When Bliss Wylie Defended the Green
Party’s Zionism is Racism Policy, Galvin Sought to Expel Her From the Green Group
Green Group Tried To Silence Her - Now This Councillor Faces Expulsion!
You might remember one of the bogus complaints of the Zionists was that the passing of the Zionism is Racism motion would lead to the expulsion of Zionists and Jews. Of course this was never the intention though why a racist would want to remain in an anti-racist and anti-Zionist party is slightly baffling.
What the experience in
Norwich demonstrates is that when it comes to expelling people with opposing
opinions it is the Zionists who do the expelling and witch-hunting.
You might remember one of the bogus complaints
of the Zionists was that the passing of the Zionism
is Racism motion would lead to the expulsion of Zionists and Jews. Of
course this was never the intention though why a racist would want to remain in
an anti-racist and anti-Zionist party is slightly baffling.
Norwich Green Party has
a slender majority of three in Norwich Council. After a meeting last night and
after its councillors cast their votes for a motion, moved by their racist
leader Lucy Galvin to expel Bliss Wylie from the group, the Green Councillors
may cut that majority to one.
Lucy Galvin
At the moment there are
21 Green Councillors, 12 Labour, 3 Lib Dems, 2 Reform and 1 Independent. When
Lucy Galvin, one of the Green Party’s Zionists issued a statement, issued
without any consultation, condemning the new Zionism is Racism policy passed at the recent Green Party
conference, Wylie called for her resignation at Green Party Leader.
Galvin retaliated by
moving a motion calling for Wylie to be expelled from the group. The local
Eastern Daily Press has covered
the story of how an anti-racist transgender councillor has been singled out and
victimised for her stance. It is difficult to believe that Galvin’s attitude to
Wylie isn’t also motivated by Transphobia too.
Bliss certainly has
some support amongst the Green councillors, who I shall not name, but whether
she has the support of at least one third to block the proposal remains to be seen.
The Green Party Establishment is 'Saddened' by Calling Zionism what it is - Adrian Ramsay is a Good Example of Racism at Work in the Green Party
Zionism was the
ideology and movement that led to the creation of the Israeli state. A state founded
on the slogan that Palestine was ‘a land
without a people for a people without a land.’
To settler colonists,
be it in Palestine or Australia or America, the indigenous population was invisible.
The Australian colonists called
Australia terra nullis, an empty
land.
Why Zionism is a Form of Racism
In 1917 British
imperialism pledged to support the Zionist colonisation and issued the Balfour
Declaration. It was named after its author, Foreign Secretary, Arthur
James Balfour, a Christian Zionist.
Sir Edwin Montague (left)
The only member of
Lloyd George’s war cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration was its only
Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, who accused
his fellow cabinet members of anti-Semitism. Montagu declared
that:
It is no more true to say that a Jewish
Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a
Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation
Montagu issued a Memorandum
on the Anti-Semitism of the Present (British) Government. Montagu, like
most Jews at the time, saw Christian support for Zionism as stemming from
anti-Semitism. They wanted British Jews to leave and where better to send them
than Palestine.
As Israeli novelist, A B Yehoshua said
in a talk to Jewish students in Britain (Jewish Chronicle 22.1.82.)
‘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.’
Balfour had been Prime Minister in 1905 when he
introduced the Aliens
Act whose purpose was to prevent the entry of Jewish refugees fleeing from the
pogroms in Czarist Russia. When speaking in favour of the Bill Balfour said
that:
a state of things could easily be imagined in
which it would not be to the advantage of the civilisation of the country that
there should be an immense body of persons who… remained a people apart, and
not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their
fellow-countrymen, but only inter-married among themselves.
Balfour was, like Lucy Galvin and her supporters, a racist and White
Supremacist. He was known as ‘Bloody Balfour’ after the death of three people
when police opened fire on a political protest in Mitchelstown, County Cork. In
a debate in Parliament in 1906 Balfour defended the refusal to give the vote to
Black people in South Africa saying.
We have to face the facts. Men are not born
equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are
born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change
Balfour like many Christian Zionists, combined an ardent support
for Zionism with anti-Semitism. Chaim Weizmann, the President of the World
Zionist Organisation and Israel’s first President, described
a conversation he had had with Balfour, who told him that he had met with
Cosima Wagner, the anti-Semitic widow of Richard Wagner. Balfour explained that
‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ Instead of protesting Weizmann
pointed
out that
we, too… had drawn
attention to the fact that Germans of the Mosaic persuasion were an undesirable
and demoralizing phenomenon…
Most Jews at that time saw Zionism as a form of Jewish
anti-Semitism. The anti-Semites wanted Jews to leave and the Zionists were only
too happy to oblige.
Adrian Ramsay & the Green MPs believe you can support the Palestinians and also Zionism - in the 19th Century they would have supported the Slaves and the Slave Owners
The British Mandate in
Palestine lasted from 1917 to 1948. Although the Zionists were a tiny handful
in 1917, no more than 30,000, the British enabled them to colonise the land behind
the protection of British bayonets.They
even brought the
Black and Tans over from Ireland under Reginald Duff to do it.
The Zionist settlements had a policy of excluding
non-Jews, i.e. Palestinians from the land and evicting the tenant farmers who
had ploughed the land for generations. The details of this apartheid land
settlement were best described in the Report of Sir
John Hope Simpson, an Inquiry set up after the 1929 riots in Palestine. It
found that the provisions of the leases of the Jewish National Fund were openly
racist. I quote:
The
following is Article 23 of this lease (of Keren Kayemeth, the Jewish National
Fund).:
The
lease also provides that the holding shall never be held by any but a Jew. If
the holder, being a Jew, dies, leaving as his heir a non-Jew, the Fund shall
obtain the right of restitution. ....
54 Zionist
policy in regard to Arabs in their colonies.The above quoted provisions
sufficiently illustrate the Zionist policy with regard to the Arabs in their
colonies. Attempts are constantly being made to establish the advantage which
Jewish settlement has brought to the Arab. The most lofty sentiments are
ventilated at public meetings and in Zionist propaganda. At the time of the
Zionist Congress in 1921 a resolution was passed which “solemnly declared the desire of the Jewish people to live with the Arab
people in relations of friendship and mutual respect, and, together with the
Arab people, to develop the homeland common to both into a prosperous community
which would ensure the growth of the peoples.” This resolution is frequently
quoted in proof of the excellent sentiments which Zionism cherishes towards the
people of Palestine. The provisions quoted above, which are included in legal
documents binding on every settler in a Zionist colony, are not compatible with
the sentiments publicly expressed.
The Zionist settlers created an economy within an
economy as part of forming a state within a state. Arabs were excluded from
that economy.
Today Israel is the most racist place on Earth. An
opinion poll conducted by Pennsylvania State University last year found
that 47% of Israeli Jews wanted to exterminate every last Palestinian in Gaza
and 56% wanted to deport Israel’s own Palestinian citizens. See Nearly
half of Israelis support army killing all Palestinians in Gaza, poll finds.
This is what Lucy Galvin and her other Green racists support.
In fact the 47% becomes 60% when
account is taken of the number of Israelis who said the Biblical parable of
Amalek, a tribe god commanded the Israelites to destroy, yeah every child and
suckling infant too.
The racism embedded in Israel is
demonstrated by the latest election results. Both Netanyahu and the ‘Opposition’
are clear – they
will not share power with the Arab parties.Because in Israel, as an ethno nationalist state, politics are
ethnicised.
It is not class but race that
counts, hence why Palestinians are ethnically cleansed so that Israel remains ‘democratic’.
Only Hadash, the Communist Party which has both Jewish and Arab Knesset members,
stands Jewish and Arab candidates.
In case anyone thinks that Israeli racism
is a product of October 7th then the Ynet poll
which was conducted in 2007 proves otherwise.
The
arrest and prosecution of Sir Jonathan Porritt
In Marriage to an
Arab is National Treason over half of Israel’s Jewish population
held marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man was ‘national treason’. The respondents didn't object to mixed marriage on
religious but racial grounds.
75% didn’t approve of apartment buildings being shared with
Arabs, 60% said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home, 40% agreed
that “Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked” and
over half agreed that Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to leave the
country.
55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment
sites”. Over 56% said they believed that Israel’s Arab citizens posed both
a security and a demographic threat to the country.
Israel's Burning Alive of 3 Year Old Marya Ghanem's
Parents and the Saving of the Child
Anyone
who opposes the Zionism is Racism motion is either a fool, a racist or both and
Lucy Galvin and her supporters amongst Norwich’s Green councillors qualify on
both grounds.
Below is my Open Letter to Green councillors in
Norwich.
Tony Greenstein
An Open Letter to Norwich Green
Councillors - Its Your Racist Leader Galvin not Bliss Who Has To Go
Dear
Councillor,
I
write as a longstanding Jewish anti-Zionist. The key lesson of the Nazi
Genocide is that the extermination of Jews and Roma do not excuse the
extermination of Palestinians in Gaza. Given the right set of circumstances any
people can become racists and ethnic cleansers.
I
am astounded that you are taking part in a racist witchhunt against the only
Green Councillor, Bliss Wylie, to have taken a principled stance in support of
the Palestinians and the Zionism is
Racism policy of the Green Party.
Zionism
is a racist movement which colonised Palestine under the slogan ‘a land without a people for a people without
a land.’ To the colonisers, all indigenous peoples were invisible.
Zionism
is a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. Zionism accepts that Jews do not belong in
the Diaspora but should live in Israel. Anti-Semites have always supported
Zionism hoping that it would help rid
them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, as Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua
said, 'a real anti-Semite must also be a Zionist'.
Arthur
James Balfour who issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 was an anti-Semite who
introduced the Aliens Act of 1905 aimed at preventing the entry of Jewish
refugees from the Russia pogroms. Today neo-Nazis like Tommy Robinsonand
Richard Spencer declare that they are White
Zionists.
Israel
is an Apartheid state where there are two systems of law in the same territory –
one for Jews and another for Palestinians. What is apartheid if not racism? As Primo Levi,
the Italian Auschwitz survivor said, “Everyone is somebody’s Jew, and today the
Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”
The
support of some Jews in Britain for Israel is no more relevant than that
of White expatriates who supported apartheid in South Africa. Jews today are
not persecuted.
Israel
is a monstrous state which locks up Palestinian children and sexually
abuses the majority of Palestinian girls and women and even rapes
men in prison. Israeli human rights groupB’tselem described
Israel’s prison system as a network of torture camps. Israel literally starved
17 year old Walid Ahmad to death. No Jewish child under 14 can be imprisoned
but Palestinian children as young as 12 are locked up, usually without trial.
American
Jewish doctor Mark Perlmutter, a veteran of over 30 conflicts, saw Palestinian
children literally
buried alive by bulldozers. Those of you who doubt these Nazi style
atrocities should watch NAZA, the award winning film that has just been
released. This is what Galvin is asking you to defend when you attack Bliss
Wylie.
Israel
has just held elections and Arab Israeli parties have gained 19 out of 120
seats. Yet instead of being part of coalition talks both Zionist blocs have
said in advance that no Arab party will be in Israel’s government. Arabs
have a vote but no power in Israel.
Israel
is an ethno-nationalist ‘Jewish’ state. States based on a religious ethnicity
are the most racist of all. Or have you forgotten why Thomas Paine supported
the French Revolution which separated Church from state?Israel is politically a medieval state..
It
was the Christian ethno-nationalist states of Eastern Europe which were the
most eager participants in the Holocaust. Slovakia, with a priest as President,
asked the Nazis to take ‘their’ Jews,. Romania butchered half of its 600,000
Jews without any help from the Nazis. Croatia
was the only Nazi occupied state to have its own extermination camp, Jasenovac.
When the Nazis
occupied Poland they placed Jews in ghettos and starved them. That is happening
today in Gaza. As Israel’s Finance Minister Smotrich said:
“it may be just and moral” to starve
2 million Gazans but “no one in the world
would let us.” He was wrong. The Lucy Galvins of this world have been happy
to allow it whilst crying ‘anti-Semitism’.
Holocaust
survivors have been the most outspoken because Israeli atrocities remind them
of their own experiences. At the time of the Lebanon War in 1982, Shlomo
Shmelzman, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, announced a hunger strike
stating:
Today, as a citizen of IsraelI 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
In
the opinion
poll conducted by Pennsylvania State University, 47% of Israeli Jews
support exterminating every Palestinian in Gaza and 56% supported deporting
Israel’s own Arab citizens. This is what racists like Lucy Galvin and Bliss
Wylie’s persecutors are supporting.
The question of
Zionism is today hotly disputed among Jews. Because of the Gaza Genocide, an
increasing number of Jews are dissociating themselves from Zionism. According
to the IJPR 44%
of young Jews (20-30) define themselves as non or
anti-Zionist. The question is whether you support racist or anti-racist Jews.
It
should be a no brainer that Zionism is Racism. What kind of state mandates
a compulsory death penalty for one ethnic group, Palestinians, but not
Jews? What kind of state is it which openly
states that it is a state, not of all its citizens but only its Jewish
citizens?
I
hope you reconsider Galvin’s racist attack on Bliss and that you remove her from
the Green Group’s leadership.
MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE – REVIEW OF BENJAMIN
MOSER’S ANTI-ZIONISM: A JEWISH HISTORY
MEMO in Conversation with Benjamin Moser
The
publication of Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism
– A Jewish History could not be more timely. The Genocide in Gaza, the Pogroms
and Ethnic Cleansing, demonstrate what Hannah Arendt and many of those featured
in Moser’s book predicted. Zionism, the project to form a Jewish State, was
based on racial myths and fantasies. It could only end in violence, terror and messianic
madness.
That Zionism would lead to war with the indigenous people
and Israel’s Arab neighbours was inevitable. During the British Mandate the
Zionists had opposed any move towards self-government whilst the Arabs were in
a majority. The Zionists were only able to colonise Palestine with the aid of British bayonets and the Black and Tans.
Arthus J Balfour, Zionist hero & author of the Balfour Declaration, was an Imperialist & White Supremacist
A Jewish State in a land where the Zionists were in
a minority could only lead to ethnic cleansing. All strands of anti-Zionism,
from bourgeois to socialist, predicted this. Transfer had been an integral part
of Zionist assumptions even before the Balfour Declaration was issued.
Anti-Zionism, A Jewish History: Benjamin Moser with Rashid Khalidi | Cullman Center
The reason it is instructive to look at the history
of Jewish anti-Zionism is because Jews today provide the moral alibi for
imperialism’s support for the settler state in Palestine. But that is all it
is, an alibi.
The real reason for imperialism’s support of Israel is that it
deems that it is in its own interests. In the words
of Joe Biden, ‘If there were not an Israel, we'd have to invent
one".According to Al Haig, Reagan's
Secretary of State, Israel was
the largest American aircraft carrier in the
world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is
located in a critical region for American national security.
US President Joe Biden: “If there were not an
Israel, we’d have to invent one.”
It also needs to be emphasised that Jews today are
not the Jews of a century ago. Up till the 1950s British Jews were seen as
being on the left. They were mainly working class. Today they are middle and
upper middle class and are to be found primarily on the right and far-right
politically,
Zionism has had a profound effect on Jews’ political
alignment as well as their psyche. When the history of the Jewish people comes
to be written, Zionism will be seen as both an aberration and an abomination. Something
to be quickly forgotten. A moment of madness.
There is a very good reason why BBC interviewers and
other right-wing journalists ask ‘Do you
support Israel’s right to exist’. They don’t ask this of any other state. Israel is unnatural. Israel is a state not of
its own citizens but of
its Jewish citizens only. It is an inherently racist state. By definition.
Jewish author describes Zionism as a racially exclusive movement
Someone should ask the idiot Green MPs like Sian Berry & Adrian Ramsay, who believe that Zionism isn't racist, why Arabs who vote in Israeli elections are accused of 'stealing the elections'
We can see that in the coverage of the latest Israeli
election. The visceral racism was on display when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
accused
Israel’s Arab voters of “trying to steal the elections” by voting in high numbers.
Netanyahu 'promised
a government built around broad Zionist principles.' But here is the irony. The Agudat Yisrael faction
of United Torah
Judaism, which gained 7 seats, formally rejects Zionism. Indeed when Agudat
Israel was formed in May 1912 in Kattowitz in the German Empire, now Katowice
in Poland, it was formed as an explicitly anti-Zionist party.
Moser has a chapter, Murder of Jaffa Street dedicated to the gay
poet Jacob Israel de Haan who came to Palestine in 1919 from the Netherlands as
a Zionist and was murdered on June 30, 1924 by Avraham Tehomi, a member of
Haganha, the armed militia set up by the Labour Zionists.
Zionism Founder Theodor
Herzl Barely Mentioned ‘Palestine’ - Zeteo
As a lawyer Israel de Haan had
become a political representative of Agudat Yisrael, the anti-Zionist Orthodox
Jewish party as his disillusion with Zionism set in. His murder had been sanctioned by Yitzhak ben Zvi of Ahdut Ha'avodah,
which was the main party of Labor Zionism. Ben Zvi later became Israel’s second
President.
Although it transitioned to a
non-Zionist party with the formation of the Israeli state Agudat Yisrael still
rejects Zionism ideologically. In the Statement
of Agudath Israel on Charedi Principles of October 28, 2020 they stated:
Recent organizational statements from representatives of the Zionist
movement have implied that Chareidi Jews have accepted the Jerusalem Program of
the World Zionist Organization. This Program, which is a statement of the
Zionist ideology, declares Zionism to be “the national liberation movement of
the Jewish people” and avers to “the centrality of the State of Israel . . . in
the life of the nation.”
The Jewish people is a nation based on the belief in One Hashem and the
Torah He gave us, and nothing else....
Among the foundational principles upon which the Torah giants of the
past century established the Agudas Yisroel movement was the firm rejection of
the Zionist redefinition of Jewish peoplehood. Throughout its history Agudas
Yisroel has remained faithful to that essential principle, and it will continue
to do so. We therefore reiterate: Any suggestion that the ideology of Zionism
is compatible with Chareidi Jewry’s fundamental beliefs has no basis and must
be rejected.
Yet Netanyahu is quite happy to include UTJ in his
coalition. In practice they are Zionist and they are in the government in order
to obtain money to fund their yeshivahs. But politically they declare
themselves not to be Zionist.
The definition of a Zionist is a belief in a Jewish
state. Therefore Arabs can hardly be in the Israeli government however many
votes their parties receive and this is the essence of the racism, both of
Israel and its Zionist ideology.
So when Netanyahu and Eisenkot’s bloc both promise
that any coalition they form will not include Arab parties what they really
mean is that they won’t include non-Jews. The fact that parties are Jewish and
Arab testifies to the abnormality of the Israeli state. As the Times of Israel reported:
While the anti-Netanyahu parties were projected
to have an edge over the ruling bloc, they won’t be able to form a coalition
unless several party heads violate campaign promises not to partner with
Arab-led parties.
The leader of the opposition Yashar election list, Gadi Eisenkot
promised that 'I will do everything in my power to establish a Zionist
government.' Translated this means a Jewish government. Ironically
Netanyahu's promise of a Zionist government isn't even true.
Zionism has turned
the Jewish religion into a genocidal religion which looks to the Book of Joshua
not the Prophets. A religion that turns the land of Israel into a golden calf,
a piece of real estate to be worshipped.
Moser’s book starts off with two pages of quotations
from the Bible about those who coveted the land and perpetrated injustice. Moser
quotes from I Chronicles 22:8 where God told David he could not build the first
temple because:
‘You
have shed much blood and have waged great wars; you shall not build a house to
my name, because you have shed much blood in my sight on the earth.’
Micah
2:1-2
criticises those who seize property by force like the West Bank settlers:
‘Woe
to those who plan iniquity... They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and
take them. They defraud people of their homes, they rob them of their
inheritance.’
Zionism ignores the Prophets preferring the blood
thirsty, atavistic passages of the Bible to those which welcome the stranger.
Why Many Jews hate Zionism: The Long History of Jewish anti-Zionism
Zionism belongs on the same political spectrum as Nazism
and Apartheid. Neo-Nazis love it. Richard Spencer, who organised the Charlottesville march which chanted ‘the Jews will not replace us’described himself as a White
Zionist.
After spending 75 years pretending that there was no
Nakba, that the Arab refugees had
voluntarily left Palestine in order to make way for the Arab armies, it fell to
the new Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, Simha
Flapan and Ilan Pappe to use recently released archives (now reclassified) to reveal
that Palestinians were driven out at the point of a gun.
It was the ‘socialist’ Zionists who committed the
worst massacres such as Dawayima
in October 1948, when the army, led by Yitzhak Sadeh, a member of the ‘Marxist’
Mapam, killed hundreds of civilians. Agriculture Minister Aharon Zislingdeclared: ‘I couldn’t sleep all night ... Jews too
have committed Nazi acts.’
Christian
Zionism and the ‘Return’ of the Jews
Some of the most fanatical Zionists are not Jews but
Christian Zionists, like the ones who turned up recently to demonstrate outside
the Green Party conference chanting ‘there
is no genocide’, as if they were holocaust deniers who had got lost.
Zionism was not a Jewish but a Christian project.
Christian Zionism predated Jewish Zionism by 4 centuries, the product of the
Reformation, Protestant Restorationism and millenarian fantasies.
A B Yehoshua, the 'honest Zionist' and novelist who told fellow Zionists what they didn't want to hear namely that '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.’
The idea of a ‘Jewish Return’ was an anti-Semitic
idea based on the belief that Europe’s Jews were visitors who had outstayed
their welcome in other people’s countries. In the words
of A B Yehoshua, Europe’s Jews ‘were
using other people’s countries like hotels.’[Jewish
Chronicle, 22.12.1989]
Jews represented ‘semitism’ in the eyes of Wilhelm
Marr who popularised the term ‘anti-Semitism’ and formed the League
of Anti-Semites in 1879. According to Marr Europe’s Jews belonged in the Middle
East not Germany. The Zionists agreed, which is why Zionism was seen by most
Jews when it arose as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.
When
Prime Minister Lord Palmerston approached the Board of Deputies in 1840 he received
a ‘a very meagre response’ to his
suggestion of a Jewish return to Palestine.’ [Regina Sherif,
Non-Jewish Zionism p.58] and in a resolution passed on 7
November 1842 the Board resolved
that
it is precluded from originating any measures
for carrying out the benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews
of Syria.it is precluded from originating any measures
for carrying out the benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews
of Syria.
Colonel
Charles Henry Churchill had written to Sir Moses Montefiore advocating that
European powers should aid Jews in attaining "the sovereignty of at least Palestine’.
The main goal of 19th century
Jewish leaders was civil emancipation. The suggestion that they
should return to where they had never been was viewed as a threat to securing
equal rights. The tension between the British imperial desire for a Jewish ‘return’
and the Jewish Establishment’s desire for equal rights explains why the Board was
not interested in the desire of the Evangelical Christians for a Jewish
‘return’:
Zionism was seen
as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism
Those
who proclaim that anti-Zionism is equal to anti-Semitism are either rogues or
charlatans, like Bella Sankey. Zionism was a product
of Christian imperialism and anti-Jewish racism.
Most
leading Nazis were supporters of Zionism. In an interview in 1955 with Wilhelm
Sassen, Adolf Eichmann declared
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.’
Eichmann wasn’t alone among the Nazis in his
admiration for Zionism. Heydrich was also was an admirer. The fact that Zionists
and Nazis got on famously has been excised from the historical record or excused
with tales about how they were really trying to save Germany’s Jews.
Manis Friedman is an influential Rabbi in the Lubavitch Hasidic Movement - Apart from Killing Palestinian Children He Believes That Child Sex Abuse is No Worse Than Diarrhea
Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis stated
during the attacks on Ken Livingstone that you can “no
more separate Zionism from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great
Britain” All he demonstrated was his own ignorance. His predecessors as
Chief Rabbi, like Herman Adler, were anti-Zionists.
The Zionists don't give up in their campaign to equate Zionism and anti-Semitism as the bogus report above demonstrates
The British
Establishment does its best to equate Zionism with being Jewish because it
provides a moral justification for imperialism’s support for Israel. Their
latest stunt being the ‘anti-Semitism’ report by David Bell that pretends that anti-Semitism is
on the rampage when his own report finds that:
British attitudes relating to Jewish people and
Israel show two broad trends. Anti-Jewish attitudes are typically less
prevalent and have remained more stable, whereas anti-Israel sentiments are
more prevalent and have been increasing.
The traditional
definition of anti-Semitism, hostility to Jews as Jews, has been redefined as ‘anti-Israel sentiments.’ This is the purpose
of the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism.
Ben Moser’s Jewish anti-Zionism
When Ben Moser, a
Jewish Pulitzer Prize winner, was young supporting Israel was as American as
god, mother and apple pie. It was common sense. How, after the Holocaust could
anyone, except anti-Semites, oppose a Jewish state?
That was my upbringing.
The UN had passed Resolution 181 in November 1947 partitioning Palestine
between Jews and Arabs and on May 15 1948 Israel gained its independence.
We learnt that the
wicked Arab states, whose only desire was to drive the Jews into the sea, had
invaded Israel at the stroke of midnight and those plucky Zionists, despite
facing all the Arab armies, had with God’s help and a few miracles, won.
The story of Israel was
a modern day morality tale. Leon Uris wrote a propaganda novel, Exodus. Jews were now able to defend themselves. But
unlike most fairy tales, Zionism will not have a happy ending. Israel has, in Netanyahu’s
words, become a Jewish
Sparta where military might is venerated.
Today Jews and non-Jews
are rediscovering a past that was carefully hidden away. The myths of Zionism
have come tumbling down. Zionism has lost its sheen. Just as in the Snow Queen, the splinters in peoples’
eyes have melted and Zionism is shown as nothing more than an ugly, racial
supremacist doctrine, a reflection of German racial nationalism.
The Snow Queen
The fable of two
thousand years of ‘exile’ is shown to be of more recent, colonial origin. Instead
of a chronological story of Jewish opposition to Zionism, Moser has chosen
twelve figures, each of whom represent different traditions.
Edwin Montagu and Hyman
Schachtel represent a bourgeois and Reform anti-Zionism which are now gone. Today
the bourgeois Jews are the most fanatical Zionists.
I consider myself well read
in the history of Zionism and anti-Zionism but I confess to not having heard of
five of the figures in the book - Aaron Samuel Tamares, the rabbi from Poland
nor Ahmad Sadiq Saad, the Arab Jewish communist from Egypt, who along with
other Arab communists was betrayed by Stalin when he decided to support the creation
of the Israeli state and arm it.
The other figures I
hadn’t heard of before were Hyman Judah Schachtel, rabbi of the Congregation
Beth Israel, the largest congregation in the South, the oldest temple in Texas.
Beth Israel was a Reform synagogue and Reform Jewry had been a stalwart of
American Jewish anti-Zionism. The Pittsburgh
Declaration of 1885 declared that:
We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a
religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine... nor
the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.
Reform Judaism is the majority strand in American
Jewry and represents the Judaism of the American Jewish bourgeoisie. As Zionism
grew in strength during the second world war so Beth Israel was torn by
divisions between those who supported Zionism and its opponents. Schachtel
rejected the Zionist idea “that we are
Jewish by race and nationality”
In the years 1943 and 1944, a century after Beth
Israel’s establishment, controversy over Zionism split the congregation. By
1948, with the establishment of the Israeli state Schachtel had become a
Zionist arguing that you couldn’t fight history.
The other figures I hadn’t heard of were Helena
Salem, Brazil’s first woman war correspondent. In 1977 Helena authored Palestinians,
the New Jews. An
echo of the Italian holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s claim,
in an interview with the newspaper Il Manifesto, that “Everyone is somebody’s Jew, and today the
Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”
Benjamin Moser in Conversation with Ahdaf Soueif
The final figure I hadn’t heard of was Nan Goldin who in 2023 was
described as the most influential person in the art world in ArtReview's
"Power 100" list of influential people.
Moser’s choice of 12 representative figures of
anti-Zionists will inevitably be controversial. I’m not sure why Hyman Judah
Schachtel was chosen since he abandoned his anti-Zionism when Israel was
formed. A far more important figure in the continuity of American anti-Zionism
would have been Rabbi Elmer Berger
who never recanted.
However we would have
known nothing about the Beth Hillel controversy if Elmer Berger had been chosen
and that I suspect was the reason for the choice. Another prominent American
Jew on the right of politics was Alfred Lillienthall.
On the left one might ask why Marek Edelman from the
Bund was not chosen or someone from the ranks of the Satmar Chasidim or an
Israeli anti-Zionist such as Moshe Machover.
The choice was Ben’s. The most talented Jews have
always tended to disavow Zionism, which attracts the violent, loud mouthed,
bigot whose vocabulary consists mainly of shouting ‘anti-Semitism’ at anyone they disagree with.
Zionism never had an enlightened side although it is
often claimed that it covers a broad political spectrum. All wings agreed on
the need for a majority Jewish state.
The Labour Zionists rejected socialism and the
‘Marxist’ Zionists of Mapam rejected class struggle. Ze'ev Sternhell, himself a
Zionist, said in TheFounding Myths of Israel,
that he would have described Labour Zionism as national socialism but for the
association with the Nazis. So he called it nationalist socialism, itself a contradiction.
When you think of Marx, Trotsky, Freud, Kafka, Michael
Rosen, Alexei Sayle, Miriam Margoyles, Einstein and Arendt, you realise that
Jewish anti-Zionism appeals to those with a brain and a sense of humanity.
The Zionists have Jeffrey Epstein, Alan Dershowitz,
Alan Sugar and the junk BBC historian Simon Schama. Even those who began as
Zionists – Arendt and Einstein – jettisoned it. Zionism has nothing to offer but
the murder of children and racial ‘cleansing’.
Zionists claim that they ‘returned’ to Palestine but
they have spent their time destroying the biblical landscape not preserving it.
It is the best proof that they are colonisers.
In the West Bank there are the ugly settlements. In
1967 they destroyed
the ancient biblical villages of Emmaus and two others with the JNF’s Canada
Park covering the crime. In pre-67 Israel they consciously razed the old Arab
villages.
The history of Gaza stretches back over
5,000 years. It is one of the most continuously inhabited places in the world.
The Zionists, like all settler-colonials, hate the history of the people who
came before them. They have destroyed the archives and memory of the
Palestinians. The Zionists are the world’s Philistines along with Trump and his
Riviera.
The chapter on Felicia Langer
is revealing. I can remember when I was a child how she was reviled in Zionist
circles. I never understood why but she was a lonely hero at a time when
anti-Zionism was not in fashion. A holocaust survivor and a Communist human
rights lawyer, Langer decided that appearing in Israeli courts was simply
providing them with a legitimacy that their 99.74% conviction rate didn't deserve.
On paper Israel has a justice system, complete with
a Supreme Court. But this is a colonial court. Not once has it rejected a
racist law as unconstitutional. Instead it has developed doctrines such as ‘stealing in good faith’
to justify the theft of Palestinian land.
It has enabled the theft of the land of Arab
citizens of Israel by applying the Absentee Property Law only to them not Jews.
It has gone on to apply it to Palestinians in Jerusalem but never Jews because
it is a Zionist court.
Ronnie Kasrils - a Living Legend and Fighter Against Apartheid & Zionism
Ronnie Kasrils
is a friend and comrade. He represents everything that is best about the
traditions of diaspora Jewry. Most of the White Anti-Apartheid activists in
South Africa were Jewish but most Jews were Zionists.
A leader of the military wing Um Konto we Sizweand Minister of
Intelligence in Nelson Mandela’s first government, he has become one of the
most implacable anti-Zionists of all, drawing the links between apartheid in
South Africa and Israel. Until I read Moser’s book I didn’t know that Ronnie
nearly ended up a Revisionist Zionist!
Avi Shlaim
is the most prominent Middle East historian in Britain, alongside Ilan Pappe
(another candidate). His anti-Zionist politics disqualify him from being
interviewed for the BBC. Shlaim’s Three World’sis
a wonderful description of how the Arab Jews were de-Arabised and treated like untermenschen when they arrived in
Israel, being sprayed with DDT on
leaving their planes.
Benjamin Moser in Conversation with Ahdaf Soueif
Shlaim provides further proof that the exodus of
Iraqi Jews was primarily because Zionist agents in Iraq went around bombing
Jewish targets in order to stimulate emigration.
Shlaim describes his shame when his father called
out to him in Arabic in front of friends. Arabic being verboten in Israel.
Shlaim was one of the post-Zionist Israeli historians.
Hannah Arendt
Many of the 12 figures in this book had a journey to
make from Zionism to anti-Zionism, none more so than Hannah Arendt who ended up with
incisive criticism of Zionism but who strictly speaking was never an
anti-Zionist as opposed to one of its most trenchant critics.
One person who didn’t have a journey to make was Sir Edwin Montagu,
Secretary of State for India in the Lloyd George government. His claim to fame
was that he was the only member of the War Cabinet to oppose the Balfour
Declaration. He was also its only Jewish member. He was outnumbered by the
Christian Zionists and their imperialist allies. He resigned in 1922, the
target of anti-Semites and died two years later aged 45.
Moser paints an interesting portrait of the man who
was a member of the Cousinhood, the interconnected and intermarried Anglo-Jewish
Establishment. The Anglo-Jewish bourgeoisie only came to support Zionism after the non-Jewish bourgeoisie had done so and they were safe in the knowledge that support for Zionism would not attract criticisms of being unpatriotic.
the entire liberal Zionist intelligentsia has united in shared hatred and contempt for Benjamin Moser and his new book on anti-Zionism. Leading the pack is good J-Street Zionist Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker, who played a key role in laundering the genocidal atrocity propaganda rape hoax via a "report" by the PHRI that was subsequently disavowed by its own authors as it merely copy-pasted headlines from tabloids without any independent verification, yet Chotiner's article remains published to this day with zero corrections. I and others have repeatedly told him that he spread provable falsehoods, and he knows very well that he did, but he refuses to acknowledge it, apologize for it and retract it. Again, even the authors of the same "report" he laundered have since retracted it. But not Chotiner. And what does he do now with Moser? He pretends like he's some expert historian on the history of Zionism after he submitted the book to Chatgpt and Claude and asked it to look for anything he could nitpick it with (yes Isaac, I know exactly what you did), and made that the basis of his New Yorker review casting Moser as an evil self-hating Jew who must be discounted as a fraud and liar, as opposed to the Good Jew Omer Bartov who says that Israel and Zionism are actually Moral and Virtuous and not intrinsically a genocidal death-cult. This same thesis of "OMG WE HAVE TO AVOID BLACK AND WHITE THINKING LIKE MOSER, HISTORY IS CONTINGENT AND GRAY AND COMPLEX" was subsequently adopted and shared by genocidal Zionists reviewing Moser's book in the New York Times and Haaretz, which again tells you exactly why Haaretz is allowed to exist.
"Liberal Zionists Are the Real Enemy" | Benjamin Moser & Barry Malone
The New Yorker Betrays the Legacy of Hannah
Arendt & Critical Thinking for the Sake of Liberal Zionism & Isaac Chotiner
It is the chapter on Hannah Arendt which is the most
interesting. Hannah Arendt, even when one doesn’t agree with her, was a highly
original thinker, as The Origins of Totalitarianismdemonstrates. Readers of my book, Zionism During the Holocaust,
will find some of the material in Chapter 7, The Conscious Pariah, familiar. This attracted the wrath of ‘liberal’ Zionist Isaac Chotiner
who was fascinated with the question of whether or not Zionism’s ‘moral crisis’
was about roads not taken and original sin.
It is a stupid question from someone who gives the
appearance of being one of those intellectuals who wants to make their own
stupidity the object of others’ fascination.
Zionism doesn’t have and never did have a ‘moral
crisis’. Not only because moral crises only belong to the living but because it
should be obvious, even to the most in(s)ane Zionist, that carrying out a
genocide and using kids as target practice, plumbs the depths of what is usually
known as evil.
Did the Nazis have a moral crisis? Its supporters believed
in building a youthful, vigorous Germany that wasn’t in hock to the bankers. It
paved the roads of Germany and built autobahns. However no one in their right
mind would talk of a Nazi ‘moral crisis’ and after the genocide and torture
camps to talk of Zionism’s moral crisis is an obscenity. Zionism has
no morality to have a crisis.
Chotiner is nothing if not a representative of ‘liberal’ Zionism which dresses up piety in flowery language. When Netanyahu and Israel becomes indefensible, the 'liberal' Zionists become the last ditch defenders of Israeli Apartheid, pretending that Zionism has more than one face.
When
Moser wrote about American Jewish support for genocide in Gaza and the attacks
on free speech by the Biden/Trump administrations, Chotiner saw this as an
example of an ‘angry’ essay. Chotiner writes that Moser
was troubled by the exceptionalist ideas that
even secular American Jews had developed about their community after the Second
World War. “We really did think, in some way that we would never have dared to
articulate, that Jews were better,” he wrote. In his telling, this superiority
eventually allowed American Jews to accommodate the United States’ “imperial
power structure.” And, if “the marriage of American exceptionalism and liberal
Zionism led to genocide,” reform was inadequate; Zionism itself had to be
abandoned.
Chotiner’s dismay at the conclusion that Moser
reached was palpable.Even worse Moser’s
new book
reminds Jewish Americans that another tradition
is available, one that opposes Israel’s existence rather than merely seeks to
curb its worst impulses.
Chotiner complains that
‘Moser does not detail what a future resolution
might entail; he argues instead that anti-Zionism offers a way out of the moral
abyss to which Zionism has led.’
For someone who writes about Zionism’s ‘moral
crisis’ this is what might be called double entry semantics.
Like most Zionists, Chotiner is carefree in his
allegations of anti-Semitism. However he was most reluctant to pin the label on
Arthur Balfour, despite the latter openly admitting
that he supported many of Cosima Wagner’s anti-Semitic postulates.
Balfour, had been Chief Secretary in Ireland where
he earned the soubriquet ‘Bloody Balfour’
after having set the military on a demonstration in Mitchelstown which killed 3
demonstrators. The best Chotiner can say is that Balfour ‘seems to have had a streak of antisemitism himself.’
Chotiner’s diatribe,
because it can hardly be called a review, asked questions that barely require a
reply such as
How did Zionism become a movement that could
accommodate such compromises [the agreement with the Nazis called Ha’avara]?
How did it come to attract so many adherents? For a people whose safety had
repeatedly proved provisional, Zionism held out the promise of refuge—a promise
that acquired new force after the Nazis murdered two-thirds of Europe’s Jews.
Moser acknowledges this history, but it rarely enters into his account of the
movement.
An agreement with the Nazis was no compromise but a
logical extension of Zionism’s own racial politics. They called it realpolitik. Chotiner might care to read
the
letter that the Zionist Federation of Germany wrote to Hitler on June 21,
1933 offering to collaborate on the basis of shared values.
As for how Zionism came to attract so many
adherents, the answer is Hitler. Most of the Jews of the pre-Nazi period were not
Zionists. It is not for nothing that I described
Israel as ‘Hitler’s bastard offspring’.
Zionism came too late to provide a refuge to anyone and the Ha’avara trade agreement
was made in order to secure a portion of German Jewish wealth for Palestine.
Saving people was not its purpose.
Chotiner reserves his bile for Moser’s chapter on Hannah Arendt, the foremost
political scientist and philosopher of the 20th century. The title
of the chapter is named after Arendt’s essay The Jew as a Pariah. It reflects her
division of diaspora Jews into Pariahs and Parvenus.
Chotiner tried to point out a series of mistakes in
Moser’s account but in the process he evidenced his own mistakes, as I pointed
out in a rejoinder. I sent it to The New Yorker out of a sense of public duty
but it failed to print it.
To take but one example Chotiner denies that the
Introduction to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws contained the sentence
“The ardent Zionists of all people have objected
least to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg Laws, because they know that these
laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people.”
There was no Introduction he wrote. In fact the quote
appeared in the official explanatory accompaniment
(written by Reich Ministry of the Interior experts like Bernhard Lösener) and
was published in the main Nazi legal gazettes and the official party press
(such as Völkischer Beobachter) to justify and interpret the new laws to
the public and legal apparatus. That is why legal scholars like John Quigley
refer to this as "the introduction
accompanying that law".
Chotiner
attributes it to a subsequent article in the German legal and administrative
journal ReichsVerwaltungsblatt.
But this was an official legal commentary or introduction which clarified the
law. In addition a highly similar and famously controversial text was published
on 17
September 1935, just two days after the Nuremberg Laws were
passed in an interview with Zionist George Kareski.
Chotiner was engaging in hair splitting. Readers can
see Chotiner’s review here
and my response here
and below. Chotiner, in a sideswipe at me, refers to my expulsion from the
Green Party and my suggestion that it was at the behest of the Israeli Embassy
that I was expelled. A quite reasonable suggestion since they were up
to their necks in the anti-Semitism smear campaign in the Labour Party.
Chotiner focuses on alleged mistakes because he is
unable to challenge the thrust of the argument that during the Holocaust the
Zionist movement had just one objective – building the ‘Jewish’ state. Not only
did they obstruct the rescue of Jewish refugees from the Nazis if their destination
was not Palestine, to the extent of lobbying the Gestapo to prevent Jews going
elsewhere but it resented groups campaigning for the refugees because they were
taking away money that they saw as theirs by right.
Chotiner all but ignores the ferocious campaign
against Hannah Arendt after she published her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. It was this that was
primarily the subject of Moser’s chapter on Arendt but Chotiner was more
interested in defending Zionism’s collaboration with the Nazis.Arendt wrote that
The campaign, conducted with all the well-known
means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than
the controversy…. (it was) as though the pieces written against the book (and
more frequently against its author) came “out
of a mimeographing machine” … the
clamor centered on the “image” of a book which was never written, and
touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had
never occurred to me before.
Ben-Gurion had carefully planned the Eichmann trial
as a show trial which would wipe away the memory of the Kasztner trial and refocus
Israel’s self-image, not as a nation of macho fighters but as perpetual
victims. Only Israel can describe its genocide as its ‘right to self-defence’.
Chotiner’s other reason for objecting to Moser’s
book is his desire to rescue something from the wreckage of Zionism. He relies
for support on genocide scholar, Omar Bartov that Israel could have taken a
different path to the one taken. This is substituting a wish and a prayer for serious
political analysis. It is understandable coming from Omar Bartov who is on his
own journey, but coming from a liberal Zionist intent on defending the apartheid
state it is no more than a last ditch attempt to defend genocidal
ethno-nationalism.
Below is my response to Chotiner’s review in The New Yorker.
Tony Greenstein
Was Zionism’s Moral Crisis
About Roads Not Taken or Roads That Never Existed?
Isaac Chotiner’s
attack on Benjamin Moser is a liberal Zionist lament, masquerading as a review,
for a Zionism that never existed. Chotiner rests heavily on Omar Bartov for
support but even Bartov has concluded that the
Zionism that still exists today is a racist ideology of Jewish supremacy, and
that ideology, like the ideologies of the twentieth century, must end up in the
dustbin of history.
Israel’s
supporters have long defended it on the grounds that it provided Jews with a home
and a refuge against persecution. However not only did the Zionist project fail
to save the Jews of the Nazi holocaust but it failed to protect the Jews of
Argentina when a neo-Nazi Junta came to power in 1976, when up to 3,000 Jews were
murdered.
The Israeli
state preferred a profitable trade supplying weapons to the Junta to protecting
Jews. In any event Israel was aligned to Argentina as part of the US led war
against communism in Latin America. Argentina’s Jews were irrelevant to those
geo-political calculations. The diaspora was expendable.
Benjamin Moser has
explored a rich history of Jewish anti-Zionism with a portrait of the lives of 12
very different anti-Zionist Jews. Instead of a considered critique, Chotiner
prefers to mourn the collapse of the Zionist dream and Zionism’s ‘moral
crisis’.
Instead of
addressing why it is that Israel, once held to be the Middle East’s only
democracy, has turned into a morass of Jewish supremacism and messianic
fascism, Chotiner takes aim at Moser’s book. The original sin of Zionism, its
settler-colonial antecedents, are left unmentioned.
Chotiner’s
argument is that there could have been another Zionism. That there was a good
as well as a bad Zionism. It is this illusion which helped perpetuate the idea
that Zionist colonisation was different from all other colonial ventures and
thus justify Zionist exceptionalism.
The triumph of
Zionism in the wake of the Holocaust meant not merely rewriting Jewish history
but writing Jewish anti-Zionism out of that history.
Anti-Zionist
Jews became invisible because their message, that being Jewish was not a
national but an international identity, was unacceptable to those who reduced
Judaism to the gold calf of a piece of land and who substituted worship of the state
and real estate, for worship of a god.
Not only has
anti-Zionism been written out of Jewish history but even the Zionist heroes of
the Jewish resistance against the Nazis, such as Chajka Klinger, have seen
their writings rewritten and distorted, their memory changed if not erased, in
order to accord with a national Zionist narrative.
Zionism began
with a rejection of the Diaspora, the ‘negation of the diaspora’ and with it
both Jewish Emancipation and the revolutionary Jewish tradition of the Pale of
Settlement. Its founder, Theodor Herzl summed this up in his pathetic plea to Count
Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Czarist Minister of Interior and instigator of the
Kishinev pogrom: ‘Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so
will the defection to the Socialists.’
Whereas Jews
were once seen as the harbinger of socialism and the agents of change, today
the perception of Jews is that of reactionary politics, racism and Islamaphobia.
Zionism and the far-right walk hand in hand as Israel becomes a magnet for
fascists and racists internationally. Figures such as Tommy Robinson, Geert
Wilders and Viktor Orban make the trip to Yad Vashem to pay tribute to the dead
of the Holocaust that their predecessors murdered.
Chotiner cites
Omar Bartov as saying that ‘"There were many forks in the road where the
country (Israel) could have chosen to go one way and not the other." It is
this failure to understand that Zionism, with its quest for a Jewish
ethno-religious state, could only take one road. The road of ethnic cleansing,
Jewish supremacy and now genocide.
Chotiner refuses
to accept that Zionism, as a settler-colonial movement, had of necessity to
seek out an alliance with imperialism with all that that entails. Winston
Churchill explained the choice in his 1920 article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, ‘Zionism or Bolshevism’. It is this longing for choices that never
existed that explains Chotiner’s scattergun attack on Moser’s book.
Chotiner takes
exception to the pairing of Herzl and Hitler for their racialisation of Jews.
Yet how else can one describe Herzl’s essay, Mauschel, which Jacques Kornberg described as an ‘anti-Semites
dream.’ The very title was the German language equivalent of the anti-Semitic
slur ‘kike’. His first play The New
Ghetto was ‘a storeroom of
anti-Semitic stereotypes’. Herzl may have sought a homeland for the Jews,
something which neither Hitler nor Eichmann objected to, but he sought it in
alliance with the persecutors of the Jews!
When the leader of the anti-Dreyfusards, Edouard Drumont reviewed
Herzl’sThe Jewish State in La Libre Parole, Herzl’s reaction in his
Diaries was ecstatic. Chotiner
praises Herzl’s treatment of Dreyfus, yet Herzl thought he was guilty. Bernard
Lazarre, the first campaigner for Dreyfus and a member of the Zionist Actions
Committee resigned over this and Herzl’s whitewashing of the Ottoman Empire’s
massacres of the Armenians. The Jewish
State doesn’t even mention Dreyfus and his Diaries only mention him in
passing.
Chotiner calls
Moser’s belief that Zionism and Nazism shared "an ideological sympathy that bled into collaboration" an ‘explosive
thesis’. Perhaps, but it is also true. If it is explosive, it is because Israel
claims that it is the inheritor of the memory of the Holocaust dead.
On
June 21, 1933 the Zionist Federation of Germany voluntarily wrote a letter to
Hitler stating that Zionism
believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life
through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the
Jewish national group...
On the
foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race...
fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible…. Precisely because we don’t
wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage
and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group.
Joachim Doron,
noted that ‘the Jewish self-criticism so widespread among the German Zionist
intelligentsia often seemed dangerously similar to the plaints of the German
anti-Semites.’According to Francis
Nicosia, the anti-Semites considered Zionism ‘a useful vehicle for ridding
Germany of its Jewish population and thus found it worthy of support.’
It was this that
led Rabbi Jacob Agus to ask if ‘the Zionist programme and philosophy contribute(d)
decisively to the enormous catastrophe of the extermination of 6 million Jews
by the Nazis by popularizing the notion that the Jews were forever aliens in
Europe?’ It is little wonder that Chaim Weizmann wrote to Simon Marks on
December 15, 1935 ‘that unless some radical measures are taken fairly soon, we
Zionists may stand charged, when history comes to be written, with criminal
indifference in the face of the greatest trial to which Jewry has been
subjected in modern times.
This ideological
symmetry led inexorably to collaboration with the Nazis as was evidenced in the
1954-8 Kasztner trial in Israel. Two-thirds of the Judenrat (Jewish Councils),
which did the work of the Nazis in rounding up Jews for deportation, were
staffed by Zionists.
Chotiner is
eager to point out what he considers mistakes in Moser’s chapter on Hannah
Arendt. He blames this on Tony Greenstein, who he informs readers has been
expelled from the British Green Party. This gratuitous piece of information,
which has no relevance to the review, betrays Chotiner’s real motives.
Chotiner takes care
to focus on what he considers Moser’s mistakes as a way of undermining his book.
It is reminiscent of the Assistant Prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, Jacob
Robinson, who was so incensed by Arendt’s Eichmann
in Jerusalem that in 1965 he wrote And
the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight detailing some 400 alleged factual
errors.
Who today has
heard of Robinson? He had teams of researchers hired to uncover the slightest
spelling mistake but Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil has survived the
touchstone of time and sold over 300,000 in the English language alone. One
such mistake that Chotiner alleges is when Moser states that the following
quotation
‘The
ardent Zionists of all people have objected least to the basic ideas of the
Nuremberg Laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution
for the Jewish people.’
formed part of the Introduction to the
Nuremberg Law. Not so he says. There was no Introduction to the Nuremberg Laws.
Rather they appeared in an article in a Nazi journal two months after the laws
appeared.
In fact the quote appeared
in the official explanatory
introduction (written by Reich Ministry of the Interior experts, like
Bernhard Lösener) and was published concurrently in the main Nazi legal
gazettes and the official party press (such as Völkischer Beobachter) to
justify and interpret the new laws to the public and legal apparatus. That is
why legal scholars like John Quigley refer to this as "the introduction accompanying that law".
Chotiner is engaging in mere hairsplitting and he is factually wrong.
Chotiner denies that the Zionists
welcomed the Nuremberg Laws when it is abundantly clear that the separation of
Jew and non-Jew was fundamental to the Zionist (and Nazi) projects. As David
Cesarani writes: ‘Zionists saw the pressure towards
segregation as fulfilment of their assertion that Jews were a separate nation
with no place in Germany…’ The Zionist Executive President, Menahem Ussishkin
was effusive:
There is something positive in
their [German Jewry’s] tragedy... and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a
race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany
would simply have converted to Christianity.
There are other mistakes Chotiner makes whilst
trying to correct Moser’s mistakes. He says that Zionist hero, Arthur Balfour ‘seems to have
had a streak of antisemitism himself.’ There can be no doubt about the fact.
Like most Christian Zionists, Balfour was anti-Semitic.
In 1905 Balfour,
as Prime Minister, introduced the Aliens Bill which was intended to stem the
flow of Jewish refugees from Russia into this country. His arguments against
Jewish immigration, that they were ‘a people apart... who only intermarried
among themselves’ were clearly anti-Semitic.
Balfour was a
convinced racist who stated, in a parliamentary debate in 1906 that ‘We have to
face the facts. Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born
with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education
cannot and will not change.’
When Balfour
told Chaim Weizmann that he had met with Cosima Wagner; the anti-Semitic widow
of Richard Wagner, he explained that ‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic
postulates.’ Instead of protesting Weizmann agreed that German Jews were an
‘undesirable and demoralizing phenomenon’.
Chotiner also
suggests that Tony Greenstein, whom Moser quotes, ‘confused a shift in
Germany's trade surplus with a shift in export volume.’ Not so. Edwin Black,
where the statistics are taken from, made it clear that export volume had
declined by a lower figure.
Chotiner goes on
to say that ‘Moser, drawn to the implication that Zionism saved Nazism, makes
claims that no serious historian would support.’
But David
Cesarani, who was clearly a serious historian, wrote in The Final Solution that ‘‘the many Jews who doubted the viability
of the regime were not engaged in wishful thinking’ and that it was beset by
enemies coupled with a chronic balance of payments deficit and a foreign
currency crisis.’
The Investor’s
Review of 5 August 1933 reported that ‘authoritative
opinion is that Hitlerism will come to a sanguinary end before the New Year.’
As Edwin Black wrote:
‘the
Nazi party and the Zionist Organization shared a common stake in the recovery
of Germany. If the Hitler economy fell, both sides would be ruined.’
Chotiner
stresses that the Ha’avara agreement enabled at least 50,000 Jews to emigrate
to Palestine. But these 50,000 had to have at least £1,000 in capital, which is
worth over £90,000 today. These Jews would have been more than able to find
refuge in other countries. It was the poor Jews whose fate Ha’avara sealed. Before
Ha’avara it was easier for German Jews to take part of their wealth out after
deductions for various taxes. This was no longer true after Ha’avara.
The purpose of
Ha’avara was not to rescue German Jews but to rescue their wealth for the
upbuilding of the future Jewish state. The Zionist Executive declared that Ha’avara was ‘the sole
way of bringing into Palestine the maximum amount of German Jewish capital.’
There is no way
of knowing whether the Boycott campaign would have succeeded in overthrowing
the Hitler regime but what is certain is that the Nazis were sufficiently
frightened by the Boycott campaign to agree to Ha’avara. Their purpose in
agreeing to it was the destruction of the Jewish Boycott.
The vast
majority of Jews worldwide wanted to destroy the Nazi regime whilst it was weak.
The Zionists fought tooth and nail against a Boycott because they saw it as a
golden opportunity to build their state. Of this there is no doubt.
Ben-Gurion’s biographer, Shabtai Teveth quotes his remarks to the Zionist
Executive in October 1942, at the height of the Holocaust:
Disaster
is strength if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is
that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation,
as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and
exploitation.
‘As
the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for
Zionism... Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities
inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. In conditions of
peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed
by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism.
... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary
concern of the movement.’)
The Zionist
destroyed the Boycott in order to secure their own advantage. Without the
Boycott there would have been no Ha’avara. This was treachery of the first
order. Even the Zionist Jewish Chronicle
condemned them for this ‘unclean act’.
So unpopular was
Ha’avara that at the 1933 Prague Congress Berl Locker lied and denied that they
had anything to do with it. They were as American Jewish Labour organiser Boris
Vladeck said ‘the scab agents’ of the Nazi regime.
Chotiner takes
Moser for task for quoting Hava Eshkoli-Wagman as saying that Ha’avara’s
proponents ‘did not see the saving of lives as an independent goal at that
time, rather they sought to extract German Jewish property for the benefit of
the Yishuv’. But as Chotiner admits, Wagman accepted that it was a ‘widely held
criticism’. It was also an accurate one.
This was the
very time that the Zionist Executive was threatening to cut German Jewish
immigration unless a ‘better quality’ of immigrant were sent. Even
Eshkoli-Wagman admitted that the Zionists gave precedence to building Jewish
Palestine to defending civil rights in Germany.
There cannot be
any doubt that given the choice between the diaspora and the Yishuv, the
Zionist leadership chose the latter. As Ben-Gurion himself said:
‘Zionism…
is not primarily engaged in saving individuals’ and that if there was ‘a
conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist
enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first.’
Chotiner’s
explanation for Robert Weltsch’s endorsement of the Yellow Star in reaction to
the 1933 siege of German Jewish shops is bizarre. His famous editorial of 4 April 1933 titled "Wear it with Pride, the Yellow Star"could hardly be
taken as anything other than an endorsement.
In later years
Weltsch admitted that this editorial had been a mistake. In October 1941 the
Jews were forced to wear the Yellow Star and this marked them out for abuse
wherever they went. There was nothing to be proud of in wearing this hated
symbol of the medieval ages.
Chotiner asks how
did Zionism come to attract so many adherents? The simple answer is that
Zionism only attracted the support of world Jewry after the holocaust. Prior to the holocaust Zionism was a minority
in the Jewish world.
Chotiner
suggests that Moser ‘Shows little curiosity
about Herzl’s arguments or the competing or contradictory forms of Zionism.’ Perhaps
that’s because Herzl’s arguments were mundane, unoriginal and repetitive. Herzl
saw in anti-Semitism a force for good. It was the Zionist dialectic. Herzl made
defeatism in the face of anti-Semitism into a badge of honour. Herzl had little
to say that was positive about Jews nor was he religious.
The ‘competing
or contradictory forms of Zionism’ exist primarily in Chotiner’s head. There
was no competition. Statist Zionism was the hegemonic form of Zionism. Brit Shalom was an incoherent collection
of intellectuals, some of whom, Ruppin and Kalvarisky in particular, who simply
sought to persuade the Palestinians to peacefully accept their dispossession.
Chotiner criticises
Arendt’s formulation of Eichmann as representing the banality of evil because
he was a passionate anti-Semite. But these are not contradictory. Eichmann was both
a convinced anti-Semite and also someone who was incapable of original thought.
He carried out orders without thinking. He did not appear as a monster but as a
desk bound bureaucrat.
Hitler did
describe Zionism as a ‘Great movement’ although, because it was a Jewish
movement, he convinced himself that it was all a Jewish swindle. However Hitler
was also capable of adapting his positions when it suited him. When Ha’avara
came under attack by sections of the Nazi state, in particular the German
Foreign Office, he came down decisively in its support.
Chotiner
believes that Israel was not predestined to end up in the way it has. However he is remarkably short of any explanation as to how the
Israeli state could have ploughed a different furrow whilst remaining a
‘Jewish’ State. This is the fundamental difference between Moser and Chotiner.
Zionism, as a settler
colonial movement, is no more able to change direction than an iceberg. Settler
colonial states are founded on the dispossession, ethnic cleansing and often
extermination of the indigenous population. That is what marks them off from
normal bourgeois democratic states.
Israel made it clear
from the very start that even its Arab citizens were a potential fifth column
to be treated accordingly. That is why, for the first 17 years of Israel’s
existence, its Arab citizens lived under military government.
That was under a
Labour Zionist government. Likud has merely continued where Labour Zionism left
off. There was no different path. It was the Labour Zionists who conquered the
West Bank and established the Greater Israel Movement and the first settlements.
The refusal to accept
a return of the refugees was common to both the ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ of
the Zionist movement. A Jewish state would not have been Jewish if it hadn’t
also been an apartheid state.
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