RIP Marika Sherwood, a Survivor of the Hungarian Holocaust, an Anti-Racist Campaigner All Her Life

In 2017 Manchester University Forced Her to Change the Title of a Talk ‘You're doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to me’ after Israel’s Ambassador Mark Regev Lobbied Them

Manchester University thought it a good idea to frame the Palestinian experience of apartheid and genocide as a religious one

Born in Budapest, Marika Sherwood (8 November 1937 – 16 February 2025) was the daughter of Hungarian-Jewish parents, Laszlo (Laci) Fenyő and Magda. Laci survived Hungary’s Jewish Labour Service, but many relatives died in the Holocaust. Magda secured false Christian identity papers for her and Marika, and they survived the Nazi occupation, reuniting with Laci after the war.

Marika survived the Budapest Ghetto that was established under the fascist Arrow Cross government that the Nazis installed in October 1944. Marika, who remembered having to wear a Yellow Star and witnessing many atrocities, later spoke of the impact of these wartime experiences in shaping her very public support of the Palestinian cause.

Marika Sherwood emigrated with her family to Australia in 1948 and then to Britain in 1965. As a teacher in London she witnessed the discrimination that Black students experienced and the absence of Black history from the curriculum.

Marika was shocked by the racism many of her pupils experienced. It was this that led to her becoming interested in learning about their Caribbean heritage.

This led to Marika becoming a pioneer in the field of Black and Caribbean history and the co-founder of the Black & Asian Studies Association with Hakim Adi, Britain’s first Black Professor of History.

Her writings include After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807, Origins of Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams and Africa and the African Diaspora. 

Marika published 13 books about slavery, colonialism and the history of African and Caribbean people Britain in a long and distinguished career as a teacher, writer, and social campaigner. She was at the forefront of attempts to diversify the curriculum across schools and higher education.

With her BASA colleagues, Marika designed and wrote a GCSE module and textbook on migration to Britain (2016). In 1990 Marika was appointed a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and began organising history seminars there. Marika’s extensive publications are listed on the ICWS Research website.

Many Struggles: West Indian Workers and Service Personnel in Britain (1939-45),  published in 1985 was one of the first publications to highlight “the racism meted out to Black people by the British state” during the second world war, and to demonstrate that those from the Caribbean were an integral part of the war effort. Over the next 40 years she would produce more than 20 books and almost 100 articles.

Her books covered a vast variety of topics. In After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807, she reminded people, during the bicentennial commemoration of the Abolition Act, that Britain’s involvement in human trafficking continued long after 1807.

In much of her work she provided in-depth histories centred on key figures and organisations in Britain, including Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad 1935-1947; Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile; Origins of Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams, Africa and the African Diaspora; Malcolm X: Visits Abroad and Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War: The West African National Secretariat 1945-48.

In October 2022 Marika was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of History at the University of Chichester.  When receiving the award she said:

I am honoured to accept this award and am extremely grateful to Professor Adi. I hope that I can inspire more students to research areas that universities have not been not looking at – the working classes, colonialisation, and the history of black people in the UK, which largely remains unexplored.

Prof Adi , whose latest book is African and Caribbean People in Britain, said:

I am delighted to present Marika with an honorary doctorate for her contributions to history. We first met in 1987 when I was a PhD student and she came to a seminar at which I was speaking. We have been friends and colleagues since, working and writing together as well as jointly launching BASA. This award is greatly deserved and long overdue.

In 2010, Marika was invited to contribute to the Kwame Nkrumah Centenary Colloquium in Accra. She wrote nine entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on the following: Dusé Mohamed, a journalist and playwright; Peter McFarren Blackman, a political activist; Robert Broadhurst, a pan-African nationalist leader; William Davidson, George Daniel Ekarte, minister and community worker; Nathaniel Akinremi Fadipe writer and anti-colonialist; Claudia Jones, communist and journalist; Ras Tomasa Makonnen, political activist and Henry Sylvester Williams pan-Africanist.

Manchester University Censored Marika Sherwood’s Talk

In March 2017 Marika was invited by students at Manchester University to give a talk, as part of Israel Apartheid Week. Marika chose the title, “A Holocaust survivor’s story and the Balfour declaration: You’re doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to me.” In the light of Gaza it is prescient.

The Zionist lobby and Israeli politicians don’t like to be reminded that their chants of Death to the Arabs, their apartheid policies and talk of extermination mirror what the Nazis did to the Jews. For them the Holocaust is sui generis.

The Jewish News reported that Manchester University had

censored the title of a talk in March by Holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood, ....

The subhead of the title was dropped and the university said it would record the speech after a visit to the university by Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, and his civil affairs attaché, Michael Freeman.

Following his visit, Freeman sent an email to Manchester University’s head of student experience, Tim Westlake, which thanked him for discussing the “difficult issues that we face”.

Freeman also said in the email that the title of Sherwood’s talk violates the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, and criticised another speaker as anti-Semitic.

Both of these events will to [sic] cause Jewish students to feel uncomfortable on campus and that they are being targeted and harassed for their identity as a people and connection to the Jewish state of Israel. I would be grateful if you could look into these events and take the appropriate action,” Freeman wrote to Westlake.

This idea that anti-Zionist critiques of Israel, because it challenges some Jewish students identification with Israel, is a form  of harassment is profoundly undemocratic and a recipe for the abolition of free speech. Would British universities have prevented anti-Nazi meetings on campuses in the 30s for fear that German students would feel uncomfortable?  Would they have banned anti-Apartheid meetings in the 70s and 80s because White students from South Africa would object?

The email also said:

We welcome debate and discussion and see it as an essential part of a healthy democracy and open society. In the case of these two particular events, we feel that this is not legitimate criticism but has rather crossed the line into hate speech.

What we had is racists deciding what is and is not legitimate and Manchester University going along with them in this.

The Guardian got access to the email after the Information Commissioner’s Office told the University to disclose “all correspondence between the University of Manchester and the Israeli lobby” between February 1 and March 3.

Marika Sherwood said that:

I was just speaking of my experience of what the Nazis were doing to me as a Jewish child. I had to move away from where I was living, because Jews couldn’t live there. I couldn’t go to school. I would have died were it not for the Christians who baptised us and shared papers with us to save us

Sherwood told The Guardian. “I can’t say I’m a Palestinian, but my experiences as a child are not dissimilar to what Palestinian children are experiencing now.”

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy was quoted in Ha’aretz as saying:

Comparing Israel to the Nazi regime could reasonably be considered anti-Semitic, given the context, according to the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's] working definition of antisemitism, which is accepted by the British government, the Labour Party, the NUS [National Union of Students] and most British universities.

In other words the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism directly led to the censorship of Marika’s talk.

Manchester University said a free speech code applied to all campus events involving outside speakers and ‘controversial topics’ and that the university also consulted “relevant laws, including the Equality Act 2010,” in setting the guidelines for the event.

This is just verbal flatulence. The Equality Act has nothing to say about freedom of speech nor Jewish identity come to that.

On January 13 I was part of a delegation which met Manchester University’s Vice Chancellor Duncan Iveson and its Vice-President for Social Responsibility, Prof. NalinThakkar. Representatives also came from UK Jewish Academic Network, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) Greater Manchester, Jewish Action for Palestine Manchester, Na’amod NorthWest and Manchester Jewish Students’ Kehillah. I represented Jewish Network for Palestine.

The delegation arose out of a ‘debate’ held as part of the Whitworth debate series on October 31 2024. The title of this debate  was “Is antizionism antisemitism?”.

In an Open Letter to Iveson the 6 Jewish organisations wrote on 27 November that:

Not only is this question absurd to any serious historian of zionism, but the presentation of the debate framed as one to be argued on a religious basis - that is, as a dispute between Muslims and Jews - could do nothing other than result in an event of intellectual vacuity, while – as some wrote to the organisers asking them to change this framing - needlessly inflaming intercommunal tensions and exacerbating both islamophobia and antisemitism. This is indeed what happened on October 31^st, just as many had warned the organisers.  

The letter went on to say that:

it seems extraordinary to us that an event billed as relevant to the current horror in Gaza, which a large number of the world’s most respected institutions are now referring to as a genocide, should have included no academic specialist in either Palestinian or Jewish history. Indeed we can only sympathise with the enraged despair of the brave young Palestinian woman who shouted out during the debate to ask why, while her people were being massacred by zionists, there was not even a Palestinian voice on the stage. She was forcibly dragged out of the hall by burly university security men, but her quintessential question still reverberates unanswerably around the world. The root cause of the century old conflict is the struggle for self-determination of the Palestinian people in the face of a settler colonial enterprise in which the UK has played a significant role. Attempts to portray this instead as a religious war are ahistorical, inflammatory and deeply divisive.

This resulted in our meeting. However it was clear that nothing that we had said about alternative Jewish voices to Zionism and support for Israel was being taken seriously. Manchester University, like most academic institutions, is too much a part of the British state to ever break free of the imperialist paradigm.

That is most evident in its support for the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism which is not about anti-Semitism but the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge wrote that the IHRA

fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite. ‘A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred’ invites a string of questions. Is anti-Semitism solely a matter of perception? What about discriminatory practices and policies? What about perceptions of Jews that are expressed otherwise than as hatred?

There are many similar critiques of the IHRA including legal opinions from Hugh Tomlinson KC who warned that it had

a potential chilling effect on public bodies which, in the absence of definitional clarity, may seek to sanction or prohibit any conduct which has been labelled by third parties as antisemitic without applying any clear criterion of assessment.

Which is exactly what happened at Manchester University. Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson KC wrote that:

There is one aspect which I find remarkable, ... Despite its imprecision, it [the IHRA] does pivot upon manifestations of “hatred towards Jews.” As I point out in paragraph 2 above, “hatred” is a very strong word. It is the emotion that can be deduced in those who daub abhorrent slogans on tombstones and Synagogues, but it falls short of capturing those who express only hostility or prejudice, or who practice discrimination... This consideration, above all others, convinces me that the definition is not fit for purpose, or any purpose that relies upon it to identify anti-Semitism accurately.

There are also Zionists such as Professor Geoffrey Alderman who are highly critical of what he called ‘a flawed and faulty definition of antisemitism’. David Feldman, Director of Birkbeck's Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism asked

So does the IHRA definition that Britain has adopted provide the answer [to the problem of anti-Semitism]? I am sceptical. Here is the definition’s key passage: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.” This is bewilderingly imprecise.

The text also carries dangers. It trails a list of 11 examples. Seven deal with criticism of Israel. Some of the points are sensible, some are not. Crucially, there is a danger that the overall effect will place the onus on Israel’s critics to demonstrate they are not antisemitic. The home affairs committee advised that the definition required qualification “to ensure that freedom of speech is maintained in the context of discourse on Israel and Palestine”. It was ignored.

Kenneth Stern

And what of Kenneth Stern, the American academic who was the principal drafter of the IHRA. In an article I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it Stern wrote that: 

Fifteen years ago, as the American Jewish Committee’s antisemitism expert, I was the lead drafter of what was then called the “working definition of antisemitism”. It was created primarily so that European data collectors could know what to include and exclude. That way antisemitism could be monitored better over time and across borders.

It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.

Yet that is what the IHRA has become.  A hate speech code.

On 29 January 2025, Trump issued an Executive Order (the Antisemitism EO) entitled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.” This built on an order that Trump signed during his first term—EO 13899—that required federal agencies to consider the IHRA definition of antisemitism and its accompanying examples when enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI).

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance

Trump’s EO states that it is intended to address the “barrage of discrimination” that Jewish students have faced “in our schools and on our campuses” since October 7, 2023, such as

“denial of access to campus common areas and facilities, including libraries and classrooms; and intimidation, harassment, and physical threats and assault.”

The  obvious question to ask is why Trump, a racist extraordinaire, who spoke of neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as ‘some very fine people’ and who has targeted migrants of colour as rapists and criminals, whilst offering asylum to White Afrikaaners is concerned with ‘anti-Semitism’? It is proof  positive that the ‘anti-Semitism’ he is concerned with is nothing more than anti-Palestinian racism.

Leaving aside the litany of lies about Jewish students being denied access to campus facilities etc. when it is common knowledge that it is pro-Palestinian protesters who have been harassed, beaten and attacked, what does this say about the IHRA that an open racist and bigot endorses it?

We only have to turn to Ken Stern’s testimony to Congress of November 7, 2017.  Referring to the use of the IHRA in Britain Stern wrote:

The EUMC’s “working definition” was recently adopted in the United Kingdom and applied to campus. An “Israel Apartheid Week” event was cancelled as violating the definition. A Holocaust survivor [Marika Sherwood] was required to change the title of a campus talk, and the university mandated it be recorded, after an Israeli diplomat complained that the title violated the definition.

Perhaps most egregious, an off-campus group [Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s] citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before. The university then conducted the inquiry. And while it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like.’

I mention this because Professor Nalin Thakkar sent an email to the 6 Jewish representatives that he met in January defending Manchester University’s continued use of the IHRA. Thakkar wrote:

In line with the majority (100) of UK higher education institutions (along with UK national government, devolved governments in Wales and Scotland, many local authorities including GMCA, College of Policing), and UK government policy ... the University adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism in June 2020.

 The University adopted the definition as guidance, which I have attached, and has due regard to the definition when interpreting and understanding antisemitism if and when raised in the University context….   

our approach to the IHRA definition does not affect the application of equality law and the rights it affords to members of our community, or our commitment to provide an environment free from harassment and discrimination.   

It also does not affect our legal obligations and the legal rights of our staff and students in relation to freedom of speech and expression, including to discuss and question difficult and sensitive topics, views and opinions, provided that is done responsibly, with respect for others, and within the law.

Thakkar seems to be saying that because most universities had caved in, under threat of defunding by former Education Secretary and toilet salesman, Gavin Williamson, Manchester University should do likewise. This is institutional cowardice.

I have responded with a letter (copied below) on behalf of Jewish Network for Palestine.  It is plain as a pikestaff that ‘anti-Semitism’ is being weaponised to defend Israel and its imperialist backers. No one seriously thinks that a racist like Trump is losing sleep over the ‘suffering’ of Jewish students.

The real question is why Manchester University is not willing to ditch a ‘definition of anti-Semitism’ that is deeply racist by defining Palestinian’s experience of racism as a form of anti-Semitism and thus making them invisible. In the IHRA’s eyes to call Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians racist is to be anti-Semitic. Yet there are a thousand reasons why Israel is racist. It is time that Manchester University and other academic institutions stopped  dissembling.

That the IHRA was used to prevent a holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood from explaining why her treatment by the Nazis was similar to that of Palestinians by the Israelis is reason enough to get rid of it.

Tony Greenstein

See also

In Memoriam: Marika Sherwood

Marika Sherwood obituary - Guardian

Marika Sherwood - Wikipedia

UK university censors title of Holocaust survivor's speech criticising Israel – Guardian Education

ZIONISM - What it is and Why it is Important? Zoom Meeting with Moshe Machover and Tony Greenstein

 Was it inevitable that Zionism would create an Apartheid monstrosity in Palestine?

To register go to

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_v7FMwt73S5iiYZP2can1fA

On Wednesday November 4^th Moshe Machover, one of the founders of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel, and myself will try and answer the question, ‘What is Zionism’.

Why is Zionism important? Why not just focus on Palestine solidarity? In her Report on racism Shami Chakrabarti asked:

Moshe Machover

‘surely it is better to use the modern universal language of human rights, be it of dispossession, discrimination, segregation, occupation or persecution and to leave Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust out of it?

This is an attractive argument but it is also a false one and speaks to nothing more than Chakrabarti’s own abysmal ignorance.

Let us imagine if, in Apartheid South Africa, someone had said that it’s better to concentrate on human rights, discrimination, particular instances of dispossession and exploitation when someone raised the question of Apartheid. They would have been laughed out of court if not branded as an apologist for racism. 

Matzpen - Socialist Organisation in Israel

Why then the distinction between Israel and South Africa?  It is clear that because Israel calls itself a Jewish State that people, bearing in mind the holocaust, are wary of accusing it of behaving as the anti-Semites behaved towards the Jews. Imagine if 200,000 South Africa expatriates had lived in Britain during the apartheid erea and when people campaigned against Apartheid they protested that this was anti-Afrikaaner racism and that Apartheid was part of their identity.

Yet when people oppose Zionism they are told that it is anti-Semitic because the majority of British Jews identify with Israel. Of course British Jews are not expatriates but according to Zionist ideology they are aliens. Israel is the ‘real home’ of Jews. Indeed it is one of the unspoken aims of Zionism to alienate Jews from their surroundings.  Zionism has always had as one of its foundational aims the winding up of the accursed Galut (exile), their name for the Jewish diaspora. This was called the Afrikaaner British Jews Galut ‘negation of the diaspora’.

To the Zionists anti-Zionism=anti-Semitism

According to David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister:

‘[Zionism] means taking masses of uprooted, impoverished, sterile Jewish masses, living parasitically off the body of an alien, economic body and dependent on others – and introducing them to productive and creative life.’  [Shlomo Avineiri, The Making of Modern Zionism, p.200]

Lucien Wolfe

Lucien Wolfe, the Secretary of the Board of Deputies Conjoint Foreign Committee described how:

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies.’ [B Destani (ed) The Zionist movement and the foundation of Israel 1839-1972 Cambridge 2004, Vol 1, p727].

Moshe Lillienblum, an early Zionist, believed that ‘aliens we are and aliens we shall remain, even if we become full to the brim with culture…’ [Lillienblum, Let Us Not Confuse the Issues, Hertzberg p. 170].

Heinrich Class of the Pan German League

The anti-Semites were grateful for the Zionist acknowledgement that what they said about Jews was true. Heinrich Class, President of the 100,000 strong Pan German League, who was made an honorary member of the Reichstag on Hitler's assumption of power, wrote that:

“... among the Jews themselves the nationalist movement called Zionism is gaining more and more adherents ... They also declare openly that a true assimilation of the Jewish aliens to the host nations would be impossible... the Zionists confirm what the enemies of the Jews... have always asserted...”  [If I Were the Kaiser:  Daniel Frymman (pseudonym).

When it comes to Israel Zionism, the racist movement and ideology that is responsible for the plight of the Palestinians, is treated as if it’s a badge of ethnic identity. There is a deliberate conflation by Zionist of the categories of Jew and Zionist.

Chakrabarti is a good example of the muddled headed thinking of social democratic apologists for Israel and Zionism: She boasts that

Notwithstanding a vibrant Palestinian solidarity tradition, of all British political parties the Labour Party has the longest and most consistent record of support for Zionism, and the Labour Government quickly moved to recognise the new state of Israel upon its formation in 1948.

The Labour Party has indeed a long and shameful record of supporting Zionism going back to the War Aims Memorandum of August 1917. Why, one might ask, should the Labour Party support Zionism in 1917 when it was a minority cult within the Jewish community and had almost no working class adherents? Zionism then was a middle class affair.  Jewish socialists shunned it as a movement of class collaboration. Poalei Zion had just a few hundred members, most of them middle-class Fabian types.

Alec, a fictional character in Simon Blumenfeld’s novel Jew Boy remarked,

I don’t see why I should change one set of exploiters for another because they are Jewish.’  [Brian Klug, Anti-Zionism in London’s Jewish East End, 1890-1948, p.6].

Why did the Labour Party support them? The reason was because Labour was as much a party of the British Empire as the Tories. They particularly supported settler colonialism, which they saw as progressive and not exploitative despite the fact that Zionism was in alliance with the British Empire. The Labour Party sought out the most right-wing Jews and turned its back on the militant Jewish working class of the East  End and later the anti-fascist struggle.

The socialist movement has become infected with the politics of identity. So instead of looking critically at the British Jewish community and how it has become embourgeoisified, they are accorded equal status to oppressed Palestinian because in the language of identity politics British Jews too are a minority community and suffer the same of Black people.

Being a ‘minority’ is in itself a virtue according to the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland.  So taking this to its logical absurdity a minority of exploiters or bankers or billionaires suddenly take on a progressive hue. The fact that Jewish identification with Israel is reactionary and that British Jews would be the first to protest if they were subject to even a fraction of the discrimination that the Palestinians experience, is considered irrelevant. Class politics have gone out of the window with much of the Left, including the Corbyn left.

Jews in Britain are White. They are privileged socio-economically and the majority define themselves in opposition to the Palestinians, although not as large a majority as the Zionist pretend.  According to the survey The Attitude of British Jews Towards Israel 59% of British Jews identify as Zionists and 31%.

The IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is based on the supposition that Israel represents Jews collectively. This means accepting that Jews are an alienated part of British society. It is why the definition is anti-Semitic ! If your only method of understanding society is in terms of identity not class politics you have no means of differentiating between persecuting and persecuted minorities, the exploited and the exploiting.

Identity Politics nonsense from Chakrabarti - of course Jews could define themselves as Martians but that doesn't mean one has to accept the self definition!

This is why Chakrabarti wittered on about having heard a

‘rich range of self-descriptions of both Jewishness or Zionism, even within the Labour Party.

Not only did Chakrabarti equate Jews with  Zionists but she treated Zionism, not as an ideology of Jewish supremacy but as one of many choices in a take away menu. Chakrabarti advised people

Chakrabarti knew nothing about Zionism otherwise she would know that it's Zionists who use Zionism as a euphemism for Jew

to use the term "Zionist" advisedly, carefully and never euphemistically or as part of personal abuse.

What this meant was that one should not call someone a Zionist in a derogatory fashion.  Those arguing this, the Jewish Labour Movement believed the term ‘Zionism’ was something to be worn with pride rather than as a badge of shame.

So why is Zionism important?

The reason is simple. If you don’t understand the ideology that led to the creation of the Israeli state and its functioning today you won’t understand why it is an inherently racist and expansionist state.

Zionism is based on the idea that the Jews form a nation, a nation separated by 2,000 years from its birthplace in Palestine. It is a convenient myth but that is all it is. European Jews have no attachment, other than religious, to Palestine. The direct descendants of the Hebrews who lived there at the time of Christ converted first to Christianity and then Islam. If anyone can claim a direct line of descent from the ancient Hebrews it is the Palestinians, as both David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak ben Zvi admitted.

The aim of Zionism has always been to ‘redeem’ the land, that is to alienate it from the indigenous population.

The best description of this process was in the report of the Hope Simpson Inquiry of October 1930 into the causes of bloody riots the preceding year.  Chaired by Sir John Simpson it went out to Palestine to investigate for itself and it was appalled by Zionist behaviour.

Chapter 5 ss. (iii) The Effect of the Jewish Settlement on the Arab is still relevant. After describing how leases for property from the Jewish National Fund stipulated that hired labour on land bought from absentee Arab landlords must be Jewish only, the Report said that

‘Attempts are constantly being made to establish the advantage which Jewish settlement has brought to the Arab. The most lofty sentiments are ventilated at public meetings and in Zionist propaganda. At the time of the Zionist Congress in 1921 a resolution was passed which '' solemnly declared the desire of the Jewish people to live with the Arab people in relations of friendship and mutual respect’ … This resolution is frequently quoted in proof of the excellent sentiments which Zionism cherishes towards the people of Palestine.

The Report goes on to note that their actions in dispossessing the natives ‘are not compatible with those sentiments.’ It concludes that:

The effect of the Zionist colonisation policy on the Arab.— Actually the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that land has been extraterritorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land. Nor can anyone help him by purchasing the land and restoring it to common use. The land is in mortmain and inalienable. It is for this reason that Arabs discount the professions of friendship and good will on the part of the Zionists in view of the policy which the Zionist Organisation deliberately adopted.

When it asked the Zionist ‘trade union’ Histadrut for the reasons why Arab labour was the subject of a Boycott they were frank:

‘They pointed out that the Jewish colonies were founded and established by Jewish capital, and that the subscriptions of which this capital is composed were given with the intention that Jews should emigrate to Palestine and be settled there—that these subscriptions would never have been given had it been thought that they would be employed to support Arab labourers.’

In other words the Zionists operated a colour bar just as damaging as the colonists did in South Africa except that in this case they objected to any reemployment of Arab labour. The Arabs could go starve.

Why then is Zionism important? Well if the PLO had had an understanding of the nature of Zionism, that the Zionist settlers did not come to Palestine to share the land with the indigenous population but to expel them then they wouldn’t have agreed to the Oslo Accords, the biggest disaster for the Palestinians since the Nakba. If the PLO had understood Zionism then they would have understood that Israel could never voluntarily agree to relinquish its claim to any part of the Occupied Territories.  As the new Ambassador to Britain, religious nut Tzipi Hotoveli, then Deputy Foreign Minister, stated:

“We need to return to the basic truth of our rights to this country,” she said. “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologise for that.”

Various left intellectuals have, as a result of the anti-Semitism campaign, which has become an Establishment narrative, beaten a retreat. Professor David Feldman of the Pears Institute of Anti-Semitism has reversed his position from opposition to the IHRA to supporting the Weaponisation of anti-Semitism.

See Failing to see the Wood for the Trees – A Response to Brian Klug’s The Left And The Jews and How David Feldman of Birkbeck and the Pears Institute Changed His Views to Accommodate Zionist McCarthyism

Another academic is Brian Klug. Brian too has bent with the wind. His attempt to rehabilitate Zionism began with a talk he gave to the SWP in July 2017. Klug based his critique on a misreading of an article by Aurora Levins Morales, a Puerto Rican feminist in On Antisemitism produced by Jewish Voice for Peace. Aurora referred to “a three-cornered argument” between the Orthodox, Zionists and socialists/communists in her grandmother’s shtetl about the solution to the pogroms. Brian uses this to suggest that Zionism is Janus faced, an ideology of emancipation as well as oppression.

Klug is wrong and tries to rationalise post hoc Zionist colonisation by reaching back in time to a period when it was a sigh of despair of the Jewish petit bourgeoisie when faced with anti-Semitism on the one hand and socialist revolutionaries on the other. Zionism is not ‘Janus faced.’  Zionism is consistent but of course it changed during the flight from the Russian Pale of Settlement to Palestine.

When Zionism first arose it expressed the desire of Jewish intellectuals and the petit-bourgeosie for their own Promised Land, a safe haven where Jews would be free to exploit each other without the interference of the goy. The prayer ‘Next year in Jerusalem’, which is recited each day by the Orthodox, in essence meant, as Bernard Lazare observed, no more than an expression of hope that next year we will be free. The Jewish masses had no more intention of emigrating to Palestine than American Jews do today and of the 2 ½ million Jews who fled the Pale, just 1% went to Palestine.  America was their Promised Land.

If Zionism had simply remained a messianic movement like so many before it, it could have been dismissed as a sigh of the oppressed. In much the same way as Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement represented Black reaction, not least in its alliance with the KKK, Zionism would have been a reactionary Jewish separatist movement. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association also preached racial segregation and racial pride.

Zionism wasn’t just a backward reaction to anti-Semitism. Its aimed to seek an alliance with imperialism and Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, spent his whole life seeking out the various rulers of Europe, from the Ottoman Sultan to the German Kaiser.

Zionism as it developed can only be understood in the context of its alliance with British imperialism, consolidated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and all that flowed from that. Zionism was a junior partner of British imperialism from 1917 to 1945. From 1945 onwards, indeed earlier in the case of the Irgun, Zionism fought the British in just the same way as the Boers had done. It sought independence from its imperialist sponsor.

Hungarian neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka - invited guest at the Zionist Organisation of America gala dinner

Hitler of course gave the Zionist project a massive boost and that was why, when the vast majority of Jews instinctively wanted to Boycott Hitler and the Nazis the Zionists fought so strongly against Boycott. Zionism never once fought anti-Semitism although today it seeks to brand everyone and everything who disagree with it as anti-Semitic .

That is one of the ironies of the present day fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign. In the United States the Zionists have allied with Trump who fought an openly anti-Semitic campaign in 2016. His final advert in that campaign featured images of prominent Jews: financier George Soros (accompanying the words “those who control the levers of power”), Fed Chair Janet Yellen (with the words “global special interests”) and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (following the “global power structure” quote). It showed Hillary Clinton saying she partnered “with these people who don’t have your good in mind.”. He has made repeated anti-Semitic comments since such as telling American Jews that their ‘real home’ is in Israel not the USA.

This didn’t stop the Zionist Organisation of America inviting Steve Bannon, Trump’s anti-Semitic Strategic Director and the neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka, another Trump adviser, as guests of honour at the ZOA’s 2016 and 2017 annual gala dinners.

Just as it doesn’t stop the Israeli state today supplying the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion with weaponry just as it did with the neo-Nazi Argentinian Junta in the 1970s and 1980s.

Zionism was unique among the very many Jewish movements that sprang up in reaction to Czarist anti-Semitism.  It accepted that Jews were aliens and therefore incapable of living amongst non-Jews. Indeed it was their very estrangement, living in an alien society that had caused the anti-social behaviour in the first place, which had resulted in anti-Semitism. The anti-Semites told the Jews that they were different and could not expect equal rights. The Zionists agreed.

Many of the things that Zionists said about the Jewish diaspora could have come from the Nazis or anti-Semites. For example Israel’s first Justice Minister, Pinhas Rosenbluth described Palestine as ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’. [Joachim Doron, Classic Zionism and modern anti-Semitism: parallels and influences’, Journal of Israeli Affairs p.169 

Jacob Klatzkin, editor of Die Welt and co-founder of Encyclopedia Judaica held that Jews were:

‘a people disfigured in both body and soul – in a word, of a horror… some sort of outlandish creature… in any case, not a pure national type... some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew.’ [Arthur Hertzberg, the Zionist Idea, pp. 322/323]

Hitler and Rosenberg, a supporter of Zionism

Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s theoretician and head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, wrote in 1919 that

‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations [Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p.25].

Rosenberg ‘intended to use Zionism as a legal justification for depriving German Jews of their civil rights’. He ‘sanctioned the use of the Zionist movement in the future drive to eliminate Jewish rights, Jewish influence and eventually the Jewish presence in Germany.  (Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, pp. 25-26]. Rosenberg who presided over a regime of terror and mass murder in captured Soviet territories was executed as a war criminal at the Nuremburg trials in 1946. 

Sir Samuel Montagu anti-Zionist Jewish MP for Whitechapel

Sir Samuel Montagu, the MP for Whitechapel (1885-1900) asked:

 ‘Is it not... a suspicious fact that those who have no love for the Jews, and those who are pronounced anti-Semites, all seem to  welcome the Zionist proposals and aspiration.?’[Sir Samuel Montagu, The Dangers of Zionism]

Not only did the anti-Semites welcome Zionism but Zionism welcomed them. That was why, in the middle of the Dreyfus Affair Herzl could write in his diaries 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.

Today Zionism calls itself a ‘national liberation movement’. Colonialism is no longer in fashion or part of the zeitgeist. But when it was fashionable to be a colonialist then Zionists were open colonists. Herzl wrote on January   11^th  1902, to Cecil Rhodes, the Prime Minister of Cape Colony from 1890-1896 and after whom Rhodesia was named, saying:

Extract from Herzl's Diaries - Letter from Herzl to Cecil Rhodes

“You are being invited to help make history...it doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial… I want you ... to put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan and to make the following declaration to a few people who swear by you: I, Rhodes have examined this plan and found it correct and practicable. It is a plan full of culture, excellent for the group of people for whom it is directly designed, and quite good for England, for Greater Britain…."

Chakrabarti asked why raise the holocaust and the Nazis. One reason is because Zionism cynically and deliberately exploits the memory of the holocaust in the service of their bloody racist enterprise. It is useful to see what Zionism was actually doing whilst the holocaust was taking place. The comparison by 9 holocaust survivors of Zionist policies with that of Nazi Germany is invaluable.

Rudolf Vrba - Escaped from Auschwitz - anti-Zionist who condemned Zionist collaboration with the Nazis

Rudolph Vrba, one of only 4 Jewish escapees from Auschwitz, wrote that

“The Zionist movement of Europe played a very important role in the mass extermination of Jews. Indeed, I believe that without the cooperation of Zionists it would have been a much more difficult task….

Vrba with Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz on April 10 1944 with the intention of warning Hungarian Jewry that they were next in line for extermination. Their report, the Auschwitz Protocols was delivered to the Zionist leader from Hungary, Rudolph Kasztner, who promptly suppressed it in order that he could negotiated a separate agreement with the Nazis allowing 1,646, mainly Zionist and bourgeois Jewish leaders to escape from Hungary in a special train. In exchange Kasztner kept secret where the deportation trains were actually heading. Kasztner was accused by survivors of the Hungarian holocaust of complicity in the extermination of Jews in the Kasztner Trial in Israel from 1954-1958.  Judge Benjamin Halevi of the Jerusalem District Court ruled in 1955 that Kasztner had sold his soul to the devil. The Israeli government of Moshe Sharrett promptly collapsed because they had defended Kasztner, a member of the Israeli Labor Party Mapai.

Another reason for comparing Zionism and the Nazi is because the blood and soil ideology of Zionism bears a distinct similarity to that of the Nazis.  Both were what one might call volkish. Of course Zionism hasn’t exterminated the Palestinians though there are many Zionists now who would like to do so if it were politically feasible. But the genocidal outlook of many Israelis, over half of whom support the expulsion even of Israeli Palestinians from Israel suggests that Zionism’s belief in a Jewish state is no different from the belief of the Nazis in an Aryan ethno nationalist state.  Being Jewish has been transformed from a religious into a racial category.

All criticism of Israel is written off as ‘anti-Semitism’. But how else to explain the fact that Israel today arms and equips some of the most right-wing, racist and genocidal regimes like Myanamar.

People should not feel afraid of hurting the feelings of Zionists by making such comparisons.  If that is the only way to help them escape their indoctrination then it is all to the good!

Come and hear Moshe and myself on ‘What is Zionism’ and hopefully we can have a good debate afterwards.

Tony Greenstein