Transcript from...The End of Zionism and the Liberation of the Jewish People(1989); by Eibie Weizfeld

Jewish People’s Liberation Organization: A Non-Zionist Declaration

1. We, the Jewish People, are a wandering Nation who have been seeking a secure right to live in those lands where we reside. It has been written that the Jewish nation is the most oppressed in Europe, and judging from the persistence of anti-Jewish prejudice, one has to acknowledge the distinctly historic proportion of that oppression. Never have we been permitted a continuous homeland for more than a few hundred years before another expulsion takes place. Now it seems that the possibility of complete extermination is not out of the question, judging by the degree to which the recent Nazi Holocaust was permitted to proceed. The consequences of such a reactionary demonstration of power have not been concluded, since fascism continues to function, and the response of a permanent revolutionary wave throughout the world has yet to reach its full proportions.

2. At the present time, confusion is spread by those seeking only to establish a power-base for themselves and so will attack Jewish people while posing as either anti-Zionists, German nationalists, Christian zealots, or more recently, as "White" Power advocates. The manipulations of the newer-Nazis and even former Nazis are by no means irrelevant as Western Nation-States have repeatedly demonstrated how much suffering they are willing to have the Jewish people endure in continuation of the various crusades launched against us and the Arab and African Muslim nations.

3. Although the Arab nation has largely been absent from the persecutions of the European Christian Nation-States, the Zionist settler-colonial organizations and parties have moved into Palestine based on the disadvantaged position of the resident population. Zionism built itself upon the Western need to make its amends when at the same time the West rejected the Jewish post-war refugees, who could not tolerate racism in Europe any longer or Stalinism in the Soviet Union. The Zionist parties accepted the Christian States' exclusion of the Jewish people from its very inception in exchange for their support. The realization of Zionism is the fulfillment of the Protestant "restorationist" programme which preceded it. The successes of Zionism have merely been accomplished through its assimilation to the Western Christian-Statist notions of religious militarism with its Crusader orientation towards the "Middle East". The Jewish Zionists adopt the Christian image of ancient Israelites, while the actual Israelites actually had more in common with their Semitic brothers and sisters, including their common Aramaic language, rather than Hebrew. Israel resembles the 52nd state of the U.S.A. more than the Kingdom of David and Solomon (who was also of Hittite parentage). The Jewish people need to liberate themselves from the Christian Nation-State and the ideology of Zionism which is only the colonized mentality of assimilation into the dogma of Protestantism, that sees the only place for Jewish people being in Israel.

4. The Zionists and the Arabic peoples are in a state of no war / no peace which the Israeli governments seek to perpetuate in order to suppress and maintain the Palestinians in exile. Only the balance of forces has resulted in certain limited and partial concessions towards the independence of the Palestinian People. While such concessions are welcome, these represent only the beginning of the reconciliation (SaaLaHa) process. It is obvious that the resistance of the Palestinian youth in the Intifada since 1987, the diplomatic initiatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the internal Israeli opposition of the Peace Now - Gush Shalom movement has brought about the agreements for which the Israeli and U.S. governments take credit.

5. However the Palestinians and the Jewish people are tied together by bonds stronger than war, more amiable than the antiquity, and more than each People realizes. It is not a semantic coincidence that anti-Semitism means both the Jewish and the Arabic peoples are feared and hated in the Occidental political culture. The bonds that unite Jewish and Arab people in practice extend to the degree that the Palestinian struggle should necessarily stand for the liberation of the Jewish people as well from anti-Semitism and from Zionism; and the Jewish struggle for liberation needs to also include the liberation of the Palestinians, each in reciprocity to the other. It is evident that a common struggle against resurgent fascism is a vital necessity.

6. It is necessary to break out of the impasse constructed by the Zionists who believed that Zionism presented the only recourse for Jewish refugees, and now presents the only recourse for future security, as if the Israeli State is to be worshipped as a deity. The Jewish People must be liberated from Zionist ideology by the actual fulfillment of our civil and collective rights in pluralist society, by national-cultural autonomy and possibly even territorialism. Territorial claims of course must only be considered valid if they respect such claims in general. One takes into consideration that the achievement of national auto-determination by the pursuit of independence is, of course, the right of every national entity, if only accomplished by means of the reciprocal principle, respecting mutual interests and rights.

7. Although both the WWII Allies and the Zionist movement presented Palestine as the only avenue to leave Europe for Jewish people in 1947, the reluctance of many Jewish Holocaust Survivors living in the Displaced Persons districts to become Zionist colonialists enforced their emigration to North America. More recently the Zionist enterprise has not even been considered a desirable situation by Israelis themselves, who have emigrated en masse. The Jewish people in the Federation of Russia do not have even a choice in the matter because of the U.S.A. / Canada quota system, in much the same way as they were excluded before and during World War II, with the collaboration of the Zionist organization.

8. It is in the interests of the Palestinian people's struggle to support the Jewish struggle against racism so that there will no longer be the apparent need for the only alternative currently presented to aid the Jewish people. The great loss of the Jewish revolutionary socialists (Bundists) to Nazism and to Stalinism has removed the most viable alternative to Zionism. There is an intertwining of the two struggles so that a solution to Palestinian-Arab oppression is circumscribed unless there is an end to Jewish oppression in general; whether or not this conclusion is welcomed by any Palestinian party. To begin with, one cannot ignore, and so accept the existence of fascists and even Nazis presenting themselves as anti-Zionists. It should be obvious as a counter-revolutionary act, and that it serves to hinder the development of a Jewish alternative to Zionist hegemony. The same is true in return; whether or not Jewish people accept that peace will only be achieved with the emancipation of the Palestinians -- all else is conjunctural to both Peoples. The ties that bind our two peoples are a consequence of the recent European purging of the Jewish population even though the Arab peoples had no responsibility in the Holocaust. The pertinence of the nature of Jewish existence to Arab concerns should rather be based upon the necessary world perspective with which to achieve their own national emancipation. This is a strategic consideration which identifies racism and fascism as common concerns. Arab nationalities in Occidental countries know very well what these concerns are.

9. We shall not be enslaved, made homeless, nor killed when it is so dictated by the whims of ideology, and so we are hated whether we be Jewish or Palestinian. Why then should either of us consider the Occidental World to be our ally, and the other to be an enemy. We are of the same status, origins and oppression, and so if we cannot co-exist in peace then no-one, it seems, will be able to, because of the powers which strive for political hegemony and oligapolistic economic dictatorship.

-A Jewish Alternative to Zionism-
10. Together with the continuing degeneration into a social existence of perpetual war and war preparation -- called peace -- there has arisen (Yesh Gvual/ There is a Frontier amongst the Israeli military, Shalom Achshav / Peace Now) a dynamic of resistance to war and its corresponding economic stagnation. Despite all the formal rationales designed to perpetuate what is universally abhorred, a Jewish opposition to the Zionist leadership and their followers of both the left and the right has emerged. This opposition is inevitable as long as we are pushed, educated, trained, ordered, tricked and then led into fighting yet another war, a secular 'Sacrifice for Israel'. Ironically the perpetuation of the rationale for violence has rebounded unto itself with the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Rabin himself, because he failed to live up to his ideology's prerequisites, by having sought to accommodate the leading Palestinian figure, the President Yassar Arafat.

11. The need and desire for a Jewish territory that is self-determinant -- freed from expulsions and pogroms -- has been led into the fortified ghetto being called Eretz Yisroel but which actually operates as the State of Israel under the auspices of the U.S.A.

12. The territorial solution that had been sought has been converted into an absolutist religious idea, replacing the traditionalist culture and its meditative routine of ritual. Prior to the Holocaust the concept of the deity was considered to have the power to deliver the chosen people towards salvation. With the dissolution of religious ideological practice itself, there arose territorialist Zionist parties based on the surviving religious conviction that only in the Land of Israel (Canaan) could there be formed a Jewish homeland. Such an idea was encouraged by the Christian States which were refusing entry to the Jewish refugees with the complicity of the Zionist parties.

13. However, the nature of things is that currently a greater proportion of Jewish people live in lands other than Palestine (Israel): in North America, Russia, Europe, South America, the Makreb (north Africa) or other Arab countries, southern Africa, India, Pakistan, China and elsewhere. In fact less than a third of the world's more than 14 million Jewish people live under the State of Israel. The fundamental premise of Zionist theory has in practice been ignored or rejected consciously by the greater proportion of all the Jewish people, who are non-Zionists. Israel is thus not considered the sole legitimate homeland of the Jewish people.

14. The Jewish nationality exists within and with out the Israeli State. However the non-Israeli Jewish communities live within an illusion of assimilation oftentimes sugar-coated in Zionist acquiescence or pretension. While the territorialist yearnings of Jewish people -- to form a majoritarian society -- is currently sifted into the Zionist pot, the territorial need should actually be satisfied in those areas where Jewish communities are centered, where our rights as citizens must and shall be met to truly satisfy our social existence. This is auto-determination for all the Jewish people rather than the pseudo-independence of the Israeli State.

15. Presently Zionism negates the very freedom of auto-determination, which it itself claims to represent, by attempting to submerge the Palestinian people below the level of the struggle forInter-national auto-emancipation; the only common definition for freedom. One's right to auto-determination is predicated upon the respect one holds for that very same right as it is held up by others. One's principled needs cannot be fulfilled unless such a right is to be upheld for all others as well, as a principle, forging a solidarity through which we become allies on the basis of our reciprocal rights. In this way are our needs to be ensured, not by militarism. In this manner, one reaches (as did Israel Zangwill) "a land without a people for a people without a land", and not by means of the Israeli-supervised Sabra-Shatila massacre -- a pogrom which has ended the illusions of all who are not deluded. After the Hebron reoccurrence and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, such anti-human outbreaks can easily be seen as being integral to the lingering status quo situation.

16. An historic turning point has been passed. Let it be universally acknowledged, as it has been by the past Director of the Planning Center of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut, Lebanon, and currently Palestinian Authority Planning Minister (Nabil Sha'ath), as early as 1977, that the Palestinian Charter; signifies equally, that the exercise by the people of Palestine of their right of self-determination in Palestine does not include the right to exclude the Palestinian Jews from Palestine, that signifies also that this right does not include the right to create in Palestine a State solely Arab. The right to self-determination of the Palestinian People, applied to the Jewish Palestinians, means that they must exercise this right on the land of Palestine, and that this right does not include the right of separation and consequently, the exclusion of the Arab people of Palestine. This is why the right to self-determination of Jews and of Arabs in Palestine must be exercised in common on the same land, Palestine. The Principle of Reciprocity is thereby acknowledged by Shaath: that signifies the end of all States which require that the self-determination of its ethnic group assumes the exclusion of another ethnic group ... it is thus the definitive end of all States in which segregation exists de jure or de facto. Ethnic-cleansing then is refuted by the PLO and the hypocrisy of Zionism remains. Currently the Palestine National Authority is attempting a negotiated settlement in ambiguous terms which provides for the partial solution of two States. Further negotiations between the two States cannot be expected to produce the desired results because of the terribly unbalanced power relation.

17. According to tradition, the Jewish people are the second brothers and sisters of the Palestinian Arab People, and it should be understood that the respect given to another is the measure of the respect to be expected, in any reciprocal manner of living. We, the Jewish People, should acknowledge that the Palestinian tradition parallels the Jewish history in duration, intensity and tragedy. We recognize the historic cultural affinities with the Holy Land by the Jewish People but we do not consider our history to be exclusive of others. The Neturei Karta provide an example of Jewish residents who have lived in peace with the Palestinians in Jerusalem.

18. The one comprehensive solution presented, of an all-inclusive pluralistic Palestine, is an alternative to war; that is, a solution poly-national in scope, including all the Palestinians who are able to return, including the resident Jewish population and including the Druze people. The method of resolution available is an international conference of reconciliation for all concerned parties, this being an immediate necessity and possibility; a mechanism provided with some momentum by the current peace process. However the intransigence of many Zionist Israelis will not allow them to tolerate the return of the Palestinian refugees because of their will to remain a majority. Such a paralysis could be resolved by the departure of those who insist that there is not enough space for the Palestinians' return, but many Israelis currently wish to leave if they could in any case.

-Independence and Territoriality-
19. The State of Israel of 1948 was not the unique first attempt to initiate a modern Jewish homeland or territory; the first attempts having been in 1791, the Czarist prison called the Pale of Settlement in western Russia, and in 1926 at Birobidjan in easternmost Russia. A true Jewish Land failed to materialize from the Bolshevik revolution, despite the Leninist promise to the Jewish Bund / Union organization of 1905. Those attempts have failed the test of viability and yet the Jewish people have continued to desire those features of life unavailable to them in the prevailing States; that is, urban national-cultural autonomy in existing settings and the need for autonomous or independent territories. This need for a Land is evident in the worship from afar politics of the various Jewish communities towards the Israeli State, a desire which is based upon the real needs for land, security, peace and the freedom of identity and culture historically denied the Jewish people. Existing societies do not provide for these material necessities, and prevailing political doctrines do not consider these Jewish needs. However Jewish territorialism should not and need not mean the abandonment of traditional Jewish opposition to political power manipulations and Statism. Considering the failure of the Zionist project, there may be a need for such territories to accommodate Sephardim and Ashkenazim in their respective regions in order to facilitate the departing Israeli population who wish to remain a majoritarian society or who have no country to go to and do not wish to remain in Palestine. At the present time the Russian Jewish population is being obliged to emigrate to the Zionist State even though previous immigrants now wish to leave. The crisis in Palestine is an inter-national problem and should be placed in a world context. The solution to Palestinian liberation is intertwined with the liberation of the Jewish People worldwide. As such it is conceivable that an Ashkenazic territory could be formed to accommodate the Jewish populations of Russia and Europe, as well as an autonomous territory for Sephardim in the Makhreb, and national - cultural autonomy for the Hebrew Jewish nationality in Palestine.

20. In this aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust, no one should deny the hostility of prevailing Occidental Nation-States to national minorities, as none of the participants or spectators in that war of extermination have undergone a substantial transformation. The Zionist establishment follows these Nation-States in parallel, seeking to jump into the footsteps of power politics. How bizarre it is that a stockpile of at least 200 genocidal nuclear bombs with a Jericho intermediate-range missile to carry them have been accumulated by a State professing peaceful intentions and created in the aftermath of our genocide. This hypocrisy is evident in the Israeli and Zionist support for the criminal actions of the USA-led axis with respect to Iraq, Iran and the Libyan Jamahiriya.

21. Should anti-Semitism be permitted to exist because of those who do not believe it is possible to overcome racism? Is that why the Labour Zionists signed the Haavra (Transfer) Agreement so acting in complicity with the Nazi Third Reich, as early as August 1933. Does this not reveal that those who accept the existence of racism in others accept it also in themselves? Has Zionism recreated the footsteps of those whom it did not have the will to oppose? Who could dare to dictate obedience to Zionism after its adherents generally acted as spectators to the spectacle of the Holocaust?

-A Jewish Revolutionary Movement-
22. In the tradition of the early nationalist formation, the 1897 Jewish Bund (General Jewish Workers' League), and based on prior efforts in the development of the Jewish People's Liberation Organization such as the Toronto-based Alliance of Non-Zionist Jews (1974), the group Canadian Jews Supporting the Palestinians (1980 UN - NGO) and, the publication Logikun Sychel, we are building a movement for liberation on an inter-national basis. We are also indebted to the Israeli Committee Against the War which publicly protested the 1982 war on its very first day and so inspired the Peace Now movement of 500,000 participants.

23. The Jewish People's Liberation Organization, a non-Zionist formation, acts on behalf of the Jewish and Palestinian Peoples to generate national emancipation in cooperation with the Palestinian movement for the liberation of Palestine, as a contribution to making war unneeded and unwanted. As an ally of the Palestinian People in this struggle, we greet the Palestine National Council in solidarity.

24. Likewise, the JPLO exists as an ally of the other liberation movements operating in our common societies: New Africans/African Americans, Indigenous Peoples, Kébékoise, Chicana, Puerto Rican, African-Caribbean, or Azanian (South Africa); consequently we declare our support to the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities (NGO) and the Anti-Racist Action (ARA) movement.

~~ JPLO Basic Principles ~~

1) We call for a complete immediate withdrawal of all the Israeli military and intelligence services from the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war, in  accordance with U.N. resolutions. Withdrawal from both the occupied Lebanese and Syrian territories is also a necessary precondition for peaceful relations among the societies of the eastern Mediterranean.

2) We call for the creation of a fully independent Palestinian Country; a Civil Society with all the powers of a State, in accordance with U.N. resolutions, throughout the territories, with full U.N. membership rights, including east Jerusalem and serving as a democratic and pluralist territory for all people of Palestinian origin, serving to reunite families continuing to live in refugee camps throughout the eastern Mediterranean region. Such provisions should not be interpreted as possibly restricting the individual civil and collective rights of the Palestinians living in the Israeli administration, comprising 19% of that citizenry. Full voting rights for all Palestinians to the Palestine National Council are necessary for those who were forced to flee Palestine during the 1948 and 1967 wars, or during the years of Israeli occupation, as well as for holders of Israeli citizenship. Likewise Jewish residents who live in Palestinian-controlled lands in peace are assured their individual civil and collective rights.

3) These interim provisions of the peace process should lead to the formation of a pluralist and bi-national Civil Society in the land of Palestine, with a united Jerusalem based upon the dissolution of the State of Israel. The return of Palestinians to their historic origins shall be a right according to the civil constitution formed by a Constitutional Assembly of all nations inhabiting Palestine. Such a Constitutional Assembly would receive representation by all nationalities to formulate a federation of autonomous national-cultural communities who govern only themselves and not the others. All rights will exist in reciprocity respecting land rights, water rights, subterranean resources, air passage, immigration, water routes, environmental controls, militarization, federated affiliations, alliances, international representation, etc. It should be noted that citizenship rights are governed by each autonomous nation while respecting the United Nations codes of human rights. Personal religious affiliation becomes a personal choice within each nationality itself. Recuperation or compensation for familial properties of pre-1948 Palestine shall be established by treaty. 

4) We insist upon the establishment of a nuclear free zone throughout the region so that no country possesses or prepares nuclear, biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction. Transport of materiel used in the production of such devices shall be forbidden by all countries.

5) We furthermore call for an end to economic and political sanctions against Iraq, Iran and the Libyan Jamaihiriya; except for military arms sales restrictions that are equally applied to all other key countries in the region.

6) There must be an end to the misguided policy known as "dual-containment", designed to continue Western/US-led policies of "divide and rule" which encourage the development of competing blocks along with continuing regional arms escalation.

7) We recognize Pan-Arabism as the functional basis of the Arab autonomous societies, thus rejecting private and external economic enterprises' interventions on the economic and political plane. The Palestinian Arab People and Palestine form an integral unit in the Pan-Arab Nation. The world context situates the Arab Nation not only among the Third World's peoples but also amongst the nationalities that exist within the industrially developed countries as well.

8) The JPLO seeks to liberate the individual civil and collective rights of Jewish People in the context of the various societies where we reside. Our collective rights include provisions for national-cultural autonomy in particular and auto-determination in general. It must be recognized that anti-Jewish anti-Semitism cannot be tolerated and refugee rights must be respected irrespective of the presence of the Zionist State.

9) Full voting and political rights must be accorded to all Jewish nationals throughout the world in their representation to the Jewish Congress of their society, as well as the World Jewish Congress, irrespective of any possible Zionist or religious affiliation.

10) Recognizing the tendency of privately-owned competitive economies to corrupt various  State structures in the interests of fascism and in opposition to Civil Society, and acknowledging the tendency for the revolutionary process to degenerate into Statism; the JPLO seeks to further the development of the historic dynamic of Socialist Permanent Revolution.