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
Tony Greenstein,author, ZionismDuring 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 Juivesold 100,000 on its first edition. He
published the anti-Semitic paper La Libre Paroleand argued for
the exclusion of Jews from society.
Yet this didn’t stop
Herzl from admiring him. Herzl wrote that ‘I
owe to Drumonta great deal of the present freedom of my
concepts, because he is an artist.’ Herzlshared Drumont’s
antagonism to French Jewrywriting that:
I took a look at the ParisJews 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, Drumontfavourably reviewed The Jewish State, in an article ‘Solution de la Question Juive’
published in La Libre Paroleon 16 January 1897. Herzlexpressed his delight with the review in his
Diary.
It was little wonder that Herzlwrote 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-Gordonhad 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 BritishEmpire, but he failed to see why
the ghettos of Londonor Leeds or Whitechapel should
be made into a branch of the ghettos of Warsawand 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 Weltand 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 Ruppincalled 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
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 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 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 Davaras well as Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw the rise of
Hitleras ‘an
opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’
Ben-Gurionwas 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’:
Hitlerwill 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.
After
registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about
joining the webinar.
It has been a long time coming but my book Zionism During
the Holocaust – The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and
Nation is due to be released this week in time for the book launch
which is being hosted by Jewish Network for Palestine.
You can order the book by contacting me at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com and sending me your name and address. The paperback will cost £12.50 and the hardback £18.00. Alternatively you can transfer the money to the following account and then contact me to let me have your details:
Name: Brighton and Hove Unemployed Workers Centre
Sort Code: 09-01-50
Account Number: 04093879
Reference: Your Name
Alternatively you can send a cheque made out to B&HUWC, with all your details, to
BUWC, PO Box 173, Brighton BN51 9EZ
Interviews & Readings
During the Labour Party Conference on
September 27 I was interviewed about the book by Tina Werkmann for the Beyond the Fringe – Future of the Left
Events
and in October I was interviewed by Electronic Intifada's Asa Winstanley and Nora Barrows-Friedman, for a PodcastHow Zionists collaborated with the Nazis,
Tony Greenstein reading extracts at the Over the Edge book fair in Galway City Library
On October 27 I was invited to read extracts from the book by
the Over
the Edge Literary Events at Galway City Library in Ireland, alongside two
other writers, Rob Doyle and Riley Johnson. The video of my talk is here.
I was also interviewed by Tony Gosling of Bristol Community
Radio about my book and you can hear the interview here:
A Brief Summary of My Book
My book covers the relationship of
the Zionist movement to anti-Semitism before, during and after
the Holocaust and looks at how the Holocaust has been weaponised by the Zionist
movement. It particularly focuses on the period of the Holocaust itself.
Despite the efforts of the Zionists
to prevent my Crowdfunder the book has been published and it is over 500 pages with more than 3,000 footnotes, mainly from Zionist sources.
Of course the mainstream media are not interested in anything that contradicts the Establishment narrative that Zionism was the answer to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. A narrative that totally eliminates the anti-Zionist leaders of Poland's Jews from history.
In Poland in the last free elections in 1938 in Warsaw the anti-Zionist Bund took 17 of the 20 Jewish Council seats. The Zionists obtained one. Throughout Poland, in conjunction with the Polish Socialist Party, the Bund were victorious. Jewish and Israeli students today know nothing of this history.
In Germany the Zionists were even more of a fringe minority. They constituted no more than 2% of its Jews.
It will make uncomfortable reading
for Zionists and supporters of the State of Israel because I rely on mostly
Zionist sources to show how the Zionist movement was a Quisling movement.
In my reading in Galway I quoted David
Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister and the then Chair of the Jewish
Agency, the Zionist government in waiting. After the British had accepted the
entrance of nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany in the wake of
Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogrom against Germany's Jews, Ben Gurion made
a speech to Mapai’s Central Committee (Israeli Labor Party) on 9 December 1938.
Ben Gurion explained that:
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.
This quote can be found in multiple sources includingthe
official biography of Ben-Gurion by Shabtai Teveth 'The Burning Ground -
1886-1948' (p.855) as well as in Yoav
Gelber’s ‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry,’ Yad Vashem Studies
(1939-42) p. 199 and Tom Segev’s, The
Seventh Million, 28.
Many Zionist leaders saw the rise of Hitler as a good thing. Of course they did not foresee the
Holocaust but whereas most Jewish people did see the Nazis as a dire threat to German’s
Jews the Zionists only saw opportunities.
Emil Ludwig, the world-famous
biographer, ‘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, 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. Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai (the
forerunner of Israel’s Labour Party) and editor of its paper 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 himself was even more
optimistic. ‘The Nazis’ victory would
become “a fertile force for Zionism.’ One of the leaders of German Zionism,
Rabbi Joachim Prinz admitted that:
It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered
as the favoured 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.
Today the Zionists keep quiet about
this because they know how appalling their record is. Their only response is to
cry ‘anti-Semitism’.
The Zionist movement even betrayed its own young Zionist fighters
in Warsaw and the other ghettos of Poland. Their writings and diaries were falsified and edited in such a way as to remove any criticism of the Zionist
movement. Tuvia (Tova) Altman, a leader of the Hashomer Hatzair underground in
Poland, wrote in December 1942 that ‘Israel
is dying before my eyes and I wring my hands and cannot help.’ What they
didn’t publish was the following:
After all, you have
erased me from your memory and what are we.... It takes all the restraint I can
muster not to vent the bitterness that has accumulated for you and your friends
for forgetting me so completely... Only the realization and the certainty that
we will never again meet led me to write…. Do not give regards to anyone. I
don’t want to know about them.
Another victim of the
censorship was Hayka (Chajka) Klinger who, when she went to Israel, couldn’t
find anywhere to publishher
experiences. When she diedher
Ghetto Diary was published. However it had so many changes and erasures that
researchers were recommended to consult the original. The originals have now been
republished, see Chajka Klinger, I am
Writing these Words to You: The original diaries, Będzin, 1943. https://tinyurl.com/4trn2dtd.
When Chajka went to Palestine in
1944 she made a speech to the Zionist Executive. However the extracts below
were not mentioned in references to the speech by Dina Porat, the Chief
Historian at the Zionist propaganda museum Yad Vashem, in her book The
Blue and the Yellow Stars of David. Chajka told how the Jewish
Councils, the Judenrate, were hated by the masses for their collaboration with
the Nazis and how they were largely staffed by members of the Zionist movement:
[the] various Jewish communities [in Europe]
were headed by members of the Zionist movement and most of them understood that
if [the Nazis] said A they would need to carry on and [do] B.
And after they
began assisting the Nazis to collect gold and furniture from Jewish homes, they
had no choice but to go on to help them prepare lists of Jews for labor
camps... And precisely because those who stood at the head of most of the
communities were Zionists, the psychological effects on most of the Jewish
masses vis-à-vis the Zionist idea was devastating, and the hatred towards
Zionism grew day by day...
One bright day
we will need to try these people. It must be said clearly and publicly that
many Zionists betrayed [their people] ... Yes one must try Haim Molchadsky, the
head of the JNF in Bedzin...
Today
the Zionist movement claims credit for the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance but at the time the leadership of the Zionist movement in Palestine
urged them to abandon the fight against the Nazis and go to Palestine via Aliya
Bet, the secret emigration of Zionist pioneers from Nazi occupied Europe.
Hayka
Klinger, who arrived in Palestine in March 1944, told the Histadrut Executive that
‘we received an order not to organize any more defence.’ To the Zionist
leadership the ghetto fighters were more valuable in Palestine. Klinger
observed that
‘Without
a people, a people’s avant-garde is of no value. If rescue it is, then the
entire people must be rescued. If it is to be annihilation, then the
avante-garde too shall be annihilated.’
Never
was the ethical and moral distinction between the Jewish diaspora and
Palestine’s Zionist leaders clearer.
The
Zionist leaders saw the risings in the ghettos as ‘a kind of betrayal of the
overriding principle of the homeland.’ Yet despite opposing the uprisings at
the time, the ghetto fighters were ‘retrospectively conscripted’ into the
Zionist terror groups. ‘We fought here
and they fought there’ according to Palmach commander Yitzhak Sadeh. Except
that the Jewish partisans were fighting against the fascists whereas the
Zionist militias fought with fascists.
The
anti-Zionist leadership of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, of which the Bund was
the main component, has been eliminated by the Zionists from history.
The Israeli state was extremely hostile
to the last commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, Marek Edelman,
who had written an Open Letter to the Palestinians asking them to stop the
bloodshed and enter into peace negotiations. The letter caused outrage because
Edelman did not mention the word ‘terrorism.’ Israeli leaders were particularly
incensed by its title: ‘Letter to Palestinian partisans’. Paul Foot wrote in an
obituary to Edelman:
Mr Edelman … wrote in a spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance
fighter, as a former leader of a Jewish uprising …He addressed his letter to ‘commanders of the Palestinian military,
paramilitary and partisan operations – to all the soldiers of the Palestinian
fighting organisations.’ This set up a howl of rage in the Zionist press, who
reminded their readers that Mr Edelman, despite his heroism in the 1940s, is a
former supporter of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund and can therefore not be
trusted.
What was particularly irksome was
that Edelman had compared the structures of the Jewish resistance movement in
Warsaw to that of the Palestinians. Although he occasionally came to Israel to
visit old friends, Edelman retained the Bund’s hostility to Zionism. In an
interview he described Israel as a:
chauvinist, religious state, where a Christian is a second-class
citizen and a Muslim is third-class. It is a disaster, after three million were
murdered in Poland, they want to dominate everything and not to consider
non-Jews!
When
Edelman died on 9 October 2009 he was honoured with a state funeral and a fifteen-gun
salute. Not even the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy attended. Edelman
received Poland's highest honour and the French Legion of Honour but he died
unrecognised and forgotten in Israel.
The President of Poland spoke at his funeral… held in the old Jewish
cemetery of Warsaw. Two thousand people attended the grave-side ceremony. But
no one from the Israeli government attended… No official representative of any
international Jewish organisation attended either: not even from the holocaust
memorialisation organisations.
You
can read about all of the above and much more besides, including the story of Ha’avara,
for which Ken Livingstone was forced from the Labour Party in my book
The alliance between Israel and the HDZ proves that Zionist Anti-Semitism
is as strong as ever
Bosnia crisis: Dodik’s separatism threatens
peace in the Balkans
To
those who are unaware of the history of Zionism, it might seem strange that Israel,
a ‘Jewish state’, should support a Croatian political party that sees itself as
the political heir to the Ustaše. The Ustaše exterminated 3 out of 4 Croatian
Jews between 1941 and 1945.
In
fact there is nothing at all strange about Israel supporting anti-Semitic
regimes. It did precisely this in Argentina
between 1976-83 when up to 3,000 Jews were tortured to death. It preferred to
sell the Junta hundreds of millions ofdollars of weaponry.
Zionism
has always seen anti-Semitism as the natural and justified reaction of non-Jews
to the Jewish presence in their midst. As Jacob Klatzkin, Editor of Die Welt wrote:
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.
The
founder of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl wrote in his Diaries that:
‘the anti-Semites will
become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’
The roots of the Ustaše’s ideology were in the Croatian
nationalism of the nineteenth century as pioneered by Ante Starčević. The Ustaše emphasised
the need for a‘racially pure’Croatia.
Ante Pavelić
From
1941-45 the Ustaše, led by Ante Pavelić, ruled the Independent State of Croatia, (NDH) a Nazi puppet state. It had the distinction of being the only German
ally to establish its own extermination camp, Jasenovac.
Between
300,000 and 750,000 Serbs, 30,000 Roma and 30,000 Jews were exterminated.
The method of killing was not with gas or shootings but by beating, drowning,
beheading and torture.
Ustase Atrocities
Things
were so bad that even the Nazis were revolted. An attaché for the Gestapo wrote to SS leader Himmler:
“The Ustaše
committed their deeds in a bestial manner not only against males of conscript
age, but especially against helpless old people, women, and children. The
number of the Orthodox that the Croats have massacred and sadistically tortured
to death is about three hundred thousand.”
The
official policy was popularly expressed as:
‘Kill
one-third of the Serbs, convert another third to Roman Catholicism, and expel
the remaining third from Croatia.’
In
2013 Croatia joined the European Union. As James Bissett, a former Canadian
Ambassador to Yugoslavia wrote,
Croatia should have apologised for the Croatian Holocaust before being allowed
to join. Germany however, which today has the pro-Zionist neo-Nazi
AfD in the Bundestag whilst simultaneously outlawing
BDS and pro-Palestinian
protests, forced through the accession.
Ante Pavelic giving the Hitler salute - the HDZ is its political successor - unsurprisingly Israel supports it against Bosnia's Jews
In
the Spring of 1990, in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia elections were
held in the Republics. In Croatia, the Croatian
Democratic Union (HDZ) triumphed. Following these elections
several HDZ officials including President Tuđman, who founded the HDZ in 1989, began engaging in a systematic rehabilitation of the Ustaše regime.
Up till the present day HDZ officials go to
Bleiburg to commemorate the massacre of Ustaše members in 1945.
War criminal former President of Croatia Franjo Tudman
This resulted in representatives from the Croatian
Jewish communityboycotting
the government’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies in 2016 and 2017 in
protest.
In the landmark Sejdic and Finci case in 2009,
the European Court of Human Rights found Bosnia’s constitution to be
discriminatory towards its citizens and ordered a civic constitution to be adopted with
equal rights for all ethnicities. This has not been done.
Jakob Finci, a Bosnian Jew, and Dervo Sejdic, a
Bosnian Roma, addressed the court in Strasbourg, France after they were blocked
from running in the elections as their ethnicity did not belong to any of the
three “constituent peoples” – Bosniak, Croat or Serb.
Christian Schmidt of the EU's OHR of Germany's far-Right CSU - he is pursuing the same policies by different means as his Nazi predecessors - excluding Jews, Roma and other minorities
The law disenfranchised at least 17 national
minority groups who are ineligible to stand for Bosnia’s tripartite presidency
or the House
of Peoples. In addition to the Jewish community, the arrangement also cut
out Bosnia’s Roma population — its largest minority, numbering nearly 60,000 —
from being able to stand for election.
“Bosnian politicians still have not
ended second-class status for Jews, Roma, and other minorities a decade after
the European Court of Human Rights found that the Bosnian constitution violates
their rights,”
“If we, the citizens of Bosnia and
Herzegovina now, are not united by Schmidt, by his imposition of a racist
Election Law, in the fight against fascism and racism, no one else will,”
Finci, the President of Bosnia’s Jewish
community, described how he was “astonished” by a leaked Israeli memo endorsing
the proposed new law. He wrote
that:
“This was the
first time that Israel is taking a position in internal Bosnia affairs, not
helping the Jewish Community, or at the request of Jewish Community, but one
political party in the country.”
Ustase Atrocities
Noah Gendler, Israeli Ambassador to Albania and Bosnia wrote claiming that “the rights of the Jewish community in the
country are being misused to block essential internal processes in [Bosnia]”
And what were these ‘essential
internal processes’?A law which will
result in Jews, Roma and up to 400,000 other inhabitants of Bosnia being unable
to stand for election. Bosnian Foreign Minister
Bisera Turkovic, who has Jewish origins, issued
a statement that
“It is hard to
fathom how the official policy of the State of Israel could be to welcome the
discrimination of Jews in not being able to hold office in Bosnia and
Herzegovina.”
Turkovic, like many diaspora Jews, did not
understand that Israel’s only interest in them is as potential immigrants or as
pliant political pawns like the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Turkovic’s condemnation sparked anger among anti-Semites,
with Deputy Foreign Minister Josip Brkić stating:
“Today, during my phone call
with Israeli Ambassador H. E. Mr. Noah Gal Gendler, I conveyed that the
demarche sent to @IsraelinAlbania is not the official position of State of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, but the particular view of one political party,”
Demonstrators outside Schmidt's Office of the High Representative
The memo was issued
in response to the electoral plan promoted by Christian Schmidt, the Office of
the High Representative, an EU-supported institution created after the Balkan
wars of the 1990s. The OHR can overrule government decisions. The Times of
Israel compared
Schmidt’s powers to those of a ‘colonial governor
or a medieval viceroy.’
Schmidt is a worthy successor to the Nazi governors of occupied Europe.
The plan is supported
by Croat and Serb nationalists and opposed by the current government in Bosnia
and Herzegovina. Bosnia’s current political system is based on a power-sharing
agreement among its three major ethnic groups: Muslim Bosniaks, Bosnian
Serbs and Bosnian Croats, an arrangement that is believed to have
excluded more than 100,000 citizens from top level political representation.
The OHR’s proposed
change would simply consolidate the power of ethno-nationalist parties. The
Israeli embassy spoke of
“the
readiness and proposals of the Croat side, as demonstrated throughout
negotiations on changes to the electoral legislation, [are] welcomed.”
Well not by Bosnia’s
Jews! What Israel really means is that it welcomes the creation of a far-Right
ethno-nationalist state like itself, even if that disadvantages Jews. But why
should Israel object? Is not the purpose of Israel to ‘ingather the
exiles’?If that means helping anti-Semites
to push them out then that is a price worth paying.
In response to
Turkovic’s statement Israel’s foreign ministry issued the following Kafkaesque statement.
Israel was supporting the ‘preservation
of their rights.’Orwellian!
“The Israeli embassy in Tirana,
which is also responsible for Bosnia and Herzegovina, issued a document [on
Monday] in which it expresses the support [for] the preservation of the rights
of the Jewish community in the country.”
The real
reason for Israel’s support for
nationalist politicians Milorad Dodik of the Serb community and Dragan Covic,
the head of the Croatian Democratic Union party was made clear in their memo –
they both support the IHRA ‘definition of anti-Semitism’ which redefines anti-Semitism
as hostility to Zionism and Israel. It has nothing to do with hatred of Jews.Dodic is described in the article as ‘a vocal supporter of Israel’ who also denies
the 1995
Srebrenica genocide in which Bosnian-Serb forces killed over 8,000 Bosnian-Muslim
men and boys.
Former Bosnian Energy
Minister Reuf Bajrovic described
Israel as ‘siding with people who want
Bosnia gone, far-right genocide deniers.” Israel is in effect allying with holocaust
deniers.
Catholic Priests Officiating at a Ustase Ceremony
With the support of the Christian Schmidt, who is trying to
finish what the Nazis began, Israel is actively helping the heirs to the Ustaše who all but wiped out Croatia’s Jews. This is Zionism.
Below is an article by Jena Delich who is a Bosnian
pro-democracy and anti-fascist activist and also a retired British lecturer..
Tony Greenstein
For
further reading about the topic of this blog go to:
Al Jazeera interview
with Christian Schmidt, the Croatian High Representative
Croatian
High representative, Christian Schmidt, intends on imposing discriminatory and anti-Semitic
election laws in Bosnia, backed by Israel
High
Representative, Christian Schmidt, whose role is to oversee the implementation
of the civic part of the Dayton Peace Accords in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is
planning on imposing new election laws on the Bosnian entity, which is an administrative
part of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, at the request of Croatia.
The new election laws are seen by the vast majority of Bosnian citizens to be
discriminatory, anti-Semitic and even fascist.
After the
1992-95 war in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (i.e. the aggression by
Serbia and Croatia) was brought to an end by the Dayton Peace Accords, the
country was internally organised into two administrative units. The role of the
High Representative was established in Annex 10 of Dayton Peace Accords.
Since the
war ended, there has been a succession of High Representatives appointed from
the EU by the Peace Implementation Council (PIC).
The present
High Representative is Christian Schmidt, a German politician and former
Minister of Agriculture in Germany. He is also a member of the Christian
Social Union, a deeply conservative party in Bavaria which is allied to the
Christian Democrats. It was a party that many ex-Nazis joined after defeat in
the second world war.
While there was a heavy ‘push’ by Germany to
have him appointed as High Representative, the Bosnian diaspora in the U.S.
firmly opposed it, expressing their grave concerns to the U.S. administration
in their letter of 22nd February 2021 to the US Secretary of State, Anthony
Blinken.(1)
In their
letter they stated that
by seeking to appease the forces of segregation and
secessionists in BiH – and their benefactors in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Moscow –
Schmidt will only distance the country from its rightful place within the
community of Western democracies.
They went on
to say that
It is also alarming that Schmidt’s political party
– the Christian Social Union (CSU) – is a very vocal supporter of the Croatian
HDZ, a far right party with a large anti-Semitic base in Croatia and BiH. In
fact, Schmidt received the Order of Ante Starcevic by the HDZ, an award that
was also given to individuals that were accused and convicted of war crimes. (1)
Christian
Schmidt was awarded the Order of Ante Starcevic in 2020, by the Prime Minister
of Croatia, Andrej Plenković. (2) The same order of Ante Starcevic was also
awarded to the convicted war criminals Dario Kordic and Jadranko Prlic.(2a)
Ante
Starcevic was a Croatian nationalist politician whose ideology included the creation
of Greater Croatia. “Most right-wing
parties in Croatia claim his politics as their legacy.”(3)
Ustase atrocities
It was Croatian
right-wing politics in WWII that led to the Ustasha movement being founded
which saw 30,000 Jews imprisoned and massacred by the Ustashas in
Croatia, in concentration camps like Jasenovac, Stara Gradiška, Lepoglava, to
mention just a few.
The legacy
of the same politics was pursued by Croatia and its ruling (far right)
nationalist party HDZ during its war on the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina which
has been ruled as ‘joint criminal enterprise’ by the International Crimes
Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, also confirming that the President of Croatia,
Franjo Tudjman was leading the ‘joint criminal enterprise’.
Ustase atrocities
The ICTY’s
ruling of 29th November 2017 also read:
“The Appeals Chamber upheld the Trial Chamber’s
findings that key members of Croatia’s then-leadership, including President
Franjo Tuđman, Defence Minister Gojko Šušak, and Janko Bobetko, a senior
General in the Croatian Army, shared the criminal purpose to ethnically cleanse
Bosnian Muslims and contributed to realizing that goal.” (3a)
A number of
Bosnian Croat politicians and military leaders have been sentenced for war
crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, running of concentration
camps such as Dretelj, Gabela, Heliodrom, to name just a few, where they
imprisoned Bosniak civilians, torturing, and killing many of them.(4)(5)(6)
Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo
The legacy
of that politics is alive and present in the official politics of present day
Croatia which is trying to impose election laws on part of Bosnia and
Herzegovina via High Representative, Christian Schmidt. The election laws can
easily be seen as being both fascist and antisemitic in that they discriminate
against Jews, Romas and others who do not fall within one of the three ethnic
groups (Croats, Serbs or Bosniaks), by depriving them of any rights to run for
High office!
The final
and ultimate aim of such an election law is for Croatia to carve up Bosnia and
Herzegovina and create ‘Greater Croatia’ by joining the part of Bosnia they
occupied by force between 1993 and 1995.
The election
law that Christian Schmidt wants to impose is also contrary to four verdicts of
the European Court of Human Rights, one of which is the verdict on Mr. Jakob
Finci, a Bosnian Jew, and Mr. Dervo Sejdic, a Bosnian Roma.(6a)(6b)
All the
rulings found the existing election law to be discriminatory as explained in an
article by Baroness Arminka Helic of 01.08.22. (7)
None of the
verdicts have been implemented up till now. (8)(9)
the Independent State of Croatia, (NDH) a Nazi Puppet State
Implementing
those verdicts would mean equality in the law for all. Sadly, High
Representative Christian Schmidt doesn’t seem concerned with implementing those
ECHR verdicts. Nor does he seem to be concerned with changing the election laws
in Bosnia’s entity of ‘Relublika srpska’ either where only a Serb can run and
be elected as a member of the Bosnian Presidency, where apartheid is the best
way to describe the place where the remaining non-Serbs (including Jews, Romas
and others) live, where all children are taught in schools that war criminals
are heroes and the history that is based on lies and fabrications, where the
maternal tongue of others is banned - the dark list of similar horrors could go
on and on!
The new
election laws Christian Schmidt seems to want to impose on the Bosnian entity
of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is seeking to further widen and
cement the ethnic divide, and ‘may cement
a de facto ban on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Jews holding high office’. (8)
Such
election laws would weigh local demographics in elections, which would benefit
only ethno-nationalists in further consolidating their power. (9)
Ustase atrocities
Such an
election law is being backed by the US and UK!(7) Knowingly or not, they seem
to have chosen to be on the wrong side of history. But, I’d say we definitely
must be concerned with such a choice and the consequences it would have on
people affected by such discriminatory and anti-Semitic election laws.
Apart from
the US and UK, Israel has given its support to election laws that would
discriminate Jews! The Israeli embassy in Tirana, covering Bosnia and
Herzegovina as well, issued a Memo ‘welcoming’
such discriminatory (and anti-Semitic) election laws, as reported in all
Bosnian media on 8th August 2022.The Israeli embassy Memo was also reported in
the Israel’s media such as Haaretz of
10th August 2022, and the Times of Israel
on 13th August 2022. (10)(11)
Ustase atrocities
The Memo of
support to the introduction of such election laws issued by the Israeli embassy
in Tirana was met with official reactions in Bosnia and Herzegovina condemning
such an action on part of Israel.
Thus,
Bosnian Foreign Minister, Mrs. Bisera Turkovic, a Bosniak of Jewish descent,
expressed her disbelief in her interview given to the Haaretz and reported in
the JTA:
“It is hard to fathom how the official policy of
the State of Israel could be to welcome the discrimination of Jews in not being
able to hold office in Bosnia and Herzegovina,”
According to
Haaretz. “The proposed electoral
legislation would cement the current discriminatory system towards minorities
in Bosnia.”(11)
The Head of the
Bosnian Jewish community, Mr. Jakob Finci, also expressed his disbelief at the
support given by Israel to the election laws that High representative Schmidt
intends on imposing on Bosnia at the request of Croatia, stating that those
would ‘minimise the political influence
of Jews and other minorities’. (9)
Criticising
Israel, Mr. Finci accused the Israeli embassy in Tirana of ‘acting in support of a local ethnic Croat political party’. Finci
stated that
‘this was the first time that Israel is taking a
position in internal Bosnia affairs, not helping the Jewish community, or at
the request of Jewish community, but one political party in the country’.(9)
The
‘political party’ that Jakob Finci referred to in his statement is the Croatian
HDZ in Bosnia - ‘a far right party with a large anti-Semitic base in Croatia
and BiH’ as per the letter of the Bosnian diaspora of 22nd February 2021. (1)
In their
response to Mr. Finci the Foreign Ministry of Israel stated they had ‘no interest in responding to his words’!(9)
Putting it
politely, ‘we heard you but we shall
still continue to do as we please’!
Should we
too, be left in disbelief at the State of Israel welcoming election laws that
discriminate against Jews, which High Representative Christian Schmidt, a
former German diplomat and politician, seems to want to impose on Bosnia at the
request of Croatia?
Shouldn’t
they instead be screaming ‘anti-Semitism’
at the very mention of a possibility of imposing such election laws in Bosnia?
Shouldn’t they be protesting to the US and UK for supporting Christian Schmidt
in his intention to impose such laws?!
I shall
leave it to the readers to ponder over those questions, and would finish by quoting
a tweet from Jews Sans Frontiers of 11th August 2022 commenting on the
interview given by Jakob Finci:
“Bosnian
Jewish community leader protests Israel's support for ethnonationalism in
Bosnia and Herzegovina. New electoral law excludes Jews and Roma with Israel's
support. I don't know why a knowledgeable Jewish leader would be surprised at
this.” (12)
What can we
do? Write to our governments and MPs or members of Congress in the UK, US
and Israel, to protest and demand that they stop supporting High
Representative, Christian Schmidt in his intention to impose such
discriminatory and anti-Semitic election laws in Bosnia and Herzegovina. If you
can, please do.
Jenna
Delich
——-
(1) Bosnian
American Diaspora Opposes German Push for New High Representative – Advisory
Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina
(2) Berlinski
Magazin - Premijer Plenković U Berlinu uručio odličje Red Ante Starčevića,
Christianu Schmidtu njemačkom zastupniku.
