay the fears of the non-Jewish population of Palestine, Samuel systematically employed a schematic vocabulary that obscured perceptions of the situation. For him, the “Jewries of the world” were simply attempting to establish their home “in the land which was the political, and has always been the religious, center of their race.” Several years later, the political secretary of the World Zionist Organization, Conrad Stein, castigated the “few mischief makers” who were “doing their best to keep the two races in Palestine apart.” (my italics)

In 1926, an anonymous “Friendly Visitor” wrote in the magazine Living Age about the “racial situation” in Palestine stating that “up to the present the two races are living side by side without intermingling” explaining that such exclusiveness was good because the Zionist policy was not to exploit Arab labor, but rather to encourage Jews to work in all sectors of the economy. The idea was that separate development, avoiding ethnic segmentation of the work force, would lead to more rapid improvement of Arab living standards: “as soon as the Arabs' standard of living has risen and the wages of the two races are equalized such discrimination will automatically disappear.” In addition, Jews must be encouraged to do agricultural labor, for “[n]othing but agriculture can change the Jews from a nation of traders into a nation with a normal distribution of its people into all branches of productive labor. The movement to the farm is the corner stone of racial regeneration.”

Zionist spokespersons incessantly emphasized that the Jews were a separate and distinct people or race. At the same time, the Muslim and Christian Palestinians were also referred to as a racial group: the “Arabs”. Less and less were the different participants in the drama designated as Europeans and Palestinians, or Jews, Muslims, Christians or Druzes. Increasingly, only two groups seemed to be present: the “Jews” and the “Arabs”. In only a few years, non-Jewish representatives of the region would also begin to speak in terms of “race” when referring to the different ethnic groups in Palestine.

Arnold Toynbee, the famous historian, raised a related question in The New Republic in 1922. For him, the trouble in Palestine lay in the imposition of a western idea — nationalism — in a region culturally unprepared for it. Palestine, regardless of its religious complexity, was in fact “a comparatively homogeneous country”. But a western political idea called “nationality” and the rise of national feeling in Palestine has “produced two effects. On the one hand, the Moslem and Christian Arabs began to feel themselves one with their Arab neighbors, especially with those of Syria, from which Palestine is divided by no physical boundaries. On the other hand, the Palestinian Jews, especially the agricultural colonists, and, still more, a majority of the Jewish ‘Dispersion’ all over the world, began to look forward to making Palestine eventually their own in the sense in which the United States belongs to the American people or France to the French.” Toynbee observed that the commitment of the British, United-Statesian, French and Italian governments to the “hazardous experiment” of the implantation of Zionism in Palestine would lead to more and more explosions of violence.

By the end of 1922 the future of social conflict within Palestine, and the uses of Palestine by powerful states, had been thoroughly discussed. The nature of Zionism as a nationalist political movement, its uses by the governments of the major western countries, the determining events in the creation of an almost intractable political situation, all of these dimensions of the “question of Palestine” were well known by educated readers. The way towards the eventual creation of a Jewish state seems to have been traced out well in advance of the actual event.

By the late 1920s, outbreaks of ethnic violence in Palestine tended to reinforce the idea that the population was divided into two irreconcilable camps. One result was the attenuation of disagreements between Jewish people over the legitimacy of the Zionist project. The creation of a reorganized Jewish Agency supportive of the colonization of Palestine, but not declaredly Zionist, seems to be related to the situation.

In November 1928, the Literary Digest cited a variety of Jewish-American periodicals (such as the American Hebrew in New York, the Jewish Tribune in New York, the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia, and the Canadian Jewish Chronicle in Montreal) in which various “non-Zionist” spokespersons expressed their solidarity with the Jewish immigration to Palestine. At a conference in New York organized by the jurist Louis Marshall, Marshall proclaimed: “there are no longer Zionists and non-Zionists. We are all Jews together.” “American Israel”, ran the conclusion, “is at last united in a ‘pact of glory’ […] for the up-building of Palestine.” Here, the use of the term “Israel” in reference to the Jewish population of the United States is significant for its “national” implications. The expression “Israel”, used to designate a people seen as a nation, will eventually denote the nation as concretized in the “nation state”.

When the United Jewish Agency was officially formed at the Zionist congress at Zurich in August 1929, its creation announced a new phase in the conflict over the destiny of Palestine.

The new Agency created at the Zionist meeting was composed of one-half non-Zionist members. The importance was that these non-Zionists promised to support the pursuit of the Jewish projects in Palestine, projects that, in fact, are properly called “Zionist”. But now the Jewish colonization of Palestine was no longer presented as a specifically Zionist project, but rather as a “Jewish” aspiration. Consequently, the demographic transformation of Palestine no longer expressed the same degree of dissension among Jews.

To refer to “Zionists” would henceforth tend to be perceived as an implicitly critical assessment of the project itself. The new political correctness was not the word “Zionist”, which implied a secular political movement in favor of a particular ethnic group, but rather a new application in this particular political context of the word “Jewish”. Replacing “Zionist” by “Jewish” consensually united all members of the confessional group in the same project by agreeing to not to disagree over modes of expression and ultimate goals.

It is possible that the new consensus among non-Palestinian (European and North-American) Jews, symbolized by the United Jewish Agency, contributed to the tragic events accompanying its emergence. The inter-ethnic violence of August 1929 may have been directly related to the creation of the United Jewish Agency. This is the opinion of the well-known writer John Gunther, who was not unfriendly to the Zionist cause. According to him, “the formation of the Agency was a direct factor contributing to the riots, because it incited outbursts of chauvinism by Jews in Palestine, and this led to Arab retaliation.”

Whatever the case, the decade of the 1920s saw the emergence of ethnic hostilities in Palestine that would not be resolved by the eventual creation of the state of Israel. The dilemma of “national” identifications linked to racialist notions is a field for political exploitation that has remained all-too-fertile and tempting for demagogues of all persuasions. In this particular case, by incessantly juxtaposing the two terms, “Jew” and “Arab”, often in a context of comparative evaluation detrimental to the latter, a confusion was created between, on the one hand, religious confession and, on the other hand, culture regardless of religion.

From a Zionist standpoint, such terminological amalgamation was perhaps necessary in order to unite Palestinian Jews and the new arrivals. The “Jew-Arab” dichotomy was also convenient in that it drove a wedge between Jewish and non-Jewish Palestinians. The problem was (and is) that the terms refer to populations, real people, who were encouraged to see themselves and “the others” as different in some qualitative way.

Is not surprising that the term “race”— that in the nineteenth century had connotations that were as much cultural as racial — should be used in reference to the general characteristics of both broadly defined groups. It is unfortunate, however, that “Jews” and “Arabs” came to be thought of as such separate peoples. All the old “orientalist” prejudices of the nineteenth century, including anti-Semitism, could now be applied in a new geopolitical environment in which great-power interests would, once again, be justified by the principle of national self-determination, but this time by helping to create a national entity where the people designated as its active population were not only a minority but also recent immigrants. It was a project legitimized in great part by the idea that “Arab” populations were incapable or unready to assume responsibility for their political destinies.

After the interwar period the term “race” was avoided in reference to the “Jewish-Arab” conflict (because of the prominence of racist ideology in the carrying out of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi regime against Jews and others). But are racialist connotations excluded from such terminology? Certainly not. Even after the creation of the state of Israel and the emergence of the new mode of referring to the conflict as “Arab-Israeli”, invidious connotations remain attached to the term “Arab”. This is, alas, but one example of how imprecise or misleading language is a tool for political manipulation that holds out the promise of instilling tenacious prejudices, all in the interest of ethnic cleansing.

Israel was created on this basis, and its culture and law are infused with racist presumptions. The very idea of a “Jewish state”, the low-intensity ethnic cleansing operative as state policy, the “law of return” designating Israel as “homeland” for all “Jews” regardless of their existing citizenship or their geographical origins, the biological definition of the term “Jew” (those who are born of a “Jewish” mother), the genocidal practices of control and repression inflicted upon those uprooted from their land and homes in the territories appropriated in 1948 and those living in the territories occupied in June 1967 (see the UN Convention on Genocide for the definition), the second-class status suffered by non-Jewish Palestinians in Israel, all of these things stem from a racialist conception of ethnicity.  The Zionist movement was founded on this conception, and in spite of wordplay or wishful thinking the Zionist state continues its long-term project unabated.

Larry Portis is a professor of American studies at the University of Montpellier, France and a founding member of Americans for Peace and Justice in Montpellier. He can be contacted at larry.portis@univ-montp3.fr

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