You cannot blame those who do not start their Gaza-related analyses without saying first, “But the Oct. 7 raid caused all this...” No, it all started long before Oct 7, 2023. In fact, the occupation first began when former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who was originally known as David Gruen and one of the leaders of Israel’s occupation and dispossession operations, moved to Palestine in 1906 as a 20-year-old advocate for the Jewish return to the land of Israel. The process of Zionification of Judaism and Zionization of Palestine made the life of Muslim, Christian and Jewish peoples so intolerable that they started leaving their homes, businesses, fields and country to the occupying forces.
You know the endless stories of massacres that took place right after the United Nations’ Partition Resolution for Palestine, dividing it between the Muslims and Jewish people, instead of giving it altogether to Jews. The U.N. General Assembly on Nov. 29, 1947, adopted Resolution 181 creating independent Arab and Jewish states. However, the Zionization program of Ben-Gurion and his partners in crime wanted it all; the only way they had in mind since the First Congress convened by Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism, on Aug. 29, 1897, in Basel, Switzerland, was to force Indigenous Arabs out of the land. Such an outrageous ambition could be accomplished only by attacking the villages, killing as many villagers, including women and children, as possible and despite the Deir Yassin village having agreed to a non-aggression pact, with prior approval of Ben-Gurion, the Zionist Paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi, who the Haganah and Palmach supported, started what was going to be the Nakba (Arabic for “the catastrophe”).
The Zionist gangs expelled almost 1 million Arabs (the total population of Palestinians was estimated to be 1.4 million) from 775 towns and villages (the total number of Arab residential places was around 1,300). Some 531 towns and villages were destroyed by the Zionist gangs. The Zionists committed more than 70 massacres in the course of the Nakba events. Those Palestinians from these towns and villages were forced to flee toward the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and neighboring Arab countries.
The ensuing years meant more ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs through violent displacement and dispossession of land, property and belongings, which destroyed the Palestinian society, culture and national aspirations. The fractured Palestinian society had only one tool to resist the ongoing Nakba: To regain the ideals of a nation and to make good use of the U.N. Partition plan, which they and neighboring Arab countries previously rejected in 1948.
Fifteen million Palestinians worldwide, since the Nakba, still do not have a unified voice against the ongoing Zionization process.
Ok, all those massacres, genocide, occupation, displacement and dispossession in Palestine did not start two years ago. Why on earth do I not blame those whose analyses of the events in Gaza (and the West Bank) place the responsibility on those responsible for the Oct. 7 raid? Because they are the victims of the Zionification process that started in 1906 when David Ben-Gurion, a 20-year-old champion of Zionism, set his damned fricking feet on the grounds of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem on which the city of David was built. Although it refers to a specific location, Zion is also used in a general way to mean “holy place” or “kingdom of heaven” for the Hebrew root “Tsiyon” holds a special importance in Judaism.
I don’t remember when I learned the word “Zionism,” but I first met the word de-Zionization before its antonym “Zionization” in an article by Göran Rosenberg, a Swedish journalist and author, titled “Can Israel Be De-Zionized?” Rosenberg, a son of Holocaust survivors, was born in Sweden and has written about his father's story and his childhood in the book: "A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz: A Memoir," which won the August Prize for literature in 2012 and has been translated into 12 languages. His personal history of Israel and Zionism was published in 1999 ("Det förlorade landet"/"The Lost Land").
Rosenberg says human existence no longer allows for societies based on exclusionary visions of ethnic or cultural homogeneity. But Israel, with its strong exclusionary mechanisms, keeps out those who do not fit into the Zionist narrative of a Jewish nation. Rosenberg finds that the definitions of who belonged to the nation and who did not were used as a tool to create division among citizens (Jewish and non-Jewish citizens); they have also “permeated the institutions of the state.” As such, Israel never had an ambition to be a democracy because “its cultural, religious and ethnic demands on its citizens do not conform with and connect to larger systems of a society with strong inclusionary mechanisms.”
Whatever we define “Jewish” as, it cannot be used to create the basis of a modern, democratic (inclusionary) nation, for it cannot avail itself to an ethnically or culturally pluralist system. Rosenberg concludes that Zionism has been reducing the status of millions of citizens to “national minority” without any economic, legal or cultural rights. Indeed, since Ben-Gurion and his cabal started ethnic cleansing based on religious designation of people, Rosenberg writes, Israeli nationality for a non-Jewish outsider aspires to can be obtained only by converting to the Jewish religion. But you cannot, if your mother is not Jewish: “This fuzzy merger of nationality, ethnicity and religion is still at the heart of the Jewish State and effectively prevents it from becoming a state for all its citizens.”
If Israel really wants to be a genuinely democratic member of the modern family of nations, there is one way: de-Zionization. Not only millions of Palestinians living in Israel, but in a pluralistic region like the Middle East, “A Jewish state” based on the tenets of Zionism, a nation with institutions “Zionized” to the tilt, cannot have guest workers who would demand, after a certain period of time, as part of their human rights, to have citizenship. As former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, a South African-born scholar and diplomat, foresaw this when he said in 1963, “The destiny of this region lies in a pluralistic interaction.” But neither he nor any other Israeli politician had the power to transform this strange definition of nationhood in Israel.
But Göran Rosenberg believes “Israel can be de-Zionized.” In his article published in 2008, he mentioned that the religious-nationalist Zionist zeal of the 80s and the early 90s was waning in the face of many territorial-ideological border closures: “The internal pressure for an Israeli civic order based on individual rights rather than on collective identity is mounting, and I see no reason that it will abate anytime soon.”
He also mentioned that there was an ongoing academic “post-Zionist” reevaluation of Israel’s political and ideological past; a group of “new historians” was “hammering away at the tenets of Zionist founding mythology.” He concluded that Israel is thus facing the continuous weakening of its ideological foundations and the growing need to reformulate basic tenets of its polity.
That is the definition of “de-Zionization,” which would be based on visions powerful enough to face the challenge of transnational partnership and power sharing, not on the false dream of separation and dominance. Israel’s most crucial choices still lie ahead.
I have repeatedly voiced my concerns that the concept of a “two-state solution” was misleading; it has been illusory, and figures like Ben-Gurion and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with their ilk, have exploited it. I, and probably you, once believed in the possibility of a “two-state solution” simply because it meant a separate state for those people whose land was stolen through the occupation and dispossession since 1906! It had very pleasant connotations, such as “state” and “solution.”
But all these are hallucinatory and misleading concepts. The real issue we should seek is de-Zionization of Palestine. After the gross strategic mistakes Netanyahu made, on the coattails of Itamar Ben-Gvir, was to open the eyes of the young people all over the world, including Israel’s, that Zionism brought war, tears and blood; it brought the Oct. 7 raids onto Israel and Palestinians.
Everything started with an artificial pipe dream of the Jewish faithful who fancied creating happiness by bringing calamities on other people. Now we know, mainstream Jews know, the whole world (except the Trumps of the world and the people like them) knows that the question is freeing the earth of Zionism.
