Sarkozy: The Extraordinary Zionist

19 February 2008

Comment by Khalid Amayreh in Occupied E. Jerusalem

Est-ce Sarkozy est Sioniste extraordinair? Is French President Nicolas Sarkozy an extraordinary Zionist.? Well, his behavior so far indicates that he is.

Last week, Mr. Sarkozy was quoted as saying that he wouldn’t shake hands with anyone that didn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The gravity of his statement is very real, since accepting Israel as an exclusively Jewish state amounts to condoning and embracing racism in its most fundamentalist forms. It is very much like insisting that France should belong exclusively to the Catholics and that the non-Catholic citizens of France would have to come to terms with their inferior status as lesser citizens who eventually would have to choose between embracing Catholicism or expulsion.

Moreover, Sarkozy recently suggested that France wouldn’t attend an anti-racism conference scheduled to take place in South Africa this year if Israeli apartheid came under attack.

Well, Mr. Sarkozy, how do you think the people of the world should relate to Israeli apartheid? Should they sing the Tikva in unison and glorify all the ethnic cleansing Israel has been effecting against the indigenous Palestinians ever since its misbegotten birth nearly sixty years ago?

Maybe you would claim there is no apartheid in Israel. But such a pornographic claim would only be an expression of either clarion ignorance or clarion lack of rectitude since apartheid in Israel-Palestine is an uncontroversial truism.

Besides, don’t you watch TV? Don’t you read the French and Israeli press? Don’t French diplomats in Israel convey to you the real image? And how about the dozens of Israeli intellectuals, people of conscience and morality like the former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg, who have described Israeli apartheid and criminality in graphic details?

Mr. Sarkozy: If you are ignorant of these conspicuous facts, it’s really a calamity. And if you are aware of them but still insisting on giving Israel the benefit of the doubt, it’s even a greater calamity. This is sad, Mr. President. Very sad, indeed.

And you are planning to attend the celebrations marking Israel’s 60th anniversary.

Well, that is even more lamentable, because celebrating Israel’s foundation anniversary, especially while the Palestinian plight is deepening with the passage of each and every day, amounts to celebrating the triumph of racism, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

It is very much like celebrating the advent to power in Germany of the Third Reich. Yes, Mr. President, the similarities are striking.

In Nazi Germany they had an evil mantra called “the master race,” and here in Israel they have an equally diabolical mantra called the “chosen people.”

In Nazi Germany, they had the Ubermensch concept, and here in Israel they have the “goyem” whose rights and lives are expendable.

In Nazi Germany they had the idea of “lebensraum,” and Israel they argue that “Jews have got to live somewhere,” a euphemism for stealing Palestinian land and expelling these helpless and powerless people from their ancestral homeland, all for the purpose of fulfilling Jewish nationalism, a nationalism that has more in common with Hitler’s Mein Kampf than with the Torah of Moses.

Mr. Sarkozy: By choosing to embrace Zionism and identify your administration with Israel’s Nazi like policies and practices, you are effectively betraying the principles of the French Republic.

Are you still truly committed to liberty, equality and fraternity? If you are, then it is clear that you are betraying these principles.

In Israel, there is no liberty for five million Palestinians who are treated as children of a lesser God, whose children are murdered because they are non-Jews, whose homes are demolished because they are non-Jews and whose land is taken away from them because they are non-Jews.

In Israel there is no liberty for the Palestinians. Instead there are huge walls, detention camps, checkpoints, roadblocks, bypass roads, and mass incarceration and a justice system that is worse than a house of whoredom.

In Israel there is no equality because the state itself belongs to one segment of its citizens, namely the Jews, and if you are not Jewish, you’ve got to rely on the good will and magnanimity of the master race.

And fraternity! Well, fraternity and Zionism can’t and shouldn’t be used in the same sentence. They are contradictory concepts because fraternity is integrationalist and universalist while Zionism is segregationalist and particularist. In short, fraternity and Zionism are a contradiction in terms.

Mr. Sarkozy, I have decided to write this article because there is a real contradiction between the principles of the French republic, which we all love and respect, and your political behavior.

No one, not even the Palestinians, is demanding that France sever ties with Israel, although morally-guided politicians and statesmen shouldn’t hesitate to call the spade a spade even if doing so is politically incorrect.

However, you are challenged to reconcile France’s principles of freedom and justice with your government’s unlimited support of Israel despite the fact that Israel is making the prospect of peace in the Middle East as remote as possible and as unrealistic as possible by continuing to expand Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem and by narrowing Palestinian horizons and slaughtering entire Palestinian families, all under the false rubric of fighting terror.

Mr. Sarkozy: If what Israel doing is right, then say so openly, for you have been projecting yourself as an honest man. But if these acts are wrong and detrimental to the cause of peace, then, please, don’t remain silent and, more importantly, don’t give Israeli leaders the impression that you support them right or wrong.