How British Quakers Became Apologists for Zionism, Ethnic Cleansing & Anti-Palestinian Racism
Opposition to anti-Semitism today is invariably support
for anti-Palestinian racism. What I don’t mean is that opposition to
anti-Jewish racism is equal to support for racism against Palestinians but what
I do mean is that opposition to the ruling class, IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism is equivalent to supporting Zionism and therefore
anti-Palestinian racism.
The Quakers have a reputation for being on the
saintly side of Christianity. For example nine of the 12 founding members of the
1787 Society
for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, were Quakers.
I know from personal experience how supportive the Religious Society
of Friends (Quakers) in Australia have been in helping the Al Tafawk
Kindergarten in Jenin to survive.
However many Quakers were active in supporting colonialism.
The founders of Barclays Bank, which helped sustain first Apartheid in South
Africa and then Israeli Apartheid, were Quakers.
In 1896 several banking Quaker families formed the
nucleus of 20 private banking firms who formed Barclay and Company Limited. The
author of Barclays
Bank and its Quaker roots wrote about how
Most of the partners had slowly drifted away from the simple lifestyle of their Quaker predecessors, but they found it advantageous to preserve the Quaker image of trustworthiness, frugality and prudence.
Richard Nixon was both a Quaker
and one of the pioneers
of McCarthyism. Not all Quakers live up to their professed values
of Simplicity, Truth, Equality and Peace
Simple piety without politics can end up in a dark
place. A good example of this is the pamphlet Britain’s
Quakers
published ‘Challenging
Antisemitism’ in February 2026. The pamphlet failed to even
mention that allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ have been used to support the
holocaust in Gaza.
Challenging
Antisemitism could
have been published by the Genocide supporting Board of Deputies. It offers no support
to the Palestinians. Instead it endorses the IHRA anti-Semitism definition which
was drawn up specifically to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
The Palestinians play the part of Banquo’s Ghost. Challenging
Antisemitism is suffused with Christian guilt over the holocaust
which seems to have corroded the authors critical faculties.
It isn’t difficult to understand that
‘anti-Semitism’ is the only defence that Israel has for the genocide in Gaza.
Donald Trump, a racist bigot who called
Somalis garbage, is nonetheless very concerned about anti-Semitism. It doesn’t
take an Einstein to work out why neo-Nazis and White Supremacists love Zionism
and Israeli Jews today.
The authors of this pamphlet are determined to
ignore all context in order to parade their virtuous opposition to an
anti-Semitism that barely exists whilst ignoring the elephant in the room –
anti-Palestinian racism.
When a warrant for his arrest was issued by the
International Criminal Court, Netanyahu’s response was that it was ‘pure
anti-Semitism’, comparing
himself to Dreyfus. When a group of Israeli soldiers were videod raping a
Palestinian man and then arrested, the Israeli right protested and mobs
besieged the Sde Teiman torture camp. When the Military Advocate General, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi,
leaked a video, she was arrested,
unlike the rapists. The allegations were described by Netanyahu as a ‘blood
libel’.
The Statement of B'tselem - Israel's main human rights group
When Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset,
asked if it was legitimate “to insert a
stick into a person’s rectum”, Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Likud responded:
“If he is a Nukhba everything is
legitimate to do! Everything!”
Quakers Against 'Antisemitism'
Even the Gestapo didn’t use rape as a method of
torture. Yet the racists who authored Challenging Anti-Semitism behaved like the
three wise
monkeys.
They neither saw, heard or spoke of evil. They won’t understand being called racists
but their bias towards White Jewish settlers is racist nonetheless.
‘Blood libel’ is the favourite retort of Israel’s
genocide apologists when caught in
flagrante. It refers to the medieval allegations made against Jews that
they had poisoned the wells of non-Jews, spread the Black Death and baked their
matzot (unleavened bread) in the
blood of Christian children. These allegations were without any substance but
they led to the death of thousands of Jews.
Zionist leaders have appropriated the innocence of
Jews in the Middle Ages, who died in horrible circumstances, to glorify their
atrocities. As with the holocaust they trade on the suffering of Jews who were
the victims of real anti-Semitism in order to perpetrate the same on
Palestinians. These Quakers didn’t want to see what should have been blindingly
obvious.
Medieval Jews were falsely accused of poisoning
wells yet it is well
documented
that the settlers do poison the water sources of Palestinians. During the Nakba
Operation Cast Thy Bread
involved introducing
dysentery bacteria into Palestinian water sources, notably
in Acre. The 1925 Geneva Protocol forbade the use of biological weapons but international
law has never stopped Zionists.
It is as if the Zionists are determined to vindicate post hoc those who made the original blood libel allegations by carrying out all their false accusations.
Those who wrote Challenging
Anti-Semitism don’t seem to get it that anti-Semitism has been weaponised
and that anti-Semitism today is not the anti-Semitism of a century ago.
Racism doesn’t stand still. Its form and contours
change as do its victims. Yesterday’s victims can become today's perpetrators,
especially when, as with anti-Semitism, it is a form of anti-White racism. This
is what the authors of Challenging
Anti-Semitism found so difficult to grasp.
The Jews of today are not the Jews who came to
Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They
faced the same racist abuse that migrants face today but which, for reasons
that are beyond this essay, they were able to escape.
Sir William Evans-Gordon, the Conservative MP for
Stepney, the founder of the anti-Semitic British
Brothers League was the Nigel Farage of his day. The Zionists were
extremely friendly with him. Chaim Weizmann, the President of the World Zionist
Organisation, wrote in his autobiography, Trial
and Error (pp. 90-1) that:
our people were rather hard on him. The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen... Sir William Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudices... He acted... in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country… he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire, but he failed to see why the ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk
A century ago most Jews lived in the East End. They were
working class, trade unionists and on the left. Jews
formed 10%
of the Communist Party in the 30s. Of the 12 Communist councillors in the East
End, 7 were Jewish. In 1945 the only Communist to have been elected to
Parliament from England was Phil Piratin, who was elected in the Mile End constituency. Half of
his votes were estimated
to have come from Jews
When Professor Geoffrey Alderman did a study of the
Hackney North constituency in 1979 he could not find one Jewish person
intending to vote Communist but he did find some 360 who intended to vote for
the holocaust denying National Front. [The Jewish Community in British
Politics’, pp. 164-5]
Today most Jews vote for the Right, are mainly upper
middle class and live in North London. As William Rubinstein,
a past President of the Jewish Historical Society wrote:
‘The rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status has led to the near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size.’ (The Right, the Left and the Jews, p.51) See also ‘How did American Jews get so rich?, YNet, 26.11.10).
On a personal note, when I was a child my father used to take me to Blooms kosher
restaurant
in Whitechapel. We had to wait because there were queues around the block. In 2010 it closed. Why?
Because there were virtually no Jews left in the East End. Their place had been
taken by Bengalis.
The racism that Jewish immigrants had experienced
didn’t go away. It was transferred to the migrants from Bangladesh. Yet the
authors of this pamphlet haven’t noticed.
This pamphlet adds nothing to the fight against racism,
anti-Semitism included. It will however aid those who use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a
battering ram against the Palestinians.
It is an execrable
tract written at the expense of an indigenous people who are being ethnically
cleansed and exterminated. It gives aid and comfort to those who cry ‘anti-Semitism’
when accused of Genocide.
The authors should ask why the Met, whose officers were
so sympathetic
to Moseley’s British Union of
Fascists
90 years ago, are now concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’.
The authors description of Israel as the ‘ancestral home’ of Jews is itself
anti-Semitic. Our home is where we live not a recreation of two mythical tiny
Jewish city states. It is akin to writing
about the medieval conquests of the Teutonic Knights in
Eastern Europe during the Nazi era (Drang nach Osten) and Lebensraum without mentioning the Jews.
This pamphlet doesn’t mention how diaspora Jewish
communities have been mobilised in support of Gaza’s holocaust. To talk of
anti-Semitism today without mentioning the Genocide is like talking about the
holocaust and not mentioning the Jews.
What the pamphlet
lacks
in analysis, being both subjective and impressionistic, it makes up for in Christian
guilt. Not guilt over British responsibility for the Nakba but the vestigial
remnants of ‘anti-Semitism’ that exist today.
There is no apology for the evils of Christian
Zionism which was based on the theological fantasy of Christ reappearing after
a Jewish ‘return’ to Palestine. This was an anti-Semitic idea that assumed that
Jews didn’t belong where they lived. It was as if the son of God was waiting
until the Palestinians had been exterminated before making an entrance.
How Britain’s Quakers
Accommodated to Zionism
The authors sheer ignorance is evident when they say that they prefer to use ‘antisemitism’ rather than ‘anti-Semitism’. They fail to understand the modern roots of anti-Semitism. It was Wilhelm Marr who, in his pamphlet The Victory of Judaism over Germandom (Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum) first popularised the term ‘anti-Semitism’.
For Marr the conflict
between Jews and non-Jew was not a religious but a racial
conflict. This marked a break from Christian or feudal anti-Semitism. For Martin Luther, who was vehemently anti-Semitic,
once a Jew had converted that was the end of the matter. For racial
anti-Semites it didn’t matter what religion the Jew was. Once a Jew always a
Jew. Hence the phenomenon of the Christian Jews in Nazi Germany who were also
killed.
The term ‘anti-Semitism’ conveys the origins of the
term. For Marr it really was a battle against ‘Semitism’ and the Orient which
the Jews represented. For him and the Zionists they didn’t belong in Europe. For the Zionists and their
Quaker friends the Zionist myth of eternal anti-Semitism sits alongside the Nazi myth of the ‘eternal Jew’.
We are told that ‘The root word Semite gives the false impression that antisemitism is
directed against all Semitic people.’ Ignorance is bliss. ‘Semitic’ applies
to languages not people and to Marr the only ‘semites’ were the Jews who were
living in their midst. The authors of the Quaker pamphlet comprehensively
misunderstand the whole term and the whole issue.
We
are also told that ‘Just like all other
oppressions, antisemitism can be unconscious.’ In which case why bother
about it? Let sleeping dogs lie. If all racism was unconscious then we would
have very little to worry about. But for those who wish to depoliticise racism
and locate it in the individual psyche then ‘unconscious racism ‘is very
important.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan
It was Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who first distinguished between ‘the racism that discriminates and the racism that kills’. Liberal Quakers are more concerned about the former than the latter. They can tolerate a genocide but god forbid if they offend a Jew. See We Are Here Because You Were With Us: Remembering A. Sivanandan (1923–2018)
We
are told that ‘the violence in Israel and
Palestine is a big driver of modern-day antisemitism’. And who is responsible
for this? We are never told. So it’s probably the Palestinians. The authors explains
that
Criticism of Israel is not always, but could well be, intentionally or unconsciously antisemitic. Sometimes, criticism of Israel is wrongly labelled as antisemitism, due to genuine misunderstandings or deliberate efforts to label all criticism of Israeli policy as antisemitic. But also, criticism of Israel could be disguised antisemitism, either intentionally or unconsciously.
What
if we said during the era of Apartheid that ‘Criticism
of South Africa is not always, but could well be anti-White.’ Or criticism
of Nazi Germany was not always anti-German?
The face of Zionism today
It
is rare in the Palestine solidarity movement, for criticism of Israel to be
anything other than genuine. Very few people criticise Israel because it is Jewish
rather than for what it does.
The
authors of the pamphlet then descend into unabashed idiocy. We are told that
‘Context matters’ as indeed it does.
‘excessive focus on Israel when other countries are doing similar actions could well make it antisemitic.’
This
is a repetition of the ‘double standards’ illustration in the IHRA.
If you focus on Israel excessively then you are anti-Semitic. The idiots who
wrote this pamphlet don’t seem to appreciate that something either is or is not
anti-Semitic. Whether you focus on Israel or not is irrelevant.
If
you criticise the sexual
abuse and torture of children in the hell
that are Israeli prisons you are anti-Semitic if you didn’t also
criticise prisons in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
People
concentrate on Israel for the same reasons that they used to concentrate on
South Africa and Nazi Germany. Racially based states are suis generis.
Apparently
Israelis are better placed than anyone to comment on the genocide:
the person saying it matters: people with stronger connections to Israel (such as by living there or in Israeli-occupied Palestine, or having close personal links with Israel) have greater leeway to speak about the country than those of us elsewhere in the world.
Presumably
the torturer has more right than Amnesty International to speak about torture?
It was an argument that the Hitler supporting, Daily Mail owner Vere Harmsworth used to make about Nazi Germany.
It’s a standard right-wing response when you have nothing left to say.
The
agenda of those who wrote this pamphlet is made explicit when they tell us that
support for the Palestinians should be seen through an ‘anti-Semitism’ lens. We
should
become more aware of how some people expressing support for others, such as Palestinians, can do so (often unconsciously) in a way that is antisemitic.
Awareness
is the one thing that the racists who wrote this pamphlet cannot be accused of.
They seem to specialise in the superficial. If people become anti-Jewish
because of the treatment of the Palestinians, that might have something to do
with the fact that Israel and supporters of Zionism associate Jews in this
country with the evils that Israel perpetrates.
The
answer is to dissociate Jewish people from Israel’s genocidal racism not to
appease the Zionists.
Some
Black people became anti-White because of Apartheid in South Africa and some
Jews became anti-German because of the Nazis. For example my father refused to
visit or even talk to a German because members of his family had died in the
holocaust. He was wrong but this is understandable.
If
Palestinians become anti-Semitic (which I’ve never come across) then they
should be treated in exactly the same way as my father and other Jews’
anti-German racism was treated. In essence it’s not anti-Semitism but reflexive
racism.
Anti-Semitism
is primarily a consequence of Zionism but which is more important? The child
burnt alive in a Gaza tent by the IDF who Chief Rabbi Mirvis thinks are the
finest in the world or the hurt feelings of a British Jew who remains silent?
The
best way for Jews to avoid being targeted by those outraged at the crimes being
committed in their name is to dissociate themselves from Zionism and its
bastard progeny, Israel. That is one reason why anti-Zionism is a growing
phenomenon amongst today’s Jews.
But
here’s the surprising thing. The wooden heads who wrote this pamphlet don’t even mention anti-Zionist Jews. In
much the same way as anti-Zionist Jews are invisible in the mass media and BBC so
they are with these Quakers authors.
The
third section ‘What
do I need to know about the history of antisemitism?’ tells you very little. It says that ‘antisemitism in Europe has for centuries been cyclical not linear’
and then informs us that ‘The Nazi
Holocaust is the most recent and most extreme example of this’. This
demonstrates that the authors have little understanding of either anti-Semitism
or the holocaust.
Under
‘The Holocaust’ the authors content themselves with more generalisations. They
write that ‘The Holocaust was the
mass-murder by the Nazi regime of Jews’ whereas other groups were ‘victims of ‘Nazi persecution’.
For
Zionism the holocaust is unique and the Jews were its sole victims. Why?
Because if something is unique then it has no universal lessons. The only
lesson that Zionism draws from the holocaust is that the creation of Israel was
the answer. Even though most of those who died were not Zionists.
Israel
is seen as inheriting the memory of the Jews who died rather than inheriting
the memory of those who killed the Jews. Making the holocaust unique means
preserving it for Zionism and using it to justifiy Apartheid and Genocide.
According to historian and holocaust survivor Henry Friedlander,
the holocaust began with the murder of the disabled and included the Roma. The
Slavs would have been next if Hitler had had time.
3b. The importance of Israel
The authors ask ‘Why
does Israel matter so much to so many Jews?’ The answer is a
word salad about ‘multi-generational, profound and pervasive antisemitism in
western culture.’
therefore, having a nation in their ancestral homeland deeply matters to many Jews, a place where they can feel safe from the antisemitism and persecution.
We should be kinder to Israelis who want to expel all Arabs
Palestine is not the ‘ancestral homeland’ of Jews.
It is the centre of three religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. That
does not make it their homeland. The Jewish homeland is where Jews live not a
settler colony in someone else’s land. We are also told, in case we ask awkward
questions that:
As in other ‘difficult conversations’, it is important to listen respectfully and look for ‘kinder ground’ rather than demand an absolutist or (to you) internally logical position.
In
other words ‘shut up’ about Israeli Apartheid. Ironically for a pamphlet about
anti-Semitism the authors indulge in it themselves when they describe Jews as ‘a nation’. Jews are not a nation within
a nation as the anti-Semites believed and as Islamaphobes like Trevor Phillips describe
Muslims.
Jews
are a religion not a nation. It was only anti-Semites who held that Jews were
not part of the nations they lived amongst. Zionism holds that Jews are a
nation and that Israel is their nation state. This is at the root of Israel’s
racism.
It
is why Netanyahu could say
that Israel is not a state of all its citizens, which is the basic prerequisite
for any state claiming to be a democracy, but a state of its Jewish citizens
which he terms ‘the Jewish people’.
The
goal of Zionism was to transform Jews from a religion into a nation. It has
been a failure. Even in Israel according to a 2016
Pew Report
46% of Israeli Jews see themselves as Jewish first and 35% as Israeli first.
Israel
is the only state that has no nationality because of the fiction that it is the
nation state of Jews worldwide. This means it is not a state of all its
citizens. We are told that it is anti-Semitic to equate
Jews with Israel, bringing in Israel or Zionism into a conversation with, or about, Jewish people where it isn’t relevant, or blaming all Jews for the actions of Israel’ is anti-Semitic.
Israel
calls itself a Jewish State. It claims that it is the nation state of all Jews.
If it is anti-Semitic to equate Jews with Israel then it is the Zionist movement
that is anti-Semitic. Given that Zionist groups claiming to represent all Jews
say that Jews do support Israel, is it really anti-Semitic to blame all Jews
for what Israel does if they don’t dissociate themselves from it?
What
is striking about Challenging Anti-Semitism is its
intellectual poverty. Instead of dealing coherently with the topic, what we get
are a series of platitudes and honeyed phrases. It is as if the authors never
got their brains into gear.
In
the only reference to Jews who are not Zionists the pamphlet says that
Holding up Jews who eg choose to take action on the occupation of Palestine as examples of the ‘good’ ones – this implies that other Jews are bad.
Israelis demonstrating against the arrest of soldiers who raped a Palestinian
The
sheer mind numbing stupidity of the authors cries out. Of course those Jews who
support the occupation are ‘bad’. I can think of far worse adjectives for Jews
who support ethnic cleansing, rape, torture, pogroms and genocide. And then the
same creatures cry ‘anti-Semitism’ at the first opportunity.
This
pamphlet is just a paean to Zionist settler colonialism. It is worthless, trash,
fit only for the garbage can.
And
in a bow to the IHRA we are told that
Invoking the Holocaust when describing human rights abuses against Palestinians. While specific contexts may influence whether this is anti-Semitic or not, it inevitably plays into a wider anti-Semitic discourse and is always inflammatory.
Why
is it anti-Semitic to compare starving Palestinian children in Gaza to starving
Jewish children in the Nazi ghettos? What racist verbal gymnastics to try and prevent such comparisons.
When
ex-Knesset member Moshe Feiglin compared
Hitler’s ‘dilemma’ in wanting to be rid of every Jew to that of Israel wanting
to be rid of all Palestinians was that anti-Semitic?
Or perhaps Shlomo
Shmelzman was being anti-Semitic when, during the 1982 Lebanon War, he
described how
In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw Ghetto, through labor camps, to Buchenwald. Today, as a citizen of Israel, I cannot accept the systematic destruction of cities, towns, and refugee camps… I hear too many familiar sounds today…. I hear “dirty Arabs” and I remember “dirty Jews.” I hear about “closed areas” and I remember ghettos and camps. I hear “two-legged beasts” and I remember “Untermenschen.”… Too many things in Israel remind me of too many things from my childhood.
Or
maybe the Quaker authors of this pamphlet are just a bunch of racists masquerading
as anti-racists.
Zionists
invoke the holocaust incessantly when they compare the Palestinians with the Nazis
but when someone points out that it is they who resemble the Nazis, we are told
it is ‘inflammatory’ or anti-Semitic.
Comparing
Palestinians to Nazis has a long Zionist pedigree. On 11 September 1945 the New
Zionist Organization of America took out an
advert
in the New York Post that referred to Palestinians as “oriental Nazis.”
Is
comparing the 47% of Israelis Jews who
believe
that the Palestinians in Gaza should be exterminated to the Nazis, anti-Semitic?
Not even 47% of the Nazi party was in favour of exterminating the Jews. It is
certainly not true that in Nazi Germany 47% of people supported the holocaust.
Israel is a far more Nazified society
than Nazi Germany. Let that sink in to the block heads who wrote this pamphlet.
I
can’t recall hearing that in Germany ordinary Germans took sofas, cold drinks
and coffee machines onto the hills so
they could watch the murder of Jews yet this
is what is happening today in Israel. Comparable? I leave it
to you to judge.
When
Hannah Arendt, a Jewish refugee from Germany, and the greatest political
philosopher of the last century, compared in her book Eichman in Jerusalem, the 1935 Nuremberg laws which forbade
intermarriage between Jew and non-Jew in Germany with the Israeli law that
forbids marriage between Jews and non-Jews, was she being anti-Semitic?
We
are told ‘Assuming that Zionism has only
one definition and that people who self-define as Zionist will not be critical
of the occupation of Palestine’ is also anti-Semitic. As any student of
Zionism knows, all wings of Zionism wanted to see a Jewish state that was, as
Chaim Weizmann put it, as Jewish as England
is English,
i.e. racially pure.
All
wings of Zionism agreed on the necessity of achieving a Jewish state where Jews
would hold the whip hand.
Under
‘Definitions of antisemitism’ the authors
inform us that the IHRA
‘definition’ of anti-Semitism, which doesn’t define anything, has
been widely adopted by governments, the European Commission etc. This is
correct but so what? The aim of the IHRA was to label support for the
Palestinians and anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic. Is it surprising that Europe’s
racist governments have adopted the IHRA?
They
also tell us that one reason why Jews don’t support the alternative Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism,
which was largely drawn up by Jewish and Israeli academics, is because
left-wing groups support it! A damning indictment!
The
pamphlet tells us that the issue of which definition to support has divided the
authors and that ‘Neither the IHRA nor
Jerusalem Declaration definitions aim to be politically partisan.’ This is
another trite statement. The pamphlet says
We should treat a complaint of antisemitism the way we treat (for example) someone saying they’ve been the victim of anti-Black racism, rather than challenge them because it doesn’t fit with a preferred definition of antisemitism.
I’m
left wondering if there are any Quaker intellectuals or people who are capable
of more than trite superficial phrases.
The
paragraph above fails to distinguish between those who experience state racism
and Jews who experience prejudice. The experience of Black people and Jews is
not comparable.
The
authors ignore the context in which the IHRA and JDA arose. The fact that the
Zionists love the IHRA should be all that you need to know. Even its principal
drafter, American academic, Kenneth Stern has attacked
its use to chill free speech on campus, in testimony to Congress saying:
The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus. In fact, at a conference in 2010 about the impact of the definition, I highlighted this misuse, and the damage it could do.
I
doubt if the pamphlet’s authors are even aware of the debates around the IHRA,
which leading human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robinson QC described
as ‘not fit for purpose’.
The
pamphlet is nothing if not repetitious. Under the heading ‘Zionism’ we are told that Zionism has various meanings and is often
used as a form of ‘disguised antisemitic abuse’. ‘If you can use a word that is clearer or more universally understood,
then use that.’
Zionist
ideology permeates through every act of land theft, murder and torture by
Israel. Zionist ideology is a Jewish supremacist ideology yet we have to tiptoe
around the issue for fear of upsetting Jewish racists.
I’ve
said nothing about two sections ‘What role can I
play in actively challenging antisemitism’ and ‘Responding to
accusations of anti-Semitism’ because they are just word sprays. However in ‘Appendix 1 Examples of antisemitism’ we are told that
when a British politician spoke out against an antisemitic attack against a group of Jewish people in the UK. Someone asked why they didn’t also speak out about Palestinians being attacked by the IDF and settlers.
What
is anti-Semitic about that? British Jews are treated like colonial pets, pampered
in order to defend the amorality of British foreign policy by using British
Jews as a moral alibi.
Apparently stating that there has been no serious anti-Semitism in
Britain since the 1950s is also anti-Semitic. Except that there haven’t been
any serious anti-Semitic outbreaks against Jews in that time. One wonders whether
these Quakers also believe that something can be true and still anti-Semitic ? Other
examples include:
- EØ
Expecting a Jewish person to have an opinion on the
Israel/Palestine conflict or to want to talk about it.
- TØ Thoughtlessly
calling anything you don’t like a Holocaust or a person a Nazi.
If this is the worst that the authors can come up with then it’s
clear that anti-Semitism in Britain today isn’t a problem. Especially when
compared with other forms of racism.
All the books that are recommended such as David Badiel’s Jews
don’t count are written
by Zionists. They will give people no insight into anti-Semitism
All the groups that they recommend, such as the Community
Security Trust, which is a
Mossad project, or the Holocaust Education Trust
are Zionist. The CEO of HET, Karen Pollock, was described by the Independent as having ‘unleashed
a furious attack on the way some pro-Palestinian protesters are comparing the
Nazis to modern-day Israel’.
The only good thing about this pamphlet is the illustrations. They
should have included more and left out the words!
These are extracts from Herzl's The Jewish State published 1896
If the authors of this pamphlet had any honesty then they could
have included a reference to the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl,
who, in his Diaries wrote that ‘The
anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries
our allies.’
When Israel’s Diaspora Minister, Amichai Chikli, organised a
conference on ‘fighting anti-Semitism’ who did he invite? The worlds’
anti-Semites. There is a logic to this. Who is better placed to understand
anti-Semitism than anti-Semites! Even the docile Zionist establishment outside
Europe was so embarrassed that they were forced to boycott it.
Zionism and Anti-Semitism have always been two sides of the same
racist coin. Which is why historically nearly all anti-Semites professed their
support for Zionism.
The same Arthur Balfour who issued the Balfour Declaration, giving
the land of the Palestinians to the Zionists in 1917, had in 1905 as Prime
Minister put through parliament the anti-Semitic Aliens Act preventing Jewish
refugees from the pogroms entering Britain. Balfour was an
anti-Semite who was also a Zionist. The Zionists too supported the Aliens
Act.
Adolf Eichman confessed in an interview, extracts of which appeared in Life Magazine on 28 November 1960 that:
I often said to Jews with whom I had dealings that, had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine being anything else. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable
Zionist novelist A B
Yehoshua was quoted in the Jewish Chronicle of 22 January 1982 as telling
Jewish students that:
‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help to rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’
This is the reality that the
authors of this worthless pamphlet failed to grasp. The best thing to do with
the pamphlet is to bin it and start again with a pamphlet about the racism that
is directed against Palestinians.
Tony Greenstein
Addendum
I have only just come across this Response to the Recent Quaker Report Challenging Antisemitism by the Quaker Socialist Society. In my view it still does not get to grips with the fundamental racism embedded in the pamphlet Challenging Anti-Semitism but at least it's a start.
