I find the recent "triggering" abhorrence of racism as silly. Racism is not evil its just stupid. Committing crime and violence because of racism is abbhorrent and illegal. The Zionist Jews immigrating into Palestine may or may not have been personally racist vis a vis the locals but they just wanted to leave them be. The local Muslim population had racist views of the Jews (sons of apes and pigs, etc) and Muslim Palestinians attacked Jews frequently, if not regularly, on overtly religous grounds.
British Racism towards the Palestinians
Laila Parsons - Peel Commission Secret Testimony
Racism was embedded in the British colonial system, and the secret testimony is suffused with racist language. In this way it is not special. But the fact that the secret sessions were closed meant that the British commissioners and witnesses spoke their minds more freely and let out a particularly clubby kind of British racism that some, at least, would have been reluctant to express in public. Hence the racism in the secret sessions is sharper edged and even more blatant than in the public sessions. I will not dwell too long on reenacting this racism here. Suffice it to say that the language of the secret testimony is full of the genteel anti-Semitism prevalent among the British ruling class in the mid-1930s, particularly when the commissioners are talking to non-Jewish British officials. The Jews in Palestine were often described as "menacing" and as "invading the professions" and "having the world forces of Jewry behind them [with their] training, experience and money." Jews were also considered to be too modern or hypermodern. By contrast, Arabs were described as "medieval," "slow," and not of the "same calibre as the Jews." In one example of the clubby racism that emerged when the British were alone in the room, Sir John Calderwood Strathearn, a British ophthalmic surgeon, described how, in a meeting at the Rotary Club, a member of a leading Palestinian family was "trying to make conversation" with a Hebrew University professor: "There was an attempt made to talk and to listen but as [Samuel] Johnson said about women preaching in Church-it always reminded him of a dog walking on its hind legs; it did not do it very well, but you were surprised it did it at all."14 This disdain was often combined with a paternalism that-while superficially benign, even affectionate-was just as damning. For many of the British officials, Arabs were incompetent but lovable, whereas Jews were competent but unlovable. Zionist witnesses also contributed to the racist discourse, especially in the secret sessions.15
Rashid Khalidi
I have no idea why Khalidi calls it subtly racist, it could hardly be more overt. It was openly stated. I presume he means it wasn't low-class "Jim Crow" style racism.
There was a fully fleshed out, subtly racist rationale behind this British policy, one that certainly operated for the first part of the Mandate, and perhaps throughout it. It was that the Jews were important, were a people with significance, while the Arabs of Palestine were insignificant, could be ignored, and indeed were not even thought of as a people per se. This was put most clearly by Foreign Secretary Balfour, in a damningly frank confidential 1919 memo that deserves to be far better known: "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land."15 Note that, in Balfour's view, the "ancient" land of Palestine did not belong to the Arabs who constituted the majority of its population: these Arabs just happened to inhabit the country at that moment in time; and they did not have lofty "traditions," "needs," or "hopes" like the Jews; by contrast, they had the far baser "desires and prejudices." Above all, they were not a people. In view of these revealing words, one can easily identify the source of the discriminatory language of the famous declaration that bears Balfour's name, and of the Mandate document that he helped to negotiate.
Another problem all too rarely addressed in the literature is that beyond the generalized racism already mentioned, most contemporary British and Zionist observers, as well as other Europeans, revealed an attitude of superiority toward Arabs of all classes, ranging from casual condescension to outright contempt. In a typical example, the British colonial secretary, the haughty former viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, is described in 1921 by the French ambassador to London as "admitting [later Iraqi King] Faysal's mischievousness, but considers it common to all Orientals and thus of no importance."14
Nur Maslaha
Jabotinsky wsa the leader of the Revisionist Zionists in the
Typically, Jabotinsky expressed racist contempt towards the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, and, unlike the leaders of Labour Zionism, he did not mince his words: We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East … The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz-Yisrael.'9 On another occasion Jabotinsky described Arabs and Muslims as a yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags'.10
Herein lies an important difference between Zionist racism and other forms of European racism familiar, since the advent of Colonialism, to the peoples of Asia and Africa. Race-supremacist European settlers eisewhere in Asia and Africa have, by and large, found it possibte to express their "supremacy" over the other strands of "lesser peoples" and "inferior races" within the framework of "hierarchical racial coexistence". Separate and unequai, the European colonists and the "natives" have on the whole coexisted in the same colony or protectorate.
Zionist Colonialism in_ Palestine - Fayez Sayegh
Though they have openly disdained the "natives", ruthlessly suppressed them, and methodically discriminated against them, European colonists have as a rule deemed the continued presence of the indigenous population; "useful" for the colonists themselves; and, as such, they have reserved for the "natives" all the menial functions and assigned to them inferior roles in the settler-dominated societies. Not so the Zionists! Race-supremacist Zionist settlers in Palestine have found it necessary to follow a different course, more in harmony with their ideological system. They have expressed their fancied "supremacy" over the Arab "natives", first, by isolating themselves from the Arabs in Palestine and, later on, by evicting the Arabs from their homeland.
And - as a racist system animated by doctrines of racial self-segregation, racial exclusiveness, and racial supremacy, and methodically translating these doctrines into ruthless practices of racial discrimination and oppression - the political systems erected by Zionist colonists in Palestine cannot fail to be recognized as a menace by all civilized men dedicated to the safeguarding and enhancement of the dignity of man. For whenever and wherever the dignity of but one single human being is violated, in pursuance of the creed of racism, a heinous sin is committed against the dignity of all men, everywhere.
Transformation of Palestine - Ibrahim Abu-Lughod.
Sanctioned by the British government, the Zionist Jewish Agency had its racist land-alienation rule. Article 3(e) of the Jewish Agency Constitution stressed Jewish labor. The Jewish National Fund lease-form rules openly stipulated "only Jewish labour" (article 23). Zionist settlers taking loans from the Palestine Foundation Fund had to agree to "hire Jewish workmen only" (article 7). Methods of enforcement of this boycott, especially against older settlers who resisted it, included forcible picketing of them and the erection of new "labour colonies" around them. The racist boycott of Arab labor was extended to Arab produce, and a key Zionist-Israeli banking official has acknowledged that "in order that the Jewish farmers might be able to sell their products it was necessary to initiate a campaign of persuasion-and sometimes even use force-to make the urban population buy the dearer Jewish agricul¬ tural products."35
Moreover, in the early years of their efforts to secure support for their enterprise, the Zionists propagated in the West the racist myth of 'a land without a people for a people without a land', a slogan popularised by Israel Zangwill, a prominent Anglo-Jewish writer often quoted in the British press as a spokesman for Zionism and one of the earliest organisers of the Zionist movement in Britain.
I do not think that Zionists were not racist but I wonder can it be defined as racism when a Zionist project demands its members hire only Zionists and buy and sell only with other Zionists? The project itself might be inherently racist but those actions seem sensible and necessary for its success.
