Hannah Arendt – a Jewish Pariah and Daughter of the Diaspora

Arendt was the German-Jewish Refugee whose Universalism Overcame her Zionism

Hannah Arendt was an enigma. She rejected any materialist or class analysis in favour of a philosophical and metaphysical discourse. Originally a Zionist, Arendt escaped the shackles and straitjacket of authoritarian nationalism. Zionism demands obedience to the Jewish volk, above all from its intellectuals, which is one reason why it has produced so few. Nationalism and worship of the state are not conducive to freedom of thought or innovative ideas.

Arendt was the child of left-wing parents. In the 1930’s she became a Zionist as she saw in the rise of Nazism the defeat of universalism and assimilation. Arendt fled from Berlin in 1933 to Paris after having spent 8 days in the custody of the Gestapo. However, as with many other Jewish refugees, the Nazis caught up with her and in 1941 she escaped again from Gurs internment camp and made her way, with her husband Heinrich Blucher, to the United States. For the Zionists, this fact alone ‘only contributed to the dismissal of her work as having no real worth.’

Arendt’s most famous work, the The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951 in McCarthy’s America. It is as its title suggests an analysis of what she called ‘totalitarianism’, the kind of a state that Orwell described in 1984.  She summed it up in the Introduction:

‘Anti-Semitism (not merely hatred of the Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) one after another, one more brutally than the other have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee.’

As a refugee she noted that when a person is driven away from one country, he is expelled from all countries “which means he is actually expelled from humanity”. Refugees are literally outlaws, beyond the protection of the law.

It is ironic that Israel alone of Western states refuses to accept any refugees on the grounds that they would undermine Israel’s (Jewish) national identity. Hostility to refugees in Israel is higher than in any other western state. Despite claiming it is a ‘Jewish’ state the injunction in Leviticus 19:33-34 is ignored:

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God”

refugees stranded at the Greek border 2016

Arendt is without doubt the greatest Jewish political philosopher of the 20^th century. It is little surprise that despite having being converted to Zionism under the influence of Kurt Blumenfeld of the German Zionist Federation and having worked for Youth Aliya in Paris in 1935 she became a bête noir for the Zionist movement after having published in 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil, about the 1961 Eichmann trial in Israel.

BACKGROUND

Gabriel Piterberg in The Returns of Zionism describes how in 2001 Yad Vashem and Jerusalem’s Hebrew University organised a conference to mark the 40^th anniversary of the Eichmann Trial. The keynote address was by Anita Shapira, the ‘princess of Zionism’ To her all Jewish history began and continued in Israel. The intervening 2,000 years of diaspora Jewry were a void. Shapira evinces what Piterberg calls ‘the hegemonic depth of Zionist ideology.’

Elizabeth Varnhagen

We can see this ideological hegemony and totalitarian thought in the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ onslaught today on Corbyn’s Labour Party whereby any fundamental critique of Israeli ‘democracy’ is deemed anti-Semitic under the IHRA. The IHRA has been adopted by all major British political parties, local authorities and the Police and Judicial College, despite excoriating criticism by legal scholars such as  Geoffrey Robertson QC, Hugh Tomlinson QC and the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge Sir Stephen Sedley. No amount of reasoned argument or logic can withstand the unanimity of bourgeois support for Zionism.

In contrast the most outrageous anti-Palestinian racism is excused by police state journalists like the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland as a product of ‘Jewish identity’ which is therefore immune to criticism. ‘Jewish identity’ is used as a shield to protect Israel yet anyone who associates Jews with Israel’s crimes is under the IHRA ‘anti-Semitic’. A case of having your Zionist cake and eating it!

Arendt committed what for her Zionist detractors was a cardinal sin. She sought to draw universal lessons from the Holocaust that were neither nationalist nor racist. ‘Shapira charges Arendt with trying to ‘understand’ Nazism and the Judaeocide from a universalist position.’  [Piterberg, 149] That was why, until 1999, Eichmann in Jerusalem was not published in Israel. As Boaz Evron put it

‘this book came to me as a fresh wind of sobriety and sensibility amongst the hysterical storm blown all around by the propaganda agencies of the Ben Gurion regime.’

Arendt was

‘in Shapira’s absurd judgment, incapable of sensing the Jewish experience because she was from ‘there’ as if ‘there’ was not where the Holocaust had occurred.’

Not only did Shapira condemn Arendt’s universalism but her refusal to accept Zionist colonisation and ownership of the Holocaust. A Holocaust which the Jewish Agency had ignored whilst it was happening but which they utilised politically and ideologically.

Arendt’s essay ‘The Jew as a Pariah’ was savaged in a review in the magazine of the American Right, Commentary. Rather than praising Jewish nationalism, Arendt praises Jewish dissidents as she focuses on 4 particular pariahs – Heinrich Heine, Bernard Lazarre, Charlie Chaplin and Franz Kafka – each brilliant in their own way. But as Ron Feldman notes sniffily regarding Chaplin ‘strangely enough, one did not have to be Jewish to be a Jewish pariah.’

Rahel Varnhagen's Literary Salon in Berlin

But of course the quintessential pariah was Arendt herself. As Lyndsey Stonebridge notes in her essay The Shape of Totalitarianism and the Meaning of Exile: Three Lessons from Hannah Arendt Arendt was a self-proclaimed pariah, a term she borrowed from Bernard Lazare. She considered her closest soulmate Rahel Varnhagen, a pariah to parvenu of the late 17^th, early 18^th century who ran a famous literary salon in Berlin. An important figure in Germany’s Romantic movement she converted to Christianity in 1814 in order to escape the social restrictions that were placed on Jews. She was the outsider who sought acceptance which is one reason why Amos Elon [The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933] falsely accused her of hating her Jewish background.

Conversion was Varnhagen’s only escape. Arendt said of her that

‘Rahel had remained a Jew and a pariah. Only because she clung to both conditions did she find a place in the history of European humanity.’

For Zionism, what is and was more important was her rejection of racial exclusivism in favour of Jewish assimilation.

In 1938, Arendt completed her biography Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess although it wasn’t published until 1957. As Piterberg notes, it took 20 years to write. For Arendt ‘a decent human existence is possible only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risks of starving or being stoned to death.’  Arendt cherished Varnhagen as her "closest friend, though she had been dead for some hundred years".

Arendt followed a similar trajectory to Einstein. From Zionist to non-Zionist. She signed a famous letter on 2^nd December 1948 on the occasion of Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States.

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.

In October 1944 Arendt wrote an essay Zionism Reconsidered. Judith Butler observed

‘Paradoxically, and perhaps shrewdly, the terms in which Arendt criticised Fascism came to inform her criticisms of Zionism, though she did not and would not conflate the two.’

Although Zionism is not a fascist ideology (although it has a remarkable number of fascist adherents) it shares a number of common features with fascism such as the premium placed on loyalty to the state and the prioritisation of the needs of the state over those of the individual.

During the Holocaust this was expressed as the need to build the Jewish state taking priority over the saving of the Jews in Europe.  Shabtai Teveth, his official biographer, quotes Ben Gurion as saying that where there was

a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say that the enterprise comes first.

In ‘Zionism Reconsidered’ Arendt noted that the American Zionist conference in 1944 had demanded a Jewish Commonwealth in the whole of Palestine without once mentioning the Palestinians, describing this as a victory for the Revisionist programme. Her conclusion was that this ‘obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second class citizenship.’  In fact there was a third choice, which in 1948 came to pass – transfer or ethnic cleansing, which she notes was discussed in a wide variety of Zionist circles.

The critical problem for Arendt was both political and humanitarian:

the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.

As Butler noted

she calls ‘absurd’ the idea of setting up a Jewish state in a ‘sphere of interest’ of the superpowers. Such a state would suffer under the ‘delusion of nationhood’: ‘Only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours.’

Zionism rested on‘an open acceptance of anti-Semitism as a “fact.” The Zionist labour movement had created, with the chalutz and kibbutz ‘a new type of Jew’ but this didn’t prevent the Zionist Organisation ‘against the natural impulses of the whole Jewish people’ doing business with Hitler in order to ‘trade German goods against the wealth of German Jewry.’

Arendt noted that the ‘socialist’ Zionists ‘failed to level a single critique of Jewish bourgeoisie outside of Palestine, or to attack the role of Jewish finance.’

Arendt had great difficulty in coming to terms with the nation state.  To her the only solution to national conflicts was either complete assimilation or emigration. The possibility of national autonomy, cultural pluralism and multi-culturalism were absent.

Arendt castigated the ‘Zionist doctrine of eternal anti-Semitism’. Quoting Herzl she noted that because Zionism ‘concluded that without anti-Semitism the Jewish people would not have survived’ it was opposed to any attempt to liquidate anti-Semitism.

Astutely Arendt observed that for all their strictures against assimilation the Zionists ‘were the only ones who sincerely wanted assimilation, namely, ‘normalization’ of the (Jewish) people.’ Theirs was a collective assimilation in a Jewish state. The irony is that because of the circumstances of its creation, under the protection of the British Empire, Zionism had created a ‘Jewish’ state which is anything but normal, not least because it is an ethno-nationalist state.

Arendt’s criticism of Zionism’s attitude to the Jewish diaspora are astute. Zionism ‘cuts off Jewish history from European history and even from the rest of mankind’.

Arendt is particularly cutting in her description of leftist Zionists ‘who simply added official Zionism to their socialism’ whilst fighting the employment of Arab labour ‘under the pretense of class-struggle against Arab labour.’

Arendt accused Zionism of being inspired by German nationalism which viewed people biologically not politically. In the process

‘Zionists ended by making the Jewish national emancipation dependent upon the material interests of another nation.’ ‘The erection of a Jewish State within an imperial sphere of interest may look like a very nice solution to some Zionists...’

The ‘relationship between the proposed new State and the Diaspora’ is one which disturbed her. Arendt put her finger on another problem of Zionism. Its claim that Jews form a separate nation, even whilst the majority continue to live outside Israel in other countries. Inevitably this posed ‘the old question of double loyalty’ which is precisely what has happened.  [see Hannah Arendt would agree with Ilhan Omar] In her essay ‘To Save the Jewish Homeland’ Arendt foresaw the time when Israel’s relations with world Jewry

would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large number of Jews lived.

Dual loyalty is inherent in Zionism.

Arendt argues that Herzl’s Zionism was ‘inspired from German sources – as opposed to the French variety.’ In other words a German nationalism which was exclusive and volkish, based on blood relations and kith and kin whereas French nationalism had been inclusive, based on all those residing within France.

Arendt noted the Zionist and Herzl view that the Jewish people were surrounded by a ‘world of enemies’ remarking that ‘if’ the whole world is ultimately against us, we are lost.’ She finishes her essay by warning of the parallels with Sabbatai Zevi, the false messiah of the 17^th century.

Arendt’s attitude to the onset of anti-Semitism was that

If one is attacked as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.

Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil

What aroused the ire of the Zionist movement to white fury was Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She famously coined the slogan ‘the banality of evil’ which Zionist historians like David Cesarani have written books about without once understanding what it meant! She portrayed Eichmann as a desk bound bureaucrat and some took this to mean that he was simply doing a job that he had no strong feelings about either way. Cesarani went out of his way to prove what none of us doubted – that Eichmann was an anti-Semite.

However his anti-Semitism was political not personal. He was not some political Lord Voldemort, breathing fire. Rather he was someone who could only talk in clichés, lacking all original thought. In fact a most unremarkable man who nonetheless had perpetrated monstrous crimes.

Lyndsey Stonebridge observed it wasn’t Eichmann who she got wrong, but a young black woman named Elizabeth Eckford who was depicted amidst screaming white women in a famous 1957 photograph from Little Rock, Arkansas as she entered an all-White schools.

Arendt argued that Eckford should not be carrying such a political burden at her age and that education was a social and largely private matter. Ralph Ellison replied that all black children in the south carried a political burden from the day they were born whether they or their parents liked it or not. Arendt shut up.

The Judgment of the Eichmann trial dovetailed with Zionism’s political requirements when it found that ‘it has not been proved before us that the accused knew that the Gypsies were being transported to destruction’. Thus no genocide charge except that against the Jews was upheld. Hannah Arendt remarked that

‘This was difficult to understand, for, apart from the fact that the extermination of Gypsies was common knowledge, Eichmann had admitted during the police examination that he knew of it.’ It had been an order from Himmler.

The trial verdict did not see the extermination of millions of people as a crime against humanity. Rather it was a crime against the Jewish people. The Holocaust was not seen as ‘a Fascist attack on human diversity’ but a specific and exclusive attack on the Jewish people.

Arendt pointed to the hypocrisy of the Prosecutor Gideon Hausner:

‘Israeli citizens, religious and non-religious seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage… there certainly was something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans.’

Kasztner was the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war. He was accused after the war by Hungarian survivors of the deportations to Auschwitz of having collaborated with Eichmann in return for a train carrying 1,684 of the Jewish and Zionist elite out of Hungary. The verdict of the trial judge Benjamin Halevi was that Kasztner had sold his soul to the devil. Although the decision was overturned on legal and political technicalities by the Supreme Court the damage had been done.

The Eichmann trial was staged primarily to undo the damage caused by the Kasztner Affair. In the words of Israeli historian Tom Segev [The 7^th Million, p.328, see Noah Lucas, The Modern History of Israel, p. 414] it was meant to ‘expunge the historical guilt that had been attached to the Mapai leadership since the Kasztner trial.’  The Kasztner trial dominated the Israel of 1954-58 and caused the fall of the 1955 Sharrett government.

Witnesses who were likely to raise the issues that had surrounded the Kasztner trial were carefully excluded from giving evidence e.g. Kasztner’s friend Andre Biss.

What Arendt did was to write a book which threatened to undo this careful stage management. Her first sin was to attack the Jewish leadership in Nazi occupied Europe. She wrote:

‘Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and half and six million people.’

As Lucien Sternberg observed, ‘Arendt’s argument caused an outcry among Zionist holocaust historians but it could not be refuted.’ [Not as a Lamb - Jews Against Hitler, Gordon & Cremones, University Press, Glasgow p.109]

Arendt was accused of being incapable of understanding the complexity of the situation. Despite the participation of the Judenrat in rounding up Jews for deportation, Israel Gutman of Yad Vashem and Rozett opined that ‘‘The Judenrat reinforced the Jews’ power of endurance in their struggle for survival,’

Hausner was foremost among those who defended the Judenrat. He attacked Raul Hilberg, the preeminent Holocaust historian because Hannah Arendt ‘in her vicious and compassionless attitude to the Judenrat’ drew upon his work.’

The problem was that one could not explain how the Nazis had achieved their objectives so efficiently without taking the behaviour of the victims, including the Jewish Councils into account.

When Israeli Professor Jacob Talman criticised Hannah Arendt, for mentioning Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, Rudolph Vrba,  the Jewish escapee from Auschwitz, then residing in London asked:

‘Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders – for example Dr R Kasztner – bartered their own lives and the lives of 1684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from Eichmann.’

The Zionist movement exploded with fury when Arendt wrote ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil.’ It threatened to undo all that had been achieved by the Eichmann Bill. Arendt’s crime was to highlight what the Eichmann Trial had been designed to avoid.  Their attacks bear a familiar ring:  Arendt wrote:

… 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” (Mary McCarthy)… 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.”

Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a German Zionist who had welcomed the rise of Hitler as vindicating Zionism, accused Arendt of having described Eichmann as a ‘sweet and misguided man.’ One French weekly went so far as to ask whether Arendt was a Nazi.

Amos Elon wrote, in an Introduction to her book, that

No book within living memory had elicited similar passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by the Jewish establishment in America.

Arendt was stunned by the uproar. She spoke of the ‘smear campaign’ being conducted ‘on the lowest level’ based on the claim that she had said ‘the exact opposite of what I did in fact write.’ What Arendt had to say about the way her book was viciously caricatured has a familiar ring to those claims of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party. In a letter to her friend, Mary McCarthy, Arendt complained ‘what a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroidery.’ Shooting the messenger rather than responding to the message has always remained the quintessential Zionist modus operandi.  Apparently Arendt had claimed that ‘the Jews had murdered themselves’ and why had she told ‘such a monstrously implausible lie? Out of “self-hatred” of course.’

The Eichmann Trial was a political show trial. It focused solely on the Jewish dead and failed to place the Holocaust in any kind of historical context. Its purpose was not to understand but to rewrite history. People have concentrated on the Appeal Court’s decision to find Eichmann guilty and the imposition of the death sentence whilst ignoring its decision that ‘the Appellant had received no ‘superior orders’ at all. He was his own superior.’ Israel’s Supreme Court had exculpated Himmler and even Hitler.

A movie The Specialist was made. It reflected Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil. Eichmann, whose enthusiasm for the annihilation of the Jews was never doubted, had nonetheless been a bureaucratic cog in the wheel.

‘The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else.’

Raul Hilberg reached the same conclusion.

‘The bureaucracy had taken over. It is the bureaucratic destruction process that in its step-by-step manner finally led to the annihilation of five million victims.’

Eichmann was an ardent Zionist. Baron von Mildenstein, the first head of the SS’s Jewish Department, had required Eichmann to read Herzl’s Der Judenstaat ‘which converted. Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism... as late as 1939 he seems to have protested against desecrators of Herzl’s grave in Vienna.’

At the Eichmann trial, the most glaring omission from the picture painted was any witness to the co-operation between the Nazis and the Jewish authorities and the Zionists. This prevented the question being asked ‘Why did you cooperate in the destruction of your own people’. When Pinhas Freudiger, the Chief Rabbi of Hungary testified, this caused the only significant interruption as Hungarian survivors called him a collaborator and ‘accused him of abandoning his position as a leader of the Orthodox Community.’

Perhaps the best example of the ideological confrontation between Zionism, with its belief in the negation of the disapora and the voice of the Jewish diaspora, is the correspondence between Arendt and Gershom Scholem, the Professor of Mysticism. 

On June 23^rd 1963 Scholem wrote to Arendt, having read Eichmann in Jerusalem.

In the Jewish tradition there is a concept Ahabath Israel: ‘Love of the Jewish people…”  In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German Left, I find little trace of this….’

Arendt’s reply demonstrated that Scholem was at heart a Jewish chauvinist. 

‘I am not one of the “intellectuals who come from the German Left.’… It is a fact of which I am in no way particularly proud and which I am somewhat reluctant to emphasize – especially since the McCarthy era in this country.  I came late to an understanding of Marx’s importance… let me begin… with what you call “love of the Jewish people.”… (Incidentally, I would be very grateful if you could tell me since when this concept has played a role in Judaism)… You are quite right – I am not moved by any “love” of this sort, and for two reasons.  I have never in my life “loved” any people or collective… I indeed love “only” my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.  Secondly, this “love of the Jews” would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect…. I do not “love” the Jews, nor do I “believe” in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument…. But I can admit to you something beyond that, namely, that wrong done by my own people naturally grieves me more than wrong done by other peoples.’

It was in truth a devastating reply.

See      Hannah Arendt would agree with Ilhan Omar, Philip Weiss

Why Hannah Arendt is the Philosopher for Now, Lyndsey Stonebridge

Hannah Arendt: Human, Citizen, Jew

Tony Greenstein

The Question of Dual Loyalities

Allegiance to Israel Threatens Safety of Jews in America

General Ulysses Grant who issued an order expelling the Jews from Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee, the most anti-Semitic official order in American history because of Jewish clothing manufacturers' decision to move southern cotton northwar

It is a long-standing canard of anti-Semites that Jews are not members of the nations amongst whom they live but constitute a separate race/nation.  Hence Germans of the Jewish  Faith were transformed by the Nuremberg Laws into being Jews who resided, as subjects not citizens in Germany.

It was the basis of Emancipation that Jews were part of the nations amongst which they lived.  They may not owe loyalty to the particular state, especially if they were socialists or communists, because the State is an instrument of class domination.  But Jews no more owed a loyalty to another state, still less constitution a separate nation, than Catholics or Protestans.

The annual Israel Day parade in New York - a disgusting mixture of racism and chauvinism

The Zionists hated Emancipation, the idea of equal political and civil rights and the removal   of political disabilities on Jews.  Theodor Herzl, founder of Political Zionism held, absurdly that ‘anti-Semitism is a consequence of the Emancipation of the Jews.’ [Diaries, p.9] In his  pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) He wrote that ‘‘In the principle countries where anti-Semitism prevails, it does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews.’ [p.25] The anti-Semites agreed.

Eduord Drumont, the leading anti-Dreyfusard and a vicious anti-Semite, had written La France Juive, [Jewish France] one the 2 major works of anti-Semitism in the 19th Century, (the other was Houston Stuart Chamberlains Myths of the 19th Century) which sold 100,000 in its first edition.  He was in total agreement with Herzl. ‘According to Drumont ‘the emancipation of the Jews in 1791 was a blunder.’ [Alex, Bein, Biography of Theodor Herzl p.80].  Unsurprisingly Drumont might been a virulent anti-Semites, editing the anti-Semitic daily La Libre Parole, but he and Herzl got on famously. 
Herzl persuaded Drumont, via another anti-Semite, Daudet, to review the Jewish State in La Libre Parole, which he did on January 15 1897.  Herzl was ecstatic about ‘Drumont’s highly flattering editorial about me and promises more.’  [Drumont] "praised the Zionists of Herzl's persuasion for not seeing in us fanatics ... but citizens who exercise the right of self-defense." [Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl, Artist and Politician, 251].

Bush & Netanyahu - Israel serves US strategic interests in the region

Although most Zionists are unaware of it, a key concept in Zionist theology is the ‘negation of the Diaspora', a rejection of Jewish existence outside Israel.  Its most articulate advocate today is the Zionist author A B Yehoshua and and academic Anita Shapira. Speaking to a meeting of the British Zionist Youth Council, Yehoshua described the Jewish Diaspora as a "cancer connected to the mainstream of the Jewish people."  Jewish Chronicle 22 December 1989.

Idiotic chauvinists and racists cover themselves in the Zionist and US flags - or the 'butcher's apron' as Irish Republicans used to describe the Union Jack.

 Its classic Zionist exponent was Jacob Klatzkin, co-founder of the Encyclopaedia Judaica and editor of the Zionist Organisation paper Die Welt (1909-11). In a collection of essays, Boundaries (Tehumim), 1914-21, he wrote that "Galut can only drag out the disgrace of our people and sustain the existence of 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 in an environment of disintegration of cultures, of darkening spiritual horizons. The result will be something neither Jewish nor gentile - in any case. '-not a pure national type. Perhaps it is conceivable that, even after the disintegration of our national existence in foreign lands, there will remain for many generations some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew." The Zionist Idea, A Hertzberg, 1959, Atheneum, p.323, NY.  Zionism's negation of the Jewish diaspora rested on a caricature of Jews that was a reflection of anti-Semitism. 

 The attempt to suggest that Jews have a dual loyalty, to the USA and Israel is a gift to the anti-Semites.  You only need to read articles such as Are Jews Guilty Of Dual Loyalty?  or David Duke’s article Is Discussing Jewish Dual Loyalty Anti-Semitic? to realise whose agenda such questions are meant to serve.

Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew and a member of Naval Intelligence sold US secrets to Israeli and was sentenced to life imprisonment. 

A very real example was the conviction of Jonathan Pollard, a 31 year old American Jew andan employee of US Naval Intelligence who provided Israeli spies with classified American satellite data on the location of Syrian antiaircraft batteries and of Iraqi nuclear test sites. The FBI arrested Pollard in November 1985. An American court sentenced him to life in prison. The Pollard Affair: Was it dual loyalty? Jerusalem Post 2.11.09.

Which is why when the Israeli Embassy distributed a questionnaire to American Jews asking whether they were more loyal to America or Israel, Jewish community leaders, usually quite tame and slavish supporters of all that Israel does, were outrage, as the following article in Ha'aretz describes:

Israel asks U.S. Jews, Israelis: Where do your loyalties lie?

PM orders ministries to stop distributing the survey, which asks questions about dual allegiance and the Jewish lobby in America.

Two sensitive and potentially explosive issues have always clouded the relationship between the Jewish community in the United States and the State of Israel. The first relates to claims of “dual allegiance” to both Israel and the United States; the other concerns the pro-Israel, American “Jewish lobby.” Many of those raising such claims against American Jewry have themselves been accused of anti-Semitism.

So it's strange that representatives of Israel’s immigrant absorption and foreign ministries have just distributed a questionnaire to tens of thousands of Israelis living in the United States and Jewish Americans, which includes problematic questions on exactly these issues, and asks them to indicate where their allegiance would lie in the case of a crisis between the two countries.

On Sunday, following the report of the story in Haaretz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed the ministries to stop distributing the questionnaire. He also ordered that it not be promoted by any official government agency.

The survey was commissioned by the Israeli American Council, a private nonprofit group based in Los Angeles. Its mission is "to build an active and giving Israeli-American community in order to strengthen the State of Israel, our next generation, and to provide a bridge to the Jewish-American community,” according to the IAC website.


The IAC was established by Israelis living in Los Angeles in 2007, and is primarily supported by Israeli-American businessman Haim Saban, who has donated close to a million dollars in the past four years.


In September, the IAC announced plans to expand by establishing new branches throughout the United States. Conducting the survey is seen as part of this process.


According to the IAC, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has taken it upon himself to help finance the group's expansion.

Adelson, considered one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest allies, owns the pro-Netanyahu free daily Israel Hayom, and donated tens of millions of dollars to Republican candidates in the last U.S. presidential election.

Last Tuesday, the IAC’s chief operating officer, Miri Belsky, sent an email to the Israeli embassy in Washington with a link to the survey, asking that Israeli consulates in the United States be instructed to distribute it. She even asked that the consulates send out four reminders - one every three days – in order to elicit replies from at least 10 percent of their mailing list.

That same day, the Israeli consulates in the United States received instructions from the embassy in Washington and the Immigrant Absorption Ministry’s returning citizens' department to distribute the survey by email to the tens of thousands of Israelis and Jews on their mailing lists.

“The IAC is conducting a survey of Israelis in the United States to map their positions and needs,” read the email the Washington embassy sent to the consulates. “We will be partners in the findings. They are asking for our help in distributing the questionnaires via our communication channels, in order to reach as many Israelis as possible … We thank you for promoting this from today.”

Midgam Research and Consulting, a polling company, has been hired to carry out the survey, which is apparently financed by the IAC but was endorsed by official Israeli government agencies. The symbol of the State of Israel appears on the survey’s opening page, and the questionnaires were sent from official Foreign Ministry email accounts.

However, it is unclear what governmental level approved this move, or whether absorption or foreign ministry officials checked what type of questions would be asked. Only after several of the consulates had already distributed the survey to tens of thousands of recipients did some Israeli diplomats realize the significance, and partially halted its distribution.

“Tell her not to send it out. The questions in this survey are unbearable and not legitimate,” Gil Lainer, consul for public diplomacy at the Israeli Consulate in New York, wrote to one of his colleagues in an email.

One question in the survey asks specifically which side the respondents would support publicly if there was a crisis in the relationship between the United States and Israel. The respondents are also asked to what extent the presidential candidates or Congress members' attitudes toward Israel impact their voting decisions.

They are also asked about the impact of American Jews and U.S. Jewish organizations on American policy, and how Israelis living in the United States and American Jews have an impact on Israel’s strength.

An Immigrant Absorption Ministry spokesperson told Haaretz, “this survey has no connection to the ministry,” but admitted ministry personal were involved in its distribution. “We will check how this hitch occurred.” 

The Foreign Ministry noted that “the survey was distributed by Ella Saban - director of the department for returning Israelis at the Absorption Ministry - to the consulates. It is a project of the Absorption Ministry and the IAC.” However, it noted that the embassy in Washington and the consulates around the U.S. helped circulate the survey.

The IAC replied via its PR, Moshe Debby. “The Israeli American Council initiated and approved the survey and questions,” Debby said. “We drafted the survey and it was distributed by many organizations, including [the Immigrant Absorption Ministry agency] Bait Israeli. The government of Israel was not involved in drafting the survey. We chose to conduct this survey … checking the characteristics of Israelis living in America and their children, to learn about the community’s nature.
 
“We think those questions are legitimate, as they are not influencing the reader to vote one way or another. The survey is totally anonymous and the results are for statistical study. The questions you referred to are questions that many Jews and Israeli Americans are faced with.”

Mira Bar Hillel
Tuesday 29 October 2013

Israel and the US: Drawing up lines of allegiance

Jewish Americans are being asked whether they feel more loyal to the US or Israel – it's hard to imagine the issue being raise at a more sensitive time

 Ask British Jews whether they feel more loyal to this country or to Israel – and expect to be instantly labelled anti-Semitic and sent packing. The same, only more so, applies in the USA.
The issue has always been sensitive. Nowadays, with Israel being increasingly criticised for its harsh treatment of the Palestinians and asking to be allowed to bomb Iran, it is potentially explosive.

When Israeli positions conflict with British ones, nothing is more inflammatory than allegations of “dual allegiance”, not to mention putting Israel first. The pro-Israel lobbyists do their work subtly, although in the US their activities, especially among politicians, attract more attention.

Which makes it even more peculiar that tens of thousands of leaflets have recently been distributed to Jewish Americans, as well as to Israelis living in the United States, asking them to indicate where their allegiance would lie in the case of a crisis between the two countries. Almost incredibly, the leaflet was originally endorsed by representatives of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

Within days, following the report of the story in the Israeli press, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu hastily directed the ministry to stop backing the questionnaire, which was commissioned by the Israeli American Council, a private nonprofit group established in Los Angeles in 2007. In September, the IAC announced plans to expand by establishing new branches throughout the United States. The survey is seen as part of this process.

According to the IAC, this expansion is to be sponsored by Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson.   Adelson, 80, is one of the biggest financial backers of both Netanyahu and Mitt Romney and is said to have spent as much as $100 million trying to help defeat Obama last year. According to a report (by Seth Hanlon, the director of fiscal reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund), the canny Adelson could have turn that investment into a $2 billion tax cut had Romney been elected.

In Israel, Adelson established and pays for a free newspaper, Hayom, devoted to praising Netanyahu and his controversial wife on a daily basis with endless “scoops” about the First Family.

The 12th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $34.4 billion recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the one reason why he switched from Democrat to Republican was that Republicans were more supportive of Israel than Democrats. That certainly applied to Romney and Netanyahu, a pair who stayed very close after working together at the Boston Consulting Group in the 70s.

In October 2013 Adelson called upon the US to warn Iran it would use Nuclear missiles if necessary, initially aimed at the desert and subsequently threatening to hit Tehran if it did not halt its nuclear programme . This could have been – and possibly was – scripted by Netanyahu.

I wouldn’t dare ask Sheldon Adelson, whose wife is Israeli, where his allegiances lie. But I would dearly love to hear his answer.

Israel's Supreme Court Confirms That There is no Israeli Nationality

Israel's Palestinians Confined to a 'Citizenship' that is Meaningless

Uzzi Ornan displays his ID card - which unlike a passport does not have any mention of an Israeli nationality.

The Israel's Supreme Court recently rejected a claim that there was an Israeli nationality. The claim was brought by Uzzi Ornan, a 90-year-old linguistics processor at the Technion, Tel Aviv. An Israeli nationality would undermine the 'Jewish' nature of the Israeli state.

The judgment reinforces the decision in a similar case was brought by George Tamarin in 1970. In the Tamarin case the Supreme Court, presided over by Justice Agranat held that ‘the desire to create an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish nation is not a legitimate aspiration.’

Hebron settlers protected an army that gives Palestinians no protection

It is a very strange State where it is held to be 'illegitimate' to want citizenship and nationality to be one and the same.  That is the basis of all western democracies and the bourgeois revolutions.

Agranat pointed out that a division of the population into Israeli and Jewish nations would create a schism among the Jewish people and negate the foundation on which the State of Israel was established. The court ruling specified, "There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish People. The Jewish People is composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of Diaspora Jewry."

Jewish Nationality Status as the Basis for Institutionalised Racial Discrimination in Israel

In Ornan the court explained that creating an Israeli nationality would have "weighty implications" on the state of Israel and could pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people.

Israel is the only state in the world which is a state, not of its own citizens, but of people residing anywhere in the world who are Jewish. The only comparison is Nazi Germany which in 1935 stripped German Jews of their nationality. Henceforth they were not Germans of the Jewish faith but Jews who were German subjects. The German Volk/people extended to all Germans, wherever they resided, and that was the basis for the attack on Czechoslovakia – the Sudetan Germans were claimed by Hitler as part of the German Vok.   Poles and Jews were expelled from the annexed territories of Poland, in particular the Warthegau, and German residents of Poland and the Eastern Territories were brought in to settle the land.

An ultra orthodox boy watches Sheik Jarrah protest against land confiscation in Jerusalem.  Jewish nationals never have their land confiscated.

The question of what constitutes a Jewish or Israeli identity has been a permanent dilemma for Israelis and non-Israelis alike. The definition of ‘who is a Jew’ is defined in Israel by Orthodox Jewry, i.e. someone born of a Jewish mother who has not adopted another religion. It is much the same as the Nazi definition in the Nuremberg Laws 1935, i.e. based on ethnicity or race.

British journalist Jonathan Cook, who resides in Nazareth, wrote an article Court nixes push for ‘Israeli nationality’ 18.10.13 Al-Jazeera. There is little to disagree with in the article but Moshe Machover, a co-founder of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel has responded with a piece ‘ ‘Confusion Compounded’. However Moshe confuses the debate even further with an exploration of nationality and citizenship in European countries as well as Israel. I have written a response below. Moshe’s argument is written in the context of his belief that Israeli Jews or Hebrews are a separate nation, with which I disagree.

Israel's flag is based on Jewish religious symbols -  it deliberately excludes non-Jews from feeling any attachment to the flag of the setters

Response to Jonathan Cook's Court nixes push for ‘Israeli nationality’

Al-Jazeera – 18 October 2013

 

All Israelis are Israeli nationals abroad!

Only on an Israeli passport is there an Israeli nationality

In my opinion, although well intentioned and laudable in many ways, this article adds to the already great confusion of the issue under discussion.

The demand by Uzi Ornan and others to be registered as "Israeli" under the Nationality rubric in their Israeli ID card is not as progressive as they claim, and as Jonathan Cook seems to believe. 

In part, the confusion is linguistic. In English, "nationality" (equivalent to the French "nationalité") has two different meanings: it can mean citizenship but can also mean national identity in the sense that the Basques, Kurds and Scots are nations although there is no Basque, Kurdish or (as yet…) Scottish citizenship.

Nationality is defined by citizenship

This ambiguity was deliberately fostered by the French state following the French Revolution. It was a curate's egg. On the positive side, it granted equal individual rights to all French citizens, those who had French nationalité. But on the negative side it was deliberately designed to deny the distinct  national identity of national minorities such as the Basques and Corsicans, and to refuse to accord them collective rights as national minorities. 

Since French was, and to a large extent still is, the main diplomatic language, passports of many countries use the rubric "Nationality/Nationalité" to state the citizenship – not the national identity in the other sense – of the passport's bearer. If Jonathan Cook will care to look at his own UK passport, he will find under this rubric the description "BRITISH CITIZEN".  And in my Israeli passport, under the rubric "Nationality" it says "Israeli". Thus Israel does officially recognize Israeli nationality in the sense of citizenship.  The national identity (in the other sense) of the bearer is not stated in either passport. A UK passport does not say whether its bearer is English, Scottish, Welsh (or Irish – but let us not get into this morass…). Nor does an Israeli passport say whether its bearer is … what? But this gets us into the next bit of confusion.

The Hebrew word that Jonathan Cook translates as "nationality" is "le'om" (or "le'umiut"). It is this word that appears as rubric in an Israeli ID document. But the Hebrew word – unlike its supposed French and English counterparts – is not ambiguous. It means just one thing: national identity in the sense that the Basques, Scots and Kurds are nations.

And in this sense there really does not exist an Israeli nationality. So the Israeli Supreme Court was right to deny its existence. But its motives and arguments for reaching this correct conclusion are entirely contemptible, as Jonathan Cook rightly implies. They are rooted in Zionist ideology and in Israel's nature as an ethnocracy, to which the Supreme Court is committed and which it seeks to uphold. 

In reality, there are in Israel two main national groups. One, a national minority, is Palestinian Arab. The other, the majority, is the settler nation, commonly (but confusingly) referred to as "Israeli Jewish".  A better term  – which Uzi Ornan himself and others promoted for many decades – is "Hebrew", a term that quite rightly has no religious connotation and emphasises the modern Hebrew language, which is unique to this nation as a medium of everyday discourse and culture. 

As in other cases where colonizers did not rely on the indigenous people as their main source of labour power – such as the US and Australia – so also in Palestine/Israel a new settler nation has come into existence. 

But Zionist ideology denies the existence of this nation. I have elaborated on this elsewhere, and rather than repeat myself I refer the reader to my article 

"Zionist myths: Hebrew versus Jewish identity" also posted on:

http://www.israeli-occupation.org/2013-05-17/moshe-machover-zionist-myths-hebrew-versus-jewish-identity/

Zionist ideology also has a problem with the existence of the Palestinian Arab national group – which it refuses to recognize fully, and denies it collective rights as such.

By demanding to recognize a single Israeli le'om (or le'umiut) Uzi Ornan and his friends are paradoxically colluding with this anti-democratic stance of the Israeli state. For if there is one Israeli national identity, that would undermine the just demand – raised by the Arab party Balad and other – to recognize the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel as a national minority, with collective rights to which it is entitled as such.

A truly democratic position would be to demand:

First, that Israel should be a state of all its citizens, with equal individual rights to all, rather than the oxymoronic "Jewish and democratic state". (An Israeli ID document should only register the citizenship – Hebrew: ezrahut – of its bearer.)

Second, that the Palestinian Arab national minority should be recognized officially and have full collective rights as such.

Moshé Machover

Court nixes push for ‘Israeli nationality’

Jonathan Cook Al-Jazeera – 18 OCTOBER 2013

A court decision this month that rejected Israelis’ right to a shared nationality has highlighted serious problems caused by Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state, say lawyers and human rights activists.

A group of 21 Israelis had appealed to the Supreme Court to demand the state recognise their wish to be classified as “Israeli nationals”.

Since Israel’s founding in 1948, authorities have refused to recognise such a nationality, instead classifying Israelis according to the ethnic group to which each belongs. The overwhelming majority are registered as either “Jewish” or “Arab” nationals, though there are more than 130 such categories in total.

Critics say the system, while seemingly a technical matter, has far-reaching effects. The citizenship laws, they say, undergird a system of systematic discrimination against the one-fifth of Israel’s population who are non-Jews – most of them belonging to Israel’s Palestinian minority.

Some observers also fear that the court ruling, which effectively upheld Israel’s definition as a Jewish state, will strengthen the aversion of Israel’s right-wing government to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted that Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority recognise Israel as a Jewish state as a condition for reaching a peace agreement.

‘I am an Israeli’

The case was brought to court by the “I am an Israeli” movement, led by Uzi Ornan, a retired linguist from northern Israel. The group, which includes both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, argued that they should be allowed to change their nationality to “Israeli”.

“This ruling is very dangerous,” said Ornan. “It allows Israel to continue being a very peculiar country indeed, one that refuses to recognise the nationality of its own people. I don’t know of another country that does such a thing. It is entirely anti-democratic.”

The “I am an Israeli” movement objects to Israel’s system of laws that separate citizenship from nationality. While Israelis enjoy a common citizenship, they have separate nationalities based on their ethnic identity. Only the Jewish majority has been awarded national rights, meaning that Palestinian citizens face institutionalised discrimination, said Ornan.

He added: “It tells the country’s Arab citizens that they have no real recognition in their own country – that they will always be treated as foreigners and they will always face discrimination.”

Others view the ruling more positively. Anita Shapira, a professor emeritus of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, said creating a new category of “Israeli national” would undermine the Jewish essence of the state and alienate Jews from other countries who felt a connection to Israel through a shared religion.

“The attempt to claim that there is a Jewish nationality in the state of Israel that is separate from the Jewish religion is something very revolutionary,” she said.

The “I am an Israeli” movement’s petition was originally heard and rejected in 2007 by a district court in Jerusalem. The group then appealed to the Supreme Court, the second time that Israel’s citizenship laws have been challenged in this venue.

In the first hearing, in 1971, Justice Shimon Agranat ruled that it was “illegitimate” so soon after Israel’s founding for the petitioners to “ask to separate themselves from the Jewish people and to achieve for themselves the status of a distinct Israeli nation”.

Though more than 40 years had passed, that position was largely upheld in the new ruling. Asher Grunis, the head of the Supreme Court, decided: “The existence of an Israeli ethnic nationality has not been proven.” Another judge who heard the case, Hanan Melcer, warned that conceding such a nationality would jeopardise “the Jewish and the democratic nature of the state”.

Unequal treatment?

However, legal analysts have drawn the opposite conclusion. Aeyal Gross, a law professor at Tel Aviv University, wrote in the Haaretz newspaper that the court’s decision “will continue to obscure the possibility of having real democracy in Israel”.

Hassan Jabareen, the director of Adalah, a legal rights group for the Arab minority in Israel, said the state’s refusal to recognise a shared nationality stripped Palestinians inside Israel of equality in most areas of their lives, including access to land, housing, education and employment. “It is also disturbing that Israeli law treats Israel as the Jewish homeland for Jews everywhere, even those who are not citizens of Israel,” he said.

Jabareen said this was achieved through the 1950 Law of Return, which allows Jews anywhere in the world to come to Israel and gain automatic citizenship.

Israel used another law – the Citizenship Law of 1952 – to belatedly confer citizenship on the Palestinians who remained on their land following the 1948 war that established Israel.

The Law of Return effectively provides an immigration policy only for Jews. Under the terms of the Citizenship Law, only a few dozen non-Jews – those who marry an Israeli citizen – qualify for naturalisation every year.

Israel passed another law in 2003 that bars most Palestinians from the occupied territories and Arabs from neighbouring states from being eligible to naturalise, even if they marry an Israeli.

At the time, officials said the law was needed to prevent terrorism, but most observers believe the legislation’s real aim was to prevent what Israelis call “a right of return through the back door” – the fear that Palestinians would use marriage to Palestinians inside Israel to win citizenship and thus erode the country’s Jewish majority.

Ornan and others complain that the ethnic and religious basis of Israeli citizenship is further accentuated by Israel’s adoption of arcane personal status laws dating from the Ottoman period. There are no civil institutions dealing with most areas of Israelis’ private lives, forcing citizens to be identified with their religious community. Civil marriage, for example, is not possible inside Israel, and anyone marrying across the religious divide must marry abroad, typically in Cyprus, and then register the marriage upon their return.

Civil rights groups such as “I am an Israeli”, as well as the Palestinian minority’s political parties, have been trying to challenge the citizenship laws, arguing that they are the key to Israel’s system of structural discrimination.

Adalah has established an online database showing that Israel has more than 55 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens. This number has grown rapidly in recent years, said Jabareen, as the Israeli right-wing has been forced to legislate many established but uncodified discriminatory practices that were under threat of being ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

In one recent example, Netanyahu’s government passed the Admissions Committee Law in 2011, to prevent the Supreme Court ruling against vetting committees that have long denied Palestinian citizens access to hundreds of communities controlling most of the land in Israel. The government acted after a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Adel Qaadan, spent two decades in a legal battle to be allowed into one such community, Katzir. Qaadan was among the petitioners who lost this month’s case to be recognised as an Israeli national.

Growing divide

The court ruling highlighted the growing divide between the ruling right-wing coalition on one side, and civil rights groups and the Palestinian leadership in Israel on the other.

Since the mid-1990s, the Palestinian political parties have increasingly challenged Israel’s claim to be a “Jewish and democratic state”. Instead, they have demanded that Israel be reformed into what they call a “state of all its citizens”, or a liberal democracy.

Leading Israeli politicians, including a recent prime minister, Ehud Olmert, have admitted that discrimination against Palestinians exists. However, they have suggested that it is informal and similar to the discrimination faced by minorities in many democratic western countries.

Civil rights groups, on the other hand, claim that the discrimination is structural to Israel’s definition as a Jewish state. One member of parliament, Ahmed Tibi, has pointedly commented: “This country is Jewish and democratic: Democratic towards Jews, and Jewish toward Arabs.”

A survey published this month by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 49 percent of Israel Jews supported giving more rights to Jewish citizens than to Palestinian citizens. The same survey found that barely more than one-quarter of Palestinian citizens felt a sense of belonging to Israel.

Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet, has officially defined the campaign for a state of all its citizens as “subversion”. It has also said it will “thwart the activity of any group or individual seeking to harm the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel, even if such activity is sanctioned by the law”.

The main proponent of this campaign, Azmi Bishara, who led the Balad party, was accused of treason by the Shin Bet a short time later and forced into exile.

‘No citizenship without loyalty’

In recent years, the Israeli right-wing has grown increasingly concerned about challenges to the state’s Jewishness. The Yisrael Beiteinu party – led by Avigdor Lieberman, a former foreign affairs minister and a political ally of Netanyahu – has lobbied for loyalty laws to restrict the Palestinian minority’s political activities. In the past two general elections, Lieberman has campaigned under the slogan, “No citizenship without loyalty”.

Over the summer it was announced that members of Netanyahu’s coalition government were drafting a basic law that would formally define Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people”.

According to reports in the Israeli media, the bill would allow only Jews the right to national self-determination, Hebrew would be the only recognised language, and Jewish religious law would be used as guidance in Israeli courts. Haaretz has argued that the bill would institute “apartheid” in Israel and turn the state into what it called a “Jewish and racist state”.

At the same time, Netanyahu’s government has also established a “Jewish Identity Administration” to work in Jewish schools. It is headed by Avichai Rontzki, a former chief rabbi of the Israel Defence Forces who at the time was accused of bringing more extremist religious views into the military.

The administration’s stated aim is to “restore the State of Israel’s Jewish soul” by teaching pupils to “love the Jewish homeland”. According to leaks to the Israeli media, Berman Shifman, a consultant who advised the goverment on the new unit, warned that the key idea behind the administration was “taken from fascism, not from the field of education”.

Response to Moshe Machover on the question of Jewish citizenship and nationality

TG:  In Britain and most European countries, citizenship and nationality are one and the same, certainly in terms of their practical effects. They might not recognise what is termed ‘national identity’ but that is the price of the nation state. In Britain, there is a debate over whether people are British nationals or English/ Welsh, Scottish. In any event it is immaterial, because no practical consequences flow from this.

MM:  This is patently untrue. In several important respects the UK is a multi-national state. Wales has its own national assembly; Scotland has not only its own national assembly with considerable powers, but also its own legal and educational system. And let us not get into a discussion of Northern Ireland...

TG:  In terms of rights and responsibilities there are no differences.  Immigration and rights of residence, social security benefits, defence are all decided on a UK wide basis.  Likewise there are no borders between the different countries and of course they have the same currency, head of state etc. 

There are however different constitutional mechanisms, designed mostly to compensate for the remoteness of Scotland and Wales from London.  But the Assemblies, created by Devolution has very limited revenue raising powers and in Wales they are non-existent.

Moshe says that Scotland (not Wales!) has its own legal system.  Only up to a point.  The laws they implement are usually one and the same and Westminster law trumps Scottish law.  More importantly the Scottish Court of Session (our Court of Appeal) is not the highest judicial body.  That is the British, mainly English, Supreme Court (which used to be the House of Lords).  The Privy Council Judicial Committee whilst not binding is 'persuasive'.

The term British Citizen in the passport is therefore irrelevant (in fact it used to be Citizen of the UK and colonies, with the implication that you were a UK national).

Of course the definition of the Basques and other national minorities as belonging to the majority nation, for example Spanish or French, is a form of national oppression because it only recognises their individual rights and where there is a conflict, as with the Kurds in Turkey, then there isn’t even an equality of individual rights.

MM:  This is exactly my point. The official French position that the French "nation" is co-extensive with French citizenry is a deliberate confusion, designed to legitimize oppression of national minorities.

TG:  I'm not sure that the conflation of 'nation' and 'citizenship' by France, which Napoleon implemented in every country he conquered, was deliberately designed to legitimise national oppression.  Rather it was important in the breakdown of feudal relations, the caste and city states.  It was certainly welcomed by the Jews but those who were colonised, as in Algeria and Corsica, were of a different opinion.

TG:  But in western Europe the conflation of citizenship and nationality is important, not least because it recognises that regardless of colour, race, ethnicity etc. one has the same rights as the next person.

MM:  Yes; this is its positive side: recognition of equal individual rights. Its negative side is denial of collective rights of national minorities.

TG:  In Israel it does matter, because citizenship accords only the right to reside, work and vote. It does not presume equality. Jewish Nationality in Israel means to be a member of a superior race of people, one with all the privileges, whereas citizenship is the most basic minimum. We can see that in Palestine Papers re the ‘peace talks’. One of Tsipi Livni’s primary demands was an exchange of land so that a future Palestinian statelet could include Israeli Arabs/Palestinians. In other words Israeli citizenship means that your presence if tolerated, not welcomed and certainly doesn’t imply equality.

MM:   We agree on this. In Israel there is oppression of both kinds: there is no equality of individual rights of all citizens; and there is also denial of collective rights of the national minority.

TG:  The French concept of citizenship and nationality being coterminous did indeed mean that Jews were not a national minority and/or an alien presence. To paraphrase Clermont Tenerre in the 1789 Constituent Assembly, ‘to the Jews as a nation nothing, to the Jews as individuals everything.’ This was welcomed by Jews everywhere, not just France (with the exception of the Orthodox and later the Zionists).

MM:  Actually the Orthodox (especially in Western Europe) also had no objection – so long as the right of Jews to practise their religion was secure.
 
MM:  No, Tony. It is not an Israeli deception. The Israeli passport uses the generally accepted terminology used in most other passports, inherited from French (that used to be the language of international diplomacy). It is this terminology that is misleading, but Israel is not responsible for it. In this terminology, "nationality" means citizenship – as its clear from its use in other passports. The Israeli passport simply follows this general international practice: it uses 2 languages, Hebrew and English. On the left-hand side under the rubric "nationality" it says: "Israeli". On the right-hand side is the Hebrew translation. "Nationality" is translated as ezrahut, which is the Hebrew word for citizenship. There is no dishonesty in this translation, because the rubric "nationality" in a passport (Israeli, British, French or whatever) actually does mean citizenship and nothing else. 

TG:  Moshe I disagree.  For most states nationality and citizenship are one and the same, they are not based on religion or ethnicity, so the answer to the heading 'nationality' is the same as it would be to 'citizen'.  But in Israel this is not the case.  Citizenship accords very few rights.  Nationality, i.e. Jewish nationality grants all sorts of rights and privileges and this is based on Israel being a state of the mythical 'Jewish  people' rather than its own citizens.  So it is clearly fraudulent to put 'Israeli' on a passport or any other document when the Supreme Court has consistently ruled there is no such thing.


Thus when Moshe says that the use of the term ‘Israeli’ under nationality implies that there is such a thing as Israeli nationality ‘in the sense of citizenship’ I disagree. It does no such thing other than to try and pull the wool over peoples’ eyes abroad as to the real situation. 
MM:  Israel officially recognizes Israeli citizenship, which in its passports (as in passports of other states) comes under the heading "nationality". Israel does not recognize an Israeli "le'om" or "leumiout", which means nationality in the other sense (as in Kurdish or Basque nationality).

MM:  Nonsense. I do not claim that there exists an Israeli nation. I actually deny it. Citizenship is a formally and officially defined status. Israeli citizenship clearly exists. To translate it as "Israeli nationality" is indeed a confusion. But Israel is not responsible of this particualr confusion. This is what most passports do.
TG:  Moshe says that the Hebrew word "le'om" in the Israeli ID card does mean Jewish nationality, but of course it is a false nationality from which non-Jews are, of course, excluded. The very definition of nationality as being based on religion not residence or citizenship, is itself a reactionary throwback to medieval Europe.  This is not a matter of semantics as very real human rights, such as the right to lease or buy ‘national’ land is dependent upon it. What is certain is that you cannot have Israeli nationality when you fly to Europe and then lose it in mid-air on the way back! Matter changes into energy when in motion but citizenship doesn’t change into nationality!MM:  You are right. The Israeli official classification under "le'om" is nonsensical, discriminatory and confused. It is in any case a scandal that a person's religion, ethnicity etc rather than citizenship is stated in their ID document.

TG:   Of course the Israeli Supreme Court was right to deny there was such a thing as Israeli nationality because this would conflict with the basis of Israel as a Jewish state, not of its own citizens but Jews everywhere.

Correct.



TG:  The question of Jewish Identity is not therefore just a racist question for Israel. It also affects Jewish people world-wide, not least in the United States, where most Jews would be considered non-Jews by Orthodox Jewry. It is clear that in the West today, in the absence of anti-Semitism and lacking any social or economic basis, the number of secular Jews is rapidly shrinking. Only Israel provides the racist glue to unite and define Jews. 

Moshe and myself had a further discussion on this which is below, in which I refer to a debate on Jewdas.

Moshé Machover wrote:

Tony,

Well is Israel following the international convention, or is it taking advantage of the confusion that results from the way the system works internationally?

Is there a difference? And if there is, how can you tell? Who is supposed to be confused by an Israeli passport? It is not a document that the general public looks at. It is looked at by border officials and similar functionaries. They know exactly what the rubrics mean. If they are "confused" by an Israeli passport, it is only because it is back to front...

Let us stick to the facts. The normal international convention is that the rubric "Nationality" in a passport refers to the bearer's citizenship, not to nationality in any other sense. The UK abides by this convention and so do lots of other countries, including multi-national ones. So does Israel. To make this even more obvious: in an Israeli passport the rubric "Nationality" is correctly translated into Hebrew as "ezrahut". So if we have any reason to complain, it is not about the rubrics in an Israeli passport.

This  rubric is based, as you say, on nationality and citizenship being one and the same. 

No; "nationality" and "citizenship" are not in general one and the same. The former is ambiguous, depending on context.; the latter is not ambiguous. 

However, in the context of a passport, the convention is that the rubric "Nationality" is to be understood as referring to citizenship. It does not follow that they are one and the same in other contexts.

But in Israel it isn't the same.  

It is the same in the context of an Israeli passport – as in the context of other passports. On the other hand, in other contexts it is not the same in many countries, including Britain.

Citizenship means very little if you are not a Jewish national and therein lies the deception.

This "deception" has nothing to do with passports. When an Israeli passport of an Arab citizen states that s/he is Israeli by "Nationality" (ezrahut in Hebrew) it is not deceiving anyone. Who is supposed to be deceived? Border officials know very well that what a passport states under the rubric "Nationality" is the bearer's citizenship. 

However, when Israel claims that it does not discriminate against its Arab citizens, it is deceiving the world.

ATB, Moshé

 Hi Moshe

You ask who is deceived?  Well when I appeared on the BBC  Big Questions programme, an Israeli who was also present disagreed when I said there was no such thing as an Israeli nationality.  'Look' she said, taking out her passport, it says 'Israeli' under nationality.  And therein lies the rub.

Israelis abroad who are Zionists can and do use this entry in their passports to deny the accusation that there is no such thing as an Israeli nationality.  If you look at the Jewdas site, this debate was had there 'Debating Anti-Semitism on the BBC'  http://www.jewdas.org/2009/11/anti-semitism-in-the-service-of-war-crimes/ where indeed Israelis lied about there being a nationality based on the entry in their passport, so I really disagree with you that it is a confusion caused by the French or whoever.

Israel seeks to deny to some that it is a state not based on equality of citizens and it uses the passport entry to confirm this.

Poll Shows Major Shift in Identity of U.S. Jews’

In October 1st 2013 an article by Laurie Goodstein appeared in the New York Times based on a survey by the Pew Research Institute. The article stated that:

The first major survey of American Jews in more than 10 years finds a significant rise in those who are not religious, marry outside the faith and are not raising their children Jewish — resulting in rapid assimilation that is sweeping through every branch of Judaism except the Orthodox.

The intermarriage rate, a bellwether statistic, has reached a high of 58 percent for all Jews, and 71 percent for non-Orthodox Jews — a huge change from before 1970 when only 17 percent of Jews married outside the faith. Two-thirds of Jews do not belong to a synagogue, one-fourth do not believe in God and one-third had a Christmas tree in their home last year.

"It’s a very grim portrait of the health of the American Jewish population in terms of their Jewish identification," said Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, in New York.

The survey, by the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, found that despite the declines in religious identity and participation, American Jews say they are proud to be Jewish and have a "strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people."

While 69 percent say they feel an emotional attachment to Israel, and 40 percent believe that the land that is now Israel was "given to the Jewish people by God," only 17 percent think that the continued building of settlements in the West Bank is helpful to Israel’s security.

Jews make up 2.2 percent of the American population, a percentage that has held steady for the past two decades. The survey estimates there are 5.3 million Jewish adults as well as 1.3 million children being raised at least partly Jewish.

The survey uses a wide definition of who is a Jew, a much-debated topic. The researchers included the 22 percent of Jews who describe themselves as having "no religion," but who identify as Jewish because they have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish, and feel Jewish by culture or ethnicity.

However, the percentage of "Jews of no religion" has grown with each successive generation, peaking with the millennials (those born after 1980), of whom 32 percent say they have no religion.

"It’s very stark," Alan Cooperman, deputy director of the Pew religion project, said in an interview. "Older Jews are Jews by religion. Younger Jews are Jews of no religion."
The trend toward secularism is also happening in the American population in general, with increasing proportions of each generation claiming no religious affiliation.

But Jews without religion tend not to raise their children Jewish, so this secular trend has serious consequences for what Jewish leaders call "Jewish continuity." Of the "Jews of no religion" who have children at home, two-thirds are not raising their children Jewish in any way. This is in contrast to the "Jews with religion," of whom 93 percent said they are raising their children to have a Jewish identity.

Reform Judaism remains the largest American Jewish movement, at 35 percent. Conservative Jews are 18 percent, Orthodox 10 percent, and groups such as Reconstructionist and Jewish Renewal make up 6 percent combined. Thirty percent of Jews do not identify with any denomination.

In a surprising finding, 34 percent said you could still be Jewish if you believe that Jesus was the Messiah.

When Jews leave the movements they grew up in, they tend to shift in the direction of less tradition, with Orthodox Jews becoming Conservative or Reform, and Conservative Jews becoming Reform. Most Reform Jews who leave become nonreligious. (Two percent of Jews are converts, the survey found.)

Jews from the former Soviet Union and their offspring make up about 10 percent of the American Jewish population.

While earlier generations of Orthodox Jews defected in large numbers, those in the younger generation are being retained. Several scholars attributed this to the Orthodox marrying young, having large families and sending their children to Jewish schools.

Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist of American Jewry at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in New York, and a paid consultant on the poll, said the report foretold "a sharply declining non-Orthodox population in the second half of the 21st century, and a rising fraction of Jews who are Orthodox."

The survey also portends "growing polarisation" between religious and nonreligious Jews, said Laurence Kotler-Berkowitz, senior director of research and analysis at the Jewish Federations of North America.

The Jewish Federations has conducted major surveys of American Jews over many decades, but the last one in 2000 was mired in controversy over methodology. When the federations decided not to undertake another survey in 2010, Jane Eisner, editor in chief of The Jewish Daily Forward, urged the Pew researchers to jump in.


It was a multimillion-dollar effort to cull 3,475 respondents from a pool of 70,000. They were interviewed in English and Russian, on landlines and cellphones from Feb. 20 to June 13, 2013. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus three percentage points.

Ms. Eisner found the results "devastating" because, she said in an interview, "I thought there would be more American Jews who cared about religion."

"This should serve as a wake-up call for all of us as Jews," she said, "to think about what kind of community we’re going to be able to sustain if we have so much assimilation."
The conclusion that can be drawn from such a poll is unmistakable. At the core of Jewish identity is belief in the Jewish religion, yet increasing numbers are atheists or of no religion. Although two-thirds identify with Israel, as assimilation reduces the number of Jews this attachment can only reduce numerically. Should we mourn what is the disappearance of Jewish people in the West? No, it’s only those who have a romantic attachment to the idea that the traditional forms of Jewish identity can be resurrected who will mourn such a loss. Indeed, in so far as the majority Jewish identity is based around support for Israel then the assimilation of the world’s largest Jewish community is to be welcomed.

That is partly why I was surprised, to say the least, that Ilan Pappe can be counted among the latter. In article Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism for Electronic Intifada of 18^th October 2013 http://electronicintifada.net/content/reclaiming-judaism-zionism/12859#comment-16729

Ilan indulges in a shmaltzy nostalgia for a period which is not going to return. He notes, correctly that when it first appeared, most Jewish rabbis and the Orthodox rejected it as substituting worship of a state for a god. But times change. Jewish Orthodoxy has benefited from Zionism, not least in the vast subsidies it has received.

Ilan is also right that most secular liberal, socialist or communist Jews rejected Zionism, believing that anti-Semitism could fought where it was found. In that respect Zionism was unique in that it accepted anti-Semitism as the natural reaction to Jews in their midst. In his Diaries (p.6 Ed. Ralph Patai), Herzl wrote that ‘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.’ Likewise Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President and the long-standing President of the Zionist Organisation wrote in his autobiography Trial & Error (pp. 90-91) of the leader of the anti-Semitic British Brothers League that ‘Sir William Evans Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudice. He acted as he thought, according to his best lights and in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country.


We are even told that he was "horrified" by events in Russia, indeed more than that:

'He was sorry but he was helpless. Also, 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.'

Normally meticulous as to his facts, Pappe’s sojourn into wishful thinking has also led to errors such as claiming that the description of the socialist Bund as Zionists who were afraid of sea-sickness was Trotsky’s comment. In fact it came from Plekhanov, a Menshevik who drifted so far to the right as to support Russian participation in World War I.

Pappe points to the contradiction inherent in secular, atheistic Zionists resting their claims to Palestine on a god whose existence they denied. But that is the whole point. By making such a claim they threw in their lot with reactionary Orthodox Judaism and turned their backs on socialism.

Pappe again goes astray when he asserts that the rejection of the Uganda plan was because of Christian opposition. In fact Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary who made such an offer, was himself a Christian Zionist. The primary opposition came from within the Zionist movement and in particular the Russian Zionists under Menachem Ussishkin.

Herzl in any event had originally preferred Argentina (Der Judenstaat). Pappe is right that the anti-Semitic Christian Zionists wanted to be rid of the Jews in Europe and have them return to Palestine in order to hasten the second coming of the Messiah – and if they refused to convert to Christianity they would perish in the flames of Armageddon.

It is true that Orthodox Jewry opposed end "Exile" in the Diaspora, holding that a ‘return’ of the Jews could not be hastened by the Zionist movement.

Pappe argues that it was ‘One of the greatest successes of the secular Zionist movement was creating a religious Zionist component that found rabbis willing to legitimise this act of tampering’. That may be true but it is simply evidence that religions change as circumstances change.

Pappe argues that ‘in the 1990s the two movements - the one that does not believe in God and the one that impatiently decides to do His work - have fused into a lethal mixture of religious fanaticism with extreme nationalism.’ I would suggest that such a mixture had long been formed when Ben-Gurion decided to form a coalition government in 1949, not with the ‘ left’ Zionist Mapam but the National Religious Party.

Pappe clings to the Ultra-Orthodox Jews such as Neturei Karta – who ‘even profess allegiance to the Palestine Liberation Organization, while the vast majority of the Ultra-Orthodox express their anti-Zionism without necessarily offering support for Palestinian rights.’ This is heavy with wishful thinking. Neturei Karta, the far-right of the Palestine solidarity movement, are an exception. Although ultra Orthodox Jewry formally states it is not Zionist, in practice they constitute the most rabidly racist section of Israeli society. When Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira wrote and had published ‘Torat HaMelech’ which was a guide to the killing of non-Jews, he was supported by hundreds of rabbis when the State of Israel was forced to take token action against him. See 'Even Non-Jewish Children Must be Killed - Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/even-non-jewish-children-must-be-killed.html Rabbi Schochet of the Racist Lubavitch - Big Questions Panellist and Guardian Columnist http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/rabbi-schochet-of-racist-lubavitch-big.html and 'Even Non-Jewish Children Must be Killed - Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/even-non-jewish-children-must-be-killed.html

It is true that this ‘religious-nationalist mixture that now informs the Jewish society in Israel has also caused a large and significant number of young American Jews, and Jews elsewhere in the world, to distance themselves from Israel.’ but what form has this taken? As the article from the New York Times shows, it leads primarily to abandoning being Jewish altogether with a minority of secular Jews rejecting Zionism on the basis of its racism. But this can and will only be a minority as there is no alternative social or economic basis for the existence other than Zionism itself, which is inadequate. As Pappe rightly says ‘This trend has become so significant that it seems that Israeli policy today relies more on Christian Zionists than on loyal Jews.’

Where Pappe indulges in wishful thinking it is when says that ‘It is possible, and indeed necessary, to reaffirm the pluralist non-Zionist ways of professing one's relationship with Judaism; in fact this is the only road open to us if we wish to seek an equitable and just solution in Palestine.’

The problem is that there is no way today, except for a tiny minority, for Jews to adopt an alternative, non-Zionist version of Judaism. Jewish Orthodoxy has long been captured for Zionism. Pappe writes that for Jews today it is; imperative to reconnect to the Jewish heritage before it was corrupted and distorted by Zionism.’ Again this is redolent of a heavy dose of wishful thinking. You can’t reverse the tide of history. It maybe an example of ‘nationalist criminality’ but it’s not something that can be reversed as there is no basis for example for the existence of the Bund. They and their supporters died in the Nazi genocide and only a remnant escaped, not least to Israel. A fascinating, yet very sad story of these remnants who lived primarily in Tel Aviv is Bundayim by Eran Torbiner, a supporter of Boycott from Within. These remnants made no concessions to Zionism but it was clear that they had had no impact or relevance on the settler colonial society surrounding them.

Ilan suggests that ‘We need to reclaim Judaism and extract it from the hands of the "Jewish State" as a first step towards building a joint place for those who lived and want to live there in the future.’ Not only is this impossible but I would ask why should one want to reclaim a dying religion? It certainly won’t affect the existence of Israel as a racist settler state, precisely because Israel’s racist is not based on but justified by an interpretation of the Pentateuch. Even if all Orthodox Jews became liberals overnight, Israel would still continue down the path to Armageddon. Ilan, like many others, needs to recognise that you cannot recreate the Jewish working class of Eastern Europe. Jews today have moved on and upwards socially and politically to the Right. No amount of self-delusions will change this simple fact.

Tony Greenstein