Zionism principles similar to Apartheid’s: Analyst

Press TV has interviewed Bruce Katz, co-President of Palestinian & Jewish Unity, in Montreal, to discuss recent anti-police brutality protests in occupied Palestinian lands.

Following is rough transcription.

Press TV: Instances like this very one where people turn up in demonstrations to protest police brutality in Israel are not isolated ones. There has been a lot of instances of Israel discriminating against Christians, against Muslims, and different races. What does this tell us about Israel?

Katz: I think that you have to remember that the founding pioneers of what was then Jewish Palestine and became Israel were principally Ashkenazim, that is white European settlers. As I have mentioned before on other interviews of Press TV, what essentially you have in Israel is a history of white European settler society that has displaced a non-white indigenous population and put them unto Bantustans.

Basically we need to remember that Revisionist Zionism which is the triumphant form of Zionism, such as was conceived by Ze'ev Jabotinsky and put into effect by David Ben Gurion, despite claims to the contrary, as one that is based on the idea of the Jews as a race, and essentially as a white European race that would have its tribal territory in what is Biblically Judea and Samaria in Gaza. Now what you are seeing is basically the fact that this particular Israeli…. does not only discriminate against Palestinians who are not white, against the Bedouin who are not white, but also against Ethiopian Jews who are not white.

Basically, what you are looking at is Selma, Alabama in the 60s; Soweto, South Africa in the 80s; you are looking at Ferguson, Missouri this past year, 2014-2015 and Israel. It is not for nothing that Israel was a very ally of apartheid South Africa. As a matter of fact Israel was founded  in 1948, so was apartheid in South Africa in 1948.

Now, I think that the principal irritants for that basically Ashkenazim political status, especially the on the right because that is basically where really vigorous racism expresses itself. It is a fact that Ethiopian Jews by their presence are living proof that Jews do not constitute a race. There are Jews in Ethiopia, there are also Jews in Yemen, there is a Jewish community in Iran which is one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. There has been a Jewish community, fairly substantial, in India for millennia and there were even remnants of Jews in China in the area of Kaifeng which is near Beijing.

Now, all of these various, ethnically different Jews are Jews because of ties to the Torah, because of ties to the Jewish moral precepts like the Mosaic Law, certain cultural and religious similarities and they are proof that Zionism gives a false image of what means to be a Jew.

Now part of the attacks on Ehiopian Jews are the fact that it… basically the presence disavowals the Zionist conception of what it means to be a Jew.

Basically what Zionism did is that it ethnicized Judaism and incorporated it into the notion of the state. That is Zionism at the conceptional level and its result has been institutionalized segregation against non-whites and that includes Ethiopian Jews.

Press TV: When it comes to anti-Semitic incidents we see mass media giving intensive coverage but then when it comes to protests like these, or Israeli aggression, we see the media very easily turning a blind eye to incidents like that.

Katz: Yes. As a matter of fact, I can assure you that the demonstration by black Ethiopian Jews in Jerusalem will not be seen and shown on the mainstream Western press. That I can assure you of! So basically what you have is a press in the West which is complicit. There are progressive newspapers that like The Guardian in the UK and other newspapers… but they are rare. That is not the type of the mainstream attention which basically completely disregards a Palestinian narrative and does not make really any reference to Israel’s institutionalized segregation against Palestinians, Bedouins and Ethiopian Jews. 

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