This the Israel we want?

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Haviland Smith’s recent op-ed (“Zionism’s Dreams Imperiled,” May 8) counsels that Israel’s “only hope” of remaining true to its Zionist ideals is to end the occupation and concede a state to the Palestinians.

His logic fails, however, because Israeli policies in the occupied territories are strategically and ideologically anchored to, not in conflict with, Zionism. Cleansing Palestine of Arabs has been the sine qua non of the Zionist project since the late 19th century.

In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homeland by Jewish forces, and most of their villages were destroyed to prevent their return. Thus, the Jewish state was born, and until 1966, it imposed a military regime on the remnants of the Palestinian nation inside its borders while confiscating their land and that of the displaced refugees.

In 1967, it began the process of dispossession and colonization anew as an occupying power. When it comes to Palestinians, liberal and conservative Zionists are cut from the same cloth. The only difference, as one Israeli historian put it, is that liberals want a smaller Israel with no Arabs and their right-wing cousins desire a larger Israel with no Arabs.

This apartheid mentality is on display daily in the occupied territories. It is also embedded in an extensive regimen of laws, regulations and jurisprudence inside Israel that extend more power, privileges and material benefits to Jews. This, too, is the hateful business of Zionism, but we don’t talk about it.

Most Palestinian children in Israel, for example, are educated in racially segregated, inferior schools. They and their parents are excluded from hundreds of Jewish communities by “admissions committees” and racist property laws.

Eighty thousand Bedouin live in “unrecognized villages,” denied water, roads, schools and electricity, while Israel expropriates their lands for Jews. Not a single new community for Palestinians has been built in Israel since 1948. Is this the Israel Mr. Smith wants to preserve?

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Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead, folio or printed date appears on this clipping — it is a trimmed letters column, cut mid-page at the top and at the right edge. Nothing on it names the newspaper. The letter answers an op-ed dated “May 8”, which is consistent with a mid-May paper, but 2011-05-15 could not be checked.

Cite this clipping

"This the Israel we want?," The Times Argus, 15 May 2011. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2011-016. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2011-016