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.

The Israeli Labour Party Attacks Netanyahu for being too soft on African Refugees

The Jewish Labour Movement’s ‘sister party’ supports the physical expulsion of refugees from Israel to Eritrea

Demonstration of Eritrean Refugees Outside the Eritrean Embassy in Tel Aviv

For those who are not aware, after Palestine had been ethnically cleansed of Palestinians in 1947-8, those who tried to return to their lands were called ‘infiltrators’ and were shot on sight.  They were not wanted because Israel, being a Jewish state, could not allow any more non-Jews to live in the State. On the contrary, throughout the 1950’s thousands of Palestinians and Bedouin were deported.

The Jewish Labour Movement, which is affiliated as a ‘socialist society’ to the Labour Party describes itself as the ‘sister’ party of the Israeli Labour Party. 

In an article The ethnic cleansing of Africans in Israel, David Sheen wrote that ‘Another one of the ways that Israeli society becomes increasingly racist is when centrist parties like Labor adopt right-wing rhetoric in order to chase after right-wing votes.’   I might take issue with David Sheen over whether or not the Israeli Labour Party is centrist but essentially he is correct.  The Israeli Labour Party’s position over the pogroms in South Tel Aviv and the virulent racism directed against Israel’s African refugees, is no different to that of Likud.

As Sheen noted,  in its attempt to win votes from Likud ‘In recent years, Labor has not played the foil to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but instead acceded to almost all of his hawkish proposals. Instead of standing firm against Israel’s lurch to the right, Labor has attempted to ply votes away from Likud with right-wing proposals.'

That tendency has increased ever since Isaac Herzog was elected to lead the party in November 2013. It has been especially evident in Herzog’s support for Netanyahu’s military campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank, but also in his support for expelling Africans from Israel.

It was not always so. When the Knesset first voted to amend the country’s “anti-infiltration” law in January 2012 to sanction the roundup, detention and expulsion of African refugees, Herzog opposed the measure.

When the Knesset voted to amend the law a second time in December 2013, Herzog didn’t show up for the vote. And by the time the Knesset voted to toughen it a third time in December 2014, he voted in favor of the amendment, along with several other Labor lawmakers.

In May 2012, Herzog wrote an opinion piece, challenging arguments by human rights groups that Eritreans in Israel deserved protection as refugees.

In March 2015, Herzog repeated this refrain in an attempt to peel anti-African votes away from Netanyahu on the eve of the Israeli national elections, saying, “We need to negotiate with Eritrea on the return of the Eritreans back to Eritrea.”

The Jewish Labour Movement describes the Israeli Labor Party as its 'sister' party

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) explained how nearly 37,000 Eritreans applied for asylum in 38 European countries over the first 10 months of last year, compared with about 13,000 in the same period in 2013. It puts the total Eritrean refugee population at more than 321,000.

The reasons for the exodus are not hard to fathom: last month, a UN inquiry accused the government of President Isaias Afewerki – who has ruled the east African country since its independence from Ethiopia in 1993 – of operating a system of “ruthless repression” and “pervasive state control”.

The chair of the inquiry, Mike Smith, noted a culture of “extra-judicial executions, enforced disappearances and incommunicado detentions”, all aimed at silencing critics of the regime.

Human Rights Watch tells of how, after ‘25 years of rule by unelected President Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s citizens remain subjects of one of the world’s most oppressive governments.’

‘In May 2016, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry (CoI) established by the Human Rights Council in its final report said it found reasonable grounds to believe the government has committed numerous crimes against humanity. The government’s “totalitarian practices” and disrespect for the rule of law manifested “wholesale disregard for the liberty” of Eritrea’s citizens, the CoI concluded.’

This is the state that the Israeli Labour Party wishes to return refugees in Israel to.  What is worse is that the British Labour Party allows the ILP’s overseas wing, the Jewish Labour Movement, as an affiliate.

This year, Labor led a successful effort to abolish the Knesset’s committee on foreign workers, one of the few forums in which the concerns of refugees could receive a hearing in parliament.

In September 2015, quite unbelievably the Israeli Labour Party publicly complained that Netanyahu’s government has not done nearly enough to expel Africans from the country. In a public statement, Herzog’s Labor Party wholeheartedly adopted the far-right’s propaganda points, insisting without any basis that most refugees in Israel have no valid claim to refugee status.

“The crisis of the refugees from Syria is not similar to the issue of the infiltrators from Africa who are mostly migrant workers,” the statement read. “If only Bibi’s government had created immigration laws, it would be possible to send back to their country those who are in Israel for their welfare and for work. But the Likud government is only good at talking, and it is responsible for the troubles of the residents of south Tel Aviv.”

Of course the opposite is true.  It is Likud MKs like Miri Regev who have led the racist agitation against the African refugees of South Tel Aviv.  Regev herself notoriously called the African refugees a ‘cancer’ and then when criticized, apologized to cancer victims for comparing them to refugees.

The Israeli Labour Party subscribes wholeheartedly to the idea that non-Jewish refugees threaten the Jewish nature of the Israeli state.  This is another example of how a ‘Jewish’ state cannot be other than a racist state.

Tony Greenstein

Avi Gabbay, the Israeli Labor Party's racist new leader

Israeli Labor sells out African refugees, as ‘infiltrators’

Jonathan Ofir

Avi Gabbay

”What has become of you? Are you the Zionist Union or the expelling union? Have you gone mad? In your tactics for wooing votes, you’ve abandoned your fundamental values and ability to tell right from wrong.”

Tamar Zandberg, a lawmaker from the leftist Meretz Party, shouted that at the left-bloc Zionist Union members who yesterday backed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s draconian legislation to forcibly deport the remaining roughly 40,000 African asylum seekers to a third country – Rwanda. 

Zandberg’s party leader Zehava Gal-On, added that the Zionist Union leader, Avi Gabbay, has “forgotten what it means to be human” – playing a bitter pun on the Gabbay’s recent echoing of Netanyahu, where he said that “the left has forgotten what it means to be Jewish.” 

Prime Minister Netanyahu told the cabinet on Sunday that it is time to “increase the pace of deporting African migrants”, as the Jerusalem Post reported, introducing a bill which passed 53-10 on Monday – much thanks to Gabbay’s support of a policy that is contrary to Labor’s former position.  

Jerusalem Post Gil Hoffman yesterday summarized Gabbay’s many shifts rightwards since his being elected chair of Labor this summer:

Gabbay said recently that there would be no need to evacuate settlements in a peace deal, that he would not sit in a coalition with the Joint (Arab) list, that he was not sure if there was a partner on the Palestinian side, that “the Left forgot what it means to be Jewish”, and that “the whole land of Israel is ours, because it was promised to our patriarch Abraham by God”.

Tamar Zandberg of Meretz, from her Twitter feed.

Indeed, with an opposition like this, who needs Netanyahu? As Meretz leader Gal-On put it, Gabbay was moving so far right, that he could even “outflank Bayit Yehudi [Jewish Home] leader Naftali Bennett”.

Netanyahu’s legislative move comes after a Supreme Court ruling two months ago that limited the state’s practice to coerce refugees to accept being deported to a third country, through indefinite imprisonment. At that point Netanyahu, together with Culture Minister Miri Regev (who has earlier called African refugees “a cancer in our body”), went on a major incitement tour against African refugees in southern Tel Aviv, saying that “We are here on a mission to give back south Tel Aviv to the Israeli residents”. 

Netanyahu was making clear that he will not be deterred by the court ‘limitation’:

“We’ll have to enact new laws that will enable us … to send the illegal infiltrators out of our country”, he said.

As the Times of Israel rightly noted at the time, “expulsion to a third country is largely unprecedented in the Western world. Italy and Australia signed similar agreements with third-party countries — Italy with Libya, and Australia with Malaysia — but both proposals were shot down by local courts. In both cases, courts ruled the bills inconsistent with international law and the 1951 UN convention on refugees — to which Israel is also a party.”

But the court did, in fact, not rule against Israel’s practice of deportation to a third country – which is now known to be Rwanda. It merely limited the state’s practice of indefinite detention aimed at putting pressure on refugees to agree to be deported. It limited the imprisonment period to 60 days. In other words, refugees who seek to hold on to their human rights could still be imprisoned for it, but ‘only’ for 60 days.

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked was clear at the time about the necessity of this coercive measure, in her statement condemning the Supreme Court decision:

“The High Court removed from the state the ability to pressure the illegal infiltrators,” she said. “It turned the [migrant’s] lack of cooperation into a reward. We will fight this until we achieve the necessary results,” she said.

So Israel is now working on moves that would simply legalize what the court has struck down, and let’s see how far it goes before it’s challenged. As Ilan Lior reported in Haaretz on Friday, “The border authority will formally announce within a few weeks a new policy, under which asylum seekers will have to return to their countries of origin, agree to be sent to Rwanda or be jailed indefinitely in Israel.”  

Gabbay’s recent push to support Netanyahu’s bill has divided the Labor leaders, and even Shelly Yachimovitch of Labor– the one who demanded immediate pardon for medic-killer Elor Azarya– said that it’s “morally impossible to support this.” 

Labor lawmaker Zouheir Bahloul said, “I don’t understand how the party can support such an immoral move by the right, which seeks to throw refugees to hell.” He added: “Angela Merkel was willing to take the political risk until Election Day and take her moral stance of accepting thousands of refugees, and we hesitate and squirm here. Israel can handle a few tens of thousands of refugees and spread them across the country.”

In the end, most of the Zionist Union MKs who are against refugee rights (and that’s the plurality of the 22 Zionist Union members) were absent from the Knesset vote. But the measure still passed, as mentioned, 53-10.

With all the dissent, let’s look at what the leaders of the Israeli left say in the end:

Gabbay’s predecessor Isaac Herzog (still leader of Zionist Union in Knesset as Gabbay isn’t MK), said that “The infiltrators took Israeli Arab jobs.” Wow. The ‘infiltrators’. Netanyahu uses the same term. And is Herzog’s concern now really about ‘Arabs’ – the one who warned the Israeli center-left not to be seen to be ‘Arab lovers’?

Think about it – “Arab jobs”. Does anyone in Israel even notice the vile, blatant, racism here?

And Labor’s Merav Michaeli, (who recently said that “a lot of the BDS movement is good old anti-Semitism”), backed Herzog’s line, just a touch more “liberally”, without the ‘Arabs’ and substituting “infiltrators” with “migrants”:

“Residents have been left at home with no work, because of the migrants”, she said. “There are MK’s in the opposition who cannot look in[to] the eyes of residents who are screaming for us to save them”, she added.

Gosh, what empathy. The Israeli residents are screaming to be saved. Nonetheless, the cries of the refugees, who at best are called “migrants” and commonly regarded as “infiltrators”, even by the left, appear inaudible.

Gabbay is no doubt wooing votes from the right, and he said behind closed doors yesterday that “this is not an issue of right or left”. Already assuming his future constituency, he said that “we would pay a price for arguing with the public”.

So whilst not wanting to argue with “the public”, Gabbay apparently didn’t mind arguing with his own party leadership to support Netanyahu’s bill.

The Israeli Labor is further shedding masks. But let us not forget, that this is also the movement whose leaders contemplated genocide in Gaza in 1967, as newly declassified documents show. This is the same political movement that was responsible for the major ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, subsequent major ethnic cleansings in 1967 and on, and the settlement project since 1967.

The movement that has so arduously created such a great Palestinian refugee crisis for the sake of the Jewish State– what is the meaning to Labor of another 40,000 African refugees after all?