How antisemitism has complemented Zionism

 The Irony of Zionist Accusations of Anti-Semitism Against Anti-Zionists is that Historically it is the Zionists who Worked With and Had Most in Common with Anti-Semites

Webinar on How Anti-Semitism Complemented Zionism

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https://tinyurl.com/4hedue7k

Speakers

Tony Lerman, author of the book, Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? Redefinition and the Myth of the 'Collective Jew', Pluto Books, https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745338774/whatever-happened-to-antisemitism/

 Barnaby Raine, PhD candidate, Columbia University. Author of several articles, e.g. ‘Jewphobia’ in the journal Salvage, https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/4059-jewophobia 

 Michael Richmond, independent writer, author of ‘Philosemitism: an instrumental kind of love’, New Socialist, 2022, https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/philosemitism-instrumental-kind-love/; also co-author of Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics

 Tony Greenstein, author, Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation

There is probably no Palestine solidarity supporter who hasn’t been accused of anti-Semitism. We know, because Netanyahu has told us, that the International Criminal Court decision to issue a warrant for his arrest was because of anti-Semitism! Any criticism of Israel today is automatically a form of 'antisemitism'. Antisemitism is no longer hatred or hostility to Jews as Jews, it is criticism of the 'Jewish state'.

Zionism arose as a reaction to anti-Semitism but it was a reaction of a special kind. Zionism accepted that Jews did not belong in their own countries, that they were a nation apart. For Zionism anti-Semitism could not be fought because it was inherent in the non-Jew.

As Leon Pinsker, the founder of the Lovers of Zionism wrote in his 1882 pamphlet Autoemancipation

Judeophobia is then a mental disease, and as a mental disease it is hereditary, and having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable.’

Theodor Herzl

And if anti-Semitism was incurable, then there was no point opposing it. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism drew the same conclusion from the Dreyfus Trial:

In Paris... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism.

Edouard Drumont

The leading anti-Semite and leader of the anti-Dreyfusards in France was Edouard Drumont whose book La France Juive sold 100,000 on its first edition. He published the anti-Semitic paper La Libre Parole and argued for the exclusion of Jews from society.

Yet this didn’t stop Herzl from admiring him. Herzl wrote that ‘I owe to Drumont a great deal of the present freedom of my concepts, because he is an artist.’ Herzl shared Drumont’s antagonism to French Jewry writing that:

I took a look at the Paris Jews and saw a family likeness in their faces: bold, misshapen noses, furtive and cunning eyes.

After Herzl had badgered his friend Alphonse Daudet, a well-known anti-Semite, Drumont favourably reviewed The Jewish State, in an article ‘Solution de la Question Juive’ published in La Libre Parole on 16 January 1897. Herzl expressed his delight with the review in his Diary.

It was little wonder that Herzl wrote that

‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’

Chaim Weizmann

So it has proved. Others went even further. Chaim Weizmann, the long-standing President of the Zionist Organisation and Israel’s first President, expressed his understanding and sympathy with the leader of the anti-Semitic British Brothers League, William Evans-Gordon MP. Weizmann wrote in his autobiography, Trial and Error, 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 as he thought, according to his best lights and 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.

Arthur Balfour & Winston Churchill

Evans-Gordon was a strong supporter of Zionism as was another anti-Semite, Arthur James Balfour. As Prime Minister Balfour introduced the 1905 Aliens Act aimed at keeping Russian Jews out of Britain. In 1917 Balfour wrote a letter, which became known as the Balfour Declaration, to Lord Walter Rothschild pledging the land of the Palestinians to the Zionist movement. The only member of the Lloyd George Cabinet who opposed the BD was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu.

As Zionist novelist A B Yehoshua said, in a lecture to the Union of Jewish Students (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.’

The Zionists aimed to create the ‘new Jew’ in Palestine and they despised the gutter ghetto Jew who lived in Eastern Europe plying their trades and living at the margins of society. 

Jacob Klatzkin, the editor of the Zionist Organisation paper Die Welt and co-founder of Encyclopedia Judaica , held that the Jews in the diaspora or ‘exile’ (Galut) were:

a people disfigured in both body and soul – in a word, of a horror. At the very most it can maintain us in a state of national impurity and breed some sort of outlandish creature… The result will be something neither Jew nor gentile - in any case, not a pure national type... some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name - Jew.

Pinhas Rosenbluth, Israel’s first Justice Minister described Palestine as ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’. So damning were these elite Zionists for their Jewish brothers and sisters that Israeli political scientist, Joachim Doron wrote in an article ‘Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-Semitism’ in the Journal of Israeli History No. 8 that

‘a perusal of the Zionist sources reveals a wealth of charges against the Diaspora Jew, some of which are so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them.’

Arthur Ruppin

The most important figure in pre-state Palestine, Arthur Ruppin was an avid supporter of the racial sciences, eugenics and Social Darwinism. He considered Arab Jews as an inferior dysgenic element among Jews.

When a friend of Ruppin called him an anti-Semite he retorted ‘I have already established here [in his diary] that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.’

Ruppin was not alone in his support for anti-Semitism. Jacob Klatzkin wrote that

If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism... Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends, who desire to defend our rights.

Although Zionists today call anti-Zionists ‘self-haters’ if anyone hated themselves, it was the Zionists. It is little wonder that when Zionism arose amongst Jews it was seen as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.

That is why in nearly all the Jewish communities prior to 1945, Zionism was a distinct minority.  In Germany in 1933 they constituted just 2% of the Jewish population.

During the Nazi era, 1933-9, the Zionists were the favoured children of the Nazis whereas the ‘assimilationists’, those Jews who asserted that they were Germans as well as Jewish, were subject to restrictions.

On 28 January 1935 Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘real engineer of the final solution’  issued a directive stating that:

The activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership. (These organizations) are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists).

In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, paper of the SS, wrote that:

the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptized, in order to subvert National Socialist principles.

When the Nazis came to power the only group amongst Jews who welcomed them were the Zionist leaders.  That was why they were so opposed to the Boycott of Nazi Germany. They wished to profit from them not fight them.

Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai (the Israeli Labour Party  and editor of Davar as well as Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’ Ben-Gurion was even more optimistic. ‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.” Joachim Prinz, one of the leaders of German Zionism and later Deputy President of the World Jewish Congress, admitted that:

It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favored children of the Nazi Government, particularly when it dissolved the anti-Zionist youth groups, and seemed in other ways to prefer the Zionists. The Nazis asked for a ‘more Zionist behaviour’.

Ben-Gurion on Saving Jewish Refugees

Eitan Bloom quoted Emil Ludwig (1881-1948), the world-famous biographer, ‘who expressed the general attitude of the Zionist movement’:

Hitler will be forgotten in a few years, but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine. You know, the coming of the Nazis was rather a welcome thing. … Thousands who seemed to be completely lost to Judaism were brought back to the fold by Hitler, and for that I am personally very grateful to him.

Nahman Bialik

Nahman Bialik, the national Zionist poet, volunteered that ‘Hitlerism has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation.’ Germany’s remaining Jews were of course annihilated, but not by assimilation.

So it should not be any surprise today that the best friends of Israel – Trump, Orban, Tommy Robinson, Richard Spencer, are all fascists and anti-Semites.

This webinar has 4 speakers on anti-Semitism, all them experts in their field. Register and join us.