Translation of Ch.1, Part 2 of Abweichende Meinungen zu Israel: Die politische Emanzipation der Juden durch eine Militärdemokratie mit imperialistischem Auftrag, H.L. Fertl, Resultate Verlag 1982

Zionism, anti-Semitism and the ethnic character of the state of Israel

l.

Zionism emerged as the idealism of a Jewish nation that had yet to be created. It was brought up in the late 19th century by Jewish intellectuals who were convinced that their “people” lacked nothing so much as their own state. The Jewish “nation” which their state-founding project referred to was not merely lacking a “native” government. It did not even exist as a cohesive society that required a sovereign power to regulate its class differences and to politically represent the interests of its accumulating wealth. The “ethnic” identity of the people chosen to be citizens of a Zionist state was – as they made clear by naming their nationalism after an ancient place of worship – in the sphere of religion, in the pious conceit of being a “chosen people.”

Fictions of this kind are not alien to any nationalism, but normally refer to a completely non-fictitious “historical community of fate,” that is, the ensemble of hardships that a state power imposes on its subjects in practice. The life practices of a pre-bourgeois people or a bourgeois class society are thus given a higher moral justification and a comforting, deeper meaning. Conversely, in the case of the “Jewish people,” self-construal as a member of the supreme boss’s own team is not idealizing a somewhat relaxed practical social nexus of work, obedience and corresponding habits of opportunism and consolation. Rather, it should and wants to first endow the lifestyle practices it prescribes with a quasi-practical identity – which therefore do not have, for example, the abstractness and universality of Christian moral precepts – and thereby substitutes for a national context between everyone who professes this way of life. The religious self-admiration of a person as a Jew is not only the beginning of his patriotism in the inverted imagination of a loyal subject, but is also the practical basis and starting point of a nationality that is yet to be created. It is the characteristic that makes a person the addressee of the Zionist state-founding program. Zionism also wants to realize politically what exists only as the mere ideal identity of a “people.” But not in the fantastic manner of a “theocracy,” an anachronistic revival of Mosaic affairs. Zionism knows the “modern,” civic relationship between politics and religion, class society and ideology, practical opportunism and patriotic self-stylization up to the point of pious delusion. It does not want to create a community of practicing idealists, but to place Jewish observance on a firm “basis” by constructing a completely “normal” national class society – with a peasantry and a proletariat, a credit system and landed property, politicians and schoolmasters – which upholds this religious-patriotic “superstructure” as an ideological superstructure in exactly the same way every bourgeois state upholds its nationalism.

For the Zionists, the reason why the Jews should participate in this transition from a faith to a citizenship in a new state did not come from the realm of religious ideals. With their project of founding a state, they addressed the observers of Jewish ways of life as fairly ready-made citizens of a “modern” kind, as practicing experts in small and large-scale business, in wage labor and exploitation, in making calculations with capital and poverty, in reckoning with submission to state power, who knew how to distinguish between the “objective laws” of the bourgeois world and pious conceits. And as such citizens – this is the material basis of the whole project! – they could not count on the state powers under which they actually lived, precisely because of their Jewish observance, for their entirely state-abiding bourgeois concerns; who saw themselves committed by their authorities to live according to the harsh laws of competition, credit and wage labor and yet only enjoyed the indispensable protection of person and property to a very limited extent. The fact that they were treated by the existing national state authorities as second-class subjects, as a non-people: this gave material weight to the self-image spun of the Jews as God’s chosen people, which the Zionists wanted to accommodate with their project of bringing the Jews together in a nation state. They thus drew from the nationalist idiocies vigorously practiced in the various home countries of the “Jewish people,” of all things, the nationalist conclusion that their plight could be relieved by a rule based solely on this “people.”

2.

“Anti-Semitism,” against which the nation state ideology of Zionism was the answer, constitutes on its part anything but a “regression” to before the egalitarian and liberal “achievements” of the modern class state, possibly back to the unenlightened Middle Ages. Certainly, the fact that the bourgeois state does not want to see any differences between its subjects in their relation to its laws and its legal protections is more than a non-binding ideology. It is precisely the equal and unexceptional subordination of everyone under its acts and resolutions that produces the economic classes and their competition; its regulated progress and revenues are what a bourgeois state depends on. Not permitting certain ethnic groups to use the private property they create and assist through property in fact contradicts the sovereign political rule’s self-designated task of taking the members of its society entirely from their functional side, as persons with or without property, and ensuring their business dealings with one another in an appropriate manner. It is just that this functional treatment of the mass of citizens as maneuverable masses of wealth functioning as private property and the power that guarantees it cannot be achieved, i.e. a modern class state cannot be created at all, without those affected subordinating all the social contradictions to which they are thereby subjected under the national unity of their society. They must see that they are ready for the patriotic lunacy of accepting state power in principle as their helper, the class society created by it as a “community of solidarity” for coping with all the difficulties arising for those who are less well-off in the first place. They must feel and act like a community of fate; and the tougher the “fate” imposed on them by the politically established “objective constraints” of their society, the more determined they have to be.

This in turn has consequences that necessarily contradict the abstract functionalism of the whole event and even more so its human rights ideals. The harsher the actual political purposes a national government asserts by invoking its people, the more it harms the human material it claims, the more offensively and brazenly a government tends to invoke its people as its “sponsors.” Conversely, the more harshly they are claimed and harmed by the state, the more patriots demand respect for the “higher” national ideological points of view under which they may personally unite as a people with their leadership to form a nation. In times of hardship and in pre-war times, the idiocy of the nation as a living community, practiced from top to bottom, “matures” completely into the ideology of a communal national struggle for existence. The increasing disagreements of bourgeois life are then reinterpreted out of pure loyalty to the state as the machinations – or measures required to ward off the machinations – of an enemy against whom the nation has to fight its battle for existence. The nationalist stylization of the subjects as a people with an unmistakable, of course excellent, “national character” becomes the ideological guideline for a no longer merely ideological examination of the people’s willingness to fight. With the exception of a few intellectuals who meet the claim to national unity with the reservation that there must first be a theory that “gives it meaning,” this test is just the thing found in those creatures of class society whose servitude to the nation’s power and wealth seems doubtful. The useless and discarded very quickly fall into the category of those who are unfit for struggle, that is, unfit for the national struggle for existence, and consequently “life unworthy of life”; workers and workers’ representatives who still discover an essential battle line within national society, i.e. who do not completely bow to the claim to national unity, are consequently regarded as “corrosive elements”; equally suspect are, at the opposite end of the social hierarchy, the practicing internationalists of national business life, the “financial magnates” whose entire business activity makes the economic truth obvious that in bourgeois class society everything revolves around credit money and its worldwide clout – and not around useful goods, not even around useful goods for the nation. Furthermore, the nationalistic opportunism of the well-educated is free to declare unpopular character masks of an economy that causes their own impoverishment to be the culprits that weaken the decisive highest good, the people’s perseverance. In addition to the identification of foreign enemies against whom the national struggle for life has to be fought and won, there is also the discovery of pests and enemies of the people within the nation who must be eradicated or at least kept under the strictest control; among good patriots, this inalienable human right to a purified national community easily finds enough voluntary advocates, judges and executioners!

From there, it is only one more step to what is called “anti-Semitism” in the bourgeois world of states: translating the finding “foreign to the people” into the diagnosis “enemy of the people.” And this “translation” is the easiest, because it is the most familiar exercise in the world for anyone who loves the homeland and its loyal citizens. A good patriot always uses himself, his likes, dislikes and other moral habits to prove his conviction that nothing characterizes a person more thoroughly than what he “owes” his people; this is how entire national societies manage to acquire communal bigotries as feelings and characters. How difficult could it be for such a people to subsume, firstly, every foreigner and, secondly, every domestic fellow citizen who is suspected of a strange distance from the native ethnicity under exactly the same nationalistic stylizations? It’s even easier when popular prejudice encounters people who take this idiocy into account and, for their part, whether in defiant self-assertion or in an effort to refute any suspicions, cultivate all kinds of collective oddities. Thus modern civic patriotism, the more it depends on a firm submissiveness, reveals itself all the more openly as a “racism” that offers up everything from remembered bits of history to hooked noses, from skin color to unique eating habits, to paint the political category of the enemy and pest of the people into a collective character image – just as national pride also creates an epitome for its own people from the habits of subjugation and hardship, which is ultimately to be found as a predetermined character in every full-fledged member of the people.

3.

The main people on the receiving end of this civic racism, the Jews of Europe, committed themselves to a response of the same caliber in Zionism. They were nothing but the victims of the violent fiction of a people and political leadership who share a national destiny, which is a personal trait that every decent subject is born with, distinguishing him from all other members of the species and entitling his contempt for them. And yet the politicized Jews of Europe never saw fit to criticize the patriotic madness itself, let alone its cause, the violence of the class state. The fatal strength of the ideology of nationalism – which is supposed to be a feeling, and probably is! – is precisely in that it simply cannot be disgraced by the atrocities committed in its name – and no atrocity worth mentioning in modern times was not inspired by love of the fatherland! Every patriot even discovers the harmfulness and mendacity of this ideology in like-minded people with foreign customs and that it turns people into mass murderers – with the best of consciences! However, it is never nationalism that is noticed and criticized or treated with horror and contempt, but the nationalism of others, exactly as if it were the true and actual opposite of one’s own! In this way, the fanaticism of one nation always serves as a title and seal of approval for the fanaticism of another, i.e. as a good conscience for its ruthlessness. And it is precisely with this nationalistic self-righteousness that the Zionists showed up. Completely in the spirit of the madness of their opponents and haters, they interpreted the victimhood of the Jews as a “national” idiosyncrasy, as a collective identity that gave those who suffered from it a kind of national folklore and those who possess it an unchallengeable right to collective subordination under their own, particularly powerful state power.

The state that the Zionists wanted to create was thus mandated from the outset to be ethnic, i.e. to stand up for the establishment and preservation of an otherwise completely “normal” bourgeois association of Jews just as exclusively as other nation states have repeatedly turned the exclusivity of their responsibility for the fate of their people against the Jews. The realization of this project in the middle of Palestine therefore naturally required far more than the will to do so and the willingness of Turkish administrative officials and the “Porte” to accept Jews as subjects. The plan was nothing less than the export of a complete small bourgeois state that includes citizens, internal division of labor, political forms of association and a sufficiently racist apparatus of violence to an area that was by no means deserted and whose inhabitants could not be so easily pushed into the jungle or desert or exterminated, as European culture-bearers and bringers of civilization had so brilliantly succeeded in doing to the Negroes in South Africa or the Indians in North America as part of analogous settlement projects. Firstly, what was needed was human material that had to meet a tougher criterion than that of an idealistic longing for home soil: people who, for all their opportunistic willingness to adapt – they couldn’t have become revolutionaries! – had come to the conclusion in their home countries that they had nothing left to lose. The necessary masses were “delivered” to the initiators and trustees of the Zionist project by the ruling (and with the active cooperation of the ruled) nationalists of Europe – in line with Theodor Herzl’s diagnosis that anti-Semitism would provide enough victims to fill the planned “homeland.” In line with this assessment, the Zionist leadership, for its part, always made sure, especially during the Second World War when the decision on national independence for the hostile ethnic groups in Palestine was pending, that the persecution of the Jews benefited their state project and that the refugees rescued from pogroms and genocide were shipped to the “Promised Land” and not to any other host country.

Even for people who have nothing left to lose, however, a power capable of self-assertion in the modern world of states cannot be established without – secondly – sufficient wealth to supply the human material, settle them and put them to reasonably profitable work. In this question, the managers of the Jewish financial oligarchy of the capitalist nations distinguished themselves above all as gifted money collectors; a kind of voluntary tax for purchasing land in “Eretz Yisrael” and basic equipment for Jewish settlers became customary for Jewish communities all over the world and especially in the USA, both Zionist and non-Zionist, through countless advertising campaigns. The money raised was not, like normal “development aid” today, given as capital to earn interest and to secure the creditor’s unrestricted access to the “natural wealth” and mobilizable labor of the “recipient country,” with the result being progressive impoverishment in the two forms of total pauperism and wage slavery. It paid for public ownership of land and means of production – initially mainly agricultural – which were made available to settler cooperatives and collectives. With this help – which deserves this name, even if there was no question of a lucrative existence for the Jewish immigrants – the “Yishuv,” in accordance with the Zionist plan, brought about a thoroughly racial economic system: the paradox of a money economy with the purpose of self-sufficiency for working people and careful cultivation of the land. The Jewish capitalists in the country were forced, if necessary through a little terror, to exclusively employ Jews at wages several times higher than those paid to Arab workers. Larger industrial projects were placed under the direction of the Jewish unified “union” Histadrut from the outset or were carried out by well-funded Jewish entrepreneurs in close coordination with it and the Zionist land development agencies. To this day, the epitome of this type of economic community are the self-sufficient agricultural collectives: the kibbutzim that are celebrated as a socialist achievement. With human material ready for any hardship and money procured from abroad, the Zionists thus made a reality in the newly created Palestinian Jewish community of what otherwise exists only as an ideal, namely as a fascist one: a comprehensive, exclusively racial workforce, based on wage labor and land rent, i.e. the so productive “objective constraints” of money, but without profit as a criterion, without pauperism as a necessary flip side, for the benefit above all of a progressive “land seizure” and sufficient communal power.

For this was, of course, the third and most important requirement for the realization of the Zionist project from the very beginning: a sovereign power over land and people that was willing and able to create space for the import of a complete Jewish state, i.e. to force the natives to accept it. The entire project would never have gotten off the ground without the British colonial power’s overriding interest in possessing a “land bridge,” including the newly created sea route between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and without its military successes against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War – and without its calculation that a settler population with a European-citizen character dependent on it in a hot spot of its strategic interests would be advantageous for it. The most important interim result was the promise, which became famous as the “Balfour Declaration,” that Great Britain would promote the project of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine; this was laid down at the end of 1917 in a letter from the British Foreign Secretary to the British Zionist leader Baron Rothschild and renewed in 1922 in the League of Nations mandate for Great Britain to administer the “liberated” Arab southern provinces of the shattered Turkish empire – this was the honorary title under international law for Great Britain’s colonial rule over the region. From the very beginning, the Zionist side accused Great Britain of lacking commitment to the realization of this “duty,” which the government had taken upon itself by paying homage to every Zionist ideal of state and nationhood, including the idea of a historically ancestral, internationally respectable Jewish legal title to the possession of Palestine. In fact, Great Britain never let the Zionist cause cost even a fraction of what Israel’s upkeep is worth to the USA today. However, the complaints, for example about a lack of British support payments, testify more to the wide-ranging claims for which Zionism hoped to benefit from Britain’s colonialist calculations, and completely overlook the considerable freedoms it was granted in Palestine. After all, unlike under Turkish rule, land could be bought on a large scale for Jewish settlements; as a rule, not from self-sufficient local farmers, but from large landowners, with the result that the local tenants were deprived of their livelihoods. The forcibly enforced principle of “Jewish labor” was also tolerated, by which the Arabs were also denied wage labor on the purchased land, as well as on the older plantations, which had always employed Arab workers, and largely also in the non-agrarian Jewish businesses. Conversely, such companies competed with the sparse Arab commerce; the repeated Arab calls to boycott Jewish goods and businesses testify to how successful this was. Thus, to the detriment of the locals, an exclusively Jewish society with a superior economy thanks to foreign subsidies spread in Palestine, which practically reduced the Arabs to a marginalized group in the country, even at a time when they still made up the vast majority of the population. Their resistance in the form of desperate attacks against Jewish settlements by tenant farmers who had been made destitute, as well as mostly rather amateurish acts of violence against facilities and personnel of the British Mandate which were intended to persuade them to stop or at least restrict Jewish immigration, was broken with police violence; it was only during the Second World War that the British government imposed some restrictions in order to stabilize the loyalty of the semi-autonomous Arab neighbor states in the fight against Germany, which was temporarily victorious in North Africa. But what was even more important than the brutal actions of the British colonial police themselves: they recruited a Jewish auxiliary force from the “Yishuv” and in addition, contrary to all applicable regulations which were always punctually applied against Arab irregulars, the Jewish settlers were allowed to arm their villages into veritable fortresses and to build up an armed militia, which was even trained and equipped by the British armed forces to suppress the Arab uprising from 1936 to 1939. Under such British custody and assistance, the community of nationalist-minded activists of a future “Eretz Yisrael,” exported to Palestine and subsidized, developed into an armed national population which, with the growing number of compatriots and increasing economic and military superiority over the Arab majority, lacked only one thing: national sovereignty.

With this claim, the Zionist leaders and their work were no longer functional for the strategic calculations of the British Empire, which was at war with Germany and then fighting to save its colonial possessions; so the violent competition with the British Mandate authority for political sovereignty over the country could not be held off. The calculated compliance of the British with Arab demands for a halt to the Judaization of Palestine coincided with the Nazi genocide of the European Jews and the irrefutable need to create places of refuge for refugees, which in turn was exploited with just as much calculation by the Zionists to expand the supply of Jewish settlers; this became the occasion and the continuing moral seal of approval of the anti-British terrorism with which the most fanatical factions in the “Yishuv” – most energetically, the “Irgun” commanded by Menachem Begin – and later the official Zionist underground army “Haganah” took up the fight for political autonomy. Great Britain led its defensive campaign with only moderate focus; and by abandoning it three years after the end of the war, declaring its mandate over Palestine to be over, not even giving any pro forma legal, let alone any practically binding force to the UN’s charming partition recommendations, and withdrawing its troops without settling the dispute between the Zionist quasi-nation and the increasingly displaced, politically disorganized Arabs in the country, it did the Zionist state project its last, if perhaps not intended, service. Sovereignty over Palestine was thus exposed as the price for the fastest and most forceful seizure by the armed competitors; and the political and military leadership of the “Yishuv,” still under British colonial sovereignty and with massive foreign aid, had made the best possible provisions for precisely this eventuality.

The Jewish army linked the assumption of sovereign rule over the Mandate areas that had been transferred to it, up to armistice lines that had been postponed several times, with the final clarification of the ethnic majority in the country. Of the approximately one million Arab inhabitants of lands that had been turned into Israeli territory, only around 160,000 remained at the end of 1948. One of the pettiest moralisms in Israeli historiography is the burning question of whether this exodus is to be regarded as an “expulsion” or whether it was the result of Arab atrocity propaganda. Even atrocity propaganda must first be believed; the Arab refugees must have realized from their experiences with Jewish society that a sovereign Jewish state would by no means make life easy for them. It cannot be said that the Arab mass exodus was not extremely convenient for the new state leadership; after all, the Jews were explicitly intended to be the people of the Zionist state project. The generous appeal of the Israeli Declaration of Independence to the Arabs in the country to show solidarity “in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us,” which is often cited as a moral justification for the new government, erases nothing from the distinction between a state-forming majority and a tolerated minority of quasi-foreigners under Jewish rule, but officially clarifies who is the subject of the action and who is the addressee of sovereign “generosity.” In any case, “lebensraum” was created for the Jewish “people” – one year later, the amount of land in Zionist hands had doubled, two years later tripled, mainly by moving in to abandoned properties in return for symbolic compensation to the “untraceable” ex-owners. Jewish people poured in in large numbers, almost one million in the following five years, more than in the previous half century since the beginning of the Zionist immigration movement. And above all: a sovereign Jewish state authority was finally constituted as the trustee of the people and their lebensraum.

4.

Zionism was thus basically at its goal and at its endpoint; what has been pending since then is its reversion to a “normal” national ideology, by means of which an effectively governed, submissive state people imagines the undertakings of its rule as a historical mission, the ruthless fulfillment of which does credit to the human material used for it. But this is precisely what Zionism does not want to be: merely the state ideology of Israel; and the Israeli state itself could hardly afford it. On the one hand, the available state population was simply too small as a basis and material for the power that Israel wanted to represent and, after the successful expulsion of several hundred thousand Arabs, had to possess in order to assert itself; and because Israel’s imperialist ambitions have also increased with the growth of its population and state power, this is still the case. Today, the entire considerable area of “Judea and Samaria” still needs to be settled by Jews and brought under the permanent control of a Jewish majority. In this respect, the founding of the state through the use of the Jewish “people,” including those not yet residing in Israel, as the most important means of violence, has not been concluded to this day. It was and is therefore far more than an ideological fiction when Israel declares itself to be the state of all Jews in the sense of the old Zionist ideal – even if it is certain that the majority of this “people” will surely never leave the USA. This fiction is practically realized in the immigration regulations which were enacted as the “Law of Return” immediately after the proclamation of the sovereign state; as the first and, to a certain extent, basic law of the nation. According to this law, every Jew may consider himself a latent citizen of Israel who can collect his passport and right of residence at any time. In this respect, the relationship between the state power and the people – as the collective of subjects – is still upside down; with the consequence, which has always been ironically appreciated by witty Jews, that the Israeli immigration authorities inherited a burning question from Hitler’s racial theories: Who is a Jew? The answer has been entrusted to the national Chief Rabbinate, which enforces the entire personal status law anyway (according to the best Talmudic and halachic tradition, it is generally: the son of a Jewish mother!) Although this allocation of authority is not compatible with the secular normality and ideological neutrality that Israel claims for itself as a bourgeois state, it is only logical. After all, the practiced fiction of a Jewish people, separate from and logically prior to the actual Jewish state, can’t have any other criterion than the idea of a special Jewish national tradition carried out in private life or, conversely, the verifiable adoption of ethnic habits of life that do not grow out the everyday misery of a national class society, but rather recreate, in living images, so to speak, the forms of a long-lost folk life that has been glorified into an imaginary theocracy. Of course, in such interesting questions as: Can the son of a Jewish father, but an undoubtedly non-Jewish mother who nevertheless professes Judaism and practices everything prescribed, be considered a Jew? And what about the son of Jewish parents who has entered the service of the Roman Pope as a Jesuit, but still wants to be an Israeli? – there is nothing that the Israeli Chief Rabbinate has not already figured out. But this shouldn’t be mocked by loyal citizens who, as good patriots, somehow adhere to this ridiculous idealism when it comes to their own nationality: that ancestry, language, national history and the like make a person, for example, a German, even prior to being a citizen of a state, who thus have the indispensable privilege of being permitted to obey German authorities and no others.

The need to constantly recruit new citizens en masse – namely in order to maintain and strengthen the state power necessary to secure “living space” in “Eretz Yisrael” for the recruited citizens – is therefore one of the practical reasons why Zionism remains valid as a Jewish nationalism that transcends Israel; the other is the economic inability of the state it created to survive. Because the circumstance has by no means ceased with and since the founding of the state, that the Jewish society exported to Palestine, for all its hard work and blinkered self-sacrifice, does not produce as profitably and generate as much surplus as its self-assertion, namely its use as the power base of a state power that dominates the region, requires. It is true that the imperialist powers, especially the USA, are spending billions in subsidies for their Middle Eastern vassals; however, Israel’s great power ambitions and its corresponding financial requirements have grown even faster. Israeli economic life needs the ongoing emergency sacrifice from world Jewry; and the only means of imposing this burden is the Zionist fiction of every Jew being an “actual” citizen of Israel. In the name of this radical national moralism, every Jew who does not immigrate to Israel should be ashamed, and even more so anyone who, after having immigrated, leaves the country again – which is not so easy and, above all, very expensive. And a lot of people must be ashamed because the Jews are not so crazy as to completely abandon all their bourgeois calculations and opportunistic calculus for the sake of their nationalism – and Israel can no longer rely on the effects of “anti-Semitism” either. On the other hand, Israel would not be able to cope without financially powerful “Jews abroad”; the more splendidly they manage to do business as citizens of other capitalist nations and give Zionist handouts to their fellow citizens, the less they need to be accused of neglecting their nationality. The relocation of the “flourishing” Zionist communities in the USA to Israel would be an economic catastrophe: the country needs dollars from them. It would prefer to continue to obtain its human material from Russia.

5.

So Israel remains what it was projected to be and what it set out to be: a resolutely ethnic state that wants to use its violence to benefit the Jews – only the Jews, but all of them – and use them accordingly. The Palestinian Arabs experience the downside of this, and not just the displaced persons, who will soon be the third generation to enjoy the comforts of a Middle Eastern refugee existence. The remaining Arabs do not have to endure pogroms and persecution – quite simply because their decimation has succeeded in demoting them to a marginal group in the country that is irrelevant in every respect. For decades they were under military rule, and some of them are still restricted in their freedom of movement. They are generally not conscripted for the hard three-years of military service – a “privilege” they pay for with a lifelong outsider status; because in Israeli society a discharge certificate from the army has become a prerequisite for jobs as well as for marriage licenses, for attending university as well as for renting an apartment. This means that Arabs do not even have to face the embarrassment of having to compete freely against their Jewish “fellow citizens.” Their own village and urban communities largely fall through the Israeli subsidy system, without which nothing works economically, if only because its blessings are still largely administered and allocated by Zionist agencies and the national organization of the Jewish workforce, the unified “trade union” Histadrut. On the other hand, the “trade union” and all the political parties have gradually “opened up” to the Arabs, granting them places on lists for elections, and thus set out to “integrate” them – with the intention and with the result that only a small Arab minority, which ended up with the anti-Zionist Jewish communists, has even considered a union or politically organizing the remaining Arabs. At this point, Jewish society’s democratic “openness” and “lack of prejudice” has proven to be a way of cementing the economic and political irrelevance of the Arab faction among the Israeli subjects. In short: the state of Israel is not interested in using them, so it does not even need to suppress them in particular.

Only for recent Jewish immigrants, the immigrants from Arab countries, especially the Maghreb, is the exclusion of Israeli Arabs from competition within national society no longer a rather incidental matter of course, a consequence of the desired national character of their state, but the object of special interest and an explicit demand on the government. As a sub-proletariat lacking the civic fanaticism of the founding generation, they are no longer simply looked after by the Zionist organizations, but are compared critically in economic life with the growing Arab minority in the country and claim the primacy of their Jewishness as their – only! – competitive advantage. With “arguments” that could have been taken directly from the West German debate on the “immigrant problem,” namely the hypocritical reverence for the peculiar “ethnic character” of the unwelcome competitors – in this case: the Arabs – the government is committed to the planned maintenance of the pro-Jewish “apartheid” so casually practiced up to now – without any guarantee that this Zionist “social benefit” of state power would actually make life more pleasant for the “beneficiaries”! After all, Zionist ideology here has to record that progress that has been pending since the founding of the state: As a legal title for the demands of subjects on their rule, that it should pay more attention to its real state people and not worry about elements alien to the people, it becomes a boringly normal fascism.