By MARY AMAL KHOURY HARVEY & ERIK MICHAEL HARVEY

Although the news out of Gaza has faded from most networks, the genocide is still happening (there is no actual ceasefire). The Israeli occupation of Palestine has been ongoing since before 1948. Don’t think for a moment that it started on Oct. 7, 2023.

During discussions of the Gaza genocide and the Israel-Palestine conflict more broadly, politically charged language with conflicting definitions is frequently used. Therefore, it is incumbent on us to get our definitions right in order to understand these words in the context of human rights.

JUDAISM

Judaism is a religion centered on the belief in one, indivisible, transcendent God, who created the universe, revealed Himself to humanity (through Abraham and Moses), and established a covenant with those who believe in Him and keep up his laws.

It’s considered one of the earliest monotheistic faiths, emphasizing the oneness of God. Along with Christianity and Islam, Judaism is an Abrahamic religion, tracing its roots to Abraham, who established the covenant and first enforced God’s laws. It is a religion, not a race or ethnicity, nor a nation. However, many people, especially Zionists, believe or refer to Jews as a unified ethnic group.

ANTISEMITISM

Antisemitism is hostility, prejudice, or discrimination directed against Jewish people.

The term was coined in Germany in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr to describe his anti-Jewish views. While the term “Semitic” actually refers to certain groups of Middle Eastern peoples including Arabs, antisemitism is used exclusively to refer to anti-Jewish bigotry. Pro-Israel groups wish to change this definition to not only refer to hatred against a religious group but also any and all criticism against the modern state of Israel. This is an absurdity on its face. To conflate irrational and unjustified hatred of a religious group with opposition to the policies of a nation founded on ethnic cleansing and currently engaged in a genocide, serves as a disservice to all Jews around the world. In the context of human rights, if antisemitism is to mean anything at all, it must be divorced completely from the state of Israel.

ZIONISM

Zionism is a settler colonialist movement, a system that displaces an indigenous population from its land and replaces the people with a new settler population; that is the foundational ideology of the state of Israel. Zionism believes that the historical land of Palestine should be a homeland to exclusively the Jewish people, and political power must be held primarily or exclusively by Jews.

Modern Zionism as an ideology was founded by Austrian Jew Theodor Herzl in 1896 in a pamphlet on establishing a Jewish state somewhere in the world due to the antisemitism that Jews were facing in Europe. It wasn’t decided that Palestine would be the primary target of their colonial efforts until a decade later. After World War I, the land of Palestine was colonized by the British, betraying a promise to the Arabs to establish an independent Arab kingdom in return for rebelling against the Ottoman Empire during the war. The British further betrayed the Arabs and stated in the 1917 Balfour Declaration that Palestine would be a homeland to the Jews, paving the way for European Jews to move to Palestine helping the British colonize the region.

Zionism later manifested as the Nakba (the Arabic word for “catastrophe”) during which was the 1948 removal of more than 750,000 Palestinians and confiscation of their land by Zionists. The purpose of the erasure and subjugation of the indigenous Palestinians by the Zionists was to establish a Jewish “ethno-state.” The catastrophe of the Nakba was an ethnic cleansing that heralded the birth of Israel.

As far as human rights and equality today are concerned, Zionism, in practice, creates a tiered system. There is an Israeli “Law of Return,” which allows any person of Jewish descent to gain Israeli citizenship even with no historical connection to the land of Palestine, while denying a similar “right of return” to Palestinian refugees and their descendants displaced since 1948 — despite it being a requirement of international law. This is straightforwardly racism against Palestinians. The 1975 United Nations resolution 3379 (later revoked at the behest of Zionists) famously declared “Zionism is a form of racism” against the indigenous Palestinians. Any ideology that privileges one group to the exclusion of others in a diverse region like Palestine is necessarily going to lead to wide-scale discrimination.

Can one truly be ethical, according to the morality of humanism or any major world religion, and still be a Zionist? We emphatically say that it is impossible. Jewish organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow argue that Zionism is inconsistent with universalist and Jewish values of justice and equality. How can one claim to have any values at all and justify the killing and ethnic cleansing of more than a million innocent people over the past 100 years?

So be careful when using and interpreting these words. Understand what these terms mean and how they relate to the human rights of Palestinians and Jews.

Mary Amal Khoury Harvey, MD is a member of the Peoria For Palestine organization. She is a first generation American born to 100% Palestinian parents who survived the Nakba and immigrated to the United States in 1960. She is a lifelong Peorian and works as a pediatrician for OSF and Heartland clinics.

Erik Harvey is Mary Harvey’s son. He is a 2019 graduate of University of Illinois in Economics, owner and technician at Peoria Laser Tattoo Removal. He is also a lifelong Peorian.