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

Please Register Here

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.

Israel Claims it Inherits the Memory of the Jews Who Died in the Holocaust – The Reality is that it Inherits the Memory of Those Who Killed Them

Interview with Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News about my book Zionism During the Holocaust

Rania Khalek Interviews Tony Greenstein

Zionism Before, During and After the Nazis: A History of Collusion, w/ Tony Greenstein

I’ve been interviewed twice by Rania Khalek this year. The first time, in early April, took place partly in Hungary and then in the UK. It was based on an article I wrote for Electronic Intifada about how the lazy explanation for the genocide in Gaza is the myth of ‘holocaust trauma’.

I explained that Israelis were suffering, not from holocaust trauma, but settler colonial trauma. Their reaction was typical of the slaveholders in the Caribbean who, faced with uprisings by their Black slaves, reacted with unbridled violence. It was the reaction of those who have their foot on the neck of the slave or subjugated and then react violently to any rebellion. It is always the nightmare of the oppressor that their victims will rise up and take revenge.

That was what October 7 was about. That was why almost immediately after October 7 Israel began fashioning a narrative about the terrible cruelties and atrocities of the Palestinian resistance attack.

First we had the stories of the 40 beheaded babies, the baked baby and even the baby hung up to dry on a clothing line.

The problem was that none of this was true. Only 2 of the 1139 Israelis who died that day were babies. The 2 babies who did die were killed accidentally. Compare this with Israel’s slaughter of 20,000+ Palestinian children.

Then we had the ‘rape narrative’ which the New York Times did so much to give legs to with its now discredited article Screams Without Words by an Israeli reporter Anat Schwartz, a supporter of Israel’s genocide, and two others. It has since been comprehensively discredited by The Intercept and other publications.

This fabricated narrative was the justification for the genocide that followed in Gaza.

My second interview a month ago, was about my book Zionism During the Holocaust.

How Israel Weaponizes the Holocaust to Justify Killing Palestinians

The interview about my book was a very wide-ranging interview, much like my interview a year ago by Asa Winstanley and Nora Barrows Friedman, which has attracted over 300,000 views.

We started out with an overview of pre-holocaust anti-Semitism and I made the point that in the feudal era anti-Semitism was a popular movement from below against the role that Jews played, the agents of money in an economy based on use values. It was the indebted peasants who reacted at times violently to the Jews.

But in the modern era, from around the last third of the 19^th century anti-Semitism took on a different character from Christian anti-Semitism. It was no longer based on religion, i.e. the economic role that Jews played in society but on race.

For Martin Luther once a Jew had converted to Christianity that was the end of the matter. Their soul was saved. For Hitler it was of no account if a Jew had been baptised. Once a Jew always a Jew. It was Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the League of Anti-Semites, who, in 1879 coined the term ‘anti-Semitism’. It was based on the false premise that Jews were Semites, that is they didn’t belong in Europe but were really from the Middle East. Semite was a linguistic not a racial term.

Count von Plehve - instigated pogroms in Czarist Russia including at Kishinev in 1903 - but as an anti-Semite he also supported the Zionist movement 

From this point onwards, anti-Semitism was a movement from the top not the bottom. It was the ruling class who used anti-Semitism as a weapon to divide the working class and oppressed. After the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 the Czarist regime under Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve consciously sought to promote pogroms and anti-Semitism as a means of dividing the enemy. That was why the Bolsheviks held that anyone who was an anti-Semite was a supporter of the Czar.

For Hitler it was ‘Marx the Jew’. Jews were the biological parents of Bolshevism/socialism. Zionism was a reaction to the support of Jews for the revolutionary and socialist groups. Zionism was a consciously counter-revolutionary current. It accepted the characterisation of Jews as foreign interlopers who didn’t belong and they sought instead the creation of a Jewish state mirroring that of the anti-Semitic countries. In this they have succeeded. Israel is, as I once said, Hitler’s Bastard Offspring.

The Zionists often outdid the anti-Semites in their description of the diaspora Jew who they hated. They accepted the caricatures and stereotypes of the anti-Semites. Being separated from what they saw as their ancient land the Jews had developed asocial tendencies. Zionism, especially in Germany, was of the Blood and Soil type, mirroring as they did German nationalism. With ‘national’ soil under them the Jews would be like all others, only more so.

In the words of the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Jews were ‘a very nasty people and its neighbours hate it and they are right.’  If one didn’t know that the speaker was a Zionist one would assume that they were a typical non-Jewish anti-Semite. As Joachim Doron, an Israeli political scientist wrote in an article, Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-Semitism – Parallels and Influences:

rather than take up arms against the enemies of the Jews, Zionism attacked the ‘enemy within’, the Diaspora Jew himself and subjected him to a hail of criticism…. Indeed 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. (my emphasis)

Zionism was seen by the ruling class as, in the words of Count Vyacheslav von Plehve, as an ‘antidote to socialism’. It was a reactionary nationalist diversion. Churchill in 1920 wrote a famous article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald Zionism vs Bolshevism. Support for Zionism was seen as a way of weaning Jews off their revolutionary habits.

Zionism always had one and only one objective. The creation of a Jewish State and it didn’t mind how it got there. Although whilst they were weak they didn’t openly call for such a state, relying on euphemisms such as a ‘Jewish Homeland’, the Zionists had one and only one objective in mind.

It is crucial that people understand, because of the myths that abound about Zionism. There was never any difference between the ‘left-wing’ and the ‘right-wing’ of Zionism. Both wings agreed on the need for a Jewish state.

In May 1948 Ben Gurion instructed the Israeli Army to fire on the Revisionist arms boat, the Altalena - here burning off the Tel Aviv shoreline

Their only differences and sometimes these were quite violent, were about tactics and on occasion blood was spilt as with the shelling of the Revisionist boat Altalena.

Although the holocaust is an essential part of the Zionist narrative today, when the holocaust was actually happening the Zionists did not want to know. It was a distraction from their project of state building. Even worse it threatened to disrupt their funding because Jews were more likely to give money to saving refugees and keeping them alive than a nationalist project in the Middle East.

The Zionists worked hard to tie the refugee problem to Zionism. If refugees were to be saved anywhere it had to be in Palestine. All other places were to be opposed because if you could save Jews elsewhere what was the point in having a Jewish State? They disparagingly talked of ‘refugeeism’.

This was the ‘logic’ behind the obstruction of any and all attempts to rescue Jews if the destination was not Palestine. It was summed up by David Ben-Gurion, the Chairman of the Zionist Organisation and first Prime Minister of Israel. When Britain offered to accept 10,000 Jewish children in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in November 1938, Ben-Gurion was outraged. In a speech to the Central Council of Mapai (Israeli Labor Party) in December 1938, he said:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.

Zionism was in essence a racial preservation project. The Zionist idea was based on race, not religion. Most of the early Zionists were atheists but they rested their claim to Palestine on the promise of a god they denied.

My book details how the Zionists wilfully obstructed the efforts of others to save Jews by always shouting ‘what about Palestine’ whenever alternative destinations were proposed. Saving Jews from the gas chambers always came second to building their state.

To the end, they opposed the setting up of Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board in January 1944, which was instrumental in saving some 200,000 Jews. In Hungary their deals with the Nazis amounted to the saving of 1684 Jews of the Zionist and Jewish elite in exchange for keeping quiet about and even misinforming the 437,000 Jews who were deported about where they were heading – Auschwitz.

All of this came out in Israel’s Kasztner trial when the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war, Israel Kasztner, brought a libel trial against a Hungarian Jew who had called him a collaborator. He lost and was then assassinated by the Israeli secret service Shin Bet. Although acquitted on appeal the facts found by the lower court were not challenged and one charge of collaboration was upheld.

When the Nazis first came to power in January 1933 most Jews were horrified and they began boycotting Nazi German goods. It was a spontaneous Boycott that grew up which nearly all Jews, except the Zionists and the bourgeois Jews, supported. The Zionist leaders welcomed Hitler to power sensing that in the carnage that followed and the inevitable exodus of Jews from Germany and elsewhere in Europe, they could only prosper.

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian wrote that

‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’ 

In August 1933 they negotiated a trade agreement, Ha'avara, with the Nazis. For mentioning this Ken Livingstone was forced out of the Labour Party.

Hayim Nahman Bialik, the Zionist national poet, welcomed Hitler to power

Some Zionists openly welcomed the advent of Hitler. Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote that:

Hitlerism has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation

Emil Ludwig was another Zionist who welcomed Hitler to power

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

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

The more important point though is that the Zionists seriously believed that because they had no ideological differences with the Nazis, because they too accepted that German Jews did not belong in Germany, that they could do business with them. They even believed that the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, which established that German Jews were aliens and a separate race from Germans, established a basis for living side by side until the Jews could emigrate. In this they were to be proved wrong.

On June 21 1933 the Zionist Federation of Germany [ZVfD] wrote in to Hitler saying that

On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible…. Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.

What the ZVfD wrote was true. The Zionists also believed in race and nation, hence their desire to co-operate. Today they hold exactly the same beliefs and they are determined to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians because they are not of the same race, the Jewish race.

I recommend that you listen to the interview with Rania.

Tony Greenstein

I have recently taken stock of 300 paperbacks which are going fast.  They are selling for £12 inc. p&p in the UK, which is a third less than Amazon.  Unfortunately I have to charge for postage outside Britain (£15 tracked to Europe and nearly double that to the USA).

You will also get a signed copy!!

If you want to order one and avoid Amazon please email me at 

tonygreenstein104@gmail.com