Israeli racism palpable for the oppressed

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran does not have a penchant for linguistic subtlety, the patience for diplomatic niceties or the know-how on being media-savvy.

The man had travelled only once outside his country before he took power four years ago (and that was just for a two-day visit to Iraq) but he has shown an uncanny ability to tell it like it is.

That was exactly what he did last Monday at the opening session of the week-long UN Geneva conference on racism. His remarks prompted several European delegates to walk out soon after he began delivering his speech. (The United States and eight other Western nations had opted to boycott the conference from the outset.)

So what was the brouhaha all about? It was about Ahmadinejad's observation that Israel was a "paragon of racism" and that its political movement, Zionism, "personifies racism".

He added: "Following the Second World War, [the big powers] resorted to making an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish suffering. They sent migrants from Europe and other parts of the world to establish a totally racist government in Palestine. In compensation for the dire consquences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine."

Truth be told, there's nothing original here. This is not just reiteration of a fact of life, hiding in plain view in Palestine, but is a sentiment held by the overwhelming majority of peoples in the Arab world, the Muslim world, the Third World and a not insignificant number of peoples in the Euro-American world.

You don't have to be a scholar in Middle Eastern Studies to know that the take-over by the Zionist movement in 1948 of 80 per cent of Palestine - since time immemorial the historic homeland of another people - and the expulsion to the surrounding countries of the native Palestinians was a racist act, nor do you have to have been an astute observer of current affairs over the last 40 years to know that what Israel has been doing in the other 20 per cent, the West Bank and Gaza, is a classical case of racism taken to its final decimal point.

When you ethnically cleanse the vast expanse of a country of its people "on the pretext of Jewish suffering", then later turn around, two decades later, and occupy whatever remnant of that country is left to its inhabitants, robbing them of their land and resources, subjecting them to the rule of the gun, and treating them as if they were an inferior species of men, that's racism. You want to choose another name for that horrendous practice, go for it. However, racism by any other name is still racism.

Isn't the UN Geneva conference held to deal with the issue of racism in the world - an issue worthy of serious debate at an international forum, since it is hard to think of an idea that has had more destructive consequences, and in whose pursuit millions have been brutalised, enslaved and exterminated?

If Israelis resent being called racist, because of their will-to-power and their drive for lebensraum, then they should stop being racist, and stop electing political leaders who act like racists. For how different are Israeli colonists from American Klansmen, and how different is Avigdor Lieberman from Jorg Haider, the late racist Austrian politician who, unlike his Israeli counterpart, never made it as foreign minister, but remained a lowly governor of Carinthia before his death in October 2008?

Our struggle in Palestine is not directed against Israelis because they are Jews but because they are occupiers who rob and torment us at every turn. And trust me on this one, our struggle there would have been as equally vehement had these people been, say, Dutch Catholic.

To hate someone because of his ethnic, racial or national background is reprehensible. Just as there are countless Arab commentators, including this one, who have identified anti-Semitism as a morally bankrupt ideology, there are equally countless Israeli commentators, including Israel's own New Historians, who have decried their leaders' repression of Palestinians.

The fact is that Israel is not just a racist state. Israel needs to be racist in order to go about its business as an occupier and a "Palestine-denier".

For how could Israelis oppress another people, year in, year out, decade in, decade out, if they felt that they shared their humanity with them? To justify to yourself the act of reducing another community to a fragment of its humanity, as Israelis are doing to Palestinians, you begin by defining them as less than you are, as the "other" who is inferior to you, not worthy of the same rights you fully enjoy. That way you assuage your conscience and convince yourself that what you are doing is, well, kosher.

You cannot, say, rob a man of his land and humiliate him to his core at a check-point, and later nonchalantly go home to hug your children as if you were just done with a day's work, unless you embrace the racist posture that your victim is lesser a human being than you. Every racist is a book, if you know how to read him.

Those European leaders who walked on Ahmadinejad's speech, and later berated him mercilessly for calling a spade a spade, have not only shown that they will give facts that challenge their pre-conceived script short shrift, but that they are not above promoting a narrow orthodox that restricts debate - a stand that often fosters an intellectual climate in which ideas, regardless of how seemingly eccentric they appear, are repressed in the name of "political correctness".

We in the Middle East, daily victimised by Israel's bigotry, not to mention its penchant for war crimes, do need to "check" the facts that attest to Israel being a "paragon of racism". Why check the facts when you are the facts?

Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books which include The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington DC.