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Honolulu Star-Bulletin · 12 March 1976

CP-1976-013

Zionism and Racism

A Particular Point of View

By Yasumasa Kuroda, Professor of Political Science, University of Hawaii

Zionism and Racism — Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 12 March 1976
Honolulu Star-Bulletin · 12 March 1976

Transcribed from the clipping

“Little has been said in the United States in defense of the Third World and its sponsorship of the resolution… The British authority reports that less than seven per cent of the land in Palestine belonged to Jewish owners at the end of the mandate in 1948. There is no democratic way or peaceful means through which Zionists could have realized their goal of developing an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine without jeopardizing the civil rights of non-Jews. There are only two ways. You either drive the natives out into the desert or subjugate them as third class citizens. How else can anyone build a country on somebody else’s land?… The Israeli Law of Return gives every Jew, just because one is a Jew, the right to immigrate at any time to Israel and to obtain Israeli nationality. On the other hand, even Gentiles who were born in Palestine are not allowed to return to their homes in Palestine just because they happened to be either Christians or Moslems. Foreigners such as Soviet Jews are welcomed in Israel but native Palestinians are not allowed to return to their homes. If this is not racism, what is?… Even Americans of Palestinian origin are treated differently as they enter Israel. They are asked to go through a special and separate gate at Tel Aviv International Airport… Why do our mass media call those who resisted the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia freedom fighters while we continue to refer to those who resist the Israeli occupation of Palestine ‘terrorists’? Are we in our zeal to prove our freedom from antisemitism, inadvertently transferring our antipathy from one Semite group to the other, i.e., anti-Jewish to anti-Arab?”

Context added by this archive

A signed op-ed defending the resolution in an American daily, which is rare, by a political scientist in Hawaii who is neither Arab nor Jewish. It answers Eldridge Cleaver’s column of two months earlier by name. Its last question — whether opposing antisemitism has been turned into antipathy toward Arabs — is the argument that would be running in American papers forty years later, made here in 1976 and pointed the other way. The paper spells Ashkanazi.

Cite this item

"Zionism and Racism," Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 12 March 1976. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1976-013. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1976-013

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1976-013.

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