The Durban conference will be hard pressed not to equate Zionism with racism because the criteria cannot be what Israel, or the US for that matter, has to say on the issue, but what the parties suffering from the racist practices of Israel have to say, notably the Palestinians, particularly with the present escalation of violence in the occupied territories. Displaying all the characteristics of a military occupying and discriminatory state and ethnic cleansing, Zionism must be equated not just with racism but apartheid, colonialism and genocide. Zionism is by definition racist in the sense that it is an ideology based on the superiority of one racial group. Hence, it is hard to see how Israel can reconcile its claim that it is a non-racist society. Under Israeli law, any Jew coming from anywhere in the world automatically acquires Israeli citizenship as soon as he sets foot on Israeli soil. He immediately enjoys all the rights of citizenship enjoyed by his fellow Israelis but not by the Arab citizens of Israel who are denied many of the rights enjoyed by their Jewish compatriots.
Israel describes itself as a just nation. It is — but only for Israelis. Every Jew has the right to return to Israel. This right is not available to Palestinians who may not return to the homes they left behind in Palestine. Surely this is discrimination with racist connotations. Palestinian security has to be subordinated to the requirements of Israel’s security, the former is to be adapted to the latter. This is not collective security which aims at satisfying both parties’ security requirements simultaneously. If the function of Israel is to Zionist aspirations, the function of a Palestinian state, if it ever comes into being, will be to keep Palestinian aspirations in check and ensure that they do not threaten Israel’s stability and security. Is this not the essence of racial discrimination?
Moreover, UN Security Council Resolution 242, accepted by all the parties as the key to the solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, calls for the return of land for peace, that is, it requires the Arabs to accept Israel’s existence in exchange for the evacuation by Israel of the Arab territories it occupied in 1967. Israel’s share of the trade-off has been effectively realized — its existence is acknowledged by Arabs — but the same is not true of the Arab share.
In response to hard-core Zionist aspirations, Israel has given itself the right to establish settlements wherever it pleases, making no distinction between land lying under its sovereignty and Palestinian land that it is currently and illegally occupying. All of this confirms that Zionism is not, as its adherents would have the world believe, merely a national expression of Jewish self-determination but an intrinsically racist ideology that justifies the most brutal acts of repression against the Palestinians. How can the United Nations, which has issued countless resolutions condemning racial differentiation and superiority as morally reprehensible and socially unjust, refuse to consider a resolution equating Zionism with racism?
In Durban, Kofi Annan said the world could not expect Palestinians to accept the holocaust as a reason why the wrongs done to them — displacement, occupation, blockage and now extra-judicial killings — should be ignored, whatever label one uses to describe them. Durban must restore Israel to its proper place, as a colonial power collectively abusing an entire people. The acts of violent repression to which the Palestinians are being subjected to by Israeli occupation forces has lent new urgency to the idea of reviving a 1975 UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism but which was annulled in 1991.
Israel has deprived the Palestinian people of their inalienable right to self-determination within secure and recognized borders. Zionism has had the final say, securing for Israelis a privileged right to assert their presence and impose their dominion over Palestinian land and people, regardless of sovereignty and international law.
