“I have great admiration for Israel’s nation-state Law. Jews are, once
again, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future,
showing a path forward for Europeans.” - Richard Spencer, poster boy for the
‘Alt-Right’ and White Nationalist Movement.
The
aforementioned statement, sent out by Spencer as a tweet on July 21st, was made
in response to the passage through the Israeli Knesset of the Basic Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the JewishPeople. It was his acknowledgement of Israel’s formal
declaration of itself to be a racialist, ethno-state.
It is
important to clarify what the primary objective of Political Zionism was from
the outset: This was to found a Jewish state centered in Palestine to the
exclusion of all other races and religions.
The founding
of the State of Israel would entail ethnically cleansing the territory
earmarked for colonisation, with the inhabitants being supplanted mainly by
Jews from Eastern European lands. It was never intended to be a multi-racial
state, but a ‘Jews only’ state, something which the founders of Zionism
envisaged would be achieved by ‘transferring’ the indigenous Muslim and
Christian Arab population to outlying Arab territories.
The term
‘transfer’ as used by Theodor Herzl and David Ben Gurion was Zionism’s
euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Where Herzl envisaged this as been achievable
through the offer of inducements: by alternately getting property owners to
vacate their land by paying them off at higher than market prices, and by
securing employment in “transit countries” for the “penniless population”
(failing which they would be “discreetly and circumspectly” spirited “across
the border”), Ben Gurion and the leaders of the Jewish Agency in Palestine,
although supposedly representing the ‘Accomodationist’ wing of Political
Zionism, knew like the Revisionist Zionist apostles of Vladimir Jabotinsky that
this would only be achieved by force of arms.
This was
largely accomplished through the implementation of ‘Plan Dalet’ during the war
of 1948.
Israel’s
Basic Law, which stipulates that only Jews have the right to self-determination
in the country, merely formalises what was already at the heart of the
philosophical and ideological foundations of Israel.
Its drift to
a more obvious form of a racial-based state was predicted by a group of Jewish
intellectuals including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, who felt compelled
to write an open letter to the New York
Times in 1948. It was an action prompted by the formation of the Right-wing
Herut Party by Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun terror group, in the same
year. The establishment of Herut was, they believed, a development full of
ominous portent that would lead Israel down the path which would legitimise
“ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority.”
Herut was the
precursor of the Likud Party, which first came to power in 1977, and which has
ruled Israel for the majority of years since, usually at the head of a
coalition of parties with extreme social, political and military agendas.
It is clear
why Richard Spencer approves of the Basic Law. He and like-minded white
nationalist ideologues envisage a ‘whites first’ form of governance in European
countries as well as in the European-majority nations of North America,
Australia and New Zealand.
It is not the
first time that Spencer has spoken favourably about Israel serving as a beacon
for the new order racial societies desired by the alt-right movement.
Speaking
before an audience at the University of Florida in October last year, Spencer
ruminated over those states from past to present which have influenced his
thinking and concluded: “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary
ethno-state, the one that I turn to for guidance, even though I might not
always agree with its foreign policy decisions - the Jewish state of Israel.”
He is not the
only one on the political Right to think this way. Geert Wilders, the Dutch
politician who has never failed to express his affinity and admiration for
Israel, praised the Israeli move by referring to it as “fantastic” and an
“example to us all”. Wilders elaborated:
Let’s define
our own nation-state, our indigenous culture, our language and flag, define who
and what we are and make it dominant by law.
And while
Israel and its supporters rail against those who claim that Israel’s laws and
values should not be construed as being similar to those of the now dismantled
apartheid regime of South Africa, Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime architect of the
system, said the following in response to an Israeli vote against apartheid at
the United Nations in 1961:
Israel is not
consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude … they took Israel away from the
Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with
them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.
And with laws
which include prohibitions against the renting and selling of properties to
Arabs and to African migrants, secret policies which sterilised Jewish
Ethiopian women, and proposed legislation aimed at making DNA testing a
mandatory requirement for an immigration system predicated on a Jews-only Law
of Return, who can argue against the proposition of it being a racialist
apartheid state?
© Adeyinka
Makinde (2018)
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England. His tweets can be read at @AdeyinkaMakinde
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