Introduction

“Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” reads Resolution 3379 of the United Nations General Assembly. This resolution was part of the life’s work of Fayez Abdullah Sayegh, the Syrian-Palestinian juror, academic and diplomat, born in 1922 in Kharaba, Syria. In 1965, Sayegh founded the Palestine Research Center in Beirut, and from there published his seminal study, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. In this work, Sayegh shows how racism is a constitutive feature of Zionism, expressed through racial self-segregation, exclusiveness, and supremacy.

While working in the Arab League’s Office in New York from 1955 onwards, Sayegh catalogued Zionist statements made in the American press. In 1983, he used this material to produce a work titled Zionist Propaganda in the United States: An Analysis. The text below is extracted from this work; it pinpoints the foundational strategies of Zionist propaganda. The enduring relevance of Sayegh’s work to our current struggle is crystal clear, as anyone who has consumed American media in the past year will quickly understand.

Part 1: The Contents of Zionist Propaganda in the United States

At first sight, the overwhelming aspect of the subject of Zionist propaganda in the United States is the abundance of material. I recall that in 1955, at the outset of my work in the Arab League's Office in New York, I attempted to catalogue the major propositions that had been made in the preceding five or six years by Zionist propagandists in the press, in publications, on radio, and on television. The number of themes that I and my associates catalogued at that time exceeded 400 topics. If I remember rightly, the exact number was 437 specific statements about the Palestine problem propagated continuously by Zionist agents in the United States.

Of those, something like 200 or so might be called lasting themes of Zionist propaganda. They endured over the years. The remainder were passing themes. They would arise when an incident or state of circumstances made them advisable or necessary, only to be passed over when the circumstances changed or the events ceased to be relevant.

Of the 200 or so lasting themes (and over the years I continued to adjust that number and to adjust that body of specially important themes), we singled out nineteen topics which one might call the essential core of durable Zionist propaganda in the United States.

Nineteen Durable Zionist Themes

The nineteen durable themes of Zionist propaganda can be grouped into some five major categories:

1: Ideas purporting to establish the right of the so-called Jewish nation to Palestine.

2: The characterization of the Palestine problem in a manner convenient for the purposes of Israeli propaganda in the United States.

3: Those propositions that describe the rise and characterize the nature of the major elements of the Palestine problem as envisioned by Zionist propagandists in the United States.

4: Proposals for the solution of the Palestine problem.

5: Proposals that are calculated to project to the American mind an image of Israel and an image of the Arabs that are likely to insure the best acceptance by Americans of the Israeli position.

Rights of the "Jewish Nation”

Of the first category, namely, those proposals that purport to establish the rights of the so-called Jewish nation to Palestine, five major proposals stand out as permanently relevant:

1: The so-called Jewish nation has a divine right to Palestine by virtue of a divine promise.

2: The so-called Jewish nation has an historical right to Palestine by virtue of past historical occupancy of the country.

3: The so-called Jewish nation has a legal right to Palestine by virtue of the Balfour Declaration, the mandate of the League of Nations, or the Partition Resolution passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in November, 1947.

4: The so-called Jewish nation has a humanitarian right to Palestine: A people dispersed and persecuted for millennia is entitled to a homeland in which it can be saved from persecution, erect its own institutions, and lead its own life without encroaching on anybody and without anybody encroaching on its own liberties.

5: The so-called Jewish nation has what might be termed a civilizational right to Palestine. By that the Zionists usually mean that the Jewish nation has proven itself better able to develop, to exploit, and to utilize the property that is called Palestine than the Arabs who owned it. Therefore, because of this superior development of a part of the property of mankind, the so-called Jewish nation is more entitled to occupy that part than are the people that was in occupancy of it before the advent of Zionism.

These, then, are the five major proposals I grouped together under the heading, "Proposals Calculated to Establish the Right of the So-Called Jewish Nation to Palestine."

The Nature of the Palestine Problem According to the Zionists

The second category deals with those ideas and notions that seek to identify and describe the nature of the Palestine problem in a manner best suited to making acceptable the position of the Zionists. Here there are two basic ideas:

1: The Palestine problem is essentially an antagonism between Arabs and Jews. Therefore, Zionist spokesmen emphasize, it has a dual character. It is partly a racist struggle born of the hatred of one race for another, and partly a religious antagonism born by the fanaticism which the adherents of one faith maintain in their relationship towards the adherents of another faith. In other words, this dually racist, religious alleged character of the Palestine problem is so presented as to raise once again the specter of anti-Semitism and to emphasize that the problem of Palestine is no different from the problem of anti-Semitism wherever that ugly phenomenon has raised its head anywhere in the world. The Arabs, in opposing the Jews in Palestine, say the Zionists, are acting from spirit, although not necessarily in the same way in which Hitler acted in Germany when he was persecuting the Jews.

2: As a political dispute, the Palestine problem is a conflict between two parties: the State of Israel and the Arab States, Deliberately omitted from the picture is the principal and main party to the Palestine problem, namely, the people of Palestine whose homes were usurped, whose land was taken over, who were expelled from their ancestral homeland. The people of Palestine are pushed aside in this characterization of the Palestine problem in order to present the problem as an ordinary dispute between one state on the one hand and several states on the other. And the very party that created Israel, the United Nations, is also left out. Its resolutions on the Palestine problem are until today awaiting implementation. Its various decisions on how to resolve the conflict over Palestine continue until today to be defied by Israel. Both the United Nations that created Israel and the Palestinian people at whose expense Israel was created, are pushed out of the picture in order to reduce the Palestine problem from its immense complexity, from its immense human tragic character, to the level of a simple dispute between the State of Israel and the Arab States.

The Significant Elements of the Palestine Problem

The third major category of notions set forth by propagandists for Israel in the United States pertains to the significant elements of the Palestine problem. Three of the Zionist claims within this category are especially important:

1:On the morning after its proclamation as a state, the infant Israel suddenly found itself exposed to the invasion of Arab states seeking to exterminate it from the face of the earth. This act of Arab aggression was stopped not by the United Nations and not by the great powers, but by the valiant army of Israel itself.

2: Because it was assaulted at birth by seven armies determined to eradicate it, Israel is entitled, by virtue of the failure of those armies in their objective, to what it acquired as a bounty of war. The Arabs' failure gave Israel the right to be. Whatever territory Israel wins by war Israel will not give up.

3: The Palestine refugee problem is nothing but the problem of the poor people of Palestine, mislead by their leaders, and by the leaders of the neighboring Arab states, who were told to leave Palestine. Then, after they left, they found themselves unable to return and dependent for survival on international charity,

Zionist Solutions

The fourth major category of Zionist notions pertains to the proposals calculated to solve the Palestine problem. According to Israeli spokesmen throughout the United States, the solution to the problem is twofold:

1: The Arabs must recognize Israel's right to exist. All that Israel wants is to be accepted as it is. What is more natural than for a state simply to want to be left alone and accepted as it is? Beyond that, Israel wants nothing from the Arab states.

2: With respect to the refugees, obviously they cannot return to a land they remember in one way and would find in another. It would be the height of unfairness to the Palestine refugee to tell him to go back to his village where his old shack has been transformed into a castle occupied by someone else. What he remembers of Palestine is no longer there. The authorities he used to live under are now different authorities, Zionist authorities, Israeli authorities. Why not open your vast expanses of land to him? Why not enable him to be a self-sufficient, dignified, self-respecting human being? The solution to the problem of the refugees then is easy. It is for the Arab states to swallow their pride and to overcome their greed and to allow their fellow Arabs from Palestine to share in the bounty of their oil and their resources and their land.

The Image of the Arabs Vs. The Image of the Israelis

Finally, the fifth category of notions spread for Israel in the United States pertains to those proposals that are calculated to create a general image of the Arabs and a general image of the Israelis which will not fail to make Americans favor the Israelis over the Arabs. Americans are told day in and day out that:

1: Israel is a "beacon of democracy," shining in the darkness of tribalism, reactionary despotism or military dictatorship which is the Arab World.

2: Israel is an oasis of progress in a wasteland, in a desert of primitive backwardness.

3: Israel is a rock of security in a sea of turbulence, where every morning the newspaper greets you with a new set of political circumstances and a new change of government.

4: Israel is potentially capable and actually intends to aid and benefit the wretched masses of the Arab World, if only their leaders will allow them to benefit from Israeli superior know-how and Israeli superior civilization.

5: Arab leaders do not allow their masses to benefit because they are afraid that exposure to the superior civilization of Israel would only create such unrest and such revolution or rising expectations among their Arab peoples that they would be toppled overnight.

6: Arab leaders, who constantly quarrel with one another and who are ever at the throat of one another, in fact have nothing in common. Nothing unifies them except their common hatred for the State of Israel.

7: These Arab leaders, joined in hate for this superior state that may unleash forces of dynamic change in their world if they but raise the walls separating Israel from its Arab neighbors, begrudge poor little Israel that small piece of land that it has for itself when they have vast expanses at their disposal.

Doubtful Soundness, Alleged Fact, Fallacious Reasoning

Obviously, I do not subscribe to any of these Zionist themes. I am certain that anyone with a minimum knowledge of the facts, with a minimum of objectivity, would be equally unconvinced by them.

Every single one of these twenty or so themes can be reduced to the form of a syllogism of which the major premise can be shown to be a universal principle of doubtful soundness, and the minor premise can be shown to be a statement of alleged fact or demonstrable falsehood. The process of reasoning from major to minor premise can be shown to be fallacious and invalid. We can take at random any of these themes and show this to be the case.