Anti-Zionism

Have you ever wondered how Palestine became occupied? How people suddenly started calling it Israel? I was shocked to see that because of the occupation in my country, Palestine, my grandparents had to flee the country, and how some people refer to it as Israel instead of the true name Palestine. Yasser Arafat was the founder of the Fatah. He spent most of his lifetime fighting Israel and that is why many Palestinians admire and respect him. Arafat died at the age of 75 from a mysterious blood…

“Apartheid is not Normal” “Normalize This” is a free form, spoken word poem from Remi Kanazi. Kanazi is a Palestinian-American born to Palestinian immigrants. Kanazi’s grandmother was pregnant with his mother when she left Palestine in 1947. Around this time there was a great exodus or “nukba” of indigenous Palestinians, just as the land was being annexed to create the new state of Israel. Kanazi’s father left Haifa after the occupation had already taken place. Born in New York City in 1981,…

Israel belongs to the Jews by religious and documented rights. From 1948 to this day, Jews and Palestinians have been fighting over the land of Israel. Both sides have been claiming that the land is theirs by numerous rights. One of the main reasons that the land should belong to Jews is the Balfour Declaration. Another is that Jewish people have strong religious ties to the land. Also the fact that this land is a safe haven for jews after being discriminated against. The Balfour Declaration…

From the inception of Zionism as a political movement, Europeans and Americans have been heavily involved. Although Zionism had been an religious/emotional longing for the Holy Land tied up in Jewish culture since the Diaspora, it did not begin to become widely politicized until the 19th century. (source?) The religious revivalism of the 1700s and the early 1800s led many Americans and Europeans to be brought up on the romanticization of Holy Land, and to the Jews, Palestine had always been that…

The SS Exodus 1947 was a ship that carried Jewish emigrants from France to British Mandatory Palestine on July 11, 1947. Most of the emigrants were Holocaust survivors who had no legal immigration certificates for Palestine. Following wide media coverage, the British Royal Navy seized the ship and deported all its passengers back to Europe. In the same period, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine visited Palestine to assess the conflict between the Jews and Arabs, trying to find a…

movement of Israel. “Zionism had as its goal the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews (Hebrew: Eretz Yisraʾel, “the Land of Israel”). Though Zionism originated in eastern and central Europe in the latter part of the 19th century, it is in many ways a continuation of the ancient attachment of the Jews and of the Jewish religion to the historical region of Palestine, where one of the hills of ancient Jerusalem was called Zion (“Zionism”)”.…

Another major reason Herzl wanted to create a Jewish state is because of the economic and class inequalities many Jewish people faced in different European countries. Herzl, in one section, describes how many Jewish people had to work even harder than mainstream Europeans when they entered into the middle class from the lower income class. Herzl states, “For we had, curiously enough, developed while in the Ghetto into a bourgeois people, and we stepped out of it only to enter into fierce…

The Balfour Declaration serves as evidence that the British supported a national home being made for the Jews in Palestine. The Brits supported the Jews with the hope that they would support them back as they go into World War I. After all, the final say in the publication of this document was determined by Britain’s War Cabinet. Forming a national home for the Jews would allow Britain to gain support of Jews in other countries that may serve as neutral. Having another country as an ally would…

There is a line in the musical Spamalot where Sir Robin sings to King Arthur; “In any great adventure, if you don 't want to lose ... you won 't succeed on Broadway if you don 't have any Jews!" (PBS, Broadway Musicals). If you can look past the sweeping generalization, Sir Robin’s surprising lyric turns out to be very true about musicals. Historians have recognized that Jewish immigrant culture heavily influenced the content of musical theatre when it was popularized in America during the early…

John Kennedy once said “Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.” (Kennedy, J) In order to have any kind of understanding you must start at the beginning. When did conflict arise and how after all these years has it continued? Is there something as an outside nation that can be done in order to help bring understanding? Can an outside influence to stop this, or should they? Not just in other…