13 October 2015

Settler’s anti-Semitic Video – Funded by the Israeli State

The first reaction of Jews to Zionism was that it was nothing but a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.  That is why the anti-Semites loved Zionism.  Both groups believed that Jews did not belong in the countries they lived in but Palestine.  The Zionists went on to accept that the anti-Semites were right.  In 'exile' (Galut) the Jews had developed very unhealthy, asocial characteristics.  

As Jacob Klatzkin, the editor of the Zionist Organisation’s Die Welt (1909-11) and co-founder of Encyclopedia Judaica in 1924  argued :

A classical anti-Semitic cartoon - courtesy of the Samaria Regional Council
'If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism... Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends, who desire to defend our rights.'  B. Matovu, “The Zionist Wish and the Nazi Deed’ Issue, Winter 1966-7. Uri Davies, ‘Utopia Incorporated’ p. 17.

Jacob Klatzkin held that Jews were: 'a people disfigured in both body and soul - in a word, of a horror… some sort of outlandish creature… in any case, not a pure national type.... some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew.' [Arthur Herzberg, The Zionist Idea, p. 322/323, Temple, Atheneum, New York 1981]

This settler video, funded by the Israeli state, is living proof of it.  Directed against Israeli Jews who tell the truth about the Occupation it has all the steretypes of traditional anti-Semitism.  The hook nosed Jew, willing to sell out his own for a golden Euro coin, Mr Sturmer (Der Sturmer was   the pornographic anti-Semitic newspaper edited by Julius Streicher, a Nazi leader executed at Nuremberg in 1946 for crimes against humanity).

It portrays the ‘eternal Jew’ a film that Goebbels made in 1940.  No matter what the Jew remains the same, except on his national soil of course.  The Zionist counterpart to the Eternal Jew being Eternal anti-Semitism.  Both are and were lies but like a dog returning to its vomit, we see the settlers of the West Bank returning to the crudest anti-Semitic tropes and steretypes.

Tony Greenstein

WATCH: The most anti-Semitic Israeli cartoon ever made?

[This post has been updated]
The Samaria Settler Council — an organization representing Israeli settlements in northern West Bank — has just uploaded a pretty jaw-dropping piece of propaganda. It’s subtitled in English and really needs to be seen to be believed. But in case you don’t want to do it to yourselves, it shows a wealthy European named Herr Stürmer (get it?) tossing shiny Euro coins to a hook-nosed, vicious character referred to only as “ze Jew.”


“Ze Jew” is paid by his master (whose face is obscured by a newspaper parodying Haaretz headlines on Israeli human rights abuses) to besmirch Israel, its soldiers and its settlers. At the end, when Herr Stürmer has no further use for him, “ze Jew” obligingly hangs himself (got that one?). The depiction of the dissenting and/or diasporic Jew as identical to the anti-Semitic caricature is a sadly familiar trope of Zionist nationalism, dating all the way back to the earliest days of the movement. The punchline is supposed to be that this is the same hooked-nosed, money-grabbing, media-manipulator that European paymasters have always seen in the Jews. But the cartoon was not drawn by Europeans — it was conceived, drawn and paid for by Israelis, for Israelis, about Israelis.

One can only wonder how right wingers, of all people, have the gall to call critics of Israeli policies ”self-hating Jews”.

UPDATE: The Samaria Settler Council is a non-profit, but most of its funds comes from the Samaria Regional Council, which is an elected local authority (confusing, I know). As Labor MK Stav Shaffir wrote to her followers on Saturday night, “In case you were wondering who was sponsoring that filth, the answer is: you” – some NIS 1.3 million of taxpayer money in the last year alone, according to Shaffir.

Since going online, the video has been lambasted by just about everyone, including settler leaders. Danny Dayan, one-time chair of Yesha Council and number one advocate for the settlement movement, stressed the Council does not represent him, while Naftali Bennett tried to place some distance between himself and the video, albeit obliquely.

“I think the clip is inappropriate,” Bennet told Army Radio. “The content, incidentally, is very true: Europe funds organizations that harm IDF soldiers, and that’s a fact. I think this should be dealt with through legal means. I’m generally against using Nazi allegories.” Later on Sunday, even the Samaria Regional Council itself professed revulsion with the clip.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Samaria Settler Council, Benny Katzover, doubled down behind the video, saying the uncut version was even harsher. “It had much stronger imagery because the picture of leftist organizations courting the greatest anti-Semites is an outrageous one,” he said to the same radio station. “But we knew that the Israeli public, which isn’t really aware of what is going on, can’t really take overdoses all at once [sic], so we softened it up.”

Morbid curiosity abounds.

Left-wing NGOs warn settler group’s video could incite to violence

Left-wing Israeli organizations are calling for the Attorney General to investigate a Jewish settler organization under Israel’s anti-incitement law for a video it shared on social media.

The Samaria Settlers’ Committee, an organization headed by veteran settler leader and Gush Emunim founder Benny Katzover, uploaded the two-minute-long animated clip to YouTube on Saturday. Its critics accuse it of being anti-Semitic and an incitement to violence against the leaders, members and supporters of left-wing organizations.

The video, which has been viewed close to 30,000 times in less than a day, is indeed replete with anti-Semitic tropes and makes clear allusions to the Nazis.

In the clip, an unseen character named “Mr. Stürmer” (Der Stürmer was the name of a Nazi newspaper that spread anti-Semitic propaganda) sits behind a newspaper titled, “Hasmol” (Hebrew for “The Left”). This unseen character orders a hook-nosed Jew to dig up and bring him untruthful news items for his newspaper about Israel and the IDF. Each time the obsequious Jew brings him this “information,” he tosses a Euro coin at him. Eventually Mr. Stürmer has no more use for the Jew and tells him to take care of himself.

The video, titled “The Eternal Jew” (also the name of an infamous anti-Semitic propaganda movie put out by the Nazis in 1940), ends with an image of the Jew hanging from a tree. Next to him are the logos of 10 different left-wing Israeli non-governmental organizations, including the New Israel Fund, Peace Now and B’Tselem and the following sentence: “The Europeans maybe seem different to you today, but to them…you are exactly the same.”

The video is evidently an attack on European funding of Israeli NGOs working to advance Israeli-Palestinian cooperation and protect Palestinians rights. A statement issued to The Times of Israel by the Samaria Settlers’ Committee quoting Katzover confirms that this was the intended message.
“In recent years, the support of foreign bodies and governments for extreme leftist organizations in Israel has grown. We are talking about foreign governments whose goal is to destroy the lives of Jews in the Land of Israel in general, and in particular over the Green Line, and do so with funding of hundreds and millions of Euros,” Katzover said.

“The purpose of the video is to show that even in the best case, Israeli leftist organizations are acting like idiotic pawns of the swarm of modern anti-Semitism. In the worst case, they are consciously acting to destroy the State of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.”

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked the video, saying in a statement that he is “stridently against the comparison between organizations or Israeli individuals — from any political stripe — and between Nazi Germany and condemn any use of it for elections.”

In 2011 and 2013, right-wing Knesset members attempted to advance a bill that would limit foreign funding for Israeli NGOs that support the prosecution of IDF officers in international courts or campaign for boycotting Israeli institutions or products.

Sunday morning, Peace Now posted on Facebook a letter that it sent to Israel’s Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein calling on him to order a police investigation of the Samaria Settlers’ Committee.

“…In this case we are talking about a true breach of the law. We believe there is an actual possibility that after watching a video like this, a person could carry out an act, either planned or spontaneous, against these organizations and activists, either in the Occupied Territories, or within Israel,” Peace Now general secretary Yariv Oppenheimer wrote.

Peace Now general secretary Yariv Oppenheimer (photo credit: Kobi Gideon/Flash90)
Oppenheimer also pointed out that the video was made with public money.

“The budget of the Samaria Settlers’ Committee comes from the Samaria Regional Council…this projects the message that this is not just a video by a fly-by-night organization, but rather the official position of state authorities,” he wrote.

Labor MK Stav Shaffir posted on Facebook her disgust for the video, and shared that NIS 1.3 million of public funds go to the Samaria Settlers’ Council every year.

Uri Misgav, writing in Haaretz, agreed that the fact that this video was made and disseminated by the Samaria Settlers’ Committee raises the anti-left rhetoric to a new level.

“Comparisons between left wingers and peace activists, human rights organizations and journalists to Nazi collaborators are not a new thing. This phenomenon reached its peak in the years around the time that the Oslo Accords were signed…But until today it seemed that this was coming from the fringes of the right-wing. The escalation of this new video is significant for two reasons. First, here we see the Europeans—and not the Palestinians—portrayed as Nazis. And second, this was produced and shared by a body that is completely part of the establishment,” Misgav wrote.

Neta Patrick, executive director of Yesh Din, an Israeli organization working to defend the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank, issued a statement calling the video an attempt at “incitement against civil society organizations.”

“It seems that after they failed to convince the public in other ways, they decided turned to Nazi propaganda. I pity the person whose feverish mind conceived those kind of images,” she said.
A spokesman for the Justice Ministry told The Times of Israel he was aware of complaints lodged with the Attorney General about the “Eternal Jew” video, but that the ministry was not issuing any comment on the matter at this time.

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