To the Israeli Government the remaining holocaust survivors, whose
reparations they stole, are just a burden – its far better to spend the money
on weapons to kill Palestinians with
Listen to the
recording of the South Africa PSC and Brighton Book Launches for Zionism During the Holocaust
PSC South Africa Book Launch
I was privileged to be invited to speak
to a meeting of PSC South Africa on 16 March 2023. The meeting was held to
launch my book 'Zionism During the
Holocaust - the Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State & Nation'
in South Africa.
My book tells the story of how the
Zionist movement not only was indifferent to the rescue of Jews from the
claws of Hitler's murderers but they actually OPPOSED the rescue of Jews from Europe if their destination was not
Palestine.
Indeed the German Zionist Federation and the emissary of the Palestinian
Jewish Agency, Feivel Polkes, even went to the lengths of pressurising the Gestapo
not to allow emigrants from Germany to
go anywhere but Palestine.
Brighton Book Launch
I have a section in my book (pp. 300-1)
‘The Zionists Lobby the Nazis to Only
Allow Emigration to Palestine’ in which I describe how Polkes, a Haganahintelligence agent, came to Berlinfor talks with the SD, the SS Security
Service, (Sicherheitsdienst ) and the
Gestapobetween 26 February and 2 March 1937. Polkesoffered to become an informant for the
Gestapo, sharing Haganah intelligence information, in return for which the
Gestapowould pressure the German Jewish communal organisation,
the RVt(Reich Representation of German Jews), the umbrella organisation of German Jewry,
to require emigrating Jews to settle exclusively in Palestine.
The Daily Mail - consistently racist and bigoted
I sourced this from
Professor Francis Nicosia’s article Zionism
in National Socialist Jewish Policy, and his books Zionism & Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and The Third Reich and the Palestine Question.
This information was obtained from German files captured after the war. The Haganah
file on Polkes is closed to researchers because it is too embarrassing.
According to the cruel logic of
Zionism, what was the point of building a Jewish state in Palestine if Jews
could find sanctuary in other countries? According to the Zionist 'logic' it
was the Jews themselves who were responsible for anti-Semitism, because they
were strangers who had outstayed their welcome in other peoples' countries.
In his pamphlet The Jewish State, Herzl wrote that Jews:
…naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted and there
our presence produces persecution…. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying
Anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.
Rescuing Jews in other countries would
simply reproduce the antisemitism that had driven them there. My book tells the
story of Zionist relations with the Nazis, their agreements and collaboration.
It is not a pretty story.
Israel’s Treatment of its Holocaust Survivors
Even today although the Zionists and the Israeli state exploit the Holocaust for propaganda purposes, they are totally unconcerned about the remaining holocaust survivors themselves. Over one-third of Israeli holocaust survivors live in poverty, forced to choose between eating and heating.
Israel spends the second highest amount
per capita in the world on arms with which to kill Palestinians and hundreds of
millions of dollars on settlements built on stolen Palestinian land yet it
cannot afford to give the remaining holocaust survivors a decent standard of
living. Even worse the Israeli state and the Israeli banks STOLE the
reparations that Germany paid in compensation to the survivors.
The Jewish Claims Conference [JCC] was
set up in 1951 as the legal successor to Jews who had a claim against Germany
and Austria. The JCC was generous, at least with itself. In 2004 the salary and
pensions contributions it was paying to its Executive Vice-President Gideon
Taylor,
was $437,811 (£240,000).
Mass Jewish Demonstration In Support of the Boycott
The JCC has been embroiled
in controversies over fraud. Former President Rabbi Israel Singerwas forced to resign in 2007 amid allegations
that he had used his position to embezzle funds. In May 2013 31 people were
convicted of fraud worth more than $57 million. A whistleblower who was
victimised alleged that this was the tip of the iceberg.
However Zionism, which turned a blind
eye to the Holocaust whilst it was happening has never hesitated to wield it as
a weapon against the Palestinians.
In the early 1950s Israelclaimed reparations from Germanyon behalf of the holocaust survivors.
Despite being claimed on the basis of individual need Israel’s first Prime
Minister, David Ben-Gurionwas determined that ‘the major portion of the compensation will be claimed by the Jewish
people as a collective body [i.e. the Israeli state]
not as individuals.’ In 2007 it was
accepted by Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik that Israel should apologise for having
stolen these funds from the Holocaust survivors.
Adolf Eichmann
If Switzerlandwas reluctant to part with the assets of
murdered Jews then the same was true of Israeli banks, which hoped that the survivors
might die first. It was only under pressure that Bank Leumiagreed to pay NIS 20m to the survivors. In
2004, a parliamentary inquiry found that Leumi owed NIS 300m ($71.65m) to
Holocaust survivorsand their families.
Israeli
medical committeeshave done their best to reduce the entitlement
of holocaust survivorsto benefits ‘alter(ing) their disability evaluations in a manipulative way.’ This
is how the ‘Jewish’ state treats the holocaust survivorsand yet none of the official Holocaust memorial
bodies, such as the Holocaust Education Trust, says a word
about these scandals. To them the Holocaust is about the Israeli statenot the individuals who died or survived.
The Lessons Zionism Draws From the
Holocaust are Racist not Anti-racist Ones
As Max Kaiser argues in
respect of Australian Jews,
Arguments
for Israel’s defence are often bolstered by the memory of the
Holocaust. That the Holocaust is an inevitable cause of conservatism and
Zionism has become part of a commonsense idea of, and about, Australian Jews.
But in the 1940s and
1950s 'Holocaust memory was key to a popular Jewish antifascist discourse
that was left-wing, non-nationalist and universalistic.' It is the
pernicious and reactionary nature of Zionism that its conclusions from the
Holocaust are racist not anti-racist ones.
The main
organisation of the Jewish antifascist left in Australia was the Jewish
Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism.
Formed in
Melbourne in 1942, the Jewish Council represented, in the words of historian
David Rechter
in institutional
form the broad-based antifascist leftism enjoying considerable vogue both
within the Jewish community and in society at large.
Today as
Australian Jewry has moved to the right, so the conclusions it has drawn from
the holocaust are ones of Jewish Supremacy and Jewish racism. As Gideon
Levy, Israel's most famous and brilliant journalist wrote:
I have yet to hear a single
teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the
way we were abused. There has yet to be a school whose pupils came back from
Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and
said, Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted
because of Auschwitz.
It is no
coincidence that the most vehement opponent of BDS and Palestine solidarity
among German political parties is the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany
7 Jewish Children - A Full Play Ireland-Palestine Festival
On 19 May 2019 the Bundestag
passed a motion declaring that Boycott
Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] was anti-Semitic. You might therefore assume
that Alternative for Germany, a neo-Nazi
party that had 13% of the seats in the Bundestag would have opposed the motion.
After all if BDS is anti-Semitic, and AfD are overrun with
neo-Nazis, then that would seem logical. See Germany designates BDS Israel boycott movement as
anti-Semitic
However the AfD, far from
opposing the motion, wanted it to go further and legally ban BDS. The Greens and Social Democrats also
voted to condemn BDS although it would appear that some members of Die Grunen had a conscience and
abstained.The majority of Die Linke members voted against the
motion but they submitted a separate motion also condemning BDS. According to
the Guardian:
The far-right Alternative für
Deutschland (AfD) brought forward a separate motion calling for a complete ban
of the BDS movement. Jürgen Braun, an AfD MP, claimed his party was the true
friend of Israel in the German parliament, adding that “antisemitism comes from
the left and Islam”. The AfD abstained on the government’s motion.
Germany's racist politicians have no problems with Israeli Apartheid
As is normally the case now, anti-Semites
mask their anti-Semitism with support
for Israel. According to The
Times of Israel 88% of AfD members will celebrate Israel’s 70th
anniversary.
Today most anti-Semites and
neo-Nazis admire Israel for being a model ethno-nationalist state where your
rights and privileges depend on your (Jewish) ethnicity.
Nearly every far-Right party in
Europe supports Zionism and Israel from Matteo
Salvini to Viktor
Orban. Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of
the US’s alt-Right defines himself as a White
Zionist. He loves the Jewish
Nation State Law which defines Israel, not as a state of its own citizens, but
of its Jewish citizens. He only wishes the United States would do the same.
Israel is a state which refuses
to accept non-Jewish refugees because that would threaten its ‘Jewish
racial identity’. Israel is a state which confines its Arab population, some
20%, to 2% of the land. It is a state that demolishes the homes
of its Arab citizens in villages such as Umm al Hiran, to make way
for Jewish towns such as Hiran.
7 Jewish Children
All this and more was perpetrated
against Germany’s Jews from 1933-1939. They too were confined to certain parts
of town, banished from parks and barred from many towns altogether. It is no
surprise that the German state should find in Israel such a congenial friend.
After all Israel is Hitler’s bastard offspring.
To most people anti-Semitism is
hostility or hatred of Jews not hatred of Israel or Israeli Apartheid. Israel
is not a Jew and it is not a Jewish State except in a racial sense. But to the
German State’s Christian Evangelist ‘anti-Semitism’ commissars it is opposition
to Israeli racism which is anti-Semitic.
The Boycott of Slave Grown Sugar in the Caribbean was the first example of the use of the Boycott tactic - the Slavers hated it as much as the Zionists and the Nazis did
The Boycott of racially
oppressive regimes is the weapon of the oppressed. It was first employed in the
sugar islands of the West Indies against slave grown sugar. It was
used in Ireland against
British colonialism, from which the word Boycott comes. In 1933 Jews throughout
the world (with the exception of the Zionists and Jewish bourgeoisie) launched
a Boycott
of Nazi Germany.
a German jury
reversed its decision to award her the Nelly Sachs prize over her support for BDS
movement against Israel.
Using the Zionist logic this was
an act of racism against Germans. In more recent times there was a Boycott
of South Africa, a state which was Israel’s
closest partner. To the Whites there this too was racist. Today,
for exactly the same reason there is a Boycott of Israel.
Poster for the Boycott of Nazi Germany campaign - in Germany today this would be considered racist
It is perfectly understandable
that racists and white supremacists the world over should oppose the Boycott of
Israel as vehemently as they opposed the Boycott of South Africa. Racists have
always opposed BDS. It is therefore no surprise that right-wing German parties,
who trace their lineage back to the Nazis, should also oppose BDS. What is more
surprising is that parties that consider themselves left-wing found themselves
in the same corner as Germany’s neo-Nazis.
How
Jewish voices critical of Israeli policies are censored in Germany
The Nazi
State Also Supported Zionism and Proscribed Anti-Zionist Organisations
In
the first 6 years of the Hitler regime, the Nazis actively discriminated against German Jewry’s non- Zionist organisations
and in favour of Germany’s Zionist
groups.
On
28 January 1935 Reinhard Heydrich,
Himmler’s Deputy in theSS, Chief of the
Police (RSHA) and the ‘real engineer of
the final solution’ (Gerald Reitlinger) issued a directive stating:
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…. (they are)
not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the
members of the so-called German-Jewish organisations (assimilationists). [Lucy
Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews,
p.118].
The result was that the activities of Zionist groups were
supervised with ‘more benevolence’
than comparable activities by non-Zionist Jewish groups. The Gestapoand the SD[Security Service] ‘place(d) no restrictions on Zionist organisations.’ (Herbert
Strauss, Jewish Emigration from Germany)
German ID card implementing Globke's innovation of giving Jews two names - Israel and Sarah
In May 1935 Schwarze Korps,
paper of the SS,
wrote that:
the Zionists adhere to a strict racial
position and by emigrating to Palestinethey are helping to build their own Jewish
state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their
loyalty to Germanyor claim to be Christians because they have
been baptised in order to subvert National Socialist principles. [Randolph
Braham, The Politics of Genocide – The
Holocaust in Hungary, Dawidowicz, War
Against the Jews].
In 1936, the Palestine Postreported that:
A bold demand
that the German Zionist Federation [ZVfD] be given recognition by the Government as the only instrument for the
exclusive control of German Jewish life was made by the Executive of that body
in a proclamation today. All German Jewish organisations, it was declared,
should be dominated by the Zionist spirit. [Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents]
At their annual meeting in
May 1935 the ZVfDdemanded a
reorganisation of the German Jewish community and parity on the Reich Representation of German Jews [RVt], which incorporated all German Jewish organisations.
Publicly no one attributed the Zionist power
bid to the Heydrichdirective and to the then current National
Socialist policy favouring the Zionists but the connection did not pass
unnoticed. [Dawidowicz]
The December 1935 Gestaporeport from Erfurt ‘conveyed that the entire community was battling against the Zionists.’
Despite their patronage by the Gestapo the Zionists were unable to get their
way until much later. Germany’s Zionists acted as a Quisling movement.
Zionismhad always been a German Jewish taboo. Today
when the equation is made between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, one should
bear in mind that when Hitlercame to power,
German Jewryvehemently rejected Zionismas an enemy from within… Anti-Zionism was one
of the few Jewish topics, Reform, Orthodox, cosmopolitan and ghetto Jews could
agree on.’ [Edwin Black, The Transfer
Agreement, p. 168.]
Bans on Jewish political meetings were
issued by the Gestapoon 31 May 1935. Zionist organisations were
exempt. [Francis Nicosia, Zionism in National Socialist Jewish Policy] Non-Zionist
youth organisations were banned from 1936 whereas Zionist youth groups were
legal up till 1939. [Merilyn Moos and Steve Cushion, Anti-Nazi Germans].An exception to the rules
banning the wearing of uniforms was allowed for the Revisionist Zionist
National Youth Herzlia.
[Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany] The SDargued that the severest measures should be
taken against all assimilationist efforts among the Jews and that the strongest
support be given to all Zionist organisations. Only the Zionist movementwas permitted to operate in Austria.
All Austrian Jewish papers were banned except for the Zionistische Rundschau.
The SShad consistently promoted the Zionist movement
in Germanyand Jewish
emigration to Palestine… by the end of 1938, the
Zionist option in National Socialist Jewish policy would continue with even
greater intensity.
An example of the Zionist endorsement of
the Nazis’ anti-Semitism was the editorial in Judische Rundschau,
eight years before it was made compulsory, endorsing the Yellow Star.
So when the German state today bans anti-Zionist groups and activities they are
acting in exactly the way as their Nazi predecessors. It is no coincidence that
the German state today target Jewish anti-Zionists in particular.
Marcel Philipp - Aachen's Racist Mayor WhoWithdrewan Art Prize to Walid Raad over his Support for BDS - You can contact this racist wretch here
German State McCarthyism
Recent targets include playwright Caryl
Churchill. In April Caryl was named the recipient
of the 2022 European Drama award. But early in November the jury retracted
its decision and cancelled this year’s award altogether, saying it had been “made aware of previously unknown
information”.
In its statement
explaining its decision the jury said that they had ‘become aware of the author’s signatures in support of boycott,
divestment and sanctions [BDS].’ They added that “The play Seven Jewish Childrencan
also be regarded as being antisemitic.’
Caryl Churchill
Anyone who has seen Seven Jewish
Children will see almost immediately that it is a brilliant description of the
agonies and dilemmas of Jewish parents over the contrast between what happened
to them in Germany and what is happening to others in Israel. It doesn’t have a
whiff of anti-Semitism about it. This decision owes more to present day German
racism and the State’s failure to deNazify than opposition to anti-Semitism.
Konrad Adenauer, the German Chancellor whose closest advisors were former Nazis, at Ben Gurion's home in the Negev
More than 170 actors, writers and producers accused
the jury of the 2022 European Drama Prize in Germany of “modern-day McCarthyism”, after it withdrew a Lifetime Achievement
Award from Caryl Churchill over her support for Palestinian rights.
The comments come in an open
letter whose signatories include Dame Harriet Walter (Killing Eve,
Succession), directors Mike Leigh (Peterloo, Mr Turner, Vera Drake), Stephen
Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Crown), Phyllida Lloyd (The Iron Lady, Mamma Mia!),
and the National Theatre’s Dominic Cooke CBE.
“Caryl Churchill
deserves the highest international awards for a lifetime of game-changing work
in the theatre”,
Hans Globke, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's closest advisor, was instrumental in the implementation of the lethal Nuremburg Laws
said Dame Harriet Walter.
“To withdraw any honour because of her political
views is a dishonourable act reminiscent of McCarthyism”.
Pointing to a series of similar attacks on artists and
scholars in recent years, the letter stated that
“this [latest]
attack on freedom of conscience… raises urgent questions about a pattern of
intimidation and silencing in Germany, and beyond”.
The signatories accused institutions in Germany of “deep-seated anti-Palestinian racism”.
They include actors Miranda Richardson, Miriam Margolyes, Khalid Abdalla,
Juliet Stevenson, Maxine Peake, and Maureen Beattie as well as leading
playwrights Abbie Spallen, Polly Stenham, Hannah Khalil, Nicholas Wright,
Sabrina Mahfouz, Tanika Gupta, film director Stephen Frears, and Observer
theatre critic Susannah Clapp.
“For the
Schauspiel Stuttgart to rescind its prestigious award is irresponsible, illiberal
and ignorant; the decision reeks of the very fascism it affects to oppose”
said Mike Leigh. This is a German state that backs
Erdogan in Turkey and neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
In May of this year Berlin Police banned Nakba
protests. They said they had assessed an “immediate danger” of “inflammatory,
anti-Semitic exclamations,” incitement, and violence. When Police starting
making political assessments as to who can and cannot demonstrate then we are
on the road to a police state. See Human Rights Watch’s Berlin Bans Nakba Day Demonstrations.
Everywhere from the USA
to France and Hungary, anti-Semites are trying to outlaw solidarity with the
Palestinians in the name of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’.
We had the absurdity
of the most racist and anti-Semitic
President of the United States,Trump, condemning
Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib as anti-Semites for supporting BDS!When Trump
told 4 Black Congresswomen to ‘go back
home’ he also
added that they hate Israel and therefore Jews.Trump is of the opinion that Israel is the ‘real
home’ of American Jews.
We live in the world of Lewis
Carroll’s Alice whose exchange in Through the Looking Glass is most
apposite:
“When I use a word,”
Humpty Dumpty said “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor
less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean
so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to
be master—that’s all.”
‘Why
now. Why the contemporary concern with the Jewish genocide… compared to its
treatment in the period immediately after the Second World War?’
His answer was that this was
about
‘consolidating a new ideology of
exclusion. Now it is the Jews who are the insiders… the genocide and the Jews
served in the construction of a European identity…’
Not only are Jews the insiders
but the memory of the Holocaust has been distorted as a justification for
Western support for Israel in the Middle East. The most barbaric acts of German
imperialism are now being used to justify the barbarism of western imperialism.
Israel is seen by the European
far-Right as the last defence against Islam. In the words of Dutch
fascist Geert Wilders ‘If Jerusalem falls
into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next.’
For Germany, coming to terms with
the Holocaust has been seen in terms of uncritical support of Israel as a
‘Jewish’ state. The reason for this is that Israel played a crucial part in the
rehabilitation of the German state and its integration into NATO during the
cold war. In return for which Israel received billions in reparations.
The irony is that Israel from its
formation modelled its
settler-colonial model on Prussian militarism and colonisation. Instead of
drawing the lesson from the Nazi era that racism and racial supremacy should be
opposed, the German state has given carte blanche to an Israeli state which is
the embodiment of Prussian militarism and racial supremacy.
Indeed the Israeli state, with
its segregation between Jew and non-Jew, is the embodiment of Nazi
values. If one looks at the period from 1933-39 then the parallels between
Israel and Nazi Germany are uncanny not least with the Nuremburg Laws of 1935
which the Zionists alone in the Jewish community welcomed.
Eugenics played a key role in
Nazi Germany and also today in Israel. In Israel conscious attempts to
‘improve’ the Jewish ‘race’ were made by Arthur Ruppin through selective Jewish
immigration.
In the 1950’s thousands of babies
of Yemenite parents were stolen and
transferred to Ashkenazi parents. It is a scandal which has been smouldering
for over half a century. See for example The
Disappeared Children of Israel.
Far from the Bundestag rejecting
the values of Hitlerism, by their actions they endorsed the perpetuation of
those values in the hands of the Israeli state.If Israel, the Jewish state, can act like Germans once did, then the
logical conclusion is that perhaps the Nazi period wasn’t so bad after
all.That is a message that the AfD and
Austria’s Freedom Party understand all too well.
When the Chief Rabbi of Safed,
Shmuel Eliyahu issued an edict banning the renting of apartments to Arabs, an
edict which was endorsed by dozens
of other rabbis, or when Jewish mobs chant‘death to the Arabs’ it is clear that
the values of German ethno-nationalism have been absorbed by Jewish
ethno-nationalism.
It is a sign of the abject
cowardice of the Greens and SPD that they say nothing about the racism of the
Israeli state. What part of the house demolitions, the ethnic cleansing or the
shooting of unarmed demonstrators do they not understand? Perhaps their tongues
might loosen with the appointment of open fascists and Jewish Nazis like Ben
Gvir to Israel’s government. But then again that too is unlikely.
Ironically it has been Israelis
themselves who have recognised that Israel’s ethno-nationalism is reminiscent
of the Nazi era.
‘toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European
strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.’
He is not alone.Other Israelis including Daniel
Blatman, a Holocaust researcher and chief historian at the
Warsaw Ghetto museum and Ofer Casif, a Hebrew University lecturer and MK for
Hadash, argued thatIsrael today is similar to early Nazi
Germany.
Members of the Bundestag
forget that when the Nazis took power in 1933, they were met with a worldwide
Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany. Just like now, the ruling classes
railed at this interference with free trade. The Zionists were vehemently opposed
to the Boycott of Nazi Germany as they wanted to reach their own trade
agreement Ha'avara,
with the Nazis. So at least they are being consistent.
‘What message does Germany send
when it protects a violent military power that in the past year alone had
indiscriminately killed over 450 Palestinians, while at the same time
condemning a non-violent movement that merely demands that Israel abides by its
obligations under international law?’
The decision of the Bundestag and
its conflation of Zionism and Judaism ignores the long history of Jewish
opposition to Zionism, as well as ignoring the numerous Jewish individuals and
organizations who either support BDS or defend its legitimacy.
Volker Beck - one of the most racist German politicians, viciously anti-Palestinian and a former Green MP
It may be painful for German
legislators to understand, but a state that demolishes Palestinian homes in
order erect Jewish homes in their place owes more to the Nazis than those who
suffered under them. Rion wrote that
few would deny that modern German identity has had a central role in the
formulation of Jewish-Israeli identity, especially in light of the Holocaust
and its key impact on the past of the two peoples.
Rion described the problem in
psychological terms:
‘A battered child often turns into a battering parent, and what applies
on the personal level is also valid on the national one.’
If your history has imposed a
burden and an obligation upon you, it is to defend justice not Israel. This is
what Judaism, not Zionism, demands. Your obligation does not lie in making
Israel or the Jewish people special or selectively excusing injustice because
Jews happen to be committing it; it lies in holding Israel and Jews to the same
ethical and moral standards that you would demand of any people, including
yourselves.
Your sense of guilt, if that is
the correct word, should not derive from criticizing Israel. It should reside
in remaining silent in the face of injustice as so many of your forebears did
before, during and after the Holocaust.
I lost a large extended family to
fascism and racism. By endorsing the motion that alleges that BDS is
anti-Semitic—regardless of one’s position on BDS—you are criminalizing the
right to free speech and dissent and those who choose to exercise it, which is
exactly how fascism takes root. You also trivialize and dishonor the real
meaning of anti-Semitism.
The Bundestag vote was also felt
in a renewed Zionist attack on Berlin’s Jewish Museum. This is an institution
that the Zionists have long detested as it isn’t under their control. Zionism
has not only colonised Palestine but Jewish communities and their institutions
in the diaspora.The Jewish museum of
Berlin is an exception.
In 2013, British lecturer Brian
Klug delivered
a thoughtful lectureWhat Do We Mean When We Say ‘Antisemitsm’?
Echoes of shattering glass on the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht. There was
an immediate Zionist response. A group calling themselves ‘International
scholars’ compiled a Dossier on Brian
Klug.
And what a collection of scholars
it was! It was headed by Gerald Steinberg of the McCarthyite NGO Monitor, which
spends most of its time attacking Israeli human rights organisations. Also
signed up was Junk Historian Ephraim Karsh, [see Benny
Morris’s review of Karsh’s book Fabricating Israeli History: The New
‘Historians’ in Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. 27 No. 2 Winter 1998] and
Sam Westrup, ‘Senior Fellow’ of the Islamaphobic Gatestone Institute.
Another ‘scholar’ was Lt. Col.
(res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar, whose main claim to fame is advocating
the rape of Palestinian women in war as a deterrent to
‘terrorists’. These ‘scholars’ even extended to our own hoodlums,
Jonathan Hoffman and Richard Millet!
Their leader Clemens Heni wrote
in The
Times of Israel that ‘Brian
Klug is among the worst choices for a keynote speaker’ because ‘he denies that there is a new antisemitism.’
In other words Klug should have been banned because he was not prepared to say
that anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism.
Other sins included the
fact that in 2012 ‘the Jewish Museum
hosted a podium discussion with US academic Judith Butler, who renewed her
calls to boycott Israel.’ Clearly this was a call for the neo-Nazis and
Greens in the Bundestag to take the kind of action Hitler would have approved of
and close down a cultural and academic institution.
‘Just say “anti-Semitism” and the
world is paralyzed. One can kill children in Gaza, then say “anti-Semitism!”
and squelch any criticism. Europe is still vulnerable on this. Exploit it to
the hilt.
It’s hard to believe that the
hundreds of Bundestag members who voted for this resolution, which defines a
completely legitimate struggle as anti-Semitic, actually agreed with it. One
may assume that deep inside, many harbor doubts if not opposition to a move
that was imposed on them
Rather than slaying the dragon of
racism and fascism the Green, Social Democratic and Die Linke parties gave a
boost to the forces of racism and fascism. It is little wonder that Die Linke at the last election barely
scraped home.
These racist hypocrites could
have taken on board the fact that Netanyahu has no greater
friend than Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister, Viktor
Orban. Orban is on record as saying of Admiral Horthy, the pro-Nazi leader of
war-time Hungary, who presided over the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz
that he was an ‘exceptional statesman’
One thing is for sure, German
politicians today and the cowards who inhabit the Bundestag are anything but
exceptional statesmen. They are the same cowards who in 1933 voted for the Enabling
Act thus ushering in the personal dictatorship of Hitler. Ha’aretz reported
that
‘Last year, it was reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded from Chancellor Angela Merkel
that Germany stop funding the museum because it had held an
exhibition about Jerusalem, “that presents a Muslim-Palestinian perspective.”
Merkel was asked to halt funding to other organisations
deemed anti-Israel. Among them were the Berlin International Film Festival,
pro-Palestinian Christian organizations, and the Israeli news website +972,
which receives funding from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Netanyahu did not deny the report
and his bureau confirmed that he had raised
The Bundestag
motion marked the first time a European parliament had officially defined
the BDS movement as anti-Semitic. The motion stated that the BDS movement’s “Don’t Buy” stickers on Israeli products
evoke the Nazi slogan “Don’t buy from
Jews.”
One wonders at the gutlessness of
a German government that wasn’t capable of telling Netanyahu to take a running
jump, preferably into a stretch of deep water. See ‘The
Bundestag motion, passed with broad multiparty support last month, has
drawn wide opposition, including from Jewish intellectuals’ Haaretz, 11 June 2019, Noa
Landau
240
Jewish intellectuals published a petition against the Bundestag motion, saying
“boycotts are a legitimate and nonviolent
tool of resistance.” The signatories, among them Avraham Burg and Eva
Illouz, called on the German government not to adopt the motion, to protect freedom
of speech and continue funding of Israeli and Palestinian organizations
“that peacefully challenge the Israeli occupation,
expose severe violations of international law and strengthen civil society.
These organizations defend the principles and values at the heart of liberal
democracy and rule of law, in Germany and elsewhere. More than ever, they need
financial support and political backing.”