The Consequences of Conflating Religion, Race, Nationality and Citizenship
By Joseph Schechla
Much has been written, forgotten and written again over the past century on the subject of Zionism and Israel’s unique civil status categories and corresponding practices. For a person with a long life and memory, it may be surprising to find that the crucial distinction between nationality and citizenship in Israel is news to so many people concerned with the conflict and problem of Zionism. Understandably for observers not regularly engaged in the conflict, such as human rights treaty body members, the concept has been a revelation.1
Why is this fundamental distinction, with its corresponding terminology, a new frontier for others, including many Palestinians long disadvantaged by the institutionalization and material consequences of that very distinction in practice?
JNF planted trees obscure a flour mill that is among the very few standing remains of the once thriving the viilage of al -Lajjūn
A partial answer may lie in the nature and history of anti-Zionism outside Palestine, which has experienced waves and currents since Jewish nationalism first sprang from its eugenic ―primordial soup‖ in race-obsessed fin-de-siècle Europe.2 The Zionist notion that people of Jewish faith constituted a ―race‖ offended emancipationist Jews first and foremost then. That quintessential premise of Zionist ideology and its colonial movement reverted to a presumed, albeit long-discredited, theory that was popular with Jew haters. They and other racists have always sought, conceptually at first, to assert a convincing distinction of the denigrated group so as to socialize the notion that they (the inferior lot) are not like us (self-acclaimed superior beings). The most ambitious racists have tried to invoke scientific – even genetic – criteria for their arguments.
Monumental thinkers and activists, including the Jewish emancipationist Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), had... [continues]
By Joseph Schechla
Much has been written, forgotten and written again over the past century on the subject of Zionism and Israel’s unique civil status categories and corresponding practices. For a person with a long life and memory, it may be surprising to find that the crucial distinction between nationality and citizenship in Israel is news to so many people concerned with the conflict and problem of Zionism. Understandably for observers not regularly engaged in the conflict, such as human rights treaty body members, the concept has been a revelation.1
Why is this fundamental distinction, with its corresponding terminology, a new frontier for others, including many Palestinians long disadvantaged by the institutionalization and material consequences of that very distinction in practice?
JNF planted trees obscure a flour mill that is among the very few standing remains of the once thriving the viilage of al -Lajjūn
A partial answer may lie in the nature and history of anti-Zionism outside Palestine, which has experienced waves and currents since Jewish nationalism first sprang from its eugenic ―primordial soup‖ in race-obsessed fin-de-siècle Europe.2 The Zionist notion that people of Jewish faith constituted a ―race‖ offended emancipationist Jews first and foremost then. That quintessential premise of Zionist ideology and its colonial movement reverted to a presumed, albeit long-discredited, theory that was popular with Jew haters. They and other racists have always sought, conceptually at first, to assert a convincing distinction of the denigrated group so as to socialize the notion that they (the inferior lot) are not like us (self-acclaimed superior beings). The most ambitious racists have tried to invoke scientific – even genetic – criteria for their arguments.
Monumental thinkers and activists, including the Jewish emancipationist Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), had... [continues]
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