Zionism & Anti-Semitism – the Conjoined Twins - The second of 5 talks on the History of Zionism 2nd April 6 pm

 The history of how and why the Zionist movement and the anti-Semites became partners and the best of friends

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This is the 2^nd of 5 talks I am giving on Zionism as part of the Labour Left Alliance Education Programme. They take place every Friday at 6 pm until 23^rd April.

One of the ironies of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations in the Labour Party is that Zionism as a movement has never objected to anti-Semitism.  Quite the contrary the history of Zionism is the history of its collaboration and co-operation with anti-Semitism.

For example throughout the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party no mention was made of the explicitly anti-Semitic comments about Jewish media owners fixing elections in Boris Johnson’s 2004 book, 72 Virgins.

Roberts Zile - fascist MEP for Latvia's LNNK - sat with Tory MEPs

Likewise there was radio silence on the alliance between Conservative MEPs and fascist and anti-Semitic MEPs in the European Parliament’s ECR Group. People like Roberts Zile of the Latvian LNNK, who marched every year alongside the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS, sat side by side with the Conservatives, yet the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement had nothing to say about this. See The Conservative Party anti-Semitism crisis nobody talks about

The collaboration of Zionists with anti-Semites is the skeleton in the Zionist cupboard. Although they never mention it now, between 1954 and 1958 Israel was gripped by the Kasztner libel trial brought by the Israeli Labor government against a Hungarian holocaust survivor, Malchiel Greenwald. Greenwald had accused a senior Mapai (Israeli Labor) official Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war, of collaboration with Adolf Eichmann and the Nazis in the Hungarian holocaust.

Jews not wanted in Hildesheim

The libel trial boomeranged when Benjamin Halevi of the Jerusalem District Court, found in 1955 that there had been no libel. Kasztner had ‘sold his soul to the devil’. Kasztner was assassinated soon after by agents of Mossad, Israel’s secret police. None of this is mentioned by Zionists today. It has disappeared into a Zionist memory hole but in 1955 the 2^nd Israeli government of Moshe Sharrett collapsed as a result of Halevi’s verdict.

A fascist EDL meeting with a Zionist Rabbi addressing the crowd

Today’s rump of the Israeli Labour Party is led by Merav Michaeli, the grand daughter of Kasztner. Michaeli doesn’t lose an opportunity to defend and try to rehabilitate her quisling grandfather. And nor does Yad Vashem, the Zionist holocaust propaganda museum in Jerusalem.

However the history of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis will have to wait until my 4^th talk. In this talk I want to explore the history of Zionist collaboration with anti-Semitism.

It is something of an irony that anti-Zionists are accused by the Zionists of ‘anti-Semitism’ because historically that was the accusation that Jews directed at the Zionists.  The Zionists were, in the words of Romania’s Jews, the ‘Hitlerjuden’, Jewish collaborators and quislings. It was because Ken Livingstone referred to this collaboration that the Zionists created such a storm.

Theodor Herzl - founder of Political Zionism

Francis Nicosia, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University wrote that:

‘whereas today non-Jewish criticism of Zionism or the State of Israel are often dismissed as motivated by a deeper anti-Semitism, in Herzl’s day an opposite non-Jewish reaction, one of support for the Zionist idea, might have resulted in a similar reaction’ ^[1]

When Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, summoned the First Zionist Congress in 1897 he chose as its venue the capital of Bavaria, Munich. Munich’s Jews rose up as one in protest. They accused the authorities of anti-Semitism for allowing it to take place. As a result the Zionist Congress was quickly relocated to Basel in Switzerland.

Herzl accurately predicted in his Diaries that ‘‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’ ^[2] It is one of the Zionist fables that it is easy to blur the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

In fact the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is the distinction between chalk and cheese. One is a form of racism and the other a form of anti-racism. If you think that racism and anti-racism are similar then you clearly need help.

Of course a few fascists still justify their hatred of Jews by pretending that they are supporting the Palestinians, even though they combine this with Islamaphobia. Yes anti-Semites use the word ‘Zionist’ when they mean Jew. But so do the Zionists! However today the vast majority of fascists and anti-Semites, from Tommy Robinson to Donald Trump combined anti-Semitism and Zionism.

The Zionists pretend that there is only a coincidence of interests between them and the anti-Semites. The anti-Semites wanted the Jews to leave and the Zionists too, for different reasons, also wanted them to leave. If this was true then it would be bad enough that the Zionists were seeking to put into practice the programme of the anti-Semites. But it isn’t true. There is also an ideological symmetry between anti-Semitism and Zionism.

Both share the assumption that the ‘real home’ of Jews is in Israel not where Jews actually live. Both accept that Jews are aliens in the countries they live in. Both share a racial conception of humanity. One of the most repeated criticisms of Zionism by socialists before the holocaust was that they were legitimizing everything the anti-Semites were saying about Jews being aliens. In the words of Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer:

‘to the Jewish workers anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out!' The Zionists were agreeing to get out.’^[3]

Alfred Rosenberg - Nazi Party theoretician and pro-Zionist

Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s main theoretician, who was hanged in 1946 at Nuremburg, 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.’[4]

Rosenberg‘intended to use Zionism as a legal justification for depriving German Jews of their civil rights’ and ‘eventually the Jewish presence in Germany.’[5]

Is it any wonder that the main Jewish German organisation, the Centralverein talked about German Zionism having inflicted ‘a stab in the back’ to the anti-fascist struggle against Hitler.^[6] Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel’s first President, wrote

‘that unless some radical measures are taken fairly soon, we Zionists may stand charged, when history come to be written, with criminal indifference in the face of the greatest trial to which Jewry has been subjected in modern times.’ [7]

Leo Pinsker - founder of the Lovers of Zion

Zionism began with an acceptance that Jews did not belong outside Palestine/Israel. They saw anti-Semitism as the normal, rationale response of non-Jews to the presence of the Jewish stranger.

In the words of left-Zionist novelist, A B Yehoshua, the Jewish diaspora is a

‘‘cancer connected to the main tissue of the Jewish people who use other peoples’ countries like hotels.’ [8]

Herzl believed that anti-Semitism was divinely ordained, sent to preserve the Jews:

‘Anti-Semitism, too, probably contains the Divine will to Good, because it forces us to close ranks, unites us through pressure, and through our unity will make us free.^[9]

Indeed anti-Semitism was beneficial!

‘(It) will not harm the Jews. I consider it to be a movement useful to the Jewish character. It represents the education of a group by the masses... Education is accomplished by hard knocks.’^[10]

Arthur Ruppin, after whom many streets in Israel are named was the second most important person in the history of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine before 1948). He became Director of the Palestine Office from 1908 onwards and he is known as the Father of Land Settlement. Ruppin was also a believer in the racial sciences and social Darwinism.  He had a hatred of Oriental Jewry and it was this that led to Yemenite Jews, imported into Palestine between 1912 and 1918 dying like flies. They were paid starvation wages and denied medical treatment. Nearly 50% died as a result of what Etan Bloom described in his Ph D thesis as ‘‘pathological stereotyping’.  [11]

Ruppin was of the belief that European Jews were not Semitic unlike the Arab Jews. They were of Aryan origin and had been corrupted by the Semitic element into becoming speculators and money lenders. That was why they had to come to Palestine. Ruppin won the Krupps prize in Germany for an essay putting social Darwinism into practice.

When a friend of Ruppin called him an anti-Semite he retorted ‘I have already established here [in his diary] that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.’ [12] Ruppin associated Judaism with capitalism and his writings reflected his belief in the identity between anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism.[13]  Joachim Doron wrote that his diary contained entries that were symptomatic of self-hatred. At a theatre performance he complained about the ‘Jewish physiognomy of one of the actresses.’ He subscribed to the myth, much loved by the Nazis, that the Jews had an especially strong sex drive and this was the reason for circumcision.[14]

If you were to read many of the comments about diaspora Jewry by Zionists you would be forgiven for thinking that they were from virulent anti-Semites. Joachim Doron described how

Rather than take up arms against the enemies of the Jews, Zionism attacked the ‘enemy within’, the Diaspora Jew himself and subjected him to a hail of criticism…. Indeed a perusal of Zionist sources reveals criticism ‘so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them.’ [15] (my emphasis)

Literally Zionism was seen by Jews when it first came on the scene as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.  Tomorrow I will go into more depth about this.

 Tony Greenstein

[1]           Nicosia, ZANG, p.7.

[2]           Complete Diaries, pp. 83/84.

[3]           Isaac Deutscher, 'The Non Jewish Jew ' & Other Essays-The Russian  Revolution and the Jewish Question' pp.66/7.

[4]           Nicosia, TRPQ, p.25 citing Die Spur 1920 p.153.

[5]           Nicosia, TRPQ, pp. 25-26.  See also Black p. 173.

[6]           Klaus Polkehn, The Secret Contacts, p. 57.

[7]           David Silberklang, Jewish Politics and Rescue: p.337. Letter to Simon Marks 15.12.35.

[8]           A B Yehoshua, JC 22 December 1989, ‘Diaspora a cancer’

[9]           Diaries, p. 231.

[10]          Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p. 10.

[11]          Etan Bloom, What the Father had in mind, pp. 344-345.

[12]          Joachim Doron, Classic Zionism, p. 186.

[13]          Joachim Doron, Classic Zionism, p. 190.

[14]          Joachim Doron, Classic Zionism, pp. 190-191

[15]          Joachim Doron, Classic Zionism, pp.169-170.

Owen Jones’ Obsession with ‘anti-Semitism’

The Lacuna in Jones’ head

One despairs of Owen Jones.  The brain of the Guardian’s resident life-style leftist seems to turn to jelly whenever he approaches the issue of anti-Semitism.  Instead of anything in the way of an insight, still less meaningful analysis, all we get is a series of platitudes linked together by Jones’ urge to demonstrate how concerned and right-on he is.  [Antisemitism is a poison – the left must take leadership against it, Guardian 15^th March]  It is as if Jones is so guilt-tripped by the legacy of anti-Semitism that he cannot think straight.

Owen Jones - the Guardian's Vacuous 'left' Columnist

Without anything in the way of substantiating, Jones asserts that 'this centuries-old sickness infects progressive circles'.  This reminds me of what Abram Leon, the leader of the Fourth International in Belgium, who died in Auschwitz, wrote in his classic book 'The Jewish Question - A Marxist Interpretation' p.247: ‘Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.’  Anti-Semitism wasn’t a ‘sickness’ it was a political, economic and social phenomenon that changed in different eras.  Jews in Europe weren’t only persecuted at particular periods they were also oppressors of the peasantry for long periods.

The Zionist Community Security Trust, aided by the Home Office, tried to get Raed Salah deported for 'anti-Semitism'.  The case collapsed when the evidence was shown to be forged.  He has since been sentenced to 11 months imprisonment in Israel on trumped up charges whilst genuine Israeli racists get off scot free

When right-wing Labour MPs, led by John Mann, and assorted Zionists orchestrate a campaign about ‘anti-Semitism’ in order to destabilise the Corbyn leadership, Jones abandons what few critical faculties he possesses to write yet another slushy mushy article for the Guardian. 

Opposing Jewish settlers is anti-Semitic

In his latest article Jones complains that when people read his article they will say ‘ah, but what about Israel’.  He complains that it’s not possible to raise the issue of anti-Semitism without people talking about Israel.  Indeed it is ‘victim-blaming (people are apparently being compelled to hate Jewish people by the actions of a foreign state)’ whereas it is the exact opposite.  Palestinians are accused of hating Jewish people by daring to protest at their treatment.

It doesn’t seem to occur to Jones that the reason Israel and ‘anti-Semitism’ are conflated is because this is a deliberate strategy of Israel’s supporters, who regularly and repeatedly accuse anti-Zionists of being anti-Semitic.  [See for example Anti-Zionism Always Equals Anti-Semitism Jonathan S. Tobin, Commentary, 18.8.14. 

According to the Zionists this is automatically anti-Semitic

Indeed any support for the Palestinians is deemed anti-Semitic.  According to Jeremy Corbyn’s new junior foreign office minister, Fabian Hamilton, [Jewish News, January 13, 2016, New shadow minister:Boycotting Israel and not vile dictatorships is anti-Semitic  Hamilton ‘said boycotting the Jewish state without taking action against other countries is “simply anti-Semitic”.

Alex Chalmers - Oxford University Labour Club's Chairperson & Upper Class Twit who resigned when the Labour Club voted to support Israel Apartheid Week

As Brian Klug, one of the founders of Independent Jewish Voices and an Oxford don who has written extensively on anti-Semitism noted, ‘[W]hen anti-Semitism is everywhere, it is nowhere. And when every anti-Zionist is an anti-Semite, we no longer know how to recognize the real thing—the concept of anti-Semitism loses its significance’  Brian Klug, The Myth of theNew Anti-Semitism. The Nation, February 2, 2004 

Protesting about Israel's murder of Palestinian children in Gaza is 'anti-Semitic' according to Junk Academic David Hirsh 

Given the controversies over the now-defunct European Monitoring Committee Definition of anti-Semitism, you might have thought Jones would address some of the issues that were raised.  This was a definition drawn up by the Zionist movement, whose main purpose was to provide some legitimacy to accusations that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism.  It held that comparisons between Zionism and Israel’s behaviour with Nazi Germany were anti-Semitic and that someone who opposes the existence of the racist, apartheid State of Israel is anti-Semitic.  

It is anti-Semitic to protest about the murder of Palestinian children

What does Jones have to say about the EUMC or ‘new anti-Semitism’ which includes ‘singling out Israel for criticism’?  Nothing.  To be fair he probably isn’t even aware of these debates. 

I doubt if there is a single Palestine solidarity activist alive who hasn’t, at one time or the other, been accused of ‘anti-Semitism’.  When York University Palestine Society is accused of anti-Semitism because it showed Caryl Churchill’s 7 Jewish Children, then it should be obvious, even to an intellectual lightweight like Jones, that the issue of anti-Semitism cannot be separated from anti-Zionism and support for the Palestinians. [see Pro-Palestinian students perform 'antisemitic' playas part of Israel Apartheid Week, Jewish Chronicle 25.2.16.] 

7 Jewish Children is a short but quite moving and stimulating play, which is on the Guardian’s own web site.   It makes the connection between hiding a Jewish child in an unnamed Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation and the death of her relatives and the bombardment of Gaza in 2008-9 during Operation Cast Lead.  According to the idiot Zionist novelist Howard Jacobson it is nothing more than “Jew-hating pure and simple”  Let's see the 'criticism' of Israel for what it really is, Independent 18.2.09.

Oxford University Labour Club was recently accused of anti-Semitism when it voted to back the Israel Apartheid Week. [It’s time we acknowledged that Oxford’s student left is institutionally antisemitic]   Guardian Comment is Free, 18.2.16.  The only example of anti-Semitism was the fact that people sometimes used the term ‘Zio’ for Zionist. 

As the former Director of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, Antony Lerman observed, the almost automatic accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ drains the term of all meaning. [Vetting in Practice, Guardian Comment is Free, 31.5.07. Tony Greenstein]  Like the boy who cried wolf, the repeated false accusations of anti-Semitism render people immune to the real thing.  That is the real problem, but it isn't one Jones is capable or able to address.

If Jones wants to find a real example of anti-Semitism it’s not the hapless Vicki Kirby, whose expressions owe more to clumsiness and stupidity, coupled with an inability to discern the difference between Zionism and being Jewish, than overt anti-Semitism.  A far more convincing target would be Aviv Bushinsky, a former aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently described the American Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, as a ‘little Jew boy’  [‘Former Netanyahu aide lambasts US ambassador in heated spat’]. 

Jones only alludes to it, but the last 8 months have been dominated by allegations of anti-Semitism surrounding Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party.  Leading the charge against Corbyn has been the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, who ironically has a record of defending anti-Semites who are pro-Israel. [Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews, Guardian, 9.10.09.]  Michal Kaminski is the reptile who opposed a national Polish apology for the burning alive of up to 900 Polish Jews by fellow Poles in the village of Jedwabne in his constituency.  He suggested that it was the few Polish Jews who weren’t exterminated by Hitler who owed the country an apology!  None of this prevented the Israeli state from feting this fascist and anti-Semitic MEP.

Contrary to Jones assertion, all the evidence is that anti-Semitism is not on the increase.  Even the avowedly Zionist Community Security Trust’s ‘Anti-Semitic Incidents Report 2015’  recorded 924 anti-Semitic incidents in 2015, a fall of 22% from the 2014 level.  As the CST’s report admits, the two highest annual totals for anti-Semitic incidents occurred in 2009 and 2014 when there were ‘significant trigger events in the form of conflicts in Israel and Gaza’. 

Jews in Britain are living in a golden era of tolerance.  The same is not true in relation to racism against Muslims.  Arson and physical attacks, including murder, are at an incomparably higher level for Muslims than Jews, leaving aside the question as to how the CST define an anti-Semitic incident.  Anti-Semitism is not a form of state hatred.  Synagogues don’t have fascist goons demonstrating outside them unlike the East London Mosque on Whitechapel Road which has faced three demonstrations by Britain First in the past month.

The elephant in the room is the relationship of Zionism itself to anti-Semitism.  Zionism was founded on the belief that Jews did not belong in the Diaspora.  Negation of and contempt for the Diaspora was a fundamental part of Zionism’s founding ideology. 

It is the Zionist movement that has often found kindred spirits among anti-Semites.  The founder of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl explained that ‘the anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries, our allies’. [Diaries, p.84]  Herzl himself had friendly relations with anti-Semites including the leader of the anti-Dreyfussards, Eduard Drumont. 

In his Diaries, Herzl relates how on a visit to the cousin of the German Kaiser, the Grand Duke of Baden, the latter explained how he supported Zionism as a means of weaning Jewish workers away from revolutionary politics but he was worried that if he openly supported the Zionist movement he might be accused of anti-Semitism.

Anyone acquainted with the writings of early Zionists know that they were full of anti-Semitic caricatures.  Israel’s first Justice Minister Pinhas Rosenbluth described Palestine as ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’.  [Joachim Doron, p.169, Classic Zionism and modern anti-Semitism: parallels and influences’ (1883-1914), Studies in Zionism 8, Autumn 1983].  An expression that would not have been out of place from the editor of the Nazi Der Sturmer, Julius Streicher.  Zionism began from an attitude of contempt for the Jewish Diaspora which was little different from mainstream European anti-Semitism.

Today in Europe some of the most racist and far-right parties are, at one and the same time, supporters of Israel.   They combine Islamaphobia, anti-Semitism and support for Israel.  This includes both the British National Party and the English Defence League.  As Ruth Smeed, spokesperson for the Board of Deputies admitted: ‘‘The BNP website is now one of the most Zionist on the web – it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel’. [BNP seeks to bury antisemitism and gain Jewish votes in Islamophobic campaign, The Guardian, April 10th 2008 .

As A B Yehoshua, one of Israel’s foremost novelists, explained in a lecture to the Union of Jewish Students

‘‘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.’ Jewish Chronicle 22.1.82.

But despite his attempt to get into the good books of Britain's Zionist lobby, Jones is savaged in this week's Jewish Chronicle (17.3.16).  David Hirsh, the junk Zionist academic from Goldsmiths College, argues in Jew hate and today’s Left 

'We remember the shoddiness, one-sidedness and the ferocity of Jones’ own condemnation of Israel at the time of the Gaza conflict; we remember his failure to speak out against the campaign to boycott Israel. ... Jones needs to take to heart that there is a relationship between hostility to Israel and antisemitism. Hostility to Israel is partly caused by antisemitism and is also itself a cause of further antisemitism.'

Whether he tries to avoid it or not, the fact is that the Zionist definition of anti-Semitism rests on support for Israel and opposition to Palestine solidarity.  This is not the first vacuous article Jones has written on anti-Semitism.  Nor I suspect will it be the last.

Tony Greenstein