Overview
Jewish opposition to Zionism has a long history, and many Israeli scholars and critics have been harsh in their judgements of the way their state has carried out its settlement and control policies in the Palestinian territories. Many Israeli organizations such as B'Tselem, Yesh Din, Ta'ayush, Rabbis for Human Rights, Gush Shalom, and Machsom Watch are active in the West Bank and both assist and document the plight of Palestinians under occupation. Former soldiers with direct experience of the realities of the occupation also provide extensive critical witness.
At the very beginning of the Occupation the Orthodox Jewish philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz thought the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza would imperil Judaism itself, [lower-alpha 1] and advocated immediate withdrawal. As the years passed, his antagonism to Israel's military successes led him to speak of "Judeo-Nazis" and the "Nazification of Israeli society", a position which did not stop him being nominated for the Israel Prize in 1993 by the government of Yitzhak Rabin. [2] Israeli demographer Oren Yiftachel considers not only the settlement policy in the West Bank, but the state of Israel itself as an example of a Judaizing ethnocratic regime, which he defines as one that "promote(s) the expansion of the dominant group in contested territory and its domination of power structures while maintaining a democratic façade." The activist Jeff Halper speaks of a "matrix of control" underlying the occupation, [lower-alpha 2] while the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit, following the Indologist David Dean Shulman, speaks of its "intricate machinery". [lower-alpha 3] Neve Gordon analyses at length the attempts to so normalize things that an "invisible occupation" is created.
For Baruch Kimmerling, the process of Israeli policies constituted what he called politicide, "the dissolution of the Palestinian people's existence as a legitimate social, political and economic entity" Yoav Peled has described Israel and its occupational policies as constituting a Neoliberal Warfare State. Zeev Sternhell has argued that the West Bank for the radical right is the touchstone of Zionism, serving as a staging post or territorial basis from which to challenge the secular state of Israel and what they perceive to be its Hellenization on the other side of the Green Line. Uri Avnery, critical of what he saw as the militarization of Israeli society, [lower-alpha 4] insisted to his dying day on "looking up" optimistically, for, "If we keep on looking down, at our feet, we will die from sorrow." Avraham Burg [lower-alpha 5] in reply to a Haaretz journalist who quipped that Burg's views were an existential threat to the state of Israel, remarked
Tell me something. How can it be that I have been a Jew for two thousand years, without a gun, without planes, without two hundred atomic bombs, and I never for a day feared for the existence and eternity of the Jewish people? And you – the Israeli – you've been armed to the teeth for sixty years, with troops and special forces, with capabilities the Jewish people never had, never had, and every day you are scared, perpetually terrified that this day is your last.
Ronit Lentin, following Shlomo Swirsky, suggests that a central function of settlement is psychological, a means of overcoming a "self-perceived Israeli-Jewish victimhood" complex. [lower-alpha 6] This position is similar to that espoused by the philosopher of science and Auschwitz survivor Yehuda Elkana [lower-alpha 7] [lower-alpha 8] and has support from empirical studies of Israeli media portrayals of the conflict, which highlight incidents of violence, and play into historic anxieties, such as those drawing on the collective memories of existential threats and the Holocaust to produce a "siege mentality" productive of the same distrust that Palestinians nurture from the sense of victimhood as an occupied people.
Zionism is an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside of Europe. It eventually focused on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a region corresponding to the Land of Israel in Judaism, and of central importance in Jewish history. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became Israel's national or state ideology.
Zeev Sternhell was a Polish-born Israeli historian, political scientist, commentator on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and writer. He was one of the world's leading theorists of the phenomenon of fascism. Sternhell headed the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and wrote for Haaretz newspaper.
Prior to the rise of nationalism during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the term Palestinian referred to any person born in or living in Palestine, regardless of their ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious affiliations. During the British Mandate over Palestine, the term "Palestinian" referred to any person legally considered to be a citizen of Mandatory Palestine as defined in the 1925 Citizenship Order.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz was an Israeli Orthodox Jewish public intellectual and polymath. He was a professor of biochemistry, organic chemistry, and neurophysiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as a prolific writer on Jewish thought and western philosophy. He was known for his outspoken views on ethics, religion, and politics. Leibowitz cautioned that the state of Israel and Zionism had become more sacred than Jewish humanist values and went on to describe Israeli conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories as "Judeo-Nazi" in nature while warning of the dehumanizing effect of the occupation on the victims and the oppressors.
Land Day, recurring on March 30, is a day of commemoration for Palestinians, both Arab citizens of Israel and those in the Israeli-occupied territories of the events of that date in 1976 in Israel.
The Palestinian people are an ethnonational group with family origins in the region of Palestine. Since 1964, they have been referred to as Palestinians, but before that they were usually referred to as Palestinian Arabs. During the period of the British Mandate, the term Palestinian was also used to describe the Jewish community living in Palestine.
During the British rule in Mandatory Palestine, there was civil, political and armed struggle between Palestinian Arabs and the Jewish Yishuv, beginning from the violent spillover of the Franco-Syrian War in 1920 and until the onset of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The conflict shifted from sectarian clashes in the 1920s and early 1930s to an armed Arab Revolt against British rule in 1936, armed Jewish Revolt primarily against the British in mid-1940s and finally open war in November 1947 between Arabs and Jews.
"Hebrew labor" and "conquest of labor" are two related terms and concepts. One of them refers to the ideal adopted by some Jews in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and later embraced by Zionism to favour hiring Jewish rather than non-Jewish workers. Another one is the slogan for the Jews to embrace productive labor rather than being engaged only in trades and professions.
Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism. Although anti-Zionism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, all its proponents agree that the creation of the modern State of Israel, and the movement to create a sovereign Jewish state in the region of Palestine—a region partly coinciding with the biblical Land of Israel—was flawed or unjust in some way.
Al-Ard was a Palestinian political movement made up of Arab citizens of Israel. It was active between 1958 and some time in the 1970s.
Judaization of the Galilee is a regional project and policy of the Israeli government and associated private organizations which is intended to increase Jewish population and communities in the Galilee, a region within Israel which has an Arab majority.
Baruch Kimmerling was an Israeli scholar and professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Upon his death in 2007, The Times described him as "the first academic to use scholarship to reexamine the founding tenets of Zionism and the Israeli State". Though a sociologist by training, Kimmerling was associated with the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who question the official narrative of Israel's creation.
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) is a group opposed to Israeli settlements, which describes itself as "an Israeli peace and human rights organization dedicated to ending the occupation of the Palestinian territories and achieving a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians."
Labor Zionism or socialist Zionism refers to the left-wing, socialist variant of Zionism. For many years, it was the most significant tendency among Zionists and Zionist organizations, and was seen as the Zionist sector of the historic Jewish labour movements of Eastern Europe and Central Europe, eventually developing local units in most countries with sizable Jewish populations. Unlike the "political Zionist" tendency founded by Theodor Herzl and advocated by Chaim Weizmann, Labor Zionists did not believe that a Jewish state would be created by simply appealing to the international community or to powerful nations such as the United Kingdom, Germany, or the former Ottoman Empire. Rather, they believed that a Jewish state could only be created through the efforts of the Jewish working class making aliyah to the Land of Israel and raising a country through the creation of a Labor Jewish society with rural kibbutzim and moshavim, and an urban Jewish Proletariat.
The New Historians are a loosely defined group of Israeli historians who have challenged traditional versions of Israeli history, including Israel's role in the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight and Arab willingness to discuss peace. The term was coined in 1988 by Benny Morris, one of the leading New Historians. According to Ethan Bronner of The New York Times, the New Historians have sought to advance the peace process in the region.
The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, has been under military occupation by Israel since 7 June 1967, when Israeli forces captured the territory, then ruled by Jordan, during the Six-Day War. The status of the West Bank as a militarily occupied territory has been affirmed by the International Court of Justice and, with the exception of East Jerusalem, by the Israeli Supreme Court. The official view of the Israeli government is that the laws of belligerent occupation do not apply to the territories, which it considers instead "disputed", and it administers the West Bank, excepting East Jerusalem, under the Israeli Civil Administration, a branch of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Considered to be a classic example of an "intractable conflict", the length of Israel's occupation was already regarded as exceptional after two decades, and is now the longest in modern history. Israel has cited several reasons for retaining the West Bank within its ambit: a claim based on the notion of historic rights to this as a homeland as claimed in the Balfour Declaration of 1917; security grounds, both internal and external; and the deep symbolic value for Jews of the area occupied. The International Court of Justice has rejected the Israeli view that the territory is not occupied and has found that Israel's "continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful".
Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany occur frequently in the political discourse of anti-Zionism. Given the legacy of the Holocaust, the legitimacy of and intent behind these accusations are a matter of debate, particularly with regard to their potential nature as a manifestation of antisemitism. Historically, figures like British historian Arnold J. Toynbee have drawn parallels or alleged a relationship between Zionism and Nazism; British professor David Feldman suggests that these comparisons are often rhetorical tools without specific antisemitic intent. On the other hand, the Anti-Defamation League sees these comparisons as attempts at Holocaust trivialization. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy argues that such comparisons not only lack historical and moral equivalence, but also risk inciting anti-Jewish sentiment.
The Nakba is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. The term is used to describe the events of the 1948 Palestine war in Mandatory Palestine as well as the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel. As a whole, it covers the fracturing of Palestinian society and the long-running rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.
Zionism has been described by several scholars as a form of settler colonialism in relation to the region of Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This paradigm has been applied to Zionism by various scholars and figures, including Patrick Wolfe, Edward Said, Ilan Pappe, Noam Chomsky, and others who view Zionism as a form of settler colonialism. Many of Zionism's founders and leaders described their project as a colonial project, and major Zionist organizations and agencies central to Israel creation held names reflecting colonial identity.
Nakba denial is a form of historical denialism pertaining to the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight and its accompanying effects, which Palestinians refer to collectively as the "Nakba". Underlying assumptions of Nakba denial cited by scholars can include the denial of historically documented violence against Palestinians, the denial of a distinct Palestinian identity, the idea that Palestine was barren land, and the notion that Palestinian dispossession were part of mutual transfers between Arabs and Jews justified by war.
