Religious and Historical Precepts of Zionism
by: Roger Garaudy
July - August
1977
The Link - Volume 10, Issue 3
Reprinted from Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter 1977.
Let us first of all recall the fundamental aims of Zionism as they have been expressed by its most prominent exponents.
Ben-Gurion, in 1963, announced what he called the “Third Kingdom of Israel.” (The first kingdom was that of King David, the second was created in 167 B.C., after the Revolt of the Maccabees against the successors of Alexander.) In 1954, in the introduction to The History of the Haganah, published by the World Zionist Organization, he wrote: “At the present time we speak of colonization, and only of colonization. It is our short term objective. But it is clear that England belongs to the English, Egypt to the Egyptians and Judea to the Jews. In our country there is room only for Jews. We will say to the Arabs: ‘Move over’; if they are not in agreement, if they resist, we will push them by force.”
This guiding idea has not ceased to inspire the territorial pretensions of Israeli leaders. In August 1967 General Moshe Dayan proclaimed: “If one possesses the Bible, if one considers oneself as the people of the Bible, one should also possess the biblical lands, those of the Judges and the Patriarchs of Jerusalem, of Hebron, of Jericho and other places as well. I do not thereby set forth a political programme but, what is more important, the means of realizing the ancestral dream of a people. The foreigner must understand that, aside from all the strategic importance for Israel of the Sinai, of the Golan Heights to the Straits of Tiran, and of the mountains to the west of Jordan, these regions are situated at the heart of the Jewish history.”1
The leader of the Israeli right, Menahem Begin, fights for what he calls “the great Israel,” which would include all of the area controlled three thousand years ago by Kings David and Solomon.
What Supports This Zionist Ideology?
1. First, Zionist ideology is supported by a religious argument: that of the Covenant of Yahweh with the Jewish people, making the Jewish people “the chosen people.”
The text on which the Zionists base themselves is that of the giving of Canaan to Abraham (Genesis 17:8): “I will give in perpetual possession, to you and to your descendants after you, the country of your wanderings, the entire land of Canaan.” But this interpretation of the Bible, which consists of isolating a text from the whole of biblical texts and from their historical context, reveals a tribal conception of religion. At the time of Abraham the Covenant was in fact conceived on the model of social relations of the period throughout the Near East: a tribe made alliance with a master, promising him obedience in exchange for his protection. This pact was sealed, as the Bible recalls, by immolating animals in a bloody sacrifice! And circumcision is the sign of this alliance (Genesis 17:10).
Interpreting the alliance in this manner is to retain only the exterior, literal, and most archaic aspects of the biblical texts in order to discriminate between the elect and the excluded. But the essential point of Abraham’s legacy, that of the great prophets of Israel and later of the New Testament and of the Qur’an, is precisely a universalist conception which goes beyond the distinction of elect and excluded. Lacking this, as the great Jewish sociologist Georges Friedman noted on his return from Israel, there can be no religious, theological renewal in Israel since Judaism is cut off from its “living roots” and “isolated in the bosom of a total nationalism.”
The result of this “sclerosis of the religious establishment” has grave political consequences: it ends by giving a religious legitimacy to nationalism. It is with arguments of this sort that some Christians justified anti-Semitism by accusing the Jews of being responsible for the death of Christ.
Whereas already in the Torah and with the Prophets, this sectarianism is transcended, Deuteronomy (10:16) and the Prophet Jeremiah (4:4) speak of “circumcision of the heart,” that is to say, the interior transformation of man by God’s presence in him and not by simple ritual observance.
Christianity, in proclaiming the “New Covenant,” that is, the individual’s personal relationship with God, goes beyond this ritualism. The apostle Paul, who was born a Jew, says clearly: “For he who is in Jesus Christ, neither circumcision or lack of circumcision is effective, but faith acting through love” (Epistle to the Galatians 5:6). It is not the rite but union with God which purifies hearts. St. Paul says again (Galatians 3:8): “Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the pagans, announced in advance to Abraham: All nations shall be blessed in you.” (Genesis 12:3)
It is in the name of this universalism which excludes all racism that he concludes: “There no longer exist either Greeks, or Jews, or slaves, or free men” (Galatians 3:28).
The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (8 and 9) breaks radically with the pretensions to exclusivity of the chosen people: God belongs to all peoples.
The Qur’an, also heir to the Abrahamic tradition, is inspired by the same universalism and the same spiritual interiority in its interpretation of the covenant. It is an alliance open to all who act according to the spirit of God: “After the Lord had tried Abraham, He said: I am going to make you a guide for all men. Abraham replied: And for my posterity also. The Lord said: My covenant will not extend to the wrong doers” (Sura 2:124). Therefore, it is not a question of an alliance according to blood but rather of a pact of the heart. “The most noble among you in Allah’s eyes,” says the Prophet, “is the most pious” (Sura 49:13).
It took the barbarism of Hitler to make circumcision the sign of race and to massacre the Jews. It is in the name of this racism that the Nazi laws of Nuremberg defined a Jew as anyone born of a Jewish mother. Haim Cohen, judge of the Supreme Court of Israel, notes: “The bitter irony of fate has decreed that the same biological and racist arguments extended by the Nazis, and which inspired the inflammatory laws of Nuremberg, serve as the basis for the official definition of Jewishness in the bosom of the State of Israel.”2
It is in the name of this racial exclusiveness of the transmission of Jewishness by the mother that, since the creation of the State of Israel, only three Jews have married Arab women.
As for the pretension of drawing from the Bible a limited theocracy, in the manner of the Policy Drawn from Holy Scripture by Bossuet, to justify the “divine right” of kings, Israeli leaders should remember that all over Europe were found Jews to draw up, in opposition to the “divine right,” the universal declaration of the rights of man. It is in the twentieth century a criminal aberration to shut oneself in on oneself in order to claim the “divine right” of a chosen people.
2. Just as the religious foundation of Zionism implies a tribal conception of religion, so the claim of the “historical rights” of the Jews to Palestine rests on a historical hoax and falsification. The country which the Bible calls Canaan and which, since the Romans, has been called Palestine (the country of the Philistines), is part of the Fertile Crescent which stretches from the Euphrates to the Nile, a historic thoroughfare allowing the mingling of innumerable peoples. When the tribes of Abraham coming from Ur in Mesopotamia in the twelfth century B.C. established themselves in Canaan, they did not arrive in a desert and were not the first occupants of this land. The Amorites had arrived there 800 years earlier, the Aramaeans in the twelfth century B.C. and, soon thereafter, the Philistines settled on the coast. It was only through war that David, near the year 1000, drove back the Philistines and the Aramaeans.
The country became an Assyrian province in the eighth century B.C., and later a Roman, a Persian, and an Ottoman province before passing into the hands of English colonialism.
By what historical manipulation can we remember from this long history only certain episodes: the migration, among so many others, of Abraham; the kingdom, among many others, of David; or the revolt, among many others, of the Maccabees?
This exclusivism is as lacking in foundation as if the Bretons, descendants of the Celts who installed themselves in the territory known today as France (at the time when Abraham emigrated to Canaan), pretended that France belonged to them by historical right.
It is, however, this historical myth which is inculcated into young Israelis from early schooling. In Israeli history books the only episodes in the history of the country which have any importance are those which concern the Jews. These children are conditioned by the fact that, according to the teaching which they have received, nothing has happened in Palestine from the last revolt of Bar Kochba in the first century and the destruction of the Temple until Herzl and the birth of Zionism—neither the passage of Islam, or the Crusades, nor the Mongol invasion, nor the battle of the Arabs against Ottoman domination. This refusal to admit the existence of anything which is not Jewish in Israel is characteristic of the Zionist spirit. It is its basic principle. When Einstein asked Weizmann: “What will happen to the Arabs if Palestine is given to the Jews?” Weizmann responded: “What Arabs? They are hardly of any consequence.”
It is fitting to recall that in 1882, at the beginning of Zionist immigration to Palestine, there were 25,000 Jews in Palestine among a population of 500,000 inhabitants. On July 18, 1948, when Count Bernadotte came to ask Ben-Gurion at the forum of the United Nations to let the Arabs return to their homeland, Ben-Gurion replied: “We must do everything possible so that they never return.”
3. From this tribal conception of religion and this historical myth evolves the typically colonialist spirit of Zionism, characterized by the denial, on the part of the colonizer, of the rights of others, of the culture of others and of the very existence of others.
A former member of the Knesset, Uri Avneri, wrote: “In Israel there exists a colonial regime as far as Arab populations are concerned.”3 This colonialism inspires Zionism in its theory as well as in its practice, in foreign policy and in domestic policy.
a. One can read from the outset in The Jewish State by Herzl, founder of Zionist theory, that the Jewish state, in Palestine, “should form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”4—which is the characteristic pretext of all colonial adventures. This idea evidently captivated colonialists of all persuasions who did not cease, from then on, to make common cause with the state of Israel. Starting in 1925 Lord Wedgwood put forth the idea of creating a Jewish state as the seventh dominion of the British Commonwealth. “This Commonwealth of emigrants,” reports Koestler, “would have become the beachhead of European democracy in Lebanon” and it would be possible “in Palestine, in the midst of a friendly European population, to establish a solid base which would have commanded the approaches to the Levant and the Suez Canal.” It was in this spirit that the “Balfour Declaration” of November 1, 1917 was conceived: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this....” England was at that time the greatest colonial power in the world. Koestler succinctly defines the colonialist origin of the idea of the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. “It is a document,” he writes, “by which one nation solemnly promises to a second nation the country of a third nation.”5 In fact it is thus that colonialists act everywhere, disposing of peoples without consulting them.
b. The foreign policy of alliance with all forms of imperialism and colonialism is a constant of Zionism and of the leaders of Israel.
As far back as 1890, Theodor Herzl was seeking the protection of Bismarck. In 1898 he proposed to William II (although an anti-Semite) the creation of a Jewish state that would be, in his words, “an outpost of Germanic culture and interests.”
The Zionists have always sought the alliance of a foreign power whose interests are opposed to those of the Arab peoples. In the twenties, in all clashes between the two communities arising from immigration, the Jews invariably sided with the English against the Arabs. On the other hand, in 1940, while the war against Hitler was raging, Abraham Stern created the secret organization of the Irgun for use against the English. After the war, since the United States emerged as the most powerful imperialist state, Zionism found its principal ally; Truman was a partisan of unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine. In 1956, when the French government, incapable of comprehending that the Algerian national movement was the expression of a people’s deepest desire, pretended that this movement was manipulated from Cairo, Israel associated itself with it and with the English to organize the expedition against the Suez Canal.
The same colonialist spirit led Israel to vote at the United Nations against the independence of African peoples, to link itself with Portugal, the oppressor of Angola and Mozambique, with the puppets of South Vietnam against the Vietnamese people, and with the racist states of southern Africa.
4. The same colonialist spirit controls the domestic policy of the State of Israel: even among Jews there exists discrimination between those who come from Europe and America—the Ashkenazi Jews—and those who come from non-Western countries of the Orient or North Africa—the Sephardic Jews. Two-thirds of unskilled workers are non-Western Jews. Although they constitute 50 percent of the population they have only 20 out of 120 deputies in the Knesset.
But discrimination is even more flagrant with respect to the Arabs. Even before the 1967 war, Arabs held only 2 percent of administrative and subordinate posts. Not a single Arab was a judge or a minister, and there were only seven Arab deputies in the Knesset. Even in the private sector, Arabs, who now constitute 13 percent of the population, have a mere 4 percent representation in universities, banks and offices. The majority of the Arabs are employed as agricultural or construction workers.
Colonialist policy with regard to the Arabs expresses itself above all in the three fundamental orientations of domestic policy: Jewish land, Jewish labour and Jewish culture.
a. Like all colonialism, Zionism began by the acquisition of territory. First by violence, in 1948 when Israel was born out of war, then by methods of plunder, which are the same type as those of colonialism.
For example, the Israeli army conducted a reign of terror, massacring entire villages—men, women, and children—as in Deir Yassin (the nights of April 9 and 10, 1947), Jerusalem, Jaffa, Lydda, and Ramleh, on which fell fire and steel. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families had to flee to escape death. Israeli leaders then issued an “Emergency Decree on the Property of Absent Persons” in 1948.6 Considered “absent” was any Palestinian who had left his domicile before August 1, 1948.
It was in this way that two-thirds of the land possessed by Arabs (70,000 hectares out of 110,000) was confiscated. When in 1953 the law on landed property was promulgated, the indemnity was based on the value of the land in 1950, but in the meantime the Israeli pound had lost five times its value.
Since the beginning of Jewish immigration, again in the purest colonial style, lands were bought from feudal non-resident property owners, effendis. The impoverished peasants, the fellahs, were forced from the land which they were cultivating by these arrangements made without them between their former masters and the new arrivals. Deprived of their land, they could do nothing but flee.
The pretext often invoked by Zionists is that the lands thus occupied by them were waste lands or badly cultivated, as though they were arriving on a desert. But this neglects the fact that the Arabs lived in a colonial situation: their wealth was confiscated by Western colonial countries (France and England), and they were kept, like all colonized peoples, illiterate. On the other hand, the Western Jews who were arriving were a party to a culture equal to that of the colonizers, and a flow of money coming from Europe and America to equip them brought into play agricultural techniques having nothing in common with those of the fellah, who had been reduced to misery by the colonial regime. From 1967 to 1971 the Jews of the Diaspora sent to Israel $1,200,000,000.
The State of Israel took the place of the former colonialists, and used the same discriminatory practices. For example, agricultural assistance permitting irrigation was distributed in such a way that Jewish farmers were systematically favoured. Between 1948 and 1969 the area of irrigated lands for the Jewish sector increased from 29,000 to 164,000 hectares, and for the Arab sector, from 800 to 4,100 hectares. Thus the colonial system was perpetuated and even aggravated. Henry Rosenfeld, who has done extensive research on Arab villages, admits that Arab agriculture was more prosperous during the British Mandate than it is today.7
b. After the Zionist watch-word “Jewish land,” that of “Jewish labour” is not less murderous. Zionism, from the beginning, had no intention of giving work to anyone but Jews. In fact, the all-powerful unions of the “General Federation of Hebrew Workers in Eretz Israel” (Histadrut) for a long time did not admit Arab workers to its ranks. When the word “Hebrew” was eliminated from the federation title in 1966, Ben-Gurion protested. This also holds true for the Labour party in Israel, which, openly and officially, accepts only Jews and rejects non-Jews, goyim.
Israeli leaders maintain that since 1967 there has been a decrease in unemployment among Palestinian Arabs. It is true that after continued discrimination directed against them, 50,000 Arabs now work in Israeli enterprises. But there again the conditions are those of all colonized peoples: for equal qualifications, the differences are between 30 and 50 percent, depending on whether the worker is Jewish or Arab.
Let us add that segregation expresses itself also in housing policies. The President of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, Dr. Israel Shahak, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reports that there exist in Israel entire towns (Carmel, Nazareth-Illith, Hatzor, Arad, Mitzpeh-Raman, and others) where the law formally prohibits non-Jews to reside.8
c. The same spirit of colonialism reigns at the cultural level. One could not define it better than did Mr. Uri Jubrani, Special Counsellor for Arab Affairs to the Prime Minister of Israel: “Undoubtedly, it would be better if there were no Arab students, but there are things which are not within our control. We cannot avoid them, and we must see how to minimize the inconveniences.”
Arab culture and its history are passed over in silence just as in colonialist England or France. It is significant that in this country, all of whose neighbors are Arabs, only 4 percent of lycee students present Arabic as a second language at the baccalaureate level. It is a question, with regard to the Palestinians, of making even the memory of their culture and history disappear. Young Palestinian Arabs must study Jewish history more than their own. Six times as many hours are devoted to study of the Bible than of the Qur’an.
The general effect of this colonialist and racist policy, founded on the principles of Jewish land, Jewish labour and Jewish culture, was accurately defined by General Moshe Dayan in 1967. Questioned on the capacity of Israel to absorb the Arab population in the prospect of an Israeli annexation of occupied territories, Dayan hid nothing when he said: “Economically we can do it. But I think this would not fit in with our future plans. The result would not be a Jewish state but a bi-national state, an Arab-Jewish state. What we seek is a Jewish state.”
This in effect is the only limit to the territorial ambitions of the Israeli leaders. The birth rate being 22 percent for the Jews and 44 percent for the Arabs, Mrs. Golda Meir declares that she sometimes has nightmares when she thinks of “the birth of Palestinian children.”
Zionism necessarily commits Israel to expansion. If the thirteen million Jews who exist in the world came to Israel at the call of the Zionists, the problem of “the vital space” of Israel would acutely present itself. Zionist mythology prevents Israel from being a national state similar to others.
In actuality only an infinitesimal minority of those who settle in Israel come to achieve “the promise.” The law of return has played an eminent role in all the domains of culture, science and the arts. It would be distressing if Zionism attained the goal aimed at by anti-Semites: uprooting Jews from their respective homelands to shut them up in a world ghetto. The example of French Jews is significant: after the Evian Agreements of 1962 and the liberation of Algeria, only 20,000 went to Israel and 110,000 went to France. This movement was not the result of an anti-Semitic persecution, for the proportion of non-Jewish settlers of Algeria leaving Algeria was the same. The reason for this departure was not anti-Semitism but former French colonialism. The French Jews of Algeria met the same fate as the other French in Algeria.
The quasi-totality of Jewish immigrants in Israel came to escape anti-Semitic persecution. In 1880 there were 25,000 Jews in Palestine out of a population of 500,000. In 1882 began the massive immigration following the great pogroms of Czarist Russia. From 1882 to 1917, 50,000 Jews came to Palestine in this way. Then, between the two wars, Polish and North African immigrants came fleeing persecution. But the most significant numbers came from Germany because of Hitler’s ignoble anti-Semitism; nearly 400,000 Jews arrived in this way in Palestine before 1945. In 1947, on the eve of the creation of the State of Israel, there were 600,000 Jews in Palestine out of a total population of 1,250,000.
Then the methodical uprooting of Palestinians began. Before the 1948 war around 650,000 Arabs lived in the territories which were to become the State of Israel. In 1949, there remained 160,000. Because of the high birth rate their descendants were 450,000 at the end of 1970. The Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights reveals that from June 11, 1967 to November 15, 1969, more than 20,000 Arab homes in Gaza and the West Bank were dynamited, displacing their residents.
This means that Zionism imposed on the Palestinians the same tragic fate suffered by the Jewish victims of criminal pogroms.
I wish to state clearly that it is just that persecuted men, as the Jews formerly were...notably in Russia, in Poland, and in Germany, should have a land of refuge and a homeland. But why should the Palestinian people pay for the crimes of Hitler and the Czars, the crimes of racism and anti-Semitism of the entire world, crimes for which the Palestinian people have no responsibility?
The founder of Zionism himself, Theodor Herzl, foresaw several alternative solutions to Palestine (all inspired by the same colonial spirit): the implantation of Jews into Argentina, Uganda or Cyprus, that is, on territories dominated by imperialism.
On the morrow of World War II, after the Nazis had savagely massacred six million Jews, it would have been normal that, in reparation, one of the territories of the Federal Republic be allotted to the Jews as a land of refuge.
The misfortune of the State of Israel is that it was created by the great colonial powers and according to colonialist principles. Whereas in 1947 the Jews possessed around 6 percent of the land, the proposal of partition made by the Western powers awarded them 54 percent and, by a war of terror and violence, the Zionists in point of fact occupied 81 percent.
So great an injustice towards the Palestinians, driven from their land and dispersed, is the source of all the succeeding conflicts. The injustice was aggravated more when, in June 1967, without a declaration of war, the Israeli Air Force attacked the Egyptian Air Force on the ground, this imitating the method employed by the fascist Japanese when they destroyed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
Since that time the Zionist leaders of Israel have never respected the decisions or the appeals put forth by the United Nations. They continue their occupation of Palestinian lands which they took over after the June 1967 war.
What are, since that time, the possible solutions of this permanent conflict which is one of the aftermaths of colonialism?
Yasser Arafat, at the United Nations on November 13, 1974, posed the problem clearly when he recalled the position of the PLO:
...our revolution has not been motivated by racial or religious factors. Its target has never been the Jew, as a person, but racist Zionism and aggression...We are struggling so that Jews, Christians and Muslims may live in equality...free from racial or religious discrimination.
We distinguish between Judaism and Zionism. While we maintain our opposition to the colonialist Zionist movement, we respect the Jewish faith.9
It is only in this spirit that the Palestinian problem can be resolved: by putting an end to all the outward tactics of imperialism and by recognizing the right of all to self-determination and the right to return to their lands. This return to their lands is not claimed by the Palestinians in the name of alleged “historical rights” which would go back millennia, but in the name of actual simple justice for the right of working on the land which has been taken away from them and for the right of not being strangers in their own land.
Without any doubt the road to be traveled will be long. It does not pass through the enslavement of the Palestinians or the destruction of Israel.
“For many years now,” said Yasser Arafat, “our people have been exposed to the ravages of war, destruction and dispersion...They have borne the burdens of occupation, dispersion, eviction and terror more than any other people. And all this has made our people neither vindictive nor vengeful, nor caused us to resort to the racism of our enemies...We deplore all the open and veiled discrimination suffered by them because of their faith.”10 It is on this basis that, as the PLO has proposed since 1967, a secular democratic state can be created where Jews and Arabs would be citizens with equal rights and duties.
In order for this self-determination to become possible, several preliminary conditions are necessary:
Israeli leaders must end the occupation of the territories which they seized in 1967, as the United Nations has consistently demanded. There will be no peaceful solution of the problem as long as Israeli leaders follow a Zionist policy which commits them to expansion and prevents them from being a national state like the others. Zionism is Israel’s worst enemy. By making Israel a Western enclave in the Middle East, by preventing it from integrating into the body of peoples of the Middle East, Zionism condemns Israel to the situation of the Christian Crusaders eight centuries ago.
In September 1967, General Yitzhak Rabin, then Commander-in-Chief of the Israeli army, compared the Zionist situation to that of the Crusades. Zionism seeks a religious justification. Like the Crusades, Zionism refuses to integrate itself with the local population and relies only on military superiority. Like the Crusades, Zionism depends on a permanent flow of capital from the West in the form of donations, armaments and pilgrimage taxes. But that enterprise ended in a terrible reversal: after having fought for eight generations, following the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, the Western Crusaders were thrown defeated back into the sea.
The Israeli people should meditate on this historical experience and realize that Zionism is leading for the short term, to a permanent state of war, and for the long term, to total failure.
On the contrary, an Israeli people aware of the ill effects of the colonialist ideology of Zionism could establish a society that would no longer be an archaic theocracy, but a tolerant secular society, and above all, integrated into the ensemble of the Middle East rather than existing simply as a Western enclave.
The Palestinian problem is not a problem of borders. It is not a problem of race. It is not a problem of religion. It is not a problem of “historical rights.” No one in the world has a so-called privileged “historical right,” always founded on myth, whether it be “the white man’s burden” with its self-styled “civilizing mission,” sung by Rudyard Kipling, or whether it be the myth of “the Aryan race” as the chosen race, utilized by Hitler to justify such claims, or whether it be Zionist ideology, murderous for the Palestinians and deadly for the Israelis. The Palestinian problem is a political and social problem. The key to it is recognition of the right to self-determination for all. The theory of “historical rights” would inevitably lead to the constant readjustment of the world map by means of gunfire.
Africa’s example merits consideration. Without any doubt the actual borders of most of the African states are the heritage of the colonialists, who, at the Congress of Berlin in 1885, arbitrarily carved up Africa according to their exclusive interests. After independence, the African heads of state had the wisdom, however, not to call into question again the issue of these borders. Africa would have been plunged into chaos if, in the name of “historical rights,” they had wished to resurrect, for example, the Mandingo Empire or that of the Songhai, or the Peuhls hegemonies. This wisdom is but a first stage toward the creation of a real African unity which would be based not on “historical rights,” that is, on the past, but on forms of inter-African cooperation responding to the needs of the people for the future.
Against all racial, religious, or cultural exclusivism disguised as “historical rights” only one thing will permit the attainment of a solution: a universal concern for the other man, the man different from me, as a part of myself, and who alone can make of me a complete man. As Marx said, “A people who oppresses another cannot be a free people.”
Yasser Arafat has constantly emphasized that the Palestinians are not inspired by racism or by violence but by the desire to end exclusivism and to obtain for all the rights to self-determination. It is only in this manner that a future with a human countenance can be built in Palestine and elsewhere in the world.
Roger Garaudy, educator, writer and philosopher, is a prominent member of the French left. He has written extensively in the area of Marxist thought.
NOTES
1. Jerusalem Post, August 10, 1967, P. 1.
2. Joseph Badi, Fundamental Laws of the State of Israel (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), p. 156.
3. Haolem Hazeh, August 7, 1954.
4. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (London: Central Office of the Zionist Organization, 1934), p. 30.
5. Arthur Koestler, Promise and Fulfillment (London: McMillan and Co., 1949), p. 4.
6. This “decree” became law in 1950.
7. See Henry Rosenfeld, Arab Migrant Workers (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1970).
8. Israel Shahak, Le Racism d’etat d’Israel (Paris: Authier, 1975), p. 57.
9. Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. IV. No. 2, Winter 1975, p. 187.
10. Ibid., p. 190.