Albert Einstein: “The Israeli state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed … I believe it is bad … There could be no greater calamity than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people … We must strive for a just and lasting compromise with the Arab people … Let us recall that in former times, no people lived in greater friendship with us than the ancestors of these Arabs."
A leader of those who thought a ‘Jewish’ state was needed was Theodor Herzl, an admirer of the British Empire, He wrote to Cecil Rhodes, founder of the white settler colony named after him. “You are being invited to help make history. It does not involve Africa but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen but Jews … I turn to you … because it is something colonial ..”
Chaim Weizmann, who suceeded Herzl as leader of the Zionist movement agreed. “Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence and should they encourage Jewish settlement … we could develop the country, bring back civilisation and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”
The British ruling class responded positively with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, a 67-word letter from British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, pledging British support for a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This led to the creation of Israel, a colonial-settler state which disregarded the interests of the indigenous Palestinian population, made up of Arabs, Jews, Christians and non-believers.
The Jewish opponents of Zionism could be found amongst the Palestinian Jews and in Europe in the Jewish Bund, founded in 1897 in Poland and Russia. They stressed the principles of, socialism, secularism and doyikayt or “localness.” Doyikaytwas was encapsulated in the slogan: “There, where we live, that is our country.” One of their early leaders, Viktor Adler, declared “Bundists wish to shatter the existing economic frameworks and show the Jewish masses how a new society can be built not by escape, but by struggle. We link the essence of the Jewish masses’ life to that of humankind”.
This tradition continues and Jewish opponents of Zionism are today at the forefront of opposition to Zionism. Even at the height of the Holocaust they were there. Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote that, “Everyone has their Jews and for the Israelis they are the Palestinians”. Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising compared the Palestine resistance to Israel to the Jewish fighters in Warsaw.
This thinking can even be found at the heart of the Israeli state. Uri Avnery, ex-Israeli army officer declared, “What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints.”
We are now witnessing Israel’s final extinction, to be replaced with the return of a Palestine that exists from the river to the sea and which will include all of its historical people; Muslims, Jews, Christians , and those of no faith, and all sharing a common land.
This is Palestine, فِلَسْطِين, פלשתינה
