The Kansas City Times · Kansas City, Missouri · 15 December 1975

CP-1975-010

Zionists Are Racists, Envoy Says

John Redmon, New York Correspondent

Transcribed from the clipping

“New York — ‘Zionist propaganda’ is working to obscure the issues underlying last month’s anti-Zionism resolution in the United Nations and to confuse the world body’s legitimate condemnation of Israel’s ‘racist’ policies in the Arab-Israeli conflict, an Arab spokesman here believes. Marwan Kanafani, information director at the Arab League’s Office of the Permanent Observer to the United Nations, said recently that many Americans who sympathize with the Israelis in their struggle against the Arab states would nonetheless disapprove of the racial discrimination that he alleged is being practiced in Israel… ‘This has nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism as a faith,’ he said. ‘In this resolution, the international community has condemned a political ideology which manifests itself in concrete practices.’… Kanafani said the resolution is constructive in that it frames this issue in proper terms. ‘We are not anti-Semites. We are Semites ourselves. We are especially aware in the Middle East of the difference between Judaism as a faith and Zionism as a political ideology, and the international community has now shown that it agrees with us.’… ‘Whatever I tell you about New York,’ he said, ‘it will be understandable. There are more Jews here than in Israel. But you must remember that New York is not the whole world.’… ‘Those are beautiful letters,’ he added, smiling. ‘The other group…,’ his smile faded, ‘they cut our ads and put dirty words on them and send them back. You ought to see some of them. You would be ashamed to be an American.’… ‘You can criticize anyone here in the United States,’ he said with a smile, ‘but you can’t criticize Israel. Oh, you can go out onto the street corner and say bad things about Israel, but just try to get it on television or in the newspapers. You can’t do it.’… ‘These people just write dirty words,’ he said. ‘They do not discuss; they do not make sense. They just take it for granted that if you talk against Zionism, you are talking against the Jews.’… ‘I was born in Palestine,’ he said. ‘My father was born there. My great-grandfather was born there. The Israelis say we do not deserve to be citizens in Israel. But Golda Meir, who was born in Russia and raised in the United States — she is a Jew, and she thinks she automatically has to have full citizenship.’ Kanafani, a Moslem, said, ‘I believe I am closer to a Palestinian Jewish young man than I am to a Pakistani Moslem. But a Jew from anywhere in the world is thought to be closer to an Israeli Jew than an Arab from 10 miles away.’ Kanafani brushes aside Israeli arguments that Arabs are citizens in Israel and that some occupy very prominent positions. Arabs are only ‘third class’ citizens, he said, and those who are in high positions are placed there only for propaganda purposes. ‘The president of France, under Vichy, was French,’ he said, referring to the World War II pro-Nazi government… In contrast to the ‘aggressive, exclusivist, and expansionist’ state of Israel, he said, the P.L.O. seeks a democratic secular state in which no distinctions as to race or religion would be drawn.”

Context added by this archive

A Palestinian official taking apart the difference between a faith and a political ideology, printed down a narrow column on page 8A. The rest of the page is a JCPenney toy sale: Sunshine family van, now 8.44; Big Jim’s Sky Commander, now 2.99; Merry Christmas from JCPenney. Nothing was cut. The argument simply runs beside the toys.

Cite this item

"Zionists Are Racists, Envoy Says," The Kansas City Times, 15 December 1975. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1975-010. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1975-010

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