Netanyahu’s vitriolic “speech,” bordering on a eloquent rant, delivered before the United Nations General Assembly, thinly attended by the member delegates, on the morning of September 27, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yy0OJ09OIc,was a masterpiece in demagoguery (avam-faribi), proving once again that in avam faribi lies such power that logic itself does not possess (dar avam baribi ghodrati nahofteh keh dar mantagh-ham vojoud nadard). He essentially equated anyone (including governments) opposed to any aspect of Israel’s war in Gaza (viz. Hamas) and/or in Lebanon (viz. Hezbollah) as anti-Semite, including the pro-Palestinian sympathizers and demonstrators in the United States! Wow!!! What drivel!!!

As I would define it, a Zionist in this day and age is one who countenances land larger than what the international legal order under the United Nations bestowed on the Israelite in 1947 for a homeland in Palestine. Unless recognized as legitimate by the United Nations or in an equal-footing treaty with a “seceding” country (like Jordan and Egypt) any land presently occupied (portions of the West Bank) or settled (in the West Bank and Golan Heights) or annexed (Golan Heights) by Israel and Israelis is held illegally under international law.

The etymon of Zionism is the toponym Zion, which biblically referred to one of the unidentified hills in southwestern part of ancient Jerusalem, but the term has assumed a much larger meaning than a symbolic reference to Jerusalem and to the Promised Land as a whole.

Simply put, beginning in as late as the 16^th century Europe, the Jewish yearning for return to Palestine was a messianic wish with very little territorial ambition; it was a desire to return to the Land of Israel (eretz yisra’el), to pray and die there. The hopeful declaration that marks the Passover Seder – Next year in Jerusalem – speaks to the depth of that two-millennial yearning to return to the land into which, according to the biblical Book of Exodus, Moses had delivered his people from Egyptian bondage.

In the last quarter of the 19^th century, the desire – the necessity – for the European and Russian Jews to be able to settle in Palestine acquired a political character and thus “political” Zionism was born. The inability of Jews to assimilate into the European societies along with rampant Russo-European anti-Jewry made the return to Palestine a matter of survival for the Jewish identity. This point was not lost even on Naser ed-Din Shah Ghajar (r. 1848- 1896). During his trip to England in 1873 the Shah remarked to the Jewish financier Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845-1934) the following: “I have heard that you and your brother have a thousand crors [krur= a unit in Iranian terminology equivalent to a 1/2 million of any currency]. Take it from me, take 50 cror of this money and give it to a small or big government and purchase a piece of territory the size of a province and gather all the Jews therein so that they may no loner be so scattered and distraught.” The Shah also noted in his diary that “We [royal sense] laughed a lot and he [the Baron] did not react. I impressed upon him that I protect all the nationalities that are in Iran.” Sardar Salehi, ed., Az pas-e shanay-e shah [Over the king’s shoulder], seyr-i dar safar farangestan-e naser ed-din shah [Periplus of the king’s travel to Europe] (Rotterdam: Markaz-e nashr-e dina, 1997), p. 209.

In 1885, the Viennese Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum coined the term Zionism, as a label for the movement calling for Jewish national revival and return of the Jewish people to Palestine. Political Dictionary of the Middle East in the 20^th Century (1972), p. 431. In 1897, the Austrian journalist Theodore Herzl convened an international congress in Basel, Switzerland, in order to make the case for a national Jewish state in Palestine, which at the time was a province of the Ottoman Empire. Rebuffed by the Turks, Herzl turned to Great Britain which, in 1903, offered Herzl land in Uganda for the Jews to settle, but the Zionists held out for a place in Palestine. Sydney Nettleton Fisher, The Middle East – A History, 2^nd Ed. (1969), pp. 370-371.

The history of Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel has many loops and turns. An unvarnished review of the Jewish migration to Palestine, hostile Arab/Moslem reaction, creation of the State of Israel and the ensuing Arab-Israeli wars (up to and including 1967) is told elsewhere. One good source is the aforecited S. N. Fisher’s book (Chapters 28, 32 and 40).

There are two inescapable historical facts that cannot be brushed aside, no matter what one’s point of view is over the current Israeli-Palestine situation -

First, the settlements of Russo-European Jews in Palestine was promoted as much by a desire on the part of the Jews to escape the anti-Jewry attitudes and policies of the Russian and European societies as it was due to the European countries’ collective guilty conscience over the mistreatment and of Jews and perhaps subconsciously seeking to rid themselves of their Jewish constituents.

Second, the State of Israel was the creation of the international legal order pursuant to the actions of the United Nations, whose General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) of 1947 called for the partition of  Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem under a special international regime. Thirty 33 countries voted for the resolution (Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, Canada, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Liberia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Sweden, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Union of South Africa, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, United States of America, Uruguay, Venezuela); 13 countries voted against the resolution (Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen); and 10 countries abstained (Argentina, Chile, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mexico, United Kingdom, Yugoslavia). Even though Yugoslavia abstained at the end, she along with Iran and India, perhaps mindful of how many ethnicities can co-exist in one federated/imperial system, were the authors of an alternative plan which called for the establishment of an independent federal state consisting of an Arab State and a Jewish State under a federal government.

No doubt, for those who were affected adversely by installation of Jewish immigrants in Palestine, Zionism was and has been a dirty word, especially among those inhabitants of Palestine who were dispersed as the result of successive waves of displacement of the non-Jewish inhabitants and their herding into enclaves of refuge, such as Gaza and refugee camps.

Following the Six-Days’ War (June 1967) between the Arab militaries fixing to attack Israel and the Israeli preemptive self-defense, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 242 (S/RES/242 of 22 November 1967) by a unanimous vote (China, France, United Kingdom, United States, Soviet Union, Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, India, Japan, Mali, Nigeria). The resolution emphasized the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security” and affirmed that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of certain principles, among them withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the 6-Days’ War and achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.

In the non-Jewish world outside of Palestine, the term Zionism remained at best a neutral term until people started to question the aggressive regional policies of the Israeli governments toward the Arab (and Palestinian) refugees that followed the Yom Kippur War (October 1973). It was in the crucible of the 1973 war that the Zionist propagandists would conflate and equate masterfully anti-Israeli sentiments with anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, implying that any non-Jew critical of Israeli government policy was an anti-Semite! Another masterful achievement of Israeli propagandists was to appropriate the term anti-Semitism to mean exclusively anti-Jew. To be clear, linguistically and anthropologically speaking, the term Semite is defined as “a member of a group of Semitic-speaking peoples of the Near East and northern Africa, including the Arabs, Ethiopians, Hebrews, and Phoenicians,” notably a biblical descendant of Shem (hence, Sem). The American Heritage College Dictionary, 3^rd Ed. (1993), p. 1240.

In December 1973, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution (A/Res/3151 G, 14 December 1973) which condemned “the unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism.” Two years later, the U.N. General Assembly resolution on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (A/Res/379, 10 November 1975), reiterated its prior resolution of 1973 (A/Res/3151 G) and determined that Zionism was a form of racism and racial discrimination (72 votes in favor, 35 votes against, 32 abstentions).

In 1981, the eighteenth assembly of heads of African states and governments at Nairobi, Kenya, signed onto African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Banjul Charter), which entered into force in October 1986. The preamble of the charter expressed the State parties’ duty to achieve the total liberation of Africa, “the peoples of which are still struggling for their dignity and genuine independence, and undertaking to eliminate colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, zionism….”

In the throes of a misguided sense of optimism that peace would be at last at hand, the U.N. General Assembly revoked its 1973 determination and decided that it no longer regarded Zionism as a form of racism (A/Res/46/86: 111 votes in favor, 25 votes against, 13 abstentions). Regardless, Zionism is the foundation of a state based on the idea of monopoly of power of, by and for a single religious/ethnic group. From a logical standpoint, therefore, Israel cannot accommodate the aspirations of other religious/ethnic groups on equal footing with the members of the Jewish staatvolk. To that extent, even if the society itself does not consider itself racist (and the jury is out on that), the state remains an apartheid system, no matter how much its leadership likes to scream otherwise. On this issue, Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine – Peace Not Apartheid (2006) and subsequent talk on the subject  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y23V6PLTCMw is worth a look.

In his address to the U.N. General Assembly this morning, Netanyahu outdid his prior vituperation on the self-righteousness of Israel: He accused the United Nations of hypocrisy on the Palestine Question because it has passed more than a hundred anti-Israel resolutions and just seventy something against all the other countries, combined! Well, could it not be that Israeli policies have begged them? Claiming “victimhood” goes only so far, especially when the “victim” becomes the victimizer, with no moral authority left, and destroys innocent life and lives, in pursuit of a vengeance that by all measures has long surpassed the “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” commandment of the Book of Exodus for proportionality.

One should hope that Netanyahu’s policies, including saying ‘no’ to a two state solution, does not end up with Israel and the Zionist community suffering the fate of Naser Khosro’s oghab (eagle), who at the height of its arrogant and soaring flight above the earth was cut short when an arrow bearing the fletching of his own feather brought it down.