Why, when Zionists abuse their Jewish opponents do they resort to anti-Semitism?

Jew hatred and anti-Semitism lie at the heart of the Zionist project

Jenny Manson - Co-Chair of Jewish Voice for Labour

For all their cries of 'antisemitism' it is Zionism which is full of racist hatred. Whether its anonymous phone calls spewing race hatred in Britain or Prime Minister Netanyahu explaining why Israel is not a state of all its citizens but only its Jewish citizen.

Jenny Manson is Chair of Jewish Voice for Labour, the non-Zionist Jewish pro-Corbyn group within the Labour Party. A week ago she received a vile anti-Semitic message on her voicemail.

‘You fucking Nazi bitch. You fucking Nazi scum. You should burn in the gas oven. You dirty fucking bitch. Fucking fucking Nazi cow you are. Stinking, stinking swine. I hope you die in a gas oven. You deserved everything (inaudible) end in hell. To burn in acid.’

This hate-filled person combined the standard Zionist accusation that anti-Zionists are ‘Nazis’ with Nazi anti-Semitism ‘I hope you die in a gas oven.’ This is similar to abuse sent to Black-Jewish activist Jackie Walker: ‘Listen bitch what part of you aint a Jew...’ ‘David’ talked about wanting to see Jackie Walker shoved into a ‘burning bin’.

I have also received my fair share of such tweets. Back in January 2010 I received two abusive tweets in one day.  The first from a Zionist began: Greenstein, you traitorous bastard, you leftist liberal Jew. To be a leftist in Israel today is an insult. His peroration was:

a shame that either Hitler or the Angel of Death, missed your family's house. Or Neturei Karta's. Don't even call yourself a Jew,traitor.

The other tweet was from a holocaust denier

It is time to face the truth about the holohoax. The Nazis did not try to exterminate the Jews. The gas chambers are a hoax. The six million dead is phantasmagoria.

Knowing that the Zionist Community Security Trust records details of anti-Semitic incidents I sent these tweets to them. The CST told me that the second tweet would be logged as an anti-Semitic incident but not the first.  Why I asked? Because they don’t log as anti-Semitic anything from a Jewish person!

What is the explanation for this phenomenon? Aurora Levins Morales provides a clue:

‘The Jews who write to tell me that I should have died in a Nazi  concentration camp before living to denounce the crimes of Israel believe with all their heart that their only possible safety in the world   is a state where Jews dominate and have protected privileges.’ [On Anti-Semitism, p. 107 Jewish Voice for Peace, 2018, Haymarket Books]

Although the rationale given for the Israeli state is that it is a refuge for Jews from oppression, the circumstances of its birth and development ensured that it could only survive by dominating others. All peoples, given the right set of circumstances can become racists and oppressors. Racism is not genetic. It was inevitable that Israel’s Jews would adopt the same mentality as the persecutors of the Jews. 

In the Occupied Territories Israeli soldiers have identified themselves with the Nazis and the Palestinians with the Nazis’ victims: [Israeli Soldiers Called Themselves the Mengele Unit’,  Al Hamishmar 24 July 1989, 

Ha'aretz 27^th July 1989]. Israeli soldiers called their companions 'Our Nazis' meaning those who like to beat. [Hotam, 24 June 1988,]. Ha’aretz described how groups of soldiers who “were called the Auschwitz 10” and “Demjanjuks’ had plotted to kill Arabs.” 

The Holocaust plays an important ideological role in legitimising the Israeli state. It has become the metaphor of first use. One supporter of Lehava, the anti-miscegenation group, declared that it was unfortunate that Hitler ‘chose the wrong nation. We are the chosen race.’

Some of the stuff sent to Jackie Walker - none of which the Labour Party which instigated this showed the slightest concern about

When Jewish school students were taken to see the play ‘Ghetto’ which portrayed Jewish life in the Nazi ghetto in Vilna

Paul Haringman's feeble efforts

during scenes depicting Jews being killed by Nazis, and when a kapo beat a Jew. Calls of “hit him harder” and “well done” were heard from the audience.

From the beginning of the Zionist movement a coincidence of interests existed between them and anti-Semitism. Both agreed that Jews did not belong in the lands of their birth. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism noted in his Diaries (p.231)

'anti-Semitism too probably contains the Divine will to Good, because it forces us to close ranks...’

In the 1950's a columnist in the Histadrut paper, Davar, wrote that:

"I shall not be ashamed to confess that if I had the power, AS I HAVE: THE WILL, I would select a score of efficient young men... and 1 would send them to the countries where Jews are absorbed in sinful self-satisfaction (!). The task of these young men would be to disguise themselves as non-Jewish and plague Jews with anti-Semitic slogans such as 'Bloody Jews', Jews go to Palestine' and similar intimacies.” A Lillienthall, 'The Other Side of the Coin' New York, p. 84 cited in Hirst p. 160.

Kapos is a favourite insult from those whose movement collaborated with the Nazis

Zionism’s priority has never been opposing anti-Semitism, which it believed was futile to fight. Its goal was the ‘ingathering’ of the Jewish ‘exiles’ in Palestine. It came to see its main enemies, not as anti-Semites but Jews who opposed Zionism and Jewish nationalism. That is why its zealots believed that those who oppose Zionism deserved to be the victims of anti-Semitism. Indeed they positively desired such an outcome.

There is a high level of intellectual debate amongst Zionists

Despite the nonsense from Macron about anti-Zionism being a modern form of anti-Semitism, anyone with the slightest knowledge of Zionist history knows that it was anti-Semitism which Zionism had most in common with.

Herzl published in 1895 a seminal pamphlet, The Jewish State in which he lay the blame for anti-Semitism on the Jews themselves.

‘Anti-Semitism increases day by day... its immediate cause is our excessive production of mediocre intellects...’ (p.26)

Herzl’s fiercest opposition, like today’s Zionists was to what they called assimilation, Jews who married non-Jews and were ‘lost’ to the Jewish tribe. He had no quarrel with what he termed ‘honest Anti-Semites.’ (p.44)  who would stimulate the emigration of Jews.

‘Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus.’ (p.57)

Herzl was conscious that people would accuse him of ‘giving a handle to Anti-Semitism, when I say we are a people – one people.’ (p. 17) As Lucien Wolf, Secretary of Britain’s Conjoint Committee and the Jewish Community’s unofficial Foreign Minister wrote:

‘I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies.

The anti-Semites told Jews they didn’t belong and Herzl agreed. Zionism consciously helped furnish anti-Semitism with political weapons. To both Zionists and anti-Semites the Jews were a separate nation which was why Herzl’s pamphlet received a more favourable reaction from those who hated the Jews than the Jews themselves.

Herzl was an admirer of the leading French anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfussard, Edouard Drumont of whom he said ‘I owe to Drumont a great deal of the present freedom of my concepts, because he is an artist.’ Most Jews at the time had somewhat more jaundiced opinions! [Desmond Stewart, Herzl, p.251]

Drumont favourably reviewed The Jewish State, in an article ‘Solution de la Question Juive’ published in his paper La Libre Parole on January 16 1897. Herzl expressed his delight. In his entry for January 18^th Herzl wrote that

‘Today three Paris friends sent me the Libre Parole of January 16^th in which Drumont gets off a highly flattering editorial about me and promises more.’ (p.509, Patai ed.)

Most Jews would have been mortified at such praise but not Herzl. 

But it wasn’t just realpolitik which led to a convergence of interest between Zionism and anti-Semitism. The Zionists accepted the anti-Semitic critique of the Jews that they were an asocial body. The ‘Marxist’ Zionist followers of Ber Borochov, Hashomer Hatzair and later Mapam who formulated the theory that Jews in the diaspora resembled an ‘inverted pyramid’.  There were too many rich Jews at the top and too few workers at the bottom.

Tom Watson - bought and paid for

This was also what the anti-Semites said but it was wrong. The vast majority of Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement had become pauperised. The anti-Semites also alleged that the Jews were cosmopolitan and rootless, loyal to no one and behind most of the excesses of capitalism whilst agitating for communism. The Zionists agreed. Herzl wrote:

When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse. [Jewish State, p. 26]

In the words of Israeli novelist, A.B. Yehoshua, Jews were ‘using other people’s countries like hotels.’ [Jewish Chronicle 22.12.89].

When Zionists described the Jewish diaspora you could be mistaken for believing that it was anti-Semites who were talking. Pinhas Rosenbluth, the first Israeli Minister of Justice, described Palestine as ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’.

Jacob Klatzkin, co-editor of the Zionist paper Die Welt and co-founder of the Encylopedia Judaica, wrote that the Jews were:

‘a people disfigured in both body and soul – in a word, of a horror… some sort of outlandish creature… in any case, not a pure national type... some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew.’ [Arthur Herzberg, The Zionist Idea, pp. 322-323, Temple, Atheneum, New York 1981

The Weltanschauung of Hashomer Hatzair, originally published in 1917 and republished in December 1936 described the Jew as

“a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline.” [Our Shomer “Weltanschauung”, Hashomer Hatzair, Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, p.22.

Why is this relevant?  Because even today Zionism considers the Jewish diaspora as essentially worthless. Whenever a choice has to be made between the Jews and the Jewish state then the interests of the latter always take priority.

Tony Greenstein 1643 words