Einstein's Words Against Racist Israel Formation

[aliasghark]

Like most decent and fair-minded people, Dr. Einstein was against the racist establishment of Israel. 

 

 

Einstein on Palestine and Zionism

by Edward C. Corrigan

 

Many Zionists claim Einstein as one of their own. Einstein, however, was a pacifist, a universalist and abhorred nationalism. The evidence of Einstein’s position on Palestine and Zionism is best seen in his own words and actions on the subject. 

• For example Einstein made a presentation to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which was examining the Palestine issue in January 1946 and argued against the creation of a Jewish State. Here is a quote from Einstein’s testimony before Judge Hutcheson, the American Chairman of the Committee:
  

Dr. Einstein to Judge Hutcheson: The state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with many difficulties and narrow-mindedness. I believe it is bad. I am against it 

• Albert Einstein wrote in a letter shortly after the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre and referred to the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin later a Prime Minister of Israel, and the Stern Gang, where Yitzhak Shamir also a future Prime Minister of Israel was a member, as terrorist organizations and refused to support these “misled and criminal people.”2
  
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• Albert Einstein, Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt and twenty-five other prominent Jews, in a letter to the New York Times (December 4, 1948), condemned Menachem Begin’s and Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud party as “fascist” and espousing “an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority.”3
  

To quote one commenter: “Einstein’s opposition to Israel was widely known and reported on during his life. In fact, the myth of Einstein’s support of Israel was born the day after Einstein’s death in his obituary in The New York Times, which shamelessly wrote that he championed the establishment of the Jewish state. This contradicted decades of reporting 

 

It is clear that Albert Einstein did not support political Zionism and opposed a Jewish State based on an ethnic or racial basis. His political views were remarkably consistent and supported universal human rights. He was opposed to war and chauvinistic ethnic nationalism.

 

[SpaceMM-]

Lots of Zionists during the pre creation of Israel, who attended lots of Zionist meetings and councils where pacifists.

Unfortuantly the radicals took over the show.

I like the idea of Zionism, and have some sympathy to Israel but Israel can no longer keep up its racial militarism. Its disliked by the Arabs, and by most left wing andnsone right wing circles in Israel

[aliasghark]

As was Mahatma Gandhi: 

 

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French." 

 

 

Gandhi's major statement on the Palestine and the Jewish question came forth in his widely circulated editorial in the Harijan of 11 November 1938, a time when intense struggle between the Palestinian Arabs and the immigrant Jews had been on the anvil in Palestine. His views came in the context of severe pressure on him, especially from the Zionist quarters, to issue a statement on the problem. Therefore, he started his piece by saying that his sympathies are all with the Jews, who as a people were subjected to inhuman treatment and persecution for a long time.

 

"But", Gandhi asserted, "My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and in the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after their return to Palestine. Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?"

 

He thus questioned the very foundational logic of political Zionism. Gandhi rejected the idea of a Jewish State in the Promised Land by pointing out that the "Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract." The Zionists, after embarking upon a policy of colonization of Palestine and after getting British recognition through the Balfour Declaration of 1917 for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jews," tried to elicit maximum international support. The Jewish leaders were keen to get an approval for Zionism from Gandhi as his international fame as the leader of a non-violent national struggle against imperialism would provide great impetus for the Jewish cause. But his position was one of total disapproval of the Zionist project both for political and religious reasons. He was against the attempts of the British mandatory Government in Palestine toeing the Zionist line of imposing itself on the Palestinians in the name of establishing a Jewish national home. Gandhi's Harijan editorial is an emphatic assertion of the rights of the Arabs in Palestine. The following oft-quoted lines exemplify his position: "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home."

 

Gandhi's response to Zionism and the Palestine question contains different layers of meaning, ranging from an ethical position to political realism. What is interesting is that Gandhi, who firmly believed in the inseparability of religion and politics, had been consistently and vehemently rejecting the cultural and religious nationalism of the Zionists.

 

What follows then is that he was not for religion functioning as a political ideology; rather, he wanted religion to provide an ethical dimension to nation-State politics. Such a difference was vital as far as Gandhi was concerned. A uni-religious justification for claiming a nation-State, as in the case of Zionism, did not appeal to him in any substantial sense.

[Yoel]

Most inhabitants of Israel are actually Arabs. Besides the official Arabic minority, about 3 millions of the Israeli Jews came from North Africa, Iraq and other Arabic countries. The traditional language of their grandfathers were various Arabic dialects and their culture was thoroughly Arabic. In every practical sense, they are Arabs who confess Judaic religion, though most of them are brainwashed by Zionism and don't realize this simple historical fact.

 

Rabbi Aharon Roth, a famous anti-Zionist rabbi, believed that Oriental Jews should continue speaking their local Arabic dialects and not Hebrew. It could be an interesting plot for an alternative history book. If Einstein's variety of soft-core bi-national Zionism would prevail, Palestine could actually be, instead of the current bloody mess, a primarily Arabic country with special provisions for people who practice both Islam and Judaism.

 

 

As was Mahatma Gandhi: 

 

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French." 

 

[aliasghark]