by Wilbur Sensor

Most people have been trained to think of Zionism in positive terms. This is understandable. Decades of propaganda have misrepresented Zionism as a progressive, modern force bringing civilization to an arid, uninhabited wasteland. Such an image is an illusion. This essay will uncover the true history of Zionism. It will reveal the facts and make clear the real nature of the movement.
A MOVEMENT WHICH ASSUMES THE INCOMPATIBILITY OF JEW AND GENTILE
Zionism is an apartheid philosophy. Its founder, Theodore Herzl, was dismayed by the mass anti-semitism in France aroused by the Dreyfuss affair. He became convinced that the separation of the Jews from the Gentiles by ingathering all Jews in a separate Jewish nation was the only solution to the age old "Jewish problem". Herzl spelled out his program in his book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State):

"The Jewish question exists. It would be foolish to deny it... The Jewish problem exists wherever Jews live in noticeable numbers. Where it does not exist, it is introduced by Jews who move in... I believe I can understand anti-semitism, which is in many ways a complicated movement. I look on this movement from the standpoint of a Jew - but without hatred or fear. I believe I recognize in anti-semitism what is crude humor, ordinary economic envy, inherited prejudice, religious intolerance - but also what is deemed to be self defense."

"Anti-semitism grows daily, hourly, among the peoples, and must continue to grow since its causes continue to exist, and cannot be alienated."

"The causa remota is the loss, in the Middle Ages, of the ability to assimilate; the cause proxima is our overproduction of middling intelligences, that can neither be drained off, nor rise higher-hence, no healthy draining off, and no healthy rising to a higher level. Downward, we are being proletarianized into revolutionaries; we are the subalterns of every revolutionary party, while at the same time our terrible financial might grows upward."

by Lance Selfa
International Socialist Review, Spring 1998

FIFTY YEARS ago in May, Israelís first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, proclaimed the founding of the State of Israel. Immediately, Jewish commandos in Palestine launched what Israel called its ìWar of Independence.î When it concluded an armistice with the armies of Egypt, Transjordan and Syria in 1949, more than 750,000 Palestinians had been forced to flee from their homes. They became refugees from their own country, which the Jewish Zionist armies now controlled. The founding of Israel marked the culmination of a 50-year-long campaign, waged by political Zionists, to establish a Jewish state.

The Zionists claimed that they expressed world Jewryís yearning for ìnational liberation.î Yet, if Zionism was a movement for national liberation, it was like no other. Rather than seeking to break free from imperialism, it actively courted patronage from imperialist powers. Rather than promising self-determination to the people of Palestine-the vast majority of whom were Arab-it expelled them. And rather than representing a widely popular expression of the fight against national oppression, Zionism counted as little more than a sect for most of its existence prior to the Second World War.

No doubt all sorts of distorted history and ideological claptrap will accompany the mediaís ìcelebrationî of Israelís 50th anniversary. This is understandable, if only because the real history of Zionism and Israel is so sordid.
What is Zionism?
Political Zionism, ìa doctrine which, starting from the postulate of the incompatibility of the Jews and the Gentiles, advocated massive emigration to an underdeveloped country with the aim of establishing a Jewish state,î1 developed as a response to an upsurge of anti-Jewish racism (anti-Semitism) in Europe at the end of the last century. In Western Europe, the formation of openly anti-Semitic political parties challenged the assumption of many middle-class Jews that they could simply blend into (or ìassimilateî into) non-Jewish society. In the Russian Empire,