September 28, 1982
To my Arab Jewish brothers and sisters oppressed in Israel:
My brothers, my sisters, I am writing to you from the depths of this prison where I am held as a revolutionary by this country that has chased you away. For twenty to thirty years the lies of the Jewish Moroccan upper class have led you into the trap of Zionism. The discriminatory and racist politics of the majority of the Muslim Moroccan upper class under the tutelage of the Moroccan regime, in fact a feudal enslavement supported by racist police violence, has done the rest. Since 1961 this regime has deliberately been selling Zionism to you.
My brothers, my sisters, I am writing to tell you of your future, of the future of your children. I want to speak of the struggles that you must undertake, if it is not already done, to ensure your children the justice, peace and dignity that have so far been denied to you by the exploiters of the people in your countries of origin as well as in the land of Palestine. You were promised that it would be a land of refuge and happiness as part of the State of Israel supposedly founded by your Jewish brothers…
Your brothers! What bitter irony! They are your oppressors. They despise you, call you “Orientals” or “Sephardic” only to better negate your identity. They call you “schwartz” in their jargon, deny you access to knowledge, to qualified jobs, to dignity… They reduce you to beasts of burden for their hard work, and to cannon fodder for their army with their foolish and criminal dreams of domination and conquest… They deny you the very exercise of the religion that our ancestors practiced for centuries. This religion of peace, justice, and mutual respect, they have transformed it into a religion of hatred, war, and injustice.
What a disgrace for the sacred memory of our ancestors! Assassins such as Begin and Sharon have women, children, and elders massacred in the name of Judaism! What disgrace and what sacrilege!
Begin has presented himself to you as wanting to end the racism and discrimination that you are victims of. Begin, this terrorist who was trained in fascist and Hitlerian demagoguerie in the ranks of the revisionist Zionist party of Jabotinski which was rightfully described as a “Jewish variant of fascism.” A party with which he would march in a brown shirt in the 30’s proclaiming “Germany to Hitler! Italy to Mussolini! Palestine to us!”... This fascist demagogue claims to blame the politics of the Labour party as solely responsible for the discrimination of which you are victims. Have racism and discrimination decreased in the five years that Begin has been in power? Have your circumstances improved? On the contrary, it is not because Begin has placed on his staff, like window dressing, an arriviste such as David Levy that anything has changed in your life, in your misery. Your future, as well as that of your children, is still irremediably blocked while the madness of colonization and conquest keeps exacerbating, dragging you deeper every year into a cycle of death and massacres. Going from a Peres to a Begin and vice versa will not change any of this. It will be so for as long as this oppressive, racist and conquering regime will remain.
Indeed, the core of the problem does not lie in these puppet games of the Knesset. It is to be found in the racist nature of the regime that oppresses you, a nature that cannot be modified by a change of men, nor of party, but only by a radical change of regime itself. Such a change will never, in Israel, come from Parliament. It will always be the result of struggle, of your struggle and that of all the oppressed who are under this yoke. As far as you are concerned, it is primarily the struggle in the streets.
Remember my brothers, my sisters, how the protests of the Black Panthers, almost twelve years ago, shook the regime much more than twenty electoral swings have. And yet all you had done was express your anger, with no organization, no program, no clearly defined objectives. For this reason, the historic movement was later penetrated by politicians and bogged down in the quicksand of the game of “Israeli democracy.” That is a democracy similar to Ancient Rome, of which you are the plebs, that keeps you in the slums and in ignorance. It is a democracy where real power is retained by a barbaric military junta, composed of fascist generals from Raphael Eytan to Motta Gur by way of Ariel Sharon. The profound reality of this regime, founded on the racist and expansionist essence of the Zionist project and its organic alliance with imperialism, is primarily to be a military base of American imperialism for domination of the entire Middle East. This is the very military base of which the Euro-Americans, the “Ashkenazim,” are the pilots and technicians, and of which you are the cannon fodder and beasts of burden.
This is the reality of this regime. This is its nature!
It is founded on a racist ideology, an ideology that has nothing to do with the religion of our ancestors, an ideology that was originally rejected by the rabbis of Europe and America, as well as those of Arab countries when these countries were affected by it. This ideology was only able to impose itself thanks to its appropriation by the capitalist Jewish upper class of Western Europe, as part of British and later American plans for imperial conquest. The Zionist leaders deliberately used the Nazi Holocaust to carry the entirety of European and American Judaism into their adventure, becoming objective accomplices to this Holocaust when needed, like Ben Gurion who opposed in 1938 the offers to evacuate German Jews into England and the US (letter to the Zionist executive of December 17th, 1938).
Zionism, this racist and chauvinistic ideology born of the crisis in Eastern European Judaism in the end of the 19th century and in the context of European colonial expansion, is contrary to all of the traditions and achievements of European Judaism. Traditions that have gifted the world with Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, and many others…
Zionism is contrary to the glorious, thousands-year-old history of Arab and Mediterranean Judaism that was historically shaped in symbiosis with Islam within Arab civilization. The blossoming Golden Age of Andalusia continues to illuminate our culture and in its continuation the Zohar has ceaselessly carried its message of brotherhood and justice in the depths of valleys, on the mountains, and in the plains where our fathers and mothers worked. Indeed, the Zohar has re-established the substance of the biblical message, a universalist message of justice and human dignity. The Zohar opposed the distortions that the ancient Hebrew State had introduced into this message for the needs of the ruling classes. It opposed the legacy of tribal fanaticism that is still conveyed by this message.
And here we are today: Zionism, a tribalist and racist ideology of modern times, is glorifying fanaticism. Criminal Zionist leaders and sacrilegious rabbis, created by and in the pay of the Zionist machinery, distort the biblical message by negating its fundamental reality, that which, through Christianity and Islam, has won the heart of half of humanity. This message, enriched by the Gospel and the theory of Liberation, has made the oppressed masses of Latin America rise. This message was, throughout history, the unshakeable core around which Judaism persisted, despite all the persecutions. Here we are: sacrilegious Zionist leaders turn the religion of our fathers over, transforming it into an ideology of racial hatred and war! This ideology and the machinery of State that supports it have ceaselessly fueled in you the hatred for our Palestinian brothers, our Arab brothers, to turn you into the cannon fodder they need for their criminal and foolish projects.
Indeed Zionism, an ideology born in colonial Europe, foreign to the historical essence of Judaism, is first and foremost an ideology of war and conquest. The goal of Zionist leaders, the goal of Ben Gurion who had nothing but contempt for you and your culture, was to actualize “Great Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates. A bloodthirsty overambitious adventurer like Sharon pushes the conquering insanity further and wants to impose Israeli hegemony from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and even all the way to the heart of Africa! The Lebanon war, the massacre of the Palestinians and the Lebanese, the death of your brothers and sons who fall to satisfy the dreams of Begin, Sharon, and other Zionist leaders, this whole procession of hardships and crimes are only another step in this foolish dream that the Zionist clique has persisted in chasing for half a century. The end justifies all the means — war, crime, and lies. They will only end when these dangerous men and their political and military machinery are removed so they can no longer do harm.
This ideology of war and conquest, this ideology of foolish adventurers, is first and foremost a racist ideology. It is the Jewish flip side of Hitlerism. Hitler made Jews the last of “races”... with Arabs. Zionism only modifies this hierarchy to make Jews the first of “races”.
It is imperative and urgent to do away with the myths that support the Zionist ideology: the “Jewish people” or the “chosen people.” These themes, born in the tribal context of the history of Hebrews, must be rejected in our time. Incidentally, can you even form a people with your racist oppressors? What mockery! The traditions of Arab Judaism, like the most noble teachings of European Judaism, had already limited these concepts to a purely religious content. The “Jewish people” is analogous to the Islamic “umma” or to Christianity. As for the notion of the “chosen people” which Spinoza proved futile, it was interpreted by the great Jewish thinkers of Andalusian mysticism as the duty for Jews to behave righteously wherever they are. In doing so, they work to bring the advent of the realm of God, the reign of justice and peace for all humanity. Nowadays, in these times when the great religions are letting go of their pretense of superiority over other beliefs, when dialogue with non-believers is finally considered valid, it is time for Judaism to transcend this concept once and for all. It will thus conform itself to the universalist content of its religiosity, to its historical dynamic, and will overcome the lethal regression imposed on it by Zionism today.
Indeed, as Martin Buber writes, “if the rites and dogmas of a religion are fixed to the point where religiosity fails to give it momentum, or ceases to accept to submit to them, then religion becomes sterile and as a consequence, a source of falseness.”
Martin Buber rose against the falseness of this tendency without understanding that it was inherent to the fundamental logic of Zionism. This logic would like to reduce Judaism to the tribal mores of two thousand years ago and turn Judaism into a racism. It proclaims the State of Israel as a “Jewish state above all,” just like Hitler proclaimed an “aryan” Germany.
In order to reach these mythical and foolish objectives Zionism must, prior to all, crush “the Arab.” It must first make Palestinian Arabs disappear as a people, and deliberately resort to genocide in order to do so, as it did in Sabra and Shatila and throughout its bloody history since 1948, in Deir Yassin, in Qibya, in Kafr Qassem. It must reduce the Arab to the state of sub-human. Some ideologists go so far as to theorize this subjugation!
That is why Zionism, in its racist anti-Arab logic, wants to reduce you to this state as well, while also proclaiming you full-fledged citizens of the State of Israel as Jews. This citizenship is none other than the citizenship of the plebs in Ancient Rome. This is where the reality of Zionism reveals itself. You are Jews, but you are Arab Jews. Your concept of life, your culture, your very practices of Judaism are rooted in the centuries old past, in these lands of the Atlas, of Yemen, of Iraq, which our ancestors have helped shape, in this Arab culture enriched by the Arab Jewish philosopher Moshe Ben Mimoun as much as by the Arab Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, in this Arab culture of dances and songs of peasants and artisans, Muslim and Jewish, from the mountains of Yemen to the palm groves of Tafilalet.
Raise your heads my Arab Jewish brothers and sisters oppressed in Israel! Because this culture, our culture, is a culture of justice and peace, of symbiosis with nature, of familial and social warmth, of brotherhood and dignity.
What is this so-called “culture” that your oppressors want to impose? A mechanism of death and hatred, a universe of blockhouse and machine-gun that uproots the thousand years old olive tree to chase the Palestinian peasant and turn you into slaves of the Euro-American capital, designated victims of its warlike adventures. What is this so-called “culture” that reduces many of you, my proud and dignified sisters, to prostitution? And you, my brothers, to unemployment and the misery of slums?
Raise your heads! Wrest your liberation and dignity from oppression! Hold your heads high again! Knock down your oppressors and build a just society, a society of peace, brotherhood and sisterhood!
My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters oppressed in Israel! I am speaking to you also because, in this very summer of 1982 marked by the bloody reality and the murderous madness of the politico-military machinery of Zionism, brought to light and culminating with this Rosh Hashanah red with the blood of the innocents of Sabra and Shatila, a prospect of peace is offering itself to you. Unlike the scam of Camp David, the path to a realistic and sustainable peace is opening itself to you which is opposed to this murderous madness.
This is indeed the objective of the realistic program that was settled upon in Fes by the Palestine Liberation Organization, only representative of the Palestinian people, with the near totality of Arab States. This program is to be understood as the PLO intended it, as a whole with eight inseparable points. Do not be influenced by the propaganda claiming that it is nothing but a first step towards a capitulation to the projects of Ronald Reagan, Shimon Peres, and King Hussein. These projects are incompatible with the raison d’etre of the Palestinian revolution, which is to recover its motherland while acknowledging the right to life, to peace and dignity, and respect to Jews cheated by Zionism who settled on this land.
My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters oppressed in Israel! I am a revolutionary. I have paid enough in struggles and in sacrifices to have no personal ambition and some lucidity. I know that the struggle is hard, will be hard for a long time, and that I will not personally see its victorious outcome. And yet it is ineluctable. Therefore, I address you with the utmost responsibility. I will not tell you to trust the Arab Chiefs of State. Whether they are feudal or bourgeois, kings or emirs, generals or colonels, you know what responsibility they have, those who were in Fes just as much as those who were not, in the fake independences and in the racist and chauvinistic demagogy. They have forced you to leave the land of your ancestors for your current exile. No, I will not ask you to trust them.
However, I also know the Palestinian people, its activists, its leaders. Reinforced by half a century of suffering and fights, rooted in the thousand-year-old culture of the Holy Land, it is the most advanced of the Arab peoples. Zionist leaders of European origin, from Ben Gurion to Begin, have wanted to tear it away from this land where Muslims, Christians, and Jews -who constituted it and whose work it carries - had lived in brotherly symbiosis for thirteen centuries. Its leaders and its organizations have been forged in the fire of one of the hardest revolutionary struggles of this century. They carry the best that humanity has built in its long and painful march towards a society of justice.
Since engaging in revolution, which allowed them to assert themselves as a conscious people, and since they have their own organization—the Palestine Liberation Organization- detached of any exterior tutelage and the only legitimate representative, the Palestinian people have ceaselessly asserted their intention to guarantee to all Jews in Palestine the possibility of living in peace on this land. While pursuing their legitimate fight to liberate their motherland, Palestinians promise to Jews full respect of their democratic rights, full equality of religion and language, as long as they abandon Zionism which is, in essence, opposed to a just and human solution. Since January 1969 the Palestinian People have ceaselessly specified, each time more concretely, the content of this noble objective. Since 1975 they have clarified the necessary steps in order to attain this solution.
The Fes Program inscribes itself in this effort for a realistic and sustainable path towards peace. Admittedly it does not demand that Israeli Jews renounce Zionism in any way for the fulfillment of the concrete stage it proposes. However, the Palestinian people reaffirmed, through the voice of their first leader Yasser Arafat, the determination to put up a legitimate resistance on the entirety of territories occupied since 1967 by any means necessary. “Nothing more, nothing less.” Simultaneous to the diplomatic action implementing the Fes Program, the Palestinian people resist occupation and colonization, as well as the terror imposed by the leading Zionist clique.
My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters oppressed in Israel! Personally, I am convinced that the Zionist leaders—Begin, Peres, and the military clique that is the true master of the state of Israel—will stand in the way of such a path towards peace by any means, and they do not hide it. Yet, this path is the only one possible because the Palestinian people will never accept submission, nor any form of capitulation, any more than it can renounce its legitimate and inalienable right to recover its motherland torn away by force. This path, the only path towards a just and sustainable peace for the Palestinian people as well as for Israeli Jews, is contrary to the very essence of Zionism which can only have its fanatic and foolish project succeed through the negation of the Palestinian people. Indeed, the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, as insane as it may seem, responds to the objective of barbarian and criminal Zionist leaders: to stand in the way of this opening towards peace precisely because it is realistic and viable.
The path towards peace is possible but it is only possible if you reject the yoke of your oppressors, the yoke of the Zionist machinery. What is Zionism to you, concretely? What has it offered you other than even more suffering and misery? It has killed even hope. What is Zionism if not this institutional, political, and military structure that ensures the Euro-American caste that oppresses you its own survival and its strength through its interpenetration with the Jewish capitalist bourgeoisie of Western Europe and the US? How through this caste, primarily with American imperialism, which sees nothing in the State of Israel but a means of domination of the region and an immense military base, you become the cannon fodder.
In struggling against the political apparatus of Zionism, against Begin, Peres, and others, in refusing to follow its military junta in the effort to occupy the West Bank and Gaza, you will fight against the core of your oppression, you will fight for your liberation and for a sustainable, peaceful future for yourselves and your children in the Middle East.
My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters oppressed in Israel! I cannot, from my prison, thousands of kilometers away from the social and political reality that you are living, although I try to follow it with my heart as much as with my reason, tell you how to fight and through which political or social organizations, whether they already exist or need to be created. What seems certain is that any organization which calls itself Zionist can only reinforce your oppression while it claims the opposite. It seems certain that you must seek to get closer to your Arab Palestinian brothers on whom the status of “Israeli citizens” was imposed, that you must refuse to participate to any work of repression directed against your Palestinian brothers from the occupied territories, as well as to any military adventure, be that of Lebanon or any other. Without a doubt you must fight side by side with other progressive Israeli Jews who work courageously for a real and sustainable peace, to evacuate all the occupied territories of 1967, and who rise against the bloody and criminal adventures of the Zionist leaders.
However, this must not prevent you from asserting yourselves specifically as Arab Jews on a political and cultural level, as well as in the context of social and political action. Regain control of your culture and identity! They are the first arm of your liberation! But, of course, do not let your struggle be co-opted by these social climbers who display a “Sephardic” label only to ensure their careers and political ambition, whether they are shameless demagogues like David Levy, bourgeois politicians like Ytstzhak Navon or corrupt rabbis like Abouhatzeira. These rabbis soil a long lineage of rabbis of the people - just and respected!
You are Arab Jews, my brothers and sisters, and you are, we are Arabs. You are also workers and oppressed and thus, it is at the side of other Arab workers that you must fight without letting yourself be separated. On the contrary, the more your identity will assert itself in the fight, the more this fight will integrate in the common struggle with all Arab workers and oppressed of Israel; in the struggle against the first victims of Zionist and racist oppression, our Palestinian brothers, and in the common struggle with all the progressives of Israel. About them, one must hold back from responding to the racism against “Oriental Jews” of the Zionist junta with a reverse racism against Ashkenazi Jews. The more you can recover and reaffirm your identity, the more you can overcome separation and mistrust towards your brothers in struggle and oppression, all your brothers in struggle and oppression!
My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters oppressed in Israel! It would be presumptuous of me to say more. I am sending you a call to struggle, for dignity, for a future of peace and justice. In a secular State of Israel, freed from Zionist racism and oppression, evacuated from the territories occupied in 1967, repaired from injustices of the colonial aggression of 1948, freed of the tutelage of American imperialism and the role as a base for aggression in the Middle East, you as well as all the citizens of this State will be able to work fraternally with a Palestinian State to prepare a common future where the Holy Land, the whole land of Palestine can become a Palestinian democratic state, secular and reunified. It will then be a source of light for all of humanity, and firstly to the entire Arab Nation — not that of kings, emirs, generals, or colonels, but one built by the Arab peoples, freed from imperialist oppression, from the feudal and comprador reaction of so-called bourgeois saviors. In this glorious land of Palestine, in fraternal unity reconstructed and brought to a higher level, Arab Judaism will bloom. It will be in a creative and democratic symbiosis with the other components, Islamic and Christian, of Arab culture and of tomorrow’s Palestinian people. The specific culture of European Jews whom the tragedies of History have rejected onto this sacred land and who remain attached to it will also be affirmed, and they will integrate it as well as their descendants. Thus will be achieved in the Holy Land, the Spiritual home of Judaism as a religion, the need of which is the only explanation for the irrational attachment that so many Jews have for the State of Israel as a Jewish State.
My Arab Jewish brothers and sisters oppressed in Israel!
This is the noble perspective that offers itself to you. This is the path of your indispensable struggle! Stand against your oppressors, against the racist and criminal Zionist leaders!
For peace, fraternity, justice, and for dignity, rise!
Translated from French by Noémie Serfaty