When Victims Rule (pdf)

ISRAEL AND ZIONISM
of the Palestinian uprising, only four cases went to court, said Naam
Yashuvi, information director for B’Tselem, a prominent Israeli human
rights group. Two resulted in jail terms: the Levinger case, and that of
Israel Zeev, who in December, 1988, got three years in jail and two more
suspended for killing a shepherd.” [BARTHOS, G., 1990, p. A2]
In overview, observed Glenn Frankel, “A country that enforced a permanent
military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza that denied its Palestinian subjects
even the most rudimentary rights of free speech and the vote, and that
locked up, abused and expelled Palestinians without formal charges or trial
could not claim to wholeheartedly share liberal American values.” [FRANKEL,
G., p. 224]
In response to Jewish dominance in the Holy Land, the Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 to violently resist the Jewish state
of Israel; it also eventually warred with Arab splinter groups like Fateh and the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
With the expulsion of large numbers of Arabs in Israel’s “War of Independence”
from self-declared Jewish lands, and with the impossibility of these refugees
returning, the new Israeli government declared, in 1950, the Law for the
Acquisition of Absent Property. Anyone absent from their property between November
1, 1947 and September 1 1948, and not residing in Jewish-controlled areas,
was declared to have abandoned ownership and the property was confiscated
by the Jewish state. This process also had the effect of robbing many Arab citizens
within Jewish boundaries (who didn’t even know about the new law, or were unable
to challenge it) from their lands. As Amnon Rubenstein explains, “once
property was declared absentee property, this status would remain in force, even
if it could later be proved that the property had been incorrectly classified.”
[RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 62] Another device to rob Arabs of their land was through
the Emergency Article for the Exploitation of Uncultivated Areas. Land that had
not been cultivated in the past three years was also confiscated by the state, often
by declaring “an area farmed by Palestinians a closed military zone so that no Palestinian
was allowed to enter it. After the three-year period had elapsed, the land
could then be declared uncultivated” and seized. [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 63] Some
Palestinian land officially under Ottoman Empire or British Mandate registration
was also confiscated by the new Jewish state.
Despite condemnation by the international community, Israel formally annexed
East Jerusalem in 1967 and the Golan Heights (bordering Syria) in 1981.
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In its formative years, Zionism was actually overwhelmingly rejected by
most of the world’s Jews. In Europe, in the nineteenth century, one of the most
influential leaders of the Reform Judaism movement, Abraham Geiger, attacked
Moses Hess as someone who “after bankruptcy as a socialist and all kinds
of swindles wants to make a hit with [Jewish] nationalism.” [LAQUEUR, p. 53]
In 1919 “French leader Sylvain Levi spoke violently against the restoration of a