If anyone needed proof that Zionism is a form of racism, then the Regulation Bill, passed on 16 November 2016 by the apartheid body also known as the “Israeli Knesset” provided a clear proof. The bill’s title, “The Israel Settlement Regulation Bill,” is a euphemism for what should have been called “The law for regulating the robbery of lands from inhabitants whose mothers are not Jewish.” This legislation enables Jews to lawfully expropriate and transfer to their possession private properties belonging to non-Jews living in occupied Palestine. This law abolishes the Palestinians’ right to own property, just like their other democratic rights – the freedom of expression, the freedom of association, the right to family life, the freedom of movement, and the right to national self-determination in their homeland – have been abolished by the Zionist entity. This legislation, an example of what the late professor Yesha’ayahu Leibovich called Judeo-Nazi measures, was of course passed by a democratic vote, like similar laws passed by the Reichstag some eighty years ago. It happened more than twenty-five years after the United Nations revoked one of its most just resolutions, equating Zionism with racism. General Assembly Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism, was abolished by Resolution 46/86, adopted on December 16, 1991. The United States played a key role in this revocation, with President George H. W. Bush personally introducing the motion.
The Israeli hasbara machine always argues that “the whole world is against us.” This is a propaganda lie that aims to demand greater rights for the settler colony also called “the state of Israel,” established as an extension of white European supremacy on the western shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The United Nations (UN), which is supposed to be guarding world peace, is in effect an institution that aims to divide the fruits of the global theft from the rest of the world between the ruling powers, and to prevent wars between them. The UN has forgiven the Zionist entity for ignoring its Partition Plan and recognized Israel after it occupied half of the territory designated by the Partition Plan for the Palestinian state. It ignored the ethnic cleansing of the native population, overlooked the fact that the Zionist entity’s apartheid regime maintains two separate citizenship categories, and did not revoke its membership in the organization whose mission statement forbids such racist legislation.
Only once in the history of the United Nations, in 1975, did it pass a decidedly anti-Israel resolution: the General Assembly resolution 3379 that equated Zionism with racism. The Resolution was put forward to the General Assembly by the African Union, most of the members of which achieved independence despite the ruling world powers and despite the Zionist entity’s opposition to their liberation for some twenty years. According to Palestinian legal scholar Noura Erakat UN resolution 3379 was drafted and guided by the Palestinian scholar-activist Fayez Sayegh in (“Zionism as a form of racism,” in L. Tatour and R. Lentin (eds.) Race and the Question of Palestine, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025).
Israel cast its UN vote against the liberation of Algeria, Tunisia, Tanganyika, Rwanda-Burundi, Guinea, and the Portuguese colonies. In some cases, Israel had a decisive vote which led to the postponement of the independence of several African states. Most Middle Eastern states, the Soviet bloc, China, and several Asian states joined the African Union’s initiative and in November 1975 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379 that determined that Zionism is a form of racism, and that Israel was collaborating with apartheid South Africa and with the Portuguese colonial regime that was committing atrocities in the countries it was colonizing. Resolution 3379 was well argued, just, and, appropriate; yet it was strange that it did not propel the United Nations to action and led to no sanctions, boycotts, or demands, as was expected by the people who initiated it.
Immediately after the resolution was passed, Israel’s former president Shimon Peres devised a clever strategic move aimed at revoking this important resolution: importing Jews from Ethiopia to Israel. Importing Black Jews as an alibi for the white villa in the brown “jungle” was a brilliant idea, intended to prove, particularly to African and Third World countries, that Israel was not racist, which was why Ethiopian Jews were used as a certificate of integrity. This led to the creation of the heroic stories of “saving” Ethiopia’s Jews, who, it was alleged, no one in Israel wanted until then.
At the end of the 1970s, during the Ethiopian civil war, the Mossad and the IGF imported a few hundred Ethiopian Jews, and in the 1980s and 1990s, Israel initiated several operations to bring Ethiopian Jews to Israel in two major operations: Operation Moses (1984) and Operation Solomon (1991). These operations, facilitated by the Zionist entity and the Jewish Agency, were allegedly designed to “rescue” the Ethiopian Beta Israel community from Ethiopia. At the start of the 1980s, Israel began a mediatized campaign, complete with bombastic statements, intended for African leaders, that Israel does not distinguish between Black and white peoples (as long as they belong to the “Jewish race”). To that effect, Asher Na’im, Israel’s ambassador in Ethiopia during Operation Solomon, stated that “Israel is the only state in the world importing blacks, unchained.”
The Zionist trick worked. Encouraged by the United States, African states were persuaded to change their vote following the pressure exerted by Israel, and on 16 December 1991 the UN revoked the resolution in Resolution 4686. Israel’s motivation to “import blacks” has reversed since, but the Ethiopian Jews who did make it to Israel got to understand what the United Nations decided to deny: that Zionism and its outcome – the state of Israel – are racist in the extreme. In fact, according to Ethiopian community spokesperson and political activist Mazal Bithaur, Ethiopian Jewish migration to Israel did not begin in the 1970s and 1980s with the help of Mossad and the IGF – Ethiopian Jews had migrated to Israel since the 1950s:
“Na’im, Israel’s ambassador during Operation Solomon, was unwilling to admit that Ethiopian Jews have staged a ten years’ struggle to emigrate to Israel… that Israel waited until the last moment, that there was a military coup in Addis Ababa, and that many people would have been murdered had they stayed in Ethiopia. After all this Na’im says, “we brought you not in chains and not as black slaves?” Physically it’s true, but in our minds, it feels like chains and black slaves to this day… Saying “we have not brought blacks in chains” is as racist as it is in the USA. It’s saying we are here despite being black. But it’s a lie. We are here because we are Jewish. What does our color have to do with it?” (M. Bithaur, “Really, thanks for not bringing us here in chains,” HaMakom Hachi Ham Bagehenom, 21 May 2020, https://www.ha-makom.co.il/post-mazal-thanks/)
Zionist racism emanates from two things. The first is the Zionist entity being a settler colony that regards the natives in whose country it settled as an inferior race. We can safely say that in all cases of settler colonialism such as the United States of America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the elimination of the natives was an integral part of the act of settlement. In other words, the process of settler colonialism involves genocide, the aim of which is replacing one nation with another. Up until now, the Zionist genocide, manifested by the ongoing seventy years long ethnic cleansing, was slow and was kept under control. From time to time, we witness genocidal acts in the Gaza Strip, which serve Israel as a laboratory for its armament and security industries, but which have not yet become consistent and permanent.
The second source of Zionist racism is halachic-rabbinic Judaism, which has flourished in this territory that had been stolen from Palestine’s original native inhabitants. The settlers’ need to find justifications for robbing Palestinian lands and eliminating the natives pushes Israeli society towards the comforting world of mythical Judaism. The Jewish identity, initially constructed by socialist Zionist colonists, is upheld by the “Jewish Home” party rabbis, who identify the Palestinians with the biblical people of Amalek. This is what these rabbis have to say about their opponents: “Interesting to see if they leave the work of concentrating the Amalekites in extermination camps to others, or if they decide that exterminating Amalek is no longer relevant” (Y. Etinger, “Who in the religious Zionist camp is planning ‘extermination camps for Amalek’?” Haaretz, 23 January 2011, https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2011-01-23/ty-article/0000017f-ed7b-da6f-a77f-fd7fc8980000). Unsurprisingly, no legal expert or politician, including Mr Netanyahu himself, accused the authors of this horrifying document of incitement to genocide.
The combination of the two sources of Israeli racism produces an explosive and dangerous mixture. The lunatic fringes do not endanger the regime but rather constitute its compass, its oracle. The plethora of anti-democratic laws against the Arab Palestinian population does not constitute fascism as the Zionist left argues, but rather a much more dangerous phenomenon. Indeed, the Jewish racial regime in Israel is becoming a Judeo-Nazi regime. The primordial myths of the sanctity of the soil, the sanctity of Jewish blood, racial supremacy based on the “thou hast chosen us” edict, plus the countless Jewish exponents of building the Temple and destroying Haram al Sharif create growing circles in a society that is undergoing a process of Nazification.
We should note that Zionist racism is also expressed by Israel’s undemocratic emergency legislation. The Zionist regime is indeed the only regime in the world, defining itself as a democracy, that has been based for nearly seventy years on the state of exception. This state of exception that enables the regime to legally revoke any law is the only example in today’s world of the vision of the juridical theorist of the Nazi party, Carl Schmitt. These racist laws are based on the 1945 British Mandate Defense (Emergency) Regulations, that fit the Zionist regime perfectly.
The comparison between Zionist and Nazi principles has both critics and defenders. Perhaps the most shocking example of the link between Nazism and Zionism and the delight with which some Zionist leaders in Germany welcomed Hitler’s rise to power, because they shared his belief in the primacy of “race” and his hostility to the assimilation of the Jews among the “Aryans,” was Rabbi Joachim Prinz. In his book Wir Juden (We the Jews), 15, Dr Prinz, a key German Zionist leader, praised the “German revolution” that had put an end to liberalism, and stated enthusiastically that “The meaning of the German Revolution for the German nation will eventually be clear to those who have created it and formed its image. Its meaning for us must be set forth here: the fortunes of liberalism are lost. The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk”.
Indeed, this would have served as a great guide for organizations such as the anti-miscegenation extreme right Jewish organisation “Lehava.” Prinz’s adherence to Hitler’s views did not prevent him from subsequently migrating to the United States, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Zionist Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir).
Israel’s Zionist left-wing politicians and their followers fear that the above-mentioned racist Regulation Bill that enables the theft of Palestinian lands may lead to international reaction or perhaps even to a renewed UN resolution that Zionism is a form of racism. The radical left, on the other hand, expects the United Nations to sanction Israel and re-adopt the correct definition of the Jewish racial state. However, they need not fear, as previous experience has proven that the real masters of the UN, the imperialist superpowers, regard Israel precisely as Herzl had envisioned it and as what Middle Eastern and African states know it is. Israel constitutes the iron arm of the Western world, a fortress aimed to rule the Arab east, prevent its unity and perpetuate its deprivation. For the time being, there is no substitute for Israel in the imperial world order, because of its huge military might. The Zionist entity’s shift towards religiosity ensures it will continue to serve the Western imperial interests against the region’s nations.
The only campaign that may change the essence of the Israeli regime is an internal campaign of turning the Jewish state into a secular democracy. I have no doubt that the wretched of the Zionist racial state will join in that struggle.
Eli Aminov (1939-2022) was a radical anti-Zionist Israeli socialist activist, a member of Matzpen, the Socialist Organization in Israel. Aminov was one of the signatories of Matzpen’s September 1967 statement that called for the Zionist entity to withdraw from the Palestinian territory it occupied in July 1967, and predicting that “Occupation entails foreign rule, foreign rule entails resistance, resistance entails repression, repression entails terror and counter-terror […] Let us get out of the occupied territories immediately.”1
Aminov, a working-class Mizrahi activist, was a constant critic of the Zionist entity and has published many articles in the Matzpen journal and in several online journals, including Hagada Hasmalit (The Left Bank), Ha’oketz (the Sting) and others. He was a relentless campaigner for one secular democracy in historic Palestine and a member of the Committee for a Secular and Democratic State in Palestine.
This article first appeared in the online Hebrew publication The Left Bank, on 1 December 2016, and was reproduced in His Clear Voice: Eli Aminov(Ofra Yeshua-Lyth, ed., November Books, 2024). It is published with the kind permission of the editor and the publisher. Note that this article reflects Aminov’s views, rather than Matzpen’s views.
Translated from Hebrew by Ronit Lentin.
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