The anti-Zionism absurdity - The Jewish Standard

If anyone believes that words do not have the power to shake up a world, consider the following:

1. On Tuesday, June 3, the second day of Shavuot in the diaspora, Azealia Banks, a popular rapper with 230,800 followers on X, the former Twitter, set off a 24-hour fusillade of messages — and made headlines around the world — with just three words: “I’m a Zionist.” (Although she is not Jewish, she is philo-Semitic and calls herself the “Jewcy Diva Queen of Sheba.”) In her posts, she also disparaged pro-Hamas demonstrators, asking if they knew “how this [expletive] started, like are you dumb?”

2. Fifty years ago — on November 10, 1975 — the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly approved Resolution 3379. That resolution contained 14 effective words and 359 explanatory ones to turn three words into an officially sanctioned chant that continues to haunt any discussion of the legitimacy of Israel and the unending Israel-Palestinian dispute. Those 14 effective words were: “The General Assembly determines that zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The 359 explanatory words were inserted between “Assembly” and “determines,” and “zionism” was deliberately denied a capital Z in order to add insult to a huge international injury.

3. Sixteen years later, on December 16, 1991, these 18 words were used in an unsuccessful attempt to undo the damage done in 1975: “The General Assembly decides to revoke the determination contained in its resolution 3379 of 10 November 1975.

“Zionism is racism” nevertheless is still kicking nearly 34 years later. Today, however, in addition to the traditional pro-Palestinian groups and those that seek to delegitimize the Jewish state, which an earlier General Assembly resolution — 181 — caused to be born, that chant is being loudly proclaimed by a growing number of Jews.

Here in the United States, the Jewish “Zionism is racism” cry is led mainly by two highly vocal secular groups — Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — and the ritually religious far-right Neturei Karta. This group believes that a halachically legitimate Jewish state can exist only after the Messiah has come. Its members often appear at both pro- and anti-Israel rallies carrying such hateful signs as “Judaism demands freedom for Gaza and all Palestine, and forbids any Jewish state,” and “Judaism condemns the State of ‘Israel’ and its atrocities.”

In Canada and the United Kingdom, the main anti-Zionist organizations are both called Independent Jewish Voices (IJV). IJV-Canada was formed in 2008, a year after 150 prominent Brits, including the playwright Harold Pinter (who died the following year) and the actor Stephen Fry, formed the IJV-UK group.

Equating Zionism with racism is thoroughly misguided and would be laughable if it were not so tragic. The growing anti-Zionist strain within the Jewish world, however, is unconscionable and unforgivable and, as I see it, a flat-out violation of Jewish law.

Not all Jews are white — and never were. Jews come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and have customs so divergent as to be unrecognizable to other Jews. Still, they are Jews, and as Jews they are welcome in every Jewish community in the world, including in the State of Israel.

They can do that because there is a Jewish state, the product of a belief held over the millennia by all their ancestors and by most of them that one day the Jewish people would return to their ancient homeland. In the late 19th century, that belief got a name: Zionism.

Zionism requires Israel’s acceptance of all Jews, regardless of who they are, where they come from, and the color of their skin. If Jews are in danger, the Jewish state — the Zionist state — is obligated to come to their rescue, and Israel has done so repeatedly.

While Israel was still engaged in setting itself up as a full-fledged state, it undertook a most complex mass rescue operation. Between June 1949 and September 1950, with planes and logistical support from the United States and Great Britain, Israel flew 380 missions to rescue nearly 50,000 Jews from Yemen. This was known both as “Operation Magic Carpet,” and “Operation on Wings of Eagles” (based on Exodus 19:4).

In 1984, Ethiopia was in the tenth year of a civil war that would continue until 1991. It was also suffering from a devastating famine that had lasted a year. The two events eventually claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 to 1 million Ethiopians. That year, thousands of Ethiopian Jews, the Beta Israel, began the perilous journey on foot to reach refugee camps in Sudan, where they had been assured that Israel would fly them to the Jewish state.

Between 1984 and 1991, Israel rescued 51,734 Ethiopian Jews in a series of massive and dramatic airlifts. Operation Moses began on November 21, 1984, and managed to rescue more than 8,000 Jews in just seven weeks, when the mission was shut down in early January 1985 after its safety was compromised by news leaks and front-page headlines. Later that year, Operation Joshua managed to rescue another 500 or so Jews stranded in the Sudanese camps. (These two operations were memorialized in the 2019 film “The Red Sea Diving Resort,” starring Chris Evans.)

Almost immediately, Israeli strategists began planning what would be one of the most daring and remarkable rescue efforts in history. In a single 36-hour period beginning on May 24, 1991, 35 Israeli aircraft (including military C-130 transport planes and El Al Boeing 747s) brought 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. One El Al 747 that had been stripped of its seats set a world record for passengers on a single aircraft by carrying 1,088 to safety. (The 2022 documentary “Exodus 91” tells this part of the story.)

Racism means discrimination or bigotry based on a belief that certain races are inferior. Which race do Jews consider inferior? The question is absurd, since there probably is not a single race on the planet Earth that does not have its Jews, and representatives of each race live in the State of Israel.

For Jews to consider any race as inferior is to consider part of their family inferior. This does not mean that no Jew is a racist. There are a few of them out there; some even serve in high positions in the current Israeli government. Some other racists are even antisemitic, meaning they hate other Jews. Hatred crosses all boundaries. For most Jews, however, racism is the one type of hatred that makes no sense whatsoever.

This “family tie” is not mere rhetoric, thanks to the discovery of DNA. Science has proven that those people who claim to be descended from Moses’ brother Aaron share the same genetic markers in the DNA of Y-chromosomes — including people in deepest, darkest Africa. This is known as the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH). If two people have the same Y chromosome, they also have a common paternal ancestor. That means a descendant of Aaron from Lemberg, Poland (known now as Lvov in Ukraine), has relatives among the Lemba tribesmen in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

My parents came from Lemberg, but I have no doubt that I have distant cousins among the Lemba, as well. They are not all kohanim.

There was — and perhaps still is, to some degree — a form of discrimination in Israel, but it has nothing to do with racism or Zionism and everything to do with Ashkenazi triumphalism. It was Ashkenazim, after all, who established the state and its governing structure.

Disparaging Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews is nothing new for Ashkenazim. The great 12th-century Ashkenazic scholar Rabbeinu Tam did it when he paraphrased Isaiah 2:3 to ridicule non-Ashkenazic teachings. Instead of “From out of Zion shall come forth Torah and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,” he wrote, “From out of Bari shall come forth Torah and the word of the Lord from Otranto,” both being Ashkenazic centers of Jewish learning in his day.

Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel, the leader of German Jewry in the latter part of the 13th century, who was forced to flee to Toledo in Spain, did so when he wrote in a commentary to the Babylonian Talmud tractate Berachot 20b that Ashkenazic scholarship and authority were “superior to that of” the Sephardim.

The Beta Israel endured great humiliation from the Ashkenazic authorities, but not because they were black. It was because their communities knew nothing about the Oral Law. Their Jewish practice was entirely dependent on the Written (Torah) Law.

Triumphalism is not racism. It is wrongheaded and even nonsensical considering how even Ashkenazim revere Maimonides and Nachmanides, both of whom were Sephardim, or that some of the leading and most revered poskim (halachic decisors) of the last 100 years were Sephardim.

The secularist Jews in the anti-Zionist camp should be ashamed of themselves for disparaging a movement that, after 2,000 years, gave our people a Jewish state — a state that arose after six million died because they had no Jewish state to protect them, and no other country wanted them. The religious anti-Zionists need to remember that an overriding principle of Jewish law is that “all Israel” — meaning all the Jews in the world — “are responsible one for the other,” and that to give support to those who would shove an entire nation of Jews into the sea is a sin for which no atonement is possible.

Jews do not have to like Benjamin Netanyahu and his politics — and he apparently has no interest in bringing the remaining hostages home — but they are still Jews and certainly have to act that way when Jewish lives are at stake.

Shammai Engelmayer is rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.

Opinion

comments