anti-Zionism, " while during the time of Stalin antiSemitism was practiced under the cover of the struggle against "chauvinism" or "cosmopolitanism." 3. The pro-Israeli bias that is so clearly felt in western public opinion and in western media is evidently the corollary of the desire, highly laudable in itself, to perpetuate the antifascist spirit. But there are other causes of this emotional atmosphere. Rejection of antiSemitism is also an affirmation of antiracism that has been put to good use and has sometimes even served as an alibi for genuine racism in that the designated victims of racism during the postwar period have been the colonial peoples and the immigrant worker rather than the Jews. "Philosemitism" has even been used as a justification for anti-Arab racism or colonial oppression, particularly during the Algerian war. And this sheds light on another aspect of the pro-Zionism peddled by the mass media: To be pro-Israeli is to support a bastion of colonialist
Inspiration, an attitude that flows quite logically from colonialist and Eurocentric traditions. It is also an emofional identification that in the final analysis Implies a choice in favor of imperialism and against the oppressed. (This was especially evident when the Zionist leaders tried to cool down certain critics of the war in Vietnam out of fear of jeopardizing American aid to Israel.) The pro-Israeli fanatacism of the Social Democratic right is in harmony with its "Arlanticism. " 4. The bastion of pro-Zionist opinion is obviously represented by the organized Jewish communities. Structurally, these communities have undergone a sort of mutation. First of all, Polish Judaism, the majority of which had been won to the reformist but anti-Nazi Bund, was exterminated, and the Bund along with it. In the two other great centers of Judaism, the United States and the Soviet Union, the Jewish workers movement has also disappeared. In both countries the Jewish workers have lost their collective specificity and have gradually dissolved into the mass of the proletariat (in the USSR Stalinist repression "activated" this process by physically liquidating Jewish workers' leaders and suppressing the press of the Jewish workers movement). In the major. capitalist states the Jewish community has gone through a process of social climbing that has entailed the rapid assimilation of the Jewish workers by the petty bourgeoisie and of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie by the middle bourgeoisie, This sociological evolution is at the root of the political shift of the political organizations of the Jewish community from center-left to rightist positions. Here again, alignment with Israel - facilitated by the disappearance of the Jewish workers movement, which had constituted an organized anti-Zionist base - logically implies open support to imperialism. The appearance of fascistic Jewish groups like the Jewish Defense League in the United States is characteristic in this regard. It also reflects, of counse, as does adherence to Zionist ideology, the frustrations and fears of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie. 5. Let us now broach the problem raised by the UN resolution. Is Zionism racist? To pose the problem in that way is not correct. Zionism is a movement of colonial expansion, belated and even anachronistic, a sui generis colonial movement because it aimed at displacing the Palestinians rather than exploiting them. Like every variety of colonialism, it rules by virtue of the implicit postulate that the rights of the colon take precedence over those of the indigenous people. When the Zionist leaders invoke the "historical rights of the Jewish people, " they are simply rationalizing their colonial practice, the establishment of an exclusively Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians. In other words, Zionism is racist not in the sense that the Israeli governments openly proclaim an ideology defining the Arabs as subhuman (on the contrary, for obvious reasons they claim to be partisans of equality of rights for all), but in that all colonialism supposes a racist practice. It is sufficient to cooly analyze what happers in Israel to be convinced that in this sense Zionism is obviously racist. When the government speaks of "peopling" the regions of Galilee that have remained predominantly Palestinian, or when it speaks, more honestly, of "Judaizing" Galilee, is that not racism? (Who would dare to speak of "Aryanizing" Scotland or Frisia?) When then Prime Minister Golda Meir confessed that she was losing sleep over the birth rate of the Arabs in Israel (her own citizens, supposedly!), was that not racist language? (Imagine François Mitterrand evoking the birth rate of Algerian immigrant workers in such terms!) It is well known that 90 percent of the land in Israel is managed by the Jewish National Fund, which requires, as a principle, that only Jews settle on that land. One could continue to cite examples, all of which can be summed up as follows: The whole Zionist project consisting of implanting a purely Jewish state on Arab land falls within this spirit. 6. Moreover, this is what is said in sum by the resolution of the UN General Assembly, only the last phrase of which is generally quoted - "declares that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" - forgetting that this conclusion is justified mainly by reference to the resolution adopted in Kampala in July 1975 by the chiets of state and governments of the Organization of African Unity. This resolution judged that "the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, given that they form a whole, that they have the same racist structure, and that they are organically linked in their policy." It is understandable that the Zionist lobby prefers to become indignant that Zionism could be labelled as racism rather than to try to explain how Israel, particularly in its present de facto borders, differs from Rhodesia. The UN vote cannot be explained solely on the basis of "petrodollars, " as some have affirmed. It corresponds to a gradual transformation of the General Assembly, within which the "third world" now has a large majority and imperialism has lost its "automatic majority, " These states feel with irritation that western pro-Zionism is the logical perpetuation of o colonialism from which they have long suffered and which has been protected and supported by the imperialist West in Algeria, Angola, and Mozambique in the past and continues to be supported in Rhodesia, South Africa, and Israel today. The third world, which has no anti-Jewish massacres for which to excuse itself but which has suffered in blood from colonialism, has difficulty understanding why westem public opinion is so reluctant to fully admit what is really going on inside the borders of Israel. In this sense, the General Assembly resolution is the logical extension of the Bandung conference of the 1950s, which symbolized the awakening of the previously colonized peoples. Even at that time, Israel was excluded while the Palestinians were represented by an observer. And as long ago as that, the conference called for the right of self-determination for the Palestinians.