Originally published 12/25/07, 11:54 AM, Eastern Daylight Time
Recently, the Blogger News Network featured a piece by Shimon Z. Klein entitled "Religious Zionism is Racism". See http://www.bloggernews.net/112424.
In Canada, free medical services are available to people who need them, but a person has to be a Canadian citizen or meet certain legal requirements under the immigration laws. That is discrimination. Some poor person from Central America who happens to be in Toronto can die from a disease for which a Canadian citizen will get free medical treatment. The fact is that distinctions exist between peoples based on a variety of criteria including nationalism, IQ, beauty, family, etc. The charge of racism cannot be simply thrown out because there are distinctions made between people. The challenge is to define the distinctions that are problematic, i.e. racist, and those that are not. This demands further definitions.
For example, are the territories won after the Six Day War occupied or liberated? Is it Jewish land that was taken from us close to 2000 years ago that we finally got back or are they new conquered land? Does the fact that we were exiled 2000 years ago, rather than yesterday, change the situation? How do we deal with those who started to live on this land in that past 2000 years? These are the questions we need to address -- but to do so one has to work on the definitions and confront the issue of language and differing definitions. In reading this article, I just found someone who really doesn't get the depth of the situation.
Rabbi Ben Hecht
1 comment:
> are the territories won after the Six Day War occupied or liberated? Is it Jewish land that was taken from us close to 2000 years ago that we finally got back or are they new conquered land?
This is an extremely poor argument because it has nothing to do with religion but rather one's interpretation of international law and when one starts keeping track of history. Certainly there is much legal support for the fact that Yehudah and Shomron are part of "the Jewish national home" as promised by the British Empire and ratifed by the League of Nations. Those whose memories begin before 1967 recall that only Britain and Pakistan recognized Jordan's control of these lands between 1949 and 1967.
The bigger question: Is Zionism racism? As racist as Americanism which demands citizenship to vote. It is only racist, it seems, for Jews to demand in Israel that which every citizen in every other credible democracy gets to take for granted.
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